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Abstract
Islam has become the second religion in a profoundly de-Christianized Europe that has seen its understanding of modern secularity harden. European countries have difficulties coming to terms with the presence of the large Muslim minorities who settled following post-war industrialization. France is a particularly instructive case, as highlighted by the legislative ban it introduced in 2010 on the wearing of full Islamic veils in public spaces. A close study of the rejection by the highest administrative court of an application for French citizenship on the basis of the applicant's ‘radical’ practice of Islam reveals a profound incomprehension of the significance of the Muslim faith for new generations (and, more broadly, of the phenomenon of Islamic neo-fundamentalism worldwide). Radicalized expressions of faith have been interpreted as being by definition synonymous with hostility to liberal modernity and thus directly linked with Islamist terrorism. Yet Islam has in fact given a sector of society marginalized for primarily socioeconomic reasons a positive identity facilitating social integration. Islamophobia, fostered by incomprehension of the subjective meaning of contemporary Islamic faith, has gained ground in French political discourse, a phenomenon mirrored in other European societies.
Notes
France, the United Kingdom, Germany and Belgium now have a second or third generation of Muslim residents or citizens. Southern and continental Europe are fast catching up. Information, country by country, can be found at www.euro-islam.info, a web-based research project established by the French national research body Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS) in conjunction with Harvard University.
To clarify my account of the way Islamic traditions of female clothing have been discussed, I need to provide brief definitions of the terms used or misused: ‘hijab’ is a generic Arabic term designating the form of clothing used to cover parts of the female body which female modesty is thought to require. The term was used in the French debates of the 1990s to refer to a scarf covering the head, for which the Iranian term ‘chador’ formerly tended to be used, under the influence of the Iranian revolution. The chador is a kind of shawl that does not hide the face, unlike the niqab and burqa. The niqab is a face covering that reveals only the eyes, in the tradition of the Arabian Gulf, and is generally worn with a long dress or abaya. The burqa, worn primarily in Afghanistan and parts of Pakistan, is a complete body-covering garment and goes further than the niqab in that it conceals the eyes behind a mesh ‘window’.
It must be pointed out that the French model has also always been ambivalent as a result of the old legacy of Gallicanism, of state control over Catholicism. This statism was exacerbated in the Turkish model of secularity. Despite the principle of neutrality, the French state never totally abandoned its ambition to exercise control over religious matters. In contemporary times, it resurfaced in the creation of the official body representing French Muslims discussed below (see note 11).
In 2010, the government of François Fillon made proposals seeking to counter this, but not without some degree of controversy, and no progress seems to have been made since. On this question of ethnic and racial statistics and French law, see Patrick Citation(2008).This lack of statistical data also applies to other European countries, including with respect to ethnic identity, a legacy of the history of the Nazi persecution of Jews. As a result, the official European agency Eurostat does not compile data for either religious affiliation or ethnicity.
Marika Herding Citation(2007) has used various sources to establish an estimate of around 16 million Muslims living in Europe (3.25 % of the population). Of the 3.5–5 million Muslims living in France, at least 2 million have French nationality. The great majority are of North African culture (Sebian Citation2007).
Earlier migrants from North African countries such as Algeria and Morocco, having been forced to merge to a large extent with the existing working-class population, tended to consider the hijab as a sign of backwardness to be hidden from view, which meant that men and children generally handled interactions with the public sphere. This is a point made by Françoise Gaspard and Farhad Khosrokhavar in their study of the tension between the hijab and French republicanism (Citation1998). Chala Chafiq and Farhad Khosrokhavar (Citation1995) had earlier investigated the ambivalent meaning of the Muslim forms of headdress in Islamism generally: initially a vehicle for the integration of women into a modern public sphere, it became the instrument of a regressive backlash.
The report recommended 26 measures, some of which promoted public recognition of Jewish and Muslim religious festivals and had a distinct ‘multicultural’ flavour. Whether this signalled a radical turn away from republican universalism, as Akan argues (Citation2009), or a pragmatic extension of the state's duty to protect religious diversity as defined by the law of 1905 on the separation of church and state remains to be debated. Whilst Anglo-American critics may see this as evidence of a growing acceptance in some sectors of ‘multicultural’ measures designed to counter the historical disadvantage Islam suffers from as a result of its much more recent arrival in France, it must be recognized that this acceptance may in fact be part of an attempt to bring the practice of Islam under the control of the state much more than an acceptance of multiculturalism; hostility to the phenomenon of ‘communitarianism’ (communautarisme) – the formulation of rights claims based on one's affiliation to a cultural group – remains high in France (see note 4). In this respect, it must be noted that those speaking out against the ban on the hijab did so primarily with reference to the individualistic understanding of individual rights that constitutes the historical basis of French republicanism.
Jean Baubérot, a leading historian of French secularity and member of the Stasi Commission, wrote a public letter to its other members proposing a way to avoid a complete ban on the hijab, which he saw as having the potential to further alienate the French Muslim population (Baubérot Citation2003).
The most vocal representative of this position was ‘Ni putes ni soumises’ (Neither whores nor submissives), a French feminist movement created in 2003 by a group of French Muslim women protesting against sexual violence in the areas of French cities mostly inhabited by North African immigrants. Controversially, it has related what it saw as a rise in violence committed against women to the spread of radical Islam in France and taken a strong stance against the hijab as a symbol of female oppression. Fadela Amara, one of its leaders, was later given a governmental position as secretary of state advisor for urban policies under the authority of the Housing Minister.
I use the term ‘neo-fundamentalism’ as Olivier Roy Citation(1994) has defined it.
For a long time, French Muslims had only very fragmented representation. The creation of one body was first canvassed in the late 1990s. It gained momentum with the events of 11 September 2001. The Conseil Français du Culte Musulman was established as a civil society organization in 2003 with the strong backing of Nicolas Sarkozy, then Minister of the Interior, but without well-defined functions. Its claims to provide autonomous representation for 4 million Muslims in France and to lobby the state on their behalf have been tainted with suspicion. On this question of representation of French Muslims in the public sphere, see Caerio Citation(2005).
Whilst in the United Kingdom the House of Lords has spoken out in favour of religious freedom and politicians have traditionally considered the issue of the headscarf to be better handled at the local level, the issue of the burqa/niqab was also raised at the national level in 2006 by Jack Straw MP.
The Dutch parliament was in fact the first to pass a resolution in 2005 urging the government to ban the wearing of burqas, but it was not enacted.
Burgat suggests that the process of re-Islamization has in fact always had two dimensions: the pursuit of the revolutionary seizure of state power not always being the dominant one, compared with re-Islamization ‘from below’.
The Muslim intellectual Tariq Ramadan, because of his family's historical link to the Muslim Brotherhood, has been caught up in this suspicion. As Roy has argued, in France he has effectively been demonized. For an analysis of the way his traditional religious views have been misrepresented, although they are not essentially different from the perspective of Catholic bishops in their assertion of a fundamental divide between an immutable divine law and the human word subject to the state's authority, see Roy (Citation2005, 16–17, 49–51).
Haenni's ‘market Islam’ points to the appearance within Islam, in recent decades, of an individualism convergent with the dominant values of Western modernity and with it, of new forms of Islamic faith.