moved onto his vital point, others were prepared to state the argument explicitly. Several times I was told: ‘You won’t understand this, because you’re not French.’ This was a strange, unwelcome comment. When I’d been a postgraduate student in Lyon in the early 1980s, barely able to string together a grammatical sentence in French, and still confusing tu and vous, my research concerned the construction of the French schooling system and laïcité. No one had told me then that I wouldn’t be able to understand my topic. Had I grown less intelligent during the years? Or had France changed?
Studying French Muslims
This work presents some reflections on these questions. It is not an analysis of the March 2004 law banning ‘ostentatious’ religious symbols from state schools, although it will include commentary on the debates that this measure provoked. What, then, is the main topic? This is a surprisingly difficult question to answer. In this section I will consider the issues raised by some previous studies, and then return to present this study’s themes in the next section.
Today, France presents academics and other commentators with a valuable opportunity to study some unique cultural interactions, for it is – arguably – the first European country hosting a long-term, permanent presence of a substantial body of people who may be termed Muslims. In fact, their numbers have provoked one recent study to suggest that France can be counted as the world’s fifteenth-largest Muslim country.5 For these reasons alone, there have been many studies concerning Muslims in France.
Many works start with the presentation of a dichotomy, neatly illustrated by the title of Françoise Gaspard and Farhad Khosrokhavar’s work, Le Foulard et la République (the headscarf and the Republic), or Oliver Roy’s La Laïcité face à l’Islam (laïcité faces Islam).6 These studies consider the context set by French legislation and the accumulated weight of French customs and practice, and then use sociological perspectives to explore the relationship between French cultures and the Muslim presence. Roy’s work is particularly impressive in its analysis of laïcité, and how its nature is being changed by the new importance of Islam. Writers interested in social policy often adopt a similar perspective: the works by Laurence and Vaisse, and by Franck Frégosi, consider governmental policies and a variety of institutional responses towards French Muslims.7 A rather more aggressive variant of the same format is represented by writers who could be considered laïque polemists, and whose writing can be linked to the revival of a nationalist Republicanism in France.8 For writers such as Régis Debray and Michèle Vianès, Islam is at best a problem to be solved and at worst a threat to be defeated. Even the titles of their works suggest a threatening plot: Debray spoke of ‘what the veil veils’, and Vianès was concerned by a ‘veil over the Republic’.9 One potential counter-tendency to these polemical works is a book like Rachid Benzine’s Les Nouveaux Penseurs de l’Islam (Islam’s new thinkers), a work which outlines a history of reformist Muslim thinkers who could, perhaps, act as a bridge between the self-consciously liberal West and the apparently traditionalist East.10 All these works concentrate on politics and policy: Islam features sometimes in a caricatured and simplified manner (as in the works by Debray and Vianès), sometimes more as a reactive force (as in Frégosi) and sometimes as an intellectual tradition (as in Benzine); only in the more perceptive works of Gaspard and Khosrokhavar, and Roy is there a fuller picture of Muslim dynamics, in interaction with the traditions of the West.
A second significant interpretative paradigm has been to start at the bottom, and to consider the lived reality of French Muslims. Anthropological writers have made some remarkable contributions in this form, and others have been inspired to adopt some quasi-anthropological methods in their depictions of Muslim life. One exceptional study which has not received the publicity it deserves is that by Dounia Bouzar and Saïda Kada.11 Entitled ‘One veiled, the other not’, it presents a series of extended interviews with French Muslim women and comments on their experiences. The work reviews their many, varied forms of veil-wearing, from the authoritarian imposition of veil-wearing in some conservative Muslim households, to the more typical negotiations within families, to ideas of the veil as fashion accessory and symbol of identity or liberation. A second, more limited but perhaps better focused work is that edited by Ismahane Chouder, Malika Latrèche and Pierre Tevanian: they present a collection of interviews with veiled school students who were threatened with exclusion from their school in 2004. This provides an invaluable insight into the girls’ experiences, but lacks any substantial analysis of its significance.12 Sadek Hajji and Stéphanie Marteau’s work draws on the older idea of travel-writing and provides some vivid descriptions of French Muslim milieux.13 Farhad Khosrokhavar has edited a fascinating and chilling collection of interviews with prisoners accused of terrorist activity who publicly avow radical Islamist perspectives. Many are eloquent and thought-provoking, but the question of to what extent (if any!) these embittered young men can be cited as typical of any substantial section of French Muslims is left unanswered.14 Two works by American academics – Trica D. Keaton and Paul A. Silverstein – are less satisfactory.15 Their initial premise is to use anthropological perspectives to analyse particular communities in France. They base their studies on extended interviews. In practice, they encounter problems in transforming their data into coherent material for analysis. While individual interviewees produce valid or telling points concerning the lifestyles of modern Muslims, no collective voice emerges.
Finally, the third form of analysis has been sociological in nature, usually linked to specific groups or particular themes. Thomas Deltombe’s work on ‘imagined Islam’ in the French media is an excellent work, informative and persuasive, and showing an intricate knowledge of his topic, but clearly is not designed as an analysis of the lives and aspirations of French Muslims.16 Alec Hargreaves has studied the category of ‘immigrants’, and explores the serious difficulties which even second- and third-generation immigrant families experience in attempting to ‘integrate’: a term that, as Hargreaves acknowledges, is exceptionally fraught with difficulty in France. His work also shows the difficulty in making valid generalizations concerning this mass of very varied peoples.17 The work produced by the International Crisis Group (ICG) is something of a curiosity: the ICG is better known for its excellent, informative studies of crises in the Third World. The very publication of this work about France suggests a type of post-colonial crisis, as the distinctive mixture of impassioned and rebellious popular discontent, religion, and corrupt or unresponsive governmental structures that has marked so many recent conflicts in the Third World now appears to be replicated in France itself. Its work presents an exceptionally useful analysis of formal Muslim organizations, but leaves open the question of the daily cultures of the mass of Muslims.18 Vincent Geisser and El Yamine Soum, two French sociologists, have produced a well-argued and informative analysis of the internal practices of French political practices in regard to minority ethnic groups. They argue that while the new buzzword of ‘diversity’ has changed the manner in which political parties treat such people, it certainly has not produced any real or substantial integration of minorities into political processes.19 While their work is exceptionally informative about attitudes within mainstream political parties, it says less about the situation of minorities outside of political parties. In particular, Geisser and Soum seem to be deliberately avoiding the use of the term ‘Muslim’.
This brief review of texts shows that the newly visible presence of Muslims in contemporary France has stimulated a wide variety of types of analysis, including religious studies, works on the sociology of immigration, women’s studies, the politics of the suburbs, social policy and anthropology. From the simple issue of a few hundred be-veiled schoolgirls, we move into a labyrinth of themes and debates, which is almost impossible to structure into a neat example of Cartesian dialectical logic. There is clearly no agreed framework for debate on these topics, and certainly no canon of key works to which all researchers refer. Furthermore, following the number of exceptional, masterful studies already produced, one does need a peculiar kind of temerity, of chutzpah, to dare to propose yet another. This present work, however, does have a different starting point from the studies listed above.
