provide an extremely valuable lesson, even a universal lesson, about the dilemmas of nationhood in today’s world. While the French government and its loyal supporters constantly proclaim the universal nature of their Republican political culture, I find that the arguments with the strongest claim to universal significance are those developed by their marginalized opponents.
One problem which dogs the works listed above is the difficult choice of perspective: concentrating on the top – on institutions and philosophies – leads to a discussion concerning great abstract historical principles, with little reference to the real lives and cultures of modern French Muslims; while concentrating on the daily lives of French Muslims leads to patchy, piecemeal data flawed by real questions about its representative nature. In this work, I resolve this awkward dilemma by examining four thinkers who have put themselves forward, with some success, as speakers for their generation: Chahdortt Djavann, Fadela Amara, Tariq Ramadan and Houria Bouteldja. Each has featured extremely prominently in the French media, to the point where it would be no exaggeration to describe them as household names. Each might be categorized as a ‘French Muslim’, although each – in turn – suggests important qualifications to this term. I use these four as guides through the conceptual labyrinth. In part, this book will analyse in detail their thinking, but more often my aim is to contextualize and to explore, to re-construct the lifeworld from which their thinking emerges, to understand how they see French nationhood and the role of Muslims within it. None of these four, significantly, calls for a blunt rejection of French secular culture in the name of dogmatic religious values: this type of ‘fundamentalism’ (for want of a better term) is extremely rare in France, and has perhaps been best explored in the previously mentioned study by Khosrokhavar. Each calls for some form of debate with the Republic, even if the terms they set for such debates vary enormously. The four thinkers draw inspiration from different sources: they have links to different countries in the Muslim world (more specifically: Iran, Algeria and Egypt). Their political attitudes range from idealistic assimilation of French values, through a more cautious, pragmatic form of assimilation, an idealistic form of Islamic civic activism to a bitter, angry criticism of France as a political-cultural model. Through studying and contextualizing these four thinkers, we can gain a rich, composite picture of a set of cultures in transition, growing and developing distinctive strands, often outside the normal parameters of French political cultures. Arguably, the data which is uncovered through such an analysis is more representative of French Muslim experiences than either the philosophical-institutional or the anthropological approaches which have so far dominated studies.
These four thinkers represent a new generation, even a new form of Muslim politics: none of them (with the possible exception of Ramadan) could be described as professional intellectuals or as established religious authorities with a powerful institutional base. Significantly, none of them feature in Benzine’s perceptive review of innovative, reformist Islamic thinking in the twentieth century. This concentration on this new generation of articulate, coherent, extra-institutional thinkers makes this work distinct from most previous studies on similar topics, which often have tended to assume that immigrants or minorities or Muslims are somehow fated to be the inarticulate victims of inexorable processes of prejudice or globalization, pushed into social positions against their will, and that therefore they are incapable of responding except through the inarticulate violence of the city riot or through the escapist eloquence of religious mysticism. In this work, I wish to return a sense of agency to the subordinate voices, and to study how they have participated in a wider national and international process.
This work will analyse the so-called ‘debate’ on Muslims and minorities that spluttered through the French media from 2002 to 2007. My concerns are largely bracketed between two presidential elections: the dramatic presidential elections of April–May 2002, which Jacques Chirac won, but in which Jean-Marie Le Pen, leader of the racist Front National, came second, to the elections of April–May 2007, when the dynamic rising star of the French Right, Nicholas Sarkozy, easily beat a type of sub-Blairite candidate from the Socialist Party, Ségolène Royal. Those principal actors – Chirac, Sarkozy and Royal – and their political struggles will feature in passing, but we will examine in more detail two of the lesser stars who contributed to their performance: Djavann and Amara, who will be analysed in chapters two and three. Both these writers won repeated plaudits, applause and publicity from the mainstream media. In the middle of this work we will pause to consider some of the institutions and organizations which play a limited part in the structuration of the presence of Muslims and minorities in mainstream French Republican culture (chapter four). Then, in the chapters five and six, we turn to two more challenging thinkers – Ramadan and Bouteldja – whose ideas are caricatured and ridiculed by a complacent media that finds it difficult to accept that French Muslims may be producing original political ideas outside the established framework of Republican political culture.
Some extremely wide-ranging issues will be raised: we will cite examples from Turkey and Iran, from Algeria and Egypt, as well as reaching backwards over the past 250 years, considering the rival strands of historical memory which counterpose contrasting images of the same date or the same figure against each other, and so compare 8 May 1945 in Europe (VE Day) with 8 May 1945 in Algeria (the political violence in the port of Sétif, which provoked a massacre of thousands of Algerian Arabs), or distinguish the two legacies of Jules Ferry (1832–93), who was at once the grandfather of the modern French state school system and the pioneer of the French Empire.
Behind the scenes of the Republic
For much of this work, I have also been inspired by the older French concept of the coulisses of a topic: literally, the topic as seen from the wings, as in the wings of a theatre or, more idiomatically, from behind the scenes. From this position one can watch a production and see it not as a finished, believable representation of human life, but as a performance. While the audience suspends their disbelief, and is held by images that they are presented, those in the coulisses see both the artifices of the actors and the reactions of the audience. The term, I believe, was first used in a work published after the Boulangist adventure of 1886–9, when a dissident general raised what appeared to be a spontaneous coalition of the dispossessed, ranging from the urban proletariat, through the peasantry, the nationalist revanchists, angry with the powers of newly united Germany, to conservative, Catholic, monarchist aristocrats who had never accepted the Republic. Les Coulisses de Boulangisme aimed to unmask and demystify the movement; to reveal how what had seemed a spontaneous movement of the people had actually been created and manipulated by a skilful, powerful, conservative minority.20 In order to write this kind of study, my most immediate models were not the academic and political studies listed above, but two rather unusual works. The first was François Maspero’s Les Passagers du Roissy-Express, a type of anti-travel writing, which describes a three-week train journey from the north to the south of the Parisian conurbation in 1989.21 The second was Azouz Begag’s Un Mouton dans le bagnoire (a sheep in the bathroom), which tells of the lonely experience of a token Arab minister – the ‘Arabe alibi’ – in the Villepin government of 2005–7.22 At first sight, these two works seem unrelated. They share, however, two concerns: both provide detailed commentary on the painful decline of a certain Republican faith, which upheld values of toleration and social solidarity. In a sense, whether knowingly or not, both of them are funeral elegies for the passing of this faith. And both provide an outsider perspective with which to interrogate and judge the world of the French insider.
The meaning of the term ‘Muslim’ is more complex than it may appear. It refers to a population who have a marginal presence in French society, and whose status is disputed to the point where some French republicans will even deny their existence as a discrete category of study. Alima Boumédienne-Thiery, a French Green euro-deputy, gave a speech to the European parliament in 2004 which included
