The Republic Unsettled: Muslim French and the Contradictions of Secularism
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The Republic Unsettled: Muslim French and the Contradictions of Secularism
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Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780822376286 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Duke University Press |
| Publication date: | 09/19/2014 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 328 |
| File size: | 1 MB |
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The Republic Unsettled
Muslim French and the Contradictions of Secularism
By Mayanthi L. Fernando
Duke University Press
Copyright © 2014 Duke University PressAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8223-7628-6
CHAPTER 1
"The Republic Is Mine"
Farid Abdelkrim's father was born in 1918 in a small town in Algeria. He came to metropolitan France when he was twenty-five to work for the SCNF, the national railway. Like many Maghrebi immigrants, Farid's father arrived in France thanks to a coordinated effort by the French government and French industry to import manual labor from the colonies, which began in the years between the world wars and accelerated after World War II. Once in France, Farid's father married Farid's mother, also an Algerian immigrant. Born in 1967, Farid grew up in Bellevue, a low-income neighborhood in the city of Nantes. Dotted with high-rise housing projects, Bellevue is inhabited mostly by North African and West African immigrants and their French-born children.
Farid was not a particularly successful student and was encouraged to attend a vocational high school, still a common educational venue for a disproportionate number of nonwhite teenagers in France. Nor was he particularly involved in any civic associations, the bedrock of French social and political life. As a teenager, Farid, like many of his friends, had taken to vandalism, drugs, petty larceny, and car theft. Then, a few months before Farid's eighteenth birthday, his friend Radouane was shot and killed by a policeman. Radouane's death and his wake at a Muslim center led to Farid's spiritual and political awakening. Until this time, Farid had not prayed or fasted, and, as he put it, he did "a lot of things that have nothing to do with Islam." But at Radouane's wake Farid met three foreign students from North Africa who had come to pursue their graduate degrees in France. All three were practicing Muslims, and Farid was impressed by their educational success, general ambition, and spiritual commitment. They, in turn, encouraged him not only to study but also to seek a more profound engagement with the Islamic tradition. Farid soon became what he called a more practicing Muslim: he began to pray, abstain from alcohol and drugs, and alter his previous behavior in significant ways. Yet individual spiritual practice was not enough; he also wanted to do something for his community and his peers. He knew from personal experience that at this time (the late 1980s), most mosques served only first-generation immigrants: "Young people, if they came, it was to pray, but they weren't really taken into account. Friday sermons were done in Arabic, sermons during the week were done in Arabic, there was nothing for young people. So we said to ourselves, we have to find a bridge between this Islam, of which our parents are the bearers, and a generation that knows nothing of its religion." He and some friends created the Association for Change (Association pour Changer) to offer courses in Arabic, after-school tutoring, social activities, and conferences on Islam.
In the early 1990s the association invited a young man named Hassan Equioussen to speak at one of its conferences. Equioussen was already active within the influential Union of Islamic Organizations of France (Union des Organisations Islamiques de France, or UOIF), and through him Farid came to know theUOIF leaders. In 1992 he was chosen, along with Equioussen and some other young Muslim activists, to form a UOIF-affiliated youth movement called Young Muslims of France (Jeunes Musulmans de France, orJMF), with local chapters in major cities across the country. Farid became president of JMF-Nantes, then of the entire JMF, stepping down in 2000. Since then, he has published two books that combine autobiography, self-help, and political and social commentary. He also served as a member of the UOlF's executive board and tours the country as a speaker at weekend conferences hosted by mosques, Islamic bookstores, and local Muslim associations.
On April 20, 2003, Farid took the stage at Le Bourget, a convention center on the northern outskirts of Paris where, since 1983, the UOIF has held an ever-growing annual congress. In 2003 about 80,000 people attended the four-day event, which drew Muslims not only from Paris and its suburbs but also from all over France, as well as from neighboring Belgium. Attendees jostled past each other as they went from stall to stall in the crowded exhibit hall, perusing books and recorded sermons; searching for prayer mats and prayer beads; and browsing through racks of clothing, which ranged from traditional jellabas and abayas to hip-hop–style tracksuits by the American Muslim company Dawah Wear. Men and women, most of them between sixteen and forty, stood in line outside the fatwa tent, where Islamic scholars affiliated with the UOIF issued religious opinions in response to individuals' queries. Bustling vendors in the cafeteria served halal couscous, sandwiches, and french fries. Visitors from out of town slept in the sex-segregated dormitories fashioned out of former airplane hangars. As always, the congress also featured four days of panels with presentations by Muslim intellectuals, activists, and religious scholars.
Farid strode onstage dressed in a black shirt and black trousers, with a pair of black plastic glasses perched on his nose. Built like a rugby player and brimming with charisma, he immediately established a sense of familiarity with his audience, alternating between joking self-deprecation and an aggressive, sometimes haranguing, exhortation. He began his speech by invoking his dead father, who had come to France to work for the national railway—not as a conductor or a driver, Farid noted pointedly, but as a track-layer. Farid spoke eloquently and forcefully about the need for historical memory, reminding his audience: "Our parents built this country on their backs." He then turned to the present. "Stop talking to me about integration!" he thundered to wild applause. "I am here, and I am French. France is my homeland, the republic is mine [La France est mon bled, la république est la mienne]." He urged the crowd to choose the party they preferred and to vote in municipal, regional, and national elections, declaring to much applause that "we are not genetically conditioned to vote for the Left." The previous evening, Nicolas Sarkozy—then minister of the interior—had given the keynote address, and Farid suddenly asked, half jesting, half serious, "Would you vote for me if I were interior minister?" At this point, the 10,000-strong crowd roared in appreciation, and many people, most of them in their twenties and thirties, rose to give Farid a standing ovation, while older members of the UOIF looked on in consternation and tried to get the rowdy crowd to sit down. Farid ended his speech with a booming exhortation: "Engagement, engagement, engagement!"
In The Suffering ofthe Immigrant, a seminal ethnography of immigration and exile from the late 1970s, the sociologist Abdelmalek Sayad writes eloquently of Algerian laborers who migrated to France and of the double absence they endure, being neither fully in Algeria nor fully in France. One key mode of first-generation immigrant life that Sayad recounts is what he calls politeness—that is, how the immigrant is "always anxious not to disturb [the dominant majority] because a foreign presence is always a cause for concern" (2004, 289). As a result, Sayad writes, immigrants either become as invisible as they can, or they reassure their hosts "by attenuating the distinctive signs that make them stand out" (290). "But the height of both civil and political impoliteness," he continues, "seems to be attained by those 'immigrants' who are not immigrants: the children of immigrants.... They are not foreigners in cultural terms, as they are integral products of this society.... Nor are they foreigners in national terms.... We therefore do not know how to regard or treat these new-style immigrants, nor do we know what to expect of them" (291).
The terms Sayad uses to describe postcolonial France—invisibility and visibility, politeness and impoliteness, "immigrants" who are not immigrants—help frame this chapter and the next, which take up questions of citizenship and the management of so-called Muslim difference. Republican citizenship demands that individuals abstract their particular racial or religious identities in order to be proper, universal citizens. This distinction between particular and universal maps onto the distinction between religion and politics that undergirds secularism as a political arrangement, in which religion is privatized and religious commitments are divorced from political engagement. The distinctions between universal and particular, public and private, and politics and religion produce the Muslim question as a matter of visibility and invisibility: to be an integrated, secular citizen means abstracting one's Muslimness and rendering it invisible in the public sphere. Conversely, to embrace one's particularity in the public sphere is to threaten the civic unity and universality of the French Republic. Doing so represents a form of communautarisme, best glossed as communalism or neotribalism and defined as the practice of enclosing oneself in one's community and privileging particular ethnic, racial, or religious affiliations over national ones. Yet the insistence that Muslims become publicly invisible as Muslims is a ruse, for Islam has always marked colonial and postcolonial subjects of North African descent as distinctively Other, as not French.
Moreover, even though secular republican citizenship remains grounded in a distinction between universal and particular, the French Republic has been defined since its inception by its imperatives to both universalize and particularize (Wilder 2007). Hence the concurrently contractual and cultural bases of republican citizenship: though ostensibly a universalist contract between abstract citizens, the republican nation has always presumed particular ethnic, racial, religious, and kinship norms that privilege whiteness, Christianity, maleness, and heterosexuality. It is precisely this tension that both demands that Muslims abstract their Muslimness in the public sphere and makes impossible any such abstraction. Taking seriously Farid's claim that "France is my homeland," in this chapter I trace the ways Muslim French refuse to remain politely invisible and how they define their Muslimness as always already French. I also examine the difficulties of inhabiting Muslim French identity when the very term Muslim French functions as an oxymoron for much of French society, and when being publicly and visibly Muslim renders one invisible, unviable, and unrecognizable as French. In sum, I analyze the dilemma of how to be Muslim French in a world in which Muslim means not French and French means not Muslim—that is, how to inhabit an identity that is unintelligible in the terms of dominant discourse, and how to be recognized as oneself when one is unrecognizable as what one is.
"Muslims, You Know, Are Part of French Society"
The French Islamic revival has taken form in diverse ways: the proliferation of Islamic bookstores and publishing houses, the production and circulation of books and taped lectures by European Muslim preachers and scholars, the formation of large federations like the UOIF, the increasing presence of men and women in "modest" Muslim dress, the construction of mosques both large and small, and demands on the state for the public recognition of what is often called France's second religion. Farid's personal trajectory exemplifies how local associations in particular have emerged as key sites in the formation and propagation of both piety and civic consciousness among Muslims. Although civic and civil associations have long been an integral element of French citizenship and immigrant integration into the nation, contemporary Muslim associations reflect a generational shift from ethno-racial to religious forms of identifications as well as more recent ideas about the relationship of Islam to France.
Farid came of age during a key moment in these developments. In 1981, as part of its program of decentralization and what was called the right to difference (le droit à la différence), the newly elected Socialist government lifted restrictions on the establishment of associations by nonnationals, spurring the social and political activism of North African immigrants and their children and culminating in what became known as the Beur movement. Deploying a language of hybridity, Beur youth opted for an in-between status, claiming to be neither fully French nor fully Algerian but rather Beur (Cesari 1994; Silverstein 2004). At once civically, politically, and culturally oriented, Beurs demonstrated against racism, created local ethnocultural and political associations to serve immigrant-origin populations, and produced music and literature that expressed Beur political subjectivity (Silverstein 2004). The Beur generation was purposefully secular, formulating its relationship to the Islamic tradition as a cultural attachment rather than a religious or ethical one. Most Beurs accepted the notions that religiosity should be a matter of private belief and that Islamic practices like fasting at Ramadan should be confined to the private sphere of the home. Consequently, the kind of visibility Beurs sought to valorize and make acceptable in the public sphere concerned their ethno-cultural difference, not their Muslimness, which was conceptualized as purely religious and therefore private. Although originally launched as a sharp critique of French racism and narrow conceptions of national identity, the Beur movement was ultimately co-opted by the Socialist Party, and a number of Beur activists have had political careers within the party. By the mid-1990s, a nascent Islamic revival among second-generation youth had replaced the Beur generation.
Although most analysts consider the Beur movement to be the major outcome of the 1981 deregulation of immigrant associations, the effect was actually more widespread. Self-consciously Islamic associations, such as the UOIF, were established by pietist and Islamist foreign students who, fleeing anti-Islamist crackdowns in Tunisia and Morocco and all-out war in Algeria, laid some of the institutional and ideological foundations for the contemporary Islamic revival in France. Farid's spiritual awakening, as he put it, grew out of his interaction with pious foreign students, and his personal history parallels the broader generational shift from an ethno-cultural identity to a publicly religious one, as well as the latter's institutionalization in local associations. I differentiate between ethno-cultural and religious associations not to reinscribe the distinction between culture and religion so central to laïcité, but to underline the shift in how civic activists saw themselves and the relationship between political action and the Islamic tradition. Farid and other activists began to break down the notion of religion as a discrete form of life separate from culture and politics, and to move past the religion-politics dichotomy thought to be foundational to political action.
If the JMF grew directly out of the institutional largesse of the UOIF and remains strongly affiliated with the organization, the Union of Young Muslims (Union des Jeunes Musulmans, or UJM) has always been a more independent, and often more politically progressive, association. Founded in 1987 by a group of Franco-Maghrebi men in their early twenties living in the banlieues of Lyon, the UJM was one of the first second-generation associations to explicitly identify itself as Muslim instead of Maghrebi, Beur, or antiracist, and it is widely considered the prototype of second-generation Islamic associations. Although similar to Beur social welfare associations established earlier in the decade with its after-school tutoring and social activities for banlieue youth, the UJM's avowedly Muslim character—even featuring the word Muslim in its title—constituted a marked departure from the avowed secularity of those earlier associations. From its inception, the UJM organized conferences on Islam and offered courses in Arabic. Strongly allied with the Muslim Swiss intellectual Tariq Ramadan in its early years, the UJM established a publishing house, Editions Tawhid, which continues to publish numerous books on Islam, both original works in French and translations of work in Arabic. Editions Tawhid also produces and sells recordings of lectures by intellectuals like Ramadan and preachers like Equioussen. In the mid-2000s, a number ofUJM activists left the association, creating other local associations and joining with activists around the country to found the national-level Collective of French Muslims (Collectif de Musulmans de France, orCMF).
Younès, a social worker of Tunisian descent in his early forties, was a founding member of the UJMand CMF who came of age in Lyon during the Beur movement. Though a decade older than Farid, Younès also lived a life of petty delinquency before turning first to Trotskyite groups and then to Islam and what he termed a respectable citizenship. He recalled how he and many of his peers felt frustrated not only by his parents' generation's seeming disregard for the linguistic and sociocultural sensibilities of youth born or raised in France, but also by the Beur generation's emphasis on ethno-cultural rather than religious aspects of their identity. Though he shared the Beurs' criticism of French racism and attended some political meetings after the 1983 March for Equality and Against Racism, he "would have felt like a Martian among earthlings" if he had participated more fully: "How would I have prayed with those guys? They were always thinking about smoking hash, picking up girls, clubs, evenings out, alcohol, you know? There weren't any limits." Beyond their lack of piety, Younès was severely critical of the Beurs for what he perceived as their shame in even being associated with Islam: "Instead of going by Mohammed, they went by Momo, they distorted their identity. Fatima no longer wanted to be called Fatima but Fofo. Oh, it's true! I lived through this period, when people hid their identity ... because it was embarrassing to be associated with something backward." Though the Beurs' active criticism of French racism certainly cannot be called polite invisibility, Younès nonetheless faulted them for attempting to render their Muslimness invisible in order to fit in.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from The Republic Unsettled by Mayanthi L. Fernando. Copyright © 2014 Duke University Press. Excerpted by permission of Duke University Press.
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Table of Contents
Acknowledgments viiIntroduction 1
Field Notes I: "Vive la République Plurielle" 29
1. "The Republic Is Mine" 33
2. Indifference, or the Right to Citizenship 69
Field Notes II: Friday Prayers 101
3. "A Memorial to the Future" 105
4. Reconfiguring Freedom 145
Field Notes III: A Tale of Two Manifestos 181
5. Of Mimicry and Woman 185
6. Asymmetries of Tolerance 221
Epilogue 261
Notes 267
References 285
Index 305
What People are Saying About This
"This wonderful book about French secularism combines rich and sensitive ethnography with original argument and analysis. Mayanthi L. Fernando contends that the so-called problem of integrating Muslim immigrants from North Africa into French secular society tells us much about the questionable assumptions underlying French nationalist discourse on secular republicanism. This is an important contribution not only to the study of contemporary France but also to the theoretical debates on secularism. Essential reading for anyone interested in either."
"The Republic Unsettled is a brilliant book, at once a concrete examination of the experiences of Muslim French and a compelling analysis of the structural and discursive obstacles they face. A major contribution to both ethnography and political theory, this provocative, beautifully written work will appeal to those interested in debates about Muslims in Europe and the possibilities for thinking difference differently."