French Muslims. Sharif Gemie

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 one of the most complete lists of the varied terms used to describe such people. She referred to a population that had been classified as ‘natives, foreign workers, immigrants, descendants of immigration, beurs [French-Arab], North Africans and – today – Muslims and, according to some, potential terrorists’.²³ Given this terminological embarras de richesses, why privilege the religious term? First, and not very convincingly, because it is a term which circulates extremely frequently in the French media. But, secondly, because the term is applied in a way which makes it into a far broader category than readers may initially think. Obviously, Muslim can refer to someone who fulfils the ritual obligations of Islam: who recognises Allah as the unique god and Mohammed as his prophet, who prays five times a day, who respects Ramadan, who gives to charitable causes and who intends to go on pilgrimage to Mecca. But given the current state of Muslim observance in France, there are many who, while familiar with these rituals, respect them infrequently, or only in a perfunctory manner. Ramadan, for example, begins to function in a different manner, with the long nights, filled with music and conversation, assuming a greater importance than the austere days.²⁴ Some celebrate the end of Ramadan by drinking a beer. Elsewhere this new generation has been identified by their food: they eat neither choucroute (almost a national dish in eastern France: pickled cabbage and pork) nor couscous (the best-known dish of North Africa, and approximately the French equivalent of curry in Britain), but McDonald’s.²⁵ Taken as a whole, this is a group which is suffering not so much an identity crisis as a process of de-culturation. Tariq Ramadan refers to such people rather