French Muslims. Sharif Gemie
that rather than thinking in terms of a monolithic ‘integration’ process, it would be better to imagine two processes: integration and assimilation. What Straw probably means by ‘not integrated’ is that this woman was ‘not integrated in a form that he considered desirable’. Within this work, I will use ‘integration’ in an entirely value-free sense, to mean a comprehension of the manner in which a society works, or the acquisition of a competence to navigate one’s way through a society, without any cloudy idealization of the values of fair play, toleration, motherhood and apple pie. This process is difficult, but young, ambitious migrants are often able to achieve it. Furthermore, there is the yet more difficult process of assimilation: this is where the question of values becomes important. Here, the migrant makes a choice to ‘become like’: to interiorize the values of the French (or British).
This is central to understanding the public significance of the veil: it is the clearest possible sign of someone who has decided to integrate without assimilating.150
Beurs
Our last key term is less controversial and, to some extent, I include it here simply in order to give information to the non-specialist.
There is a form of French slang known as verlan, based on the approximate inversion of the syllables of a word, which works best for two-syllable words. It is referred to in nineteenth-century novels, such as those of Balzac, and is probably older, for its logic makes most sense in an oral culture, and written examples will inevitably look forced or incomprehensible. Table 1.1 shows some common examples.
Table 1.1: Four French verlan terms
| Orthodox French | Verlan |
| Mec (guy, bloke) | Keum |
| Pourri (rotten, corrupt) | Ripou |
| Juif (Jew) | Fij |
| Arabe | Beur |
One point to stress here is that while these words are a very casual form of slang, they are not insulting. According to legend, verlan was devised by criminals or prisoners to prevent the police from being able to understand their conversations: its purpose was not to offend, but to conceal. In other words, ‘beur’ and ‘fij’ do not belong to that vast litany of hate words which all languages seem to accumulate. On the contrary, it is possible to present a positive reading of ‘beur’: it was a spontaneous creation, which marked the integration of Arab immigrant youth into the structures of French culture. A range of spin-offs evolved: beurette for a young, female Arab, and even beur-geoisie for that strata briefly known in English as Yummies: Young Upwardly Mobile Muslims.
The word beur acquired a political significance, for it is associated with two political movements. The first of these grew out of the banlieues of Lyon, in which a large, second-generation Arab immigrant population was concentrated, and in which there were constant problems of poverty, crime and police harassment.151 An appeal was issued by a local militant, Toumi Djaïja, for a protest march across France, which was rapidly termed ‘La marche des Beurs’. This movement acted as a forum through which the dispossessed beurs of the suburbs could meet middle-class beur professionals. It was through this movement that Fadela Amara first learnt of political organization.152 Mainstream political parties grew interested in this movement, partly because they were genuinely moved by the spectacle of these usually secular, ‘young, generous and apolitical’ marchers,153 whose first demand was entry into the structures of Republic. Robert Castel notes: ‘They felt that they were French, and they knew that they would live in France.’ Their movement marked the end of the old immigrant’s illusion of a ‘return’, one day, to North Africa.154 The parties were also in search of what became known as the ‘Beur vote’: they sought political mechanisms by which immigrant votes could be delivered as elections.155
In December 1984 a new organization was created, SOS-Racisme. This was linked to the Socialist Party and drew together beur militants, anti-racists and young socialists, with the avowed aim of stopping the rise of the anti-immigrant National Front. While this goal was worthy in itself, some aspects of SOS-Racisme’s strategy were less praiseworthy. First, by concentrating solely on the National Front as the source of French racism, it turned attention away from the gentle, moderate, ambient racism that suffuses French society. Secondly, SOS-Racisme’s tactics were often quite patronizing: it is now best remembered for a briefly omnipresent badge, ‘Touche pas à mon pote’ (don’t touch my mate), which was popular among a young, white, liberal audience. Lastly, the movement was firmly controlled by the Socialist Party, which enforced some crucial decisions concerning tactics and leaders.156 There is a fairly well-founded suspicion that the Socialists were primarily interested in SOS-Racisme as a means to win the ‘Beur vote’. Certainly, today, the organization is principally remembered among French Muslim activists as a model of how not to organize politically, and it is hard to point to a single real success it achieved.157 The National Front vote continued to rise in the 1980s and 1990s, no North Africans were elected as deputies (in fact, none have been elected since 1962),158 conditions in the banlieues got worse, and the Beur vote proved to be divided among lines of class and age – just like the rest of the French population.
Even the term ‘beur’ has fallen out of favour. When Michèle Lamont interviewed thirty North African workers in Paris in 1992–3, he found that none of them accepted the term.159 Nasséra, a 19-year-old student interviewed by Bouzar and Kada, disliked the way it reduced a complex reality to a single word.160 One rarely sees it being used by academics or researchers: Geisser and Soum’s volume, published in 2008, is unusual in using it as a principal term of analysis. French Arabs I have talked to tend to shudder when they hear the word: once again, it is not pejorative, but it does sound outdated and even slightly patronizing. Instead, out of the disappointment with SOS-Racisme, a new generation began to look to Islam as a source of identity and values.
Conclusion: the little world of Marie L.
The ‘debate’ on the veil was decided in advance. Given the conceptual vocabulary used by leading politicians and the media there was never any doubt about the final decision of the Stasi Commission, or the ultimate consequences of its report. A revealing glimpse of the sub-culture which it created came to light in July 2004.161 A young woman, whose full name was never revealed, reported that she had been attacked by four North Africans and two black people on a Parisian suburban train line: they told her that they would not allow Jews into their area, they cut off her hair and carved a swastika into her arm. The episode was reported extremely widely on French television and in the press: it was taken as another dreadful example of the innate violence of the immigrant population, whose actions revived the memories of the worst moments of French history. However, almost alone, the police investigating the case were suspicious: no evidence could be found to confirm Marie’s experience. A few days later, she confessed: the whole episode was a fantasy. She had made it up, and was sentenced to four months in prison for making a false accusation. However, a society gets the insanity it deserves. Her sorry melodrama was an accurate reflection of the emotional charge within the case made by Brenner and Stasi: black people and Arabs were not to be trusted. More significantly, a double standard seemed to be operating. Anti-Semitic violence rightly aroused an immediate public revulsion among the media; other acts of racism somehow seemed less important, less central to the debate. Under these circumstances, why was it expected that immigrant families would accept Brenner and Stasi’s protests that the Republic had instituted equality?
The contrast between the meanings ascribed to our two keywords is significant. All politicians loudly proclaim their loyalty to laïcité, but produce wildly divergent interpretations of what this term means. On the other hand, attitudes to the veil are consistent, if inaccurate. In other words, the positive principle, which is supposed to bind together the isolated citizens of the Republic into a united national community, is illusory, a mere politician’s charade, while the negative principle, little more than an expression of educated prejudice, really does provide a type of cultural unity. The implications of this contradiction are extremely serious.