French Muslims. Sharif Gemie
was consistently asserted: French colonialism had attempted to liberate Algerian women from the repression of Islam.41 The ‘proof’ for this argument was produced by reference to the ‘veil’: a topic to be discussed in the next chapter.
The important point to stress here is that the history of Algerian colonialism left French people with a set of commonly circulating images by which to understand Muslim and/or Arab populations.42 (Indeed, one problem was precisely that the Algerian experience left many French people unable to distinguish between Arab and Muslim cultures.) The lessons drawn from 130 years of Algerian colonialism taught French people to see Islam as an enemy force, retrograde in its values and violent in its methods. This third colonial, racialized contact has also left a permanent suspicion about almost all forms of Muslim organization. A quip which is re-told by Muslim activists in France today states that: ‘When a group of Bretons meet in the street, it’s called regionalism; when it’s a group of Portuguese, it’s called folklore; and when it’s a group of North Africans, it’s called communautarisme.’43 One point needs to be clarified here: France is probably the only country in the world in which a word linked to the term ‘community’ carries severely negative connotations. ‘Communautarisme’ does not mean an innocent activity to build up a community: instead it means a challenge to the Republican ideal of a transparent, unified public sphere in which all citizens appear as approximate equals, as in the previously cited example of ‘Jews indoors, French citizens outside’. Perhaps the best translation of the term is ‘ghetto-ization’, with the proviso that in this case it is understood as an example of the minority group ‘ghetto-izing’ itself.
This brief review of France’s three contacts with racialized groups suggests how heavily the weight of centuries of history is acting to determine and to structure the apparently spontaneous, commonsense forms of political culture in France today.
Conclusion
This is a book about a group of people, Muslims, with the strong, clear qualification that this term is a provisional, constructed category, often an externally imposed category, which may be surpassed surprisingly quickly by events. While this work certainly makes frequent reference to a religion – Islam – its main purpose is not to study a faith. Instead, our principal topic is the difficult relationship between Muslims and the French Republic: a political form which, in the late nineteenth century, seemed to be the very embodiment of modernity; a form which was secular, democratic (if one is permitted to use this term to describe a regime in which women were denied the vote until 1944) and progressive; a form which seemed to unite diverse peoples in a common national culture. As the epigraph for this chapter suggests, these Republican ideals are at the centre of debates: the Republic was once a form which excited admiration and – in Bouteldja’s words – even love from the non-French people who learnt about it. In studying the relationship between contemporary Muslims and the French Republic, we will note the decline of Republicanism as an effective political form. We will identify an unusual, probably unique, form of racism contained within the Republican form: a virtuous racism, in the words of Nacira Guénif-Souilamas, which could even be termed an anti-racist racism.44
This work will discuss how Republicanism has failed to adapt to the challenges of the twenty-first century. In the words of Yann Moulier Boutang, ‘The Republic has become reactionary’.45 Like President Chirac in September 2003, we are witnessing a silent state funeral.
The War of Symbols: a Chronicle of a Debate Foretold
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The means by which French people were alerted to the issues raised in the previous chapter was through the presence of a few hundred veiled schoolgirls in French state schools. This chapter will first re-tell the story of the ‘war of the veil’, and then consider some key concepts and terms that this clash brought into prominence: laïcité (and the Republican tradition), the veil, integration and beur. My intention in examining these terms is to draw out some hidden political implications concerning how debate was structured: these assumptions form the context for the interventions by our four thinkers.
The war of the veil
It has become commonplace to suggest that the dispute surrounding the status of veiled schoolgirls in French state schools started, out of the blue, in September 1989.1 In that month, three veiled schoolgirls were excluded from the Gabriel-Havez college in Creil, a small town north of Paris, on the grounds that their veils were not compatible with the laïque principles of the French state schooling system. Their veils were relatively light pieces of cloth covering their hair, but not their faces: nothing like the small tents that the Taliban imposed on the women of Kabul. (Indeed, ‘headscarf’ is probably a more accurate word, and was used more widely in the early 1990s. I will use ‘veil’ as it was the most commonly circulating word after 2000.) The Socialist Party was confused by the incident: a substantial minority in the party felt deep loyalty to the ideals of laïcité and therefore strongly supported criticisms of the girls’ behaviour. Party lines were further muddled by the publication of a manifesto in the left-leaning Nouvel Observateur weekly, signed by prominent intellectuals such as Elisabeth Badinter, Régis Debray and Alain Finkielkraut, which called for a stronger defence of laïcité against the threat represented by the schoolgirls. Christian Democrats, normally located in the centre or centre-right of the French political spectrum, were more tolerant of the veiled schoolgirls. A long, tortuous, legal-constitutional argument followed, and it was finally accepted in July 1995 that veil-wearing schoolgirls could be – reluctantly – tolerated in French state schools as long as they did not engage in active attempts to convert other pupils to Islam.2 Disputes continued, and in the late 1990s about 150 cases each year went to a central arbitration body.3
In reality, it is clear that the episode in 1989 was a new chapter in a far longer story that could be dated back to 1830 (the French invasion of Algeria), if not still earlier.4 The question returned to the political agenda in 2003, when the two daughters of a secular French-Jew converted to Islam. In October 2003, they returned to their school in Aubervilliers wearing headscarves. They were excluded from the school a few days later: it seems that some laïque militants in the school publicized their case, and therefore it was closely followed by the French media.
At first sight, these seem absurd episodes: how could the Republic be threatened by a few hundred (at most a thousand) schoolgirls choosing to wear veils on their heads? How could Chirac, in 2003, publicly associate himself with those who stated that they considered that wearing a veil to be an aggressive act? The contradictions in such arguments seem so obvious: does not Marianne, the buxom symbol of the French Republic, normally cover her hair? Are veil-wearing Catholic nuns also to be understood as aggressive?
At this point we have to consider at least three further dimensions to this issue. First, a general point: schooling occupies an intensely important position within French political culture, and it is no exaggeration to say that the school – understood principally as the state school – is the prime symbol of Republican values. French state schools have also performed reasonably effectively as a means of social promotion for some of the excluded and marginalized.5 For some years, however, schoolteachers have been complaining of a decline in respect for their role, and – perhaps more seriously – of increased levels of aggression and violence in their schools. Such complaints received a powerful expression in a collection of essays and interviews edited by Emmanuel Brenner in 2004, with the provocative, memorable title of The Republic’s Lost Territories.6 The picture that emerges from this work is certainly alarming. Some 405 anti-Semitic acts were recorded in France between September 2000 and January 2002: many of these incidents were violent, and the numbers recorded were undoubtedly increasing. Tags and graffiti were becoming more common in many