“Also the School Is a Temple”: Republicanism, Imagined Transnational Spaces, and the Schooling of Muslim Youth in France

Abstract

This chapter is concerned with the debates and media constructions on the schooling of Muslim youth in France. First, it positions these debates in relation to the shifting bases of political power under the Fifth Republic. Second, it examines media constructions of Muslim youth in the larger debates on integration, social diversity, and multiculturalism. Third, it examines initiatives to establish Muslim schools over the backdrop of shifting class stratification and marked spatial segregation of the city and the suburbs. Fourth, it positions the founding of Muslim private schools over the larger backdrop of European political integration and the emergence of a “European space” of praxis in relation to which new forms of citizenship and political action are possible. The concluding section offers a reflection on the role schooling plays in constructing competing notions of Muslim youth within the larger context of a “transnational European” space.