Ex-musulmans and musulmans laïques in contemporary French literature and film

Abstract

Although several public apostates from Islam are well known in France, most are not French. More attention is granted to French musulmans laïques: practicing Muslims who underline their support for a contemporary model of laïcité holding that religious practices should be restricted to the private sphere. Olivier Arnaubec’s novel 2023. Le mur (2015), Xavier Durringer’s film Ne m’abandonne pas (2016), and Zahwa Djennad’s novel Tabou. Confession d’un jeune de banlieue (2013) reflect this, each deploying musulman laïque protagonists to communicate divergent visions of French Islam, while mentioning the figure of the apostate at most in passing. This may be because the figure of the secular Muslim can easily be appropriated to support the creator of each work’s differing vision of the place of Islam in French society. Musulman laïque protagonists help further Arnaubec’s racist rejection of populations racialized as “Muslim”; the more insidious form of Islamophobia associated with the political mainstream seen in Durringer’s film; and Djennad’s portrayal of Islamic practice as already wholly French without needing further “assimilation.” This article argues that the figure of the ex-Muslim is harder to appropriate to any of these ends, a difficulty which helps to explain the discrepancy in public prominence between the musulman laïque and the apostate in contemporary France.