French Muslims: New Voices in Contemporary France

Abstract

In this searching and lively analysis, Sharif Gemie asks what it is like to be a Muslim, and above all a Muslim woman, in contemporary France. This is not a new topic, but one which Gemie tackles with great alacrity through a consideration of struggles around the law of 2004 which in effect banned veil-wearing girls from state schools, and an in-depth study of four high-profile French Muslims who have set the pace in the debate on the place of Muslims in France today. As Gemie points out, there is a tension in the contemporary Republic between the universalist principles of liberty, equality and fraternity available to all citizens and the principle of laïcité which requires that all religious and ethnic groups leave their identities at the door of neutral public spaces such as the town hall and state school. Whereas Jewish and black citizens have had little trouble with this trade-off, argues Gemie, Muslims have generally had more difficulty. This relates for Gemie to the way Muslims are constructed in the media and popular imagination, as living in ghetto-like banlieues, prone to riot, ‘communitarian’, fundamentalist and part of a foreign conspiracy, and to the unhealed scars of the Algerian War. Gemie demonstrates that French Muslims are not a bloc, nor ghettoized, by exploring four case studies of French Muslims who have engaged in the media with the public debate on integration. On the one hand there is Chahdortt Djavann, a Muslim of Iranian origin who has entirely espoused the idea than France is enlightened and countries like Iran backward and oppressive to women. There is also Fadela Amara, a beur of Algerian origin brought up in a banlieue of Clermont-Ferrand, who was one of the founders in 2003 of Ni Putes ni Soumises which criticised sexual violence in immigrant communities themselves, and in 2007 became Sarkozy’s secretary of state for urban policy. On the other side of the debate, Gemie takes the case of Tariq Ramadan, an intellectual whose father was an exiled member of Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood, who argues that Muslim immigrants in the West must fight to preserve their religious identity from globalized mass culture by becoming involved in anti-globalization, anti-capitalist movements. Finally, Gemie takes the case of Houria Boutelja, another beur brought up in Lyon, who co-founded the ‘Indigènes de la République’, who argue that Muslims in France are still suffering the effects of the Algerian War and French colonialism which makes them into second-class citizens.