Introduction

Abstract

This introductory chapter considers the reasons as to why the secular French Republic seems unable to separate a particular population from its religious affiliation—in this case, Islam—and why the same Republic is otherwise able to make peace with Catholics, Protestants, and Jews. Part of the answer to this question lies in the creation of what will hereafter be referred to as “French Islam,” or Islam français. French Islam was a system that blended French secular republicanism with distinct embodied practices and aesthetics drawn from the French imaginary of orthodox Moroccan Islam. This particular vision of Islam, though quite distinct from the heterodox Islam(s) practiced by some immigrants from France’s Muslim-majority colonial territories, was nonetheless used as the basis for metropolitan French understandings of Islam and Muslim.