Encounters France Islam and the Secular Order (original) (raw)
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France and Islam: Introduction
French Historical Studies, 2007
Recent global events have focused attention on the Islamic world and encouraged the resurgence of the unfortunate stereotypes of Muslims as fanatical and Islam as a religion with a proselytizing zeal structured by the jihad, or holy war. But many of the historical connections that the juxtaposition of France and Islam conjure up-the Crusades, orientalism, or the postcolonial "banlieues" and immigrant ghettos-are also associated with France initiating or participating in conflict and violence, be it military, political, social, or cultural. France's relations with Islam have always been difficult, at times hostile, at others more conciliatory, but a historiographical preoccupation with the most confrontational dimensions of the relationship obscures its complexity and diminishes the ambiguous roles of the players involved. The choice of the terms France and Islam to describe what follows is, of course, a conceptual anomaly: France signifying a state or nation, Islam a religion. Even if at an earlier stage of their relationship France, as a major Catholic country, had religious connotations, over time the significance of the term has shifted from Christian state to secular nation, whereas Islam has remained for the West a signifier of religion. Retaining these two terms, in spite of the evolution of their linguistic and cultural significance, is thus emblematic of the West's present
Challenging The French Exception: ‘Islam’ and Laïcité
In-Spire Journal of Law, Politics and Societies, 2008
This article examines the validity of claims to a ‘French exception’ regarding immigration and normalisation policies for France’s growing North African population. While many laud France’s efforts to cultivate citizenship based on a notion of French civic neutrality, a prodigious amount of scholarship claims, to the contrary, that the French state prejudicially supports the breach of Human Rights and limits on pluralism by removing what it sees as ‘ostentatious’ religious symbols in the public sphere that are claimed to pose a security threat to France’s internal stability. The Headscarf Affair is utilised to illustrate the untenable demands of ‘ideal citizenship’ that the French exception attempts to cultivate, namely one that requires the divesting of previously held cultural and religious beliefs and values in favour of adopting a French historical narrative that includes, among other things, a favorable view of the ‘colonizing mission’ of North African states during the French colonial period.
From 'Mahometan Tyranny' to 'Oriental Despotism': The Secularization of Islam in French Political Thought
Since the publication of Edward Said’s Orientalism in 1978, scholars have analysed Western representations of the Orient as a window into Western contexts, identities, and ideas. Drawing on Said’s insights, recent literature has sought to complicate Said’s vision of Orientalism as an imperialist tradition that expressed and legitimised Western colonial interests. Although a growing number of works, particularly in the field of literary studies, have proposed to re-evaluate the relationship between Orientalism and Western contexts, the history of Islam’s significance to European political thought has yet to receive substantial scholarly attention. This thesis seeks to revisit representations of Islam in light of their interactions with, and contributions to, the political dynamics of early modern France, from 1610 to 1798. It analyses the ways in which images of Islam, over the course of more than a century, both reflected and helped to shape processes of political secularisation in France.
A French Paradox? Islam and Laïcité
Is Islam compatible with laïcité, the particular French version of secularism? And conversely, does French laïcité permit the free exercise of religion under a neutral regime, or is it a code word masking Islamophobia? If I have posed these questions in these simplistic and somewhat Manichean terms, such are the terms of the “debate” (perhaps “dialogue des sourds” is a better qualification) often heard in French political discourse, in the media (French and non-French), and elsewhere. Fortunately, more nuanced approaches to these questions abound as well: indeed, laïcité has become a cottage industry for scholars, French and non-French, in sociology, history and political science. And a large number of articles and books have been published by politicians, militants, and religious leaders: some of it polemical, but much of it nuanced and thoughtful. The purpose of this brief article is not to try to break new conceptual ground in the subject, nor to do full justice to the plethora of books and articles in the field, but to make available to the (largely US) readership of the Georgetown Journal of International Affairs an idea of how laïcité has emerged and evolved in French society and its relation to established religions, in particular Islam.
French Secularism and Islam Beyond an Orderly Vision of Politics
This chapter outlines an analytical approach to the study of French secular politics (laïcité) and Islam since 1989. This approach emphasizes the heterogeneous logics of French secularism and argues against an orderly vision of secular politics. An orderly vision of politics refers here to an understanding of secular politics where the question of the object of politics (here “Muslims” and “Islam”) is seen as basically unproblematic. Put differently, the question of how power exercise is connected to secular knowledges is granted minor analytical importance. In fact, those who ask this question are almost exclusively interested in processes of racialization of Islam and the spread of Islamophobia. Meanwhile, the focus in studies on French secularism tends to be on various normative frameworks and their usage, and on how they specify the place of religion in modern society, the functioning of the public sphere, conditions of citizenship, etc. I want to argue the case for a much more important and more complex connection between knowledge and secular politics. It is more complex in the sense that the knowledges in question cannot be as easily disqualified as illegitimate as can racializing and Islamophobic discourses. This connection is constituted by institutionalized bodies of thought – i.e. social, historical, and aesthetic rationalities – which allow diverse members of the public to describe and analyse “Islam” and “Muslims” in a variety of in principle legitimate ways. These rationalities allow them to make diverse statements about policies which are held to be necessary, desirable, or feasible with regard to Muslims. These political rationalities need to be taken into account if the aim is to analyse French secular politics, its modes of reasoning and legitimating policies, and if the aim is to analyse how Muslims engage with ‘the secular context’ of France or, rather, what exactly they engage with. These rationalities – which are secular in the sense that their authority does not depend upon any kind of religious tradition – constitute an essential part of the secular discursive context. This conceptualization of secular politics highlights the insufficiency of the secular-religious dyad as an analytical matrix for politics. Through the rationalizations examined here, “Islam” is configured as ‘more’ (or ‘less’) than a matter to be classified in the legal category “worship”, and a similar observation can be made about “Muslims”. Moreover, these processes are not simply concerned with drawing boundaries between the secular and religious. These diverse processes of rationalization are not conjunctural, nor can they be reduced to particularities of the debate on Islam, the racialization of Muslims or Islamophobia. Ultimately, the multiple rationalities of secularism lead up to a question about how to conceive of secularism’s unity. Put differently, they indicate that the question whether one can imagine a power “that unites in itself a what, a why, and a how” (Foucault 2000:336) also deserves to be asked about secular politics in France.