French Muslims – Exploring the Issues
August 23, 2010
The dilemmas faced by Muslims living in France are examined in a new book out early next month.
French Muslims by Professor Sharif Gemie, University of Glamorgan, provides a critical perspective on Muslim politics and experiences in contemporary France, the European country with the largest Muslim population. It focuses on the work of four prominent Muslim thinkers and activists—Chahdortt Djavann, Fadela Amara, Tariq Ramadan, and Houria Bouteldja.
Professor Gemie is a leading expert on the marginalised groups and cultures in Western Europe.
The book examines issues such as the veil, assimilation, the role of the school, the traditions of the French republic, and the legacy of the French empire. In France, the state school system is a central feature of the Republican social system, which is defined as secular.
Professor Gemie said, “The few hundred Muslim schoolgirls who wore headscarves to school were seen as a challenge to the values of the Republic: they were also an indication that within the Muslim population there were contrasting attitudes to assimilation, and that a new generation were no longer prepared to accept uncritically all things French. Lastly, the public presence of Muslims revived uncomfortable memories of the end of Empire, in particular the extremely bloody struggle of Algerian independence (1954–62). The four prominent thinkers examined in this work hold contrasting attitudes to these issues, ranging from as idealistic assimilation of French values to an angry rejection of them.”
The book carefully avoids portraying French Muslims as a solid, monolithic group, and is sensitive to their wide variety of opinions and experience. French Muslims concludes by highlighting some of the dilemmas of national identity in the postcolonial context of globalization, and by pointing out some shortcomings inherent in recent French government initiatives in relation to the Muslim presence.
French government policy initiatives have had several negative effects: they have taught the majority French population to be suspicious of all Muslims, and have created a type of double standard by which all who are defined as Muslims are subjected to excessive enquiries into their political and moral standards, from which the rest of the population are exempt. The government has also encouraged a romanticisation of the quality of ‘laïcité’, the French-Republican ideal of a secular public sphere. The key problem here is that an initiative which made sense in the early twentieth century is no longer adequate as a solution to the cultural and identity issues of the early twentieth century.
French Muslims also analyses the most important organizations and structures that represent French Muslim opinion, including the government-sponsored French Council of the Muslim Faith and the independent Muslim association, the Union of Islamic Organizations of France.
The book is published by the University of Wales Press and will be available from 7th September 2010.
