Hijab and the Republic: Uncovering the French Headscarf Debate

3. French Muslims: Between “Integration” and “Muslimism”

89 3 FrenchMuslims Between “Integration” and “Muslimism” T H E DE V EL OPM EN T T H E DE V EL OPM EN T during the 1970s and 1980s of a postcolonial French population that had, now that the postwar boom was over, become associated with socioeconomic problems, gave rise to a sort of national identity crisis and concerns over “immigration,” which were in part manufactured by the extreme-right party Front National and its leader, Jean-Marie Le Pen. Indeed, the economic recession and its associated social crisis provided the ammunition necessary for the extreme-right to regroup under the National Front’s banner and rocket to a political stardom of sorts during the 1980s. Another key player in the 1980s debate over racism and immigration was the new national organization SOS-Racisme (from which the leadership of Ni Putes Ni Soumises—Neither Whores Nor Submissive—emerged two decades later), which mobilized hundreds of thousands of young people around racism and police brutality. It was, however, also much criticized for its closeness to the Socialist Party and was perceived by many as having coopted and sanitized an already-existing antiracist movement. Also gathering force within the context of the 1980s debate over racism and “integration,” to emerge during the 1990s in particular, largely via the hijab debate, was French Islamism, represented by a number of organizations of varying radical or moderate tendencies. These organizations, most of which have links with Maghrebian Islamist groups, the Muslim Brotherhood, the Saudi-controlled World Islamic League, the Turkish Islamist group Millî Görüs, or with Hamas in Palestine, have been accused, with good reason, of manipulating and escalating the hijab debate and 90 | C O N T E X T U A L I Z I N G T H E D E B A T E even of manufacturing it, much as Le Pen manufactured the “problem” of immigration. Yet, many studies of the French hijab debate, notably most of those published in English, completely ignore or considerably downplay the role played by Islamist groups and their sympathizers within the debate (for example, Ardizzoni 2004; Scott 2005; Bowen 2007). Which is all the more reason to pay these groups some attention here. Who Are “French Muslims”? This is a less straightforward question than might be assumed, for two main reasons. The first of these is that disaggregation of census data by religious and political belief is prohibited under a 1978 law on “information technology and freedom,” unless the person surveyed gives written consent (Kaltenbach and Tribalat 2002, 55). Estimates are thus extrapolated from survey data as well as existing census data about country of origin of immigrant populations, which have to be looked at in historical perspective, as a significant number of today’s French Muslims were born in France. The second reason is that the term “Muslim” is polysemic: it can refer to a religious belief, to an ethnic background, or to an ethnic or cultural identification . Although these may often overlap, they do not do so systematically. Once again, a paucity of disaggregated data makes analysis difficult, but in this second case, there are little such data anywhere. In Muslim countries, given that in most cases there is no formal separation of religion and state, (a) there are unlikely to be demographic studies of degree of religious and cultural identification with “Muslimness,” or (b) even if there were, respondents would be foolhardy indeed, in many national contexts, to respond that they were nonbelievers, as this could incur some degree of personal risk for them, ranging from social stigmatization to death. In non-Muslim countries, either the state assumes all Muslims to be religious (which is curious , because such assumptions are not made with relation to Christianity) or does not invest in research that might provide information about religious and ethnic identification. Fortunately, however—and despite the abovementioned prohibitions on census data—France is one country where a lively interest is taken in the degree of religiosity of its citizens, and a number of surveys, some small, some quite large, have provided some indications as to French Muslims | 91 what “Muslimness” might mean. That said, as Kaltenbach and Tribalat have pointed out, many strongly expressed opinions about “French Muslims” by those participating in current debates are often just that: opinions, not facts, even if they are often expressed as certainties (2002, 55ff). Moreover, they argue, citing Franck...