As French as Everyone Else?: A Survey of French Citizens of Maghrebin, African, and Turkish Origin

1. Are the New French More Religious and Less La

CHAPTER 1 Are the New French More Religious and Less Laïque? U NTIL NOW, the religious affiliation and practice of French people who immigrated or are the descendants of immigrants from Africa or Turkey has rarely been the object of systematic , rigorous, and in-depth study. Indeed, the few existing surveys focus on Muslims and are subject to numerous critiques as to their methodological foundations. Because, for legal reasons, there are no questions about religious belonging on the French census, it is impossible to construct a representative sample of the Muslim population using a quota method. “The bottom line of survey methodology is that one cannot represent an unknown population” (Tribalat 2004b, p. 25). Moreover, in questioning only Muslims, we cannot learn the percentage of Muslims in France (in particular among the New French) or observe any potential differences between Muslims and non-Muslims. To do this, we still need to define who a “Muslim” is. Our study has taken great care not to ethnicize religion. We do not adopt “an essentialist approach that assumes that everyone from a Muslim family or Muslim country can only be Muslim; a characteristic that, by consequence , is independent of the will and convictions of individuals” (Kateb 2004, pp. 36–37). Our definition of the term “Muslim” is strictly religious. As a result, in our approach, there are no “sociological Muslims” (Venel 2004) or French people who are “culturally Muslim ” but not Muslim by confession. The only Muslims are those individuals who declare Islam as their religion. Despite the richness of its 10 ■ Chapter 1 results (Tribalat 1995, 1996), the major fault of the only existing indepth survey, the MGIS study of 1992,1 is that it did not follow this approach. Indeed, as Michèle Tribalat (1995, p. 92) candidly states, “It is extremely unfortunate that we did not use in the survey a direct and precise question on religion (the question ‘Are you Muslim, Catholic, etc.’ was not asked).” This omission, at the same time voluntary and obligatory,2 has considerable consequences for the way in which the data can be used. It either presumes membership in a religion or considers Muslims to be “people who are culturally Muslim.” In the absence of “public statistics from an organized random sample survey on religious affiliations and practices,” as advocated by Michèle Tribalat , our intention is to prepare the ground for an understanding of religious belonging among the New French. This chapter gives a faithful and precise account of relationships to Islam among those who constitute the most important group of French Muslims—that is, if we believe as Michèle Tribalat does that “the Muslim question is largely a Maghrebin question, and will be for a long time” (Tribalat 2004b, p. 29). All Muslims? While the importance of Catholicism in French society, its evolution, and the behavior of Catholics have long been the object of in-depth analyses, the study of relationships to Islam in France is still in its early days. For practical reasons, since the foundational work of Gilles Kepel, Les banlieues de l’islam (The suburbs of Islam), the principal publications mainly describe the doctrinal content and history of Islam3 or investigate its radical factions. The empirical ignorance of how Muslims in France relate to Islam opens the door to all sorts of misunderstandings : we can just as easily stigmatize Islam as disproportionately strong in France as we can deny the existence of a significant community of believers. One cannot help but notice that the tendency today is to inflate, improbably (to say the least), the number of Muslims in France. What is this figure in reality? Is it legitimate to assume 1 Geographic Mobility and Social Insertion Study (Enquête mobilité géographique et insertion sociale). 2 For more about the reasons for this omission, see Tribalat 1995. 3 Among others, Césari 2004 and Étienne 2003. Are the New French More Religious and Less Laïque? ■ 11 that all French people with an African or Turkish immigrant background are Muslims? In our representative sample of the French population (18 years and older) originating from Africa or Turkey, 59 percent of people describe themselves as Muslim. Catholics make up 13 percent, and Protestants make up 2 percent. It must be noted that nearly 20 percent of those interviewed originating from Africa or Turkey say they are not religious. Of the French originating from the Maghreb, 66 percent describe themselves as Muslim, 8 percent as Catholic, and 20...