Nadia Marzouki’s book is much more than just a monograph about Islam in the United States. Through careful consideration of the relations between the West and its Islam, her study reflects on the vision that the West keeps of itself, especially when doubting its values and its own political culture. The debate about Islam is the symptom of a profound crisis, even if, of course, this debate takes up Islam either to reject it or integrate it. And these two “camps”—those who think that Islam is incompatible with the West (though which West?) and those who think that it can be integrated within it—are in agreement when it comes to defining Islam as the locus of the other, of difference, and of foreignness. “Living with one’s differences,” “multiculturalism,” “reasonable accommodation,” “tolerance”—all these terms deployed to conceptualize integration also cement in place the idea of an unsurpassable alterity.
The advantage of Nadia Marzouki’s detour through the United States is to isolate the quasi-existential presence of Islam from the various parameters that cloud the debate more than they clarify it. If in both Europe and the United States the presence of a large Muslim population is recent, the place of that population is different. In Europe, Muslims are linked to three sensitive issues: immigration, social exclusion, and “the return of the sacred.” In the United States, the debates on immigration and the socially excluded are hardly focused on the Muslim population but instead on Latinos (when it comes to immigration) and on African Americans (when it comes to social exclusion). Moreover, American Muslims, especially the foreign born, generally belong to the middle and upper classes, unlike their European coreligionists. Finally, America is familiar with the resurgence of religious practitioners, especially Christians, as illustrated by evangelicals and the Tea Party. In America, public demonstrations of religiosity are not on the face of it considered bizarre or expressions of fanaticism, as is often the case in Europe, including when it comes to Christianity. But the paradox is that, even after setting aside these three factors (immigration, social exclusion, religious visibility) that are associated with Islam in Europe, one nevertheless finds across a large portion of the American population the same rejection of Islam as a religion, a rejection that has boosted European populism of late.
In short, there is indeed an invariable rejection of Islam in the West that is independent of questions of immigration, social exclusion, and challenges to secularism and French
laïcité. Islam is perceived as the absolute other whose very presence requires a rethinking of what constitutes the political bond, beyond the social contract and republican integration—that is, beyond the two founding elements that allowed one to conceive of the “
civis” as composed of varying individuals and populations. Yet the vast amount of what’s been written in the social sciences about the integration of Muslims in Western countries generally focuses on three questions: the theological question (Is Islam compatible with Western values?), the sociological question (How does one integrate a population that derives mostly from immigrant workers?), and the legal question (What standing should the religious practices of Muslims have, including the matters of veils, minarets, halal meat, etc.?). In other words, it considers the conditions of compatibility between Islam and Western societies by establishing entirely reasonable objectives. One can notice how, little by little, Muslims, with the exception of Salafists, define their faith in compatible terms (with values of self-realization instead of Sharia), enter the middle classes, and integrate within the institutional framework provided for religion (Mosque parishes, chaplaincies, etc.). But this scientific literature mostly leaves out the subjective question of “acceptability”—that is, the emotional reaction to the presence of Islam. Generally, these reactions, if recognized at all, are lumped into an unworthy category of subjectivity, as primitive reactions that ought to be surpassed by rational thought, or worse yet rejected out of hand under the heading “racism.” And even if the number of studies of racism is increasing in the social sciences, inquiry into Islamophobia is either denied (“There is no Islamophobia, only racism” or “This is just an exercise in free speech”) or disqualified (because it’s racist, and therefore devoid of all pertinence). However, one hardly ever asks about what the rejection of the other means for self-affirmation. If Islam is perceived as unassimilable—in other words, as incompatible with the constitution of the political bond—then what does constitute the political bond?
In simple terms, Western political culture has two models of political bond: citizenship, which entails that the social bond is above all political and derives from the nation-state, and the social contract, which considers the state as a simple arbitrator over a contract decided on by free, equal, and rational individuals. The first paradigm is the ground of republican integration, so dear to the French, but is also active in countries of “positive law” (where law is the expression of the will of the “sovereign”); the second is the foundation of reasonable accommodation, the expression of a liberal conception of political life as practiced in countries of “common law” (where laws are above all contractual). But as we shall see, these two paradigms have hardly been successful at dissipating a malaise, as one notices both the failure of the liberal call for reasonable accommodation and the crisis of ineffectual calls to citizenship and political integration.
If we take three entirely distinct examples of what is supposed to regulate the religious within the public sphere—France’s 1905 law affirming republicanism centered on the state, the Italian constitution as an expression of concordance with a privileged church, and Canada’s principle of “reasonable accommodation”—one observes that all three have more trouble managing secularism than the religious. We can consider as examples a recent crisis in each country: the
eruv in Montreal (an enclosure requested by an ultra-Orthodox Jewish community that consists of placing a white thread nine feet off the ground to encircle the neighborhood of the faithful, thus letting them circulate on the Sabbath); the Italian crucifix (which a nonreligious person requests be removed from the classroom of her son); and halal meat in the Quick fast-food restaurants in France (where a campaign is launched against the systematic provision of halal meat in certain restaurants and cafeterias). In the three cases, the argument in favor of the acceptance of the religious element in the public space is that it does not bother the nonbeliever for whom it has no meaning. The case of halal meat is clear: what serves as a religious symbol for the believer is merely a slaughtering technique for the nonbeliever (i.e., one that results in meat that contains less blood). This might pose a culinary problem, especially for someone who likes rare meat, but it is not a matter of moral conscience. As long as for economic reasons the halal or kosher meat is distributed in the private sphere, the 1905 law does not come into effect. Similarly, it would be impossible to prohibit the sale of communion wafers in supermarkets.
In all these cases, “secularism” is unable to chase out the religious (because courts refuse to exclude it), and “reasonable accommodation” does not work because the nonbeliever feels sensitive about the religious element—he demands (in vain, hence his anger) its exclusion from the public sphere even when it has nothing to do with proselytizing or any pressure whatsoever. The neighborhood that includes the Jewish community in Montreal refuses the eruv, the Italian schoolchild’s parent refuses the crucifix, and a portion of French public opinion refuses the invisible halal. People want to exclude from public space either religion in general or the other religion while forgetting in the case of France that the 1905 law was not designed to exclude religion from public space but, on the contrary, to organize religion within that space. This is why the courts refuse to exclude the religious from the public sphere, and it is why frustrations mount against a law that seems to ignore emotions and feelings. The religious symbol, even if invisible, without practical consequences, and detached from all proselytizing (as with the Italian crucifix), is bothersome. Of course, it is especially bothersome when associated with a “foreign” culture, but not only: a nun in her wimple will attract stares in France, and a priest in a cassock or soutane is immediately taken for a fundamentalist. Legal proceedings multiply in areas where newcomers move in and request that church bells not ring at night (and roosters not crow). In short, the religious is meaningful even for the unbeliever, and this is why we can no longer speak of rational parties establishing reasonable legal rules for harmonious cohabitation.
The problem of religious liberty is therefore not just a matter of law, the courts, and a harmonization of different liberties (freedom of speech, freedom to choose, and freedom to not have a religion). It comes from deeper wellsprings that we are more and more coming to think about under the heading of identity. Of course, identity is the rallying cry of all populist movements. The reference to freedom of religion that is enshrined in all Western constitutions runs up against a reaction based on identity. In a sense, then, populism runs counter to human rights. Therefore, it is one of the cornerstones of modern democracy that is at stake in the debate about Islam.
Consequently, one must look elsewhere to find what, in the eyes of Islam’s opponents, constitutes the political bond—in something infrapolitical that allows for the establishment of a political community. This infrapolitics is elaborated in terms of culture or, more succinctly, as identity. As though identity, instead of being a product of the political bond, was in fact what made it possible.
However, since this identity is impossible to define, it is instead felt as affects, emotions, and anger. It is not a matter of rights, as a slogan in opposition to the construction of an Islamic center in Manhattan puts it, but of what ought and can be done: “Not a matter of rights, but of what is right,” as Nadia Marzouki underlines.
As she says in her conclusion, the debate underscores well the question of the social bond and whether it supposes “sameness.” And if yes, how does one define this sameness? The term “identity” appears everywhere today, but it is actually relatively recent within political science. It begins to be used often in the 1970s, and that use becomes exponential in the 1990s. People talk of a common “culture,” of “Western values,” and “European Christian identity”—something tells me that the old term “Judeo-Christian” was dropped in favor of just “Christianity”—while forgetting the extent to which the last centuries in the West have been more about civil wars than a harmony of values. No serious political scientist would speak of a culturally homogeneous France in the course of history—neither in religious matters (unless one is going to praise the revocation of the Edict of Nantes and the expulsion of Jews) nor in politics. Laïcs and “Cathos” (the nonreligious and Catholics) led distinct parallel lives in twentieth-century France. Finally, the European Christian identity that numerous laïcs regularly evoke has little in common with the values defended by the Catholic Church, which, on the contrary, believes that the dominant culture in Europe has lost touch with its Christian roots because for the Church, Christianity is a faith before being a culture. Likewise, the happy-hour gatherings of identity enthusiasts, who down sausages and wine as a way to thumb their noses at Muslims (and Jews), are far from the spirit of the Eucharist.
Wanting to define a Western identity is to deny the complexity of Western culture and leads to falling into a reductive incantation.
So then what should be done? Well, instead of looking for the truth hidden behind the debate, or the truth that the debate is hiding, it is worth asking if it is not the debate itself that creates a new world. In other words, we could ask if the emotions, the fears, and the angry feelings do not themselves bring together, paradoxically, a large number of those who are upset to debate not just about the other but with each other, and therefore to grant the other his or her dignity. In short, Westerners ought to take seriously their own conception of citizenship and liberty. Christian churches ought to reflect on the reference to Christianity. Is it a culture, and, if so, what does one do with the European Western culture that is opening itself to gay marriage? Is it a faith? But in that case, the Muslim believer is closer to it than the identity-obsessed atheist. Besides the small minority of extremists who go off enthusiastically toward civil wars, the fear of conflict is also a desire to overcome conflict. The other is called on to explain himself, but he also wants to express himself. He is called on to do so according to a code of polite manners that he attempts to comprehend. The debate creates its own formatting effects. There’s an obligation to respond on the part of the Muslims who must therefore invent, outside of all theological dogmatism, the responses they will give both practically, in the observance of their beliefs, and in the formulation of their identity in order to define their new presence in the West. In this way, the incantatory quest for a new illusory identity can instead arrive at a new social compact.