Secularism Confronts Islam

How is it possible to define the relationship between two terms as vague and controversial as laïcité and “Islam”? We know that laïcité is a characteristically French phenomenon, incomprehensible in Great Britain, where customs agents and police officers are permitted to wear veils, as well as in the United States, where no president can be elected who does not speak of God. And yet both those countries are Western secular democracies. The question of laïcité thus raises two distinct problems: one is the identity and particularity of France and the other the relationship between Islam, on one side, and “secularization” and democracy, on the other. At the outset, we must draw a distinction between secularization, whereby a society emancipates itself from a sense of the sacred that it does not necessarily deny, and laïcité, whereby the state expels religious life beyond a border that the state itself has defined by law.¹ In fact, situations differ considerably, depending on variations in two parameters: the separation of church and state (yes or no) and the position of religion in society (strong or weak). A country may be secular but not laïque, because it has an official religion (Great Britain, Denmark); it may even be laïque (strictly asserting the separation of church and state) while simultaneously recognizing the role of religion in the public sphere (the United States, where the Supreme Court recently upheld the recitation of “under God” in the Pledge of Allegiance in public schools); in a state described as laïque like Turkey, where the law contains no reference to Islam, there is, in fact, no separation of church and state, because imams are government employees, as are pastors in Denmark.

Likewise, when we speak of Islam, what are we referring to? The dogma? But that is a matter of debate and a variety of interpretations among Muslims themselves: they all assert that there is only one Islam, but each has his own personal analysis, ranging from a liberalism that rejects the veil and would not turn down a drink to a fundamentalism that kills the spirit in the name of the letter. It is thus always possible to identify polemically the “true” Islam of one’s choosing: fundamentalist, liberal, even secular.² Are we referring to the culture and history of the Arab Muslim world? But as a matter of fact, Islam has now left the Middle East, and that is why the question of its relationship to French laïcité has arisen. We can, of course, consider democratization in the Middle East and the relationship between democracy and Islam, but we ought not to forget that the principal obstacles to democracy in the Middle East are posed by secular regimes (Tunisia, Baathist Syria, the Front de libération nationale [National Liberation Front] and the army in Algeria, Egypt) and that their political model (one party and president for life) is borrowed from European fascism or Third World socialism, very distant from the Koran and the tradition of the Prophet. Moreover, does speaking of Islam as a unitary phenomenon really enable us to understand the concrete practices of people known as Muslims? In what way is the element “Islam” relevant to an understanding of the underlying motive forces of modern societies, even Muslim societies? All this leads to little but the rehashing of a few tired clichés.

Of course, when we speak of the relationship between Islam and laïcité in the Western world, we always have in mind the symmetry with (or opposition to) Christianity. For the West, secularization and laïcité alike were established alongside, or rather against, Christianity. Is the same story being repeated with Islam as in 1905, when veiled women were driven from public places by force of arms (then it was Catholic nuns), or is there something specific about Islam that makes it incompatible with our laïcité? A parallel is often drawn between the way the French Republic manages Christianity or Judaism and its current confrontation with Islam, but usually to show the irreducible difference that Islam embodies. But if there is a structural incompatibility between Islam and laïcité, we would need to explain in what way that is not true for other religions. We would, for example, like Islam to experience a religious reformation like Protestantism, while we forget that Catholicism has laboriously adapted to modernity and neglected any such reformation. It is argued that Christianity has always accepted a secular space (“Render unto Caesar …”), while forgetting that the churches (from Gregory the Great to Calvin) claimed the right to define and control that space. The establishment of such a space is first of all a political act: French laïcité was indeed built against the Catholic Church, but not necessarily against religion, although for the most dedicated rationalists the two went hand in hand, and for many secular people today the expression of religious feeling remains a threat and a scandal, as we saw in the rejection of Rocco Buttiglione as European commissioner because he openly expressed very conservative religious positions.

Instead of getting lost in cultural and theological debates that might shed light on the past but are irrelevant to what is meaningful today, we ought to reconsider the constant oscillation between secularization, whereby society gradually emancipates itself from religion without necessarily denying it, and laïcité, in which the political authority closes off the space of religion the better to define public space as its opposite. We have to say clearly what is the problem for our laïcité: Some particular religion or all religion? And to do that, we have to reconsider the very matrix of the relationship between the republic and religion in general.

Why is laïcité such a burning subject in France? The first reason is probably that the debate touches on what is considered the heart of French identity, at a moment when that identity has been challenged from above by European integration. Consequently, we cling to a pseudoconsensus on republican and national values, which seem to be dissolving from below, in the banlieues and the schools. At bottom, Islam is not the cause of the crisis of the French model but the mirror in which society now sees itself. France is experiencing the crisis of its identity through Islam. The second reason is that different meanings are attached to the concept of laïcité. But the problem here is not so much to define the true meaning of laïcité as to determine how it creates meaning in our society. The supporters of laïcité are far from sharing a single view; there is a large distance between advocates of an open and modest laïcité, like Jean Baubérot, and defenders of laïcité defined as a comprehensive project (Henri Peña-Ruiz).³ I see three registers in which the word is used.

This goes far beyond the separation of church and state and implies a conception of values, of society, of the nation, and of the republic, based on the philosophy of the Enlightenment, the idea of progress, and finally advocacy of an ethics not rooted in religion but proclaimed as rationalist. This philosophy has, of course, imbued the teaching profession and school textbooks since Jules Ferry and has become the consensus view of the Left.⁴ A good contemporary expression of the view can be found in the works of Henri Peña-Ruiz and the writings of Didier Motchane (who was an adviser to Jean-Pierre Chevènement when he was interior minister).⁵ It will not be discussed here, because it is in fact an opinion, a perfectly respectable one, but one that it would be groundless to set up as a standard or an official truth. Ideologies are like religions: there are those that appear more amiable, more open, more tolerant or that are more familiar to us because they are rooted in our upbringing, but they are conceptually closed systems, because they define themselves as hegemonic (since religion is acceptable in this instance only if it is integrated into this system of values); the limit of the hegemony is tolerance, but tolerance presupposes hierarchy—you tolerate by including, by making the other’s thinking a subset of the whole. By definition, there can be no consensus on laïcité as a philosophy, because many believers—whatever their religion—cannot recognize themselves in it. If we want to leave the religious realm, we must not make laïcité into a religion. I see no reason to combat one ideological discourse with another, when my intention is to determine under what conditions it is possible to refrain from ideological discourse.

Many advocates of political laïcité have developed philosophical thinking on the subject, but a study of the secular coalition that finally imposed the separation of church and state in 1905 shows that it was never driven by a consensus on a philosophical or an ideological conception of laïcité and that its members had very varied allegiances and motivations.⁶ Secular thinking is an afterthought that does, of course, have a philosophical history, but it is not the origin of the politics of laïcité.⁷ Laïcité is a body of laws before being a system of thought.

The notion of laïcité as a legal principle is open to question, because it is never defined as such by the text of a law.⁸ The 1905 law establishing separation did not use the word laïcité. It was not until the Constitution of 1946 that the word appeared explicitly as a constitutional principle entailing legal effects, but without being further specified. The reality of laïcité is, however, clearly legal, because, after all the debates, parliament by passing laws and the courts by applying the laws and through jurisprudence define what is required of citizens: laïcité is known through the law. We may therefore conclude that laïcité is defined by the body of statutes making up the French law of religion, interpreted by jurisprudence. Laïcité is what may be inferred as the common principle of all the laws that have regulated the place of religion in the French public square since the assertion of the principle of the separation of church and state. In the eyes of the law, laïcité is neither a state of mind nor a philosophy nor even a principle, but a body of laws that derive their validity—of course—from the will of the legislature: its truth is thus political.⁹

Laïcité in France is tied to a precise historical and political context: the determination to disengage the state and society from the influence of the Catholic Church, more than from religion in general. The republic was finally constructed in opposition to the Catholic Church. French laïcité is historically a matter of dispute between the republican state and the Catholic Church, founded on anti-clericalism. It is thus a combative laïcité marked by verbal violence and anathema, which has recurred today in the polemics on Islam. Broadly speaking, this conflict lasted from 1790, the year of the imposition of the Civil Constitution of the Clergy, to 1924, the year when the church accepted the 1905 law. It has persisted in the sphere of education. The atmosphere of ideological civil war that France experienced from 1790 to 1981 (or, rather, 1984, with the huge demonstration in favor of private schools) hinged almost entirely on the question of the political position of the Catholic Church; in fact, the defense of laïcité has probably been the only common denominator of all the parties of the Left. In parallel with this political establishment of laïcité, the church’s acceptance of the republic and of laïcité was political, not theological. The recognition of the republic by the Catholic Church (the “toast of Algiers” delivered at the pope’s instigation by Cardinal Lavigerie in November 1890) had nothing to do with new theological speculation; it was a purely political decision, motivated by political considerations. The Vatican’s belated acceptance of the 1905 law (in 1924), once the republic had agreed to recognize the hierarchical structure of the Catholic Church—that is, the bishop’s control over parishes through the diocesan organization—was also a political decision. It was through the dissociation between the political and the theological that the separation became acceptable, but this dissociation was not a matter of course: the popes at first condemned it, but the fear that Catholics would be marginalized or that they would undertake the construction of a Catholic party, dragging the church into partisan disputes, persuaded the papacy and the majority of the clergy to accept the new political order precisely so that it would be neutral and not an instrument for the imposition of a vision of the world. The question of laïcité is primarily political.

The subsequent emergence of Christian Democracy signaled the real—not opportunistic—adhesion of Catholics to the republic. The church attempted to rediscover common ground for the definition of moral values with nonpracticing citizens, clinging sometimes to the notion of natural law, sometimes to that of the Christian culture of Europe (as Pope John Paul II did in 2004 when he asked that a reference to Christian culture be incorporated into the preamble of the European Constitution), and even, for the Catholic Left, by developing what is known as liberation theology. But the peace treaty was not immediately concluded: twentieth-century France, in its unions, civic associations, and schools—that is, in civil society—was deeply divided between laïcs and cathos (and only Catholics, because Jews and Protestants were on the side of the laïcs). Behind the false unanimity of the public school, there were two kinds of networks for sociability, union organization, and even leisure activities (sports clubs, holiday celebrations, summer camps, scouting, youth groups, informal universities, lecture series, and so on): the secular and the church-sponsored, with greater or lesser antagonism depending on the region. Of course, there were sometimes mixed marriages, as there are today, but people lived in two different worlds. The French Communist Party had, in its way, sectarianized the banlieues (and hardly shared certain republican values, such as parliamentary democracy). Even though the political choices made by each group grew less distinct (with the Resistance and the development of a Catholicism of the Left), the split affected ways of thinking (we know how little the “second Left,” often led by men from Christian backgrounds, was ever able to make itself acceptable to the Socialist Party). This conflict focused on the question of education, which faded only between 1984 (the year when the Left accepted private schools) and 1994 (the year when the Right stopped seeking the revenge of the private school). One might wonder, moreover, whether the end of the conflict over education is connected with the rise, if not of Islam, at least of violence in the banlieues, with leftist members of the middle classes finding in private schools a means of getting around the rigidities of the residential assignment of schools, which they had always supported. In any event, at the very moment when a split that was two centuries old was fading, a new one appeared: laïcité against Islam (or vice versa). It was as though the old pattern of conflict were inherent in French identity and only the religious agent had changed.

Laïcité thus refers back first of all to the structuring of French political space, which was carried out in conflict and polemics but helped to forge and stabilize French identities, which went well beyond the ballot (from the Communist to the Catholic, including the Radical Socialist along the way). French laïcité is inseparable from the construction of the republican state from the Revolution on. It also no doubt served to create a “class alliance” to sidestep the troublesome social question.¹⁰ It certainly still plays the same role of blurring social divisions to the extent that the criticism of Islam cuts across class lines and touches very varied political, social, and religious circles but also to the extent that it adopts a primarily cultural perspective on the complex realities of the banlieues. This very close bond between republic and laïcité is a product of French history, but it has been so far internalized that we have invented the myth of a consensus on republican values. Political choice has logically been expressed by a body of laws, but it has also been surrounded by a philosophical (others would say ideological) elaboration of laïcité, which there is even less reason to make into a normative system because it is, in fact, very complex (many laïcs, especially in the nineteenth century, thought of themselves as the defenders of a certain religious idea against Catholic clericalism).

Oddly enough, then, today’s laïcité is based on the myth of consensus, particularly the consensus on republican values. This is doubly a myth because one wonders, first of all, about what there was a consensus about (between a Stalinist of the 1950s and a Catholic opposed to Vatican II, for example) and, second, since it is obvious that there are citizens who do not seem to join in the consensus, whether the latter should be considered excluded from the political order (or excluding themselves, which amounts to the same thing). Civil war is not far off because, while the republic is founded on a consensus, which remains to be demonstrated, whoever does not adopt it is not inside the republic.

But Jules Ferry’s consensus was negative: the elementary-school teacher was to say nothing that might shock a father (laïcité was also patriarchal; today we would add the mother).¹¹ Laïcité aimed not to exclude believers but to define a space of neutrality. If there is a consensus, it is not on values but on respect for a rule of the game, insofar as it is ratified by the popular will. The consensus concerns the political and constitutional principle of laïcité, not philosophy. We see, among other things, how the Catholic Church defends fundamental values against legislative choices, for example, in opposing abortion. And if that opposition does not lead to civil war, this is because the two parties accept precisely that the debate will not turn into opposition to the political system. The law does not ask that the archbishop of Paris approve of abortion: a priest in the pulpit may condemn it and say that it is a sin and a crime. But any encouragement of or support for an attack on clinics conducting abortions is a criminal offense. There is a very clear line between actions and opinions, and it must stay that way. But it is, in fact, becoming blurred because of the recent tendency to criminalize opinions (the Gayssot law on racism, anti-Semitism, and xenophobia; the law on homophobia), which means that even if one starts from a republican consensus (revisionism is unacceptable), one arrives very soon at a policing of ideas.

Laïcité thus ought to be negative above all: it aims at freeing political, but also public, space from religious control. But it does not aim to replace religious discourse by a new ethics: such an idea is totally absent from the body of laws that defines laïcité. And this touches on a very important aspect of French laïcité: because it is based on the separation of church and state, it is absolutely forbidden for it to speak of dogma. This is at least the theory.

It might be thought that there are hence no grounds for raising the question of the theological compatibility of any particular religion with laïcité. And yet the debate now concerns theology more than ever.

The recurrent question in this book is to determine why we question Islam about dogma, whereas we hold that Christian dogma is compatible with laïcité or that the church’s political acceptance of laïcité exonerates it from any suspicion about theological content. Dual language or observation of a fact: Muslim dogma is thought to pose a problem that Christianity does not. Essayists and politicians summon Islam to give pledges: they want an Islam à la française, liberal, even … secular.¹² Some therefore assert that we have to foster this Islam, while others suggest that at bottom Islam is by definition not compatible with laïcité. More deeply, there arises the question of all forms of fundamentalism: Can some be absorbed into the republic, or do we have to struggle against all fundamentalism (defined here as the requirement that the believer fully live his faith, that is, submit all activities of his life, including social and political activities, to a religious standard)? While these questions may be legitimate on the intellectual level, they pose a political problem: Should the state take dogma into consideration?

French laïcité forbids it. The state has no call to intervene in dogma: the courts and the Conseil d’État frequently reiterate this point, emphasizing that when the state must intervene—for example, on vaccinations and transfusions for Jehovah’s Witnesses—it take into account only public order or the interests of the child (because he is a minor) but never question dogma. And this is true even when the dogma asserts things that are in contradiction with the law. This is, moreover, a constant of jurisprudence: a woman may not sue the Catholic Church for sexual discrimination because she has been prevented from studying in a seminary and being ordained as a priest. In addition, ordinary law does not apply to the internal organization of churches (a priest deprived of his priesthood by the bishop cannot sue for wrongful dismissal). For the same reason, there is no ground for the state to challenge religious dogmas in Islam (apostasy, prohibition of marriage between a Muslim woman and a non-Muslim man, and so on), except to prosecute someone relying on a principle of the kind to commit the actual offense of inciting a crime or committing a crime himself.¹³

It would therefore suffice to hold to this principle so as not to pose the question of dogma, all the more because, as the Traité du droit français des religions demonstrates, Islam raises no specific problems that would require new legislation: current laws and jurisprudence suffice to deal with the particular cases posed by Islam (besides, very few Muslim community leaders have asked for a modification of the 1905 law, which has rather been suggested by Christians—including Pastor de Clermont—and by Nicolas Sarkozy).¹⁴

Yet the entire debate today concerns dogma from several angles. First, the question of the selection of members of the Conseil français du culte musulman (French Council of the Muslim Faith): Should the largest organizations be favored, although they are close to Salafist circles, such as the Union des organisations islamiques de France (UOIF; Union of Islamic Organizations of France) (recognizing the differences, this reminds us that the state has always had a weakness for strong, centralized, and organized unions, which by definition are very dogmatic, like the Confédération générale du travail [General Confederation of Labor]), or rather “liberal” figures? The political choice here presupposes a choice between religious interpretations. There then arises the question of the training of ministers of the religion: the call, which has now become ritual, for the training of French imams is meaningful only if one assumes that those imams will be more liberal than imported fundamentalists or the self-proclaimed young imams of the banlieues. The demand for the reform of the dogmas, in this case formulated outside state bodies, also comes from intellectuals engaged in the debate on Islam. For example, Michèle Tribalat and Jeanne-Hélène Kaltenbach, in their book La République et l’Islam, are indignant that the Ministry of the Interior withdrew from a proposal to consult Muslim authorities about the reference to an oath of allegiance to republican laws and especially the explicit mention of the right to change religions.¹⁵ But here, too, such a step would be completely contrary to legal laïcité: an oath makes sense only in a regime governed by concordat; asking for the renunciation of what some consider to be a part of dogma (the condemnation of apostasy) is not within the state’s province.

The paradox is that Tariq Ramadan’s celebrated declaration calling for a moratorium on the application of hudud (corporal punishments explicitly provided by sharia for certain “crimes against God”) is much more in conformity with the concept of laïcité than the requirement that the very principle of these divine commandments be renounced.¹⁶ The state has no knowledge of the heavenly kingdom and legislates only on terrestrial matters; it is therefore important for it that no sentence of corporal punishment be pronounced and even less executed here below. Hell can wait. The moratorium is a good compromise, to be sure a bit hypocritical, but what religion is not when it has to deal with earthly political realities? And yet this declaration was greeted with jubilation by those opposed to Ramadan, because they saw it as proof that he was using a dual language. In fact, however, he asserted (1) that one cannot change the law of God, and (2) that the law of the state is the one that prevails in the world. What bishop would say the contrary? Of course, out of concern not to stigmatize Islam alone, one might accompany the criticism of Islam with an attack against Christianity or Judaism (as some extreme secularists such as Jocelyn Bézecourt in fact do). One might, for example, always consider that Christian theology is inegalitarian and discriminatory and demand not only the right of women to be priests but also the abolition of hell, because it discriminates against nonbelievers (but the invention of purgatory by the Catholic Church is a step in that direction, because it is nothing but, as Ramadan would say, a long moratorium). Similarly, it would be a good idea to demand that the Calvinists give up the concept of predestination (which asserts that God has chosen those who will be saved or damned from the moment of their birth), because the damned, condemned even before coming into existence, have access to no appeal procedure. And we could ask the Jews to give up the idea of the “chosen people” (interestingly enough, by the way, the notion is often invoked, precisely by those who slide from anti-Zionism into anti-Semitism, for the purpose of defining Israel as a racist state: the manipulation of theology for purposes of political demonization does not affect Islam alone).

The debate, in fact, clearly illustrates an ambiguity in French laïcité that goes back to 1790 and the Civil Constitution of the Clergy but resurfaced with the policy consistently followed by all interior ministers since Pierre Joxe set up the Conseil représentatif de l’Islam de France (CORIF; Representative Council of Islam in France) in 1989—that the state get involved precisely in the organization of religion and by doing so try to influence religious choices by the selection of its interlocutors. Instead of taking offense at this confusion, the supporters of strict laïcité criticize it for not going far enough by not excluding “fundamentalists.” The slogan of Islam à la française, or French Islam, is explicitly aimed at favoring a liberal or even secular Islam—that is, of emptying any religion not necessarily of its transcendence but of its demand for the absolute.

The unspoken thought of laïcité à la française is, in fact, the control of the religious by the political sphere, following either a Caesar-opapist model—where the sovereign intervenes in theological matters—or a Gallican one—where the Church of France, encouraged by the state, jurisdictionally frees itself from Rome. It was not an accident that to set up the CORIF, Pierre Joxe chose Alain Boyer, a high-ranking government official and agrégé in history, who had studied the establishment of the grand Sanhedrin by the emperor Napoleon, who wanted to create an institution to represent and control the Jews of France. This model of the authoritarian organization of the Jewish community within the framework of the French state is, in fact, frequently cited to explain how one may proceed to integrate a religion without churches and with a strong communitarian tradition. The problem is that the establishment of what was to become the Consistoire israélite (umbrella organization of French Jews) was carried out in the framework of an authoritarian empire operating under a concordat—that is, the complete opposite of a secular democratic republic. The republic is never very far from the authoritarian temptation: in the concordat period (before 1905), the republican state punished priests who refused to give communion for reasons that were deemed to be political.¹⁷ The recent deportation of imams for mere statements seems to point in the same direction. The impulse to control also affects the educational system. The organization of a course of study of Islam by the state, frequently mentioned by the authorities but always put off, was, to be sure, never openly aimed at propagating an Islam à la française, but officials did hint at the possibility: “But the responsibility incumbent on [the state] does not amount to organizing training in Islam, in other words, the education of imams, but in fact to developing knowledge of Islam in our country (it being clearly understood that one may anticipate that the development of such knowledge is one of the conditions that will give Muslims in France the possibility of recruiting their imams in their own country).”¹⁸

The oath of allegiance for ministers of religion, briefly contemplated by the High Council for Integration in 2000 for Muslims alone, was imposed by the Civil Constitution of the Clergy of 1790 on all priests (when the country was officially subject to a concordat). It was rejected by the papacy, which divided the clergy between those who swore the oath and the refractory, who were severely repressed. This kind of oath is presecular: it fits into the Gallican determination to control religious institutions. Applying it to Muslims alone would, in addition, be discriminatory (and would have automatically been nullified by the Conseil d’État). Similarly, the 1905 law provides that the state not intervene in the internal organization of religious institutions, but this is precisely what the Interior Ministry has done by setting up the Conseil français du culte musulman. This is not a criticism of the substance of the policy pursued but simply a way of pointing out that if you want to adopt a laïcité with rules that vary for political reasons, this predominance of the political ought to be openly accepted, not hidden behind some purported philosophical essence of laïcité and a sacrosanct respect for the 1905 law, the spirit, if not the letter, of which is violated by this approach.

Moreover, if we consider the history of the 1905 law, we clearly see that some secular politicians hesitated at the idea of separating church and state precisely because it would deprive the state of a means of control.¹⁹ This was the point of view of Mustafa Kemal Atatürk in Turkey: his secularism was very militant and would have been openly antireligious had the influence of Islam in his country not compelled him to be more cautious. He therefore chose not the separation of church and state but the control of religion by the state (the imams are under an office of religious affairs, the Dyanet, that pays their salaries and even composes sermons). One can sense a longing for this kind of state-directed laïcité in many contemporary French commentators.

But can we speak of an antireligious laïcité? It is clear that for many secular activists the problem is indeed religion: for example, when they sincerely argue that religion is a purely private affair, which is not at all the definition provided in the law.²⁰ The 1905 law provides for the conduct of worship in public space (and it, of course, organizes it): religious edifices are public, processions are conducted in public, chaplains also carry out their activities in public places (schools, prisons, barracks), protocol assigns a place to representatives of religions, and priestly dress is not prohibited in public places (it was discovered at the start of classes in the fall of 2004 in some lycées in Var that chaplains had been showing up for years in cassocks: the administration banned them only then out of concern for the parallel with the prohibition of the veil, but it had not previously been a problem—yet another sign that Islam is in fact the problem). Some heads of schools have been so zealous as to bar entry to mothers wearing veils, whereas others are not content with refusing to have hallal meat in their cafeterias (which remains within the framework of laïcité) but want Muslim children to eat non-hallal meat (which goes far beyond it).²¹

There is clearly a continuity in the affirmation of laïcité in France: most teachers who refuse to have veiled students in class would be just as intransigent against seminarians in cassocks (well, almost: it took the law on the veil to bring to their notice that there were Sikh students wearing turbans and chaplains wearing cassocks). The phobia against sects has sometimes served to justify a full-scale attack against innocent followers of more or less harmless practices. But in the end, laïcité had managed to find a compromise with established religions. The abrupt appearance of new forms of religiosity starting in the 1970s changed everything. The 1980s were a turning point; just when militant laïcité seemed about to disappear for want of opponents, it reconstructed itself around a new enemy, Islam. At a time when the conflict with the Catholic Church was dying down, new forms of religious affirmation appeared, not all of which, incidentally, were connected to Islam: Sephardic Jews repatriated from Algeria injected more demonstrative piety into French Judaism, evangelical Protestantism and the charismatic movement placed the question of faith in the forefront and left the four walls of churches to show themselves in the streets, sects flourished, and, finally, Islam became a massive presence.

But reactions to these revivalist movements varied. The community of Taizé was popular, but the sects were disturbing. It was interesting to see hostility develop in particular cases, such as sects suspected of infiltration and the formation of parallel networks in power centers (Scientology, for example; the Freemasons, too, were not exempt from this suspicion, judging by the number of features that weeklies published about them). But another form of rejection appeared when there was an ostensible occupation of public space by a specific group (especially when it was overdetermined by an ethnic element), even if the law was respected: for example, evangelical assemblies of Gypsies, when tens of thousands of people converged on airfields leased for the occasion, caused local mayors to mobilize (whereas the annual procession of Gypsies in Saintes-Maries-de-la-Mer was integrated into tradition and indeed folklore); also worth mentioning is the construction of regional worship and meeting centers (the Jehovah’s Witnesses in Montreuil in Eure-et-Loir, for example), as well, of course, as the construction of mosques. The title of a book, Les Territoires perdus de la république, says a good deal about this basically territorial view of society as being whittled away at by the “other.”²² The prohibition of the veil in school and the question of hallal meat in school cafeterias should be seen more in light of this notion of territorial reconquest than as a defense of neutrality.

It is therefore natural for Islam to lie at the heart of this anxiety, because it has a demographic weight beyond that of other movements. But it causes anxiety in two different registers: the communitarian ghetto and triumphant proselytism. The banlieue and the world, the local and the global: Islam is present at both extremities where national identity seems to be crumbling. Islam’s proselytism causes anxiety, as if by definition a universalistic religion did not have a vocation to convert. Islam is perceived as a potential factor of profound change in society. The idea is that, given the demographic weight of Muslims, any process of communitarization would bring about a profound imbalance in French society: first by fragmenting society from below but also by plugging the “ghettos” into a universal Islam that is not bound by the framework of the nation-state. We are thus caught between two visions: an ethnic Islam (Arab, Middle Eastern) that would import the conflicts of the Middle East into France, and a nonethnic and supranational Islam, specifically European. The foil in this second instance is less the Middle East than the very dissolution of the national framework of the state in favor of supranational institutions and identities. The question of Islam is thus intimately related to that of sovereignty, of Europe and the debate about the nation-state, globalization, the deterritorialization of conflicts, and the crisis of identity. At bottom, the growth of Islam is intuitively seen as part of the process of globalization and deterritorialization (and contemporary Salafism is surfing that wave). The response is thus a demand for the nationalization of Islam, or else its secularization. The ambiguity here (and what differentiates it from the right-wing anti-Semitism of the 1930s) is that many on the Left consider it urgent (hence possible) to de-Islamize immigration: integration, indeed assimilation, remains the objective, but Islam is seen as an obstacle. We have nothing against immigrants (at least for now), but we want secular Muslims. The intervention of the republican state into religious affairs thus seems justified by this combat situation. Many books published recently in France contain explicit calls to sanction fellow travelers, the naive, the lukewarm, the soft, the fascinated, and so on. In a word, in light of the failure of the intelligentsia, it is up to the state to take things in hand. There is talk of resistance to “Islamo-fascism.” There are recurrent comparisons to Munich in 1938, but many who take themselves for Churchill write like Céline, without his style.

The defense of laïcité is more than ever the defense of an identity that has difficulty defining itself positively because, as we have seen, it is largely based on myths, including the myth of consensus. In particular, the debate on laïcité, now as in 1905, makes it possible to obscure the social question: if the banlieue is primarily a problem of Islam, then there is no social problem. This is, in fact, an old tradition of French social democracy: to use laïcité to evade a debate on the economy. The problems of society are transformed into a debate about ideas. And consequently, ideas become the quarry of a witch hunt (as shown in the campaigns against Tariq Ramadan and Xavier Ternisien). The circulation of ideas is thus attributed to the activity of certain individuals, and the old clichés of the cold war return (like that of contagion, transforming ideas into viruses). There is no analysis of why some ideas work, whereas the market of religion contains not only a supply but also a demand. It is interesting to note that this is practically the same reasoning that is applied to sects: the most prominent explanation is the influence of a guru and mental manipulation. A young girl wearing a veil is necessarily manipulated, and the paradox is that we repress her the better to liberate her: since the veil is a sign of enslavement, a woman could not possibly choose it voluntarily. The same reasoning drove the French Revolution to prohibit religious orders, because a free person could not voluntarily alienate his own freedom. And yet God knows (He especially) that voluntary slavery exists. Emancipating people despite themselves is another paradox.

What is often the expression of a personal choice (wearing the veil) is seen as the consequence of social pressure. This optical illusion clearly shows that the obsession is with communitarianization. The determination to intervene in religious matters is aimed at “liberating” the Muslim woman (whether from the veil or from an arranged marriage). The woman question is indeed central in communitarianism: social control of the group over women, beyond the question of custom, involves the question of marriage and hence of the perpetuation of the community. Once again, however, the desire to preserve endogamy is not specific to Islam; it is found in religious Jewish communities, and that creates no political difficulties: the denunciation of mixed marriages is a constant for Conservative rabbis and poses well-known problems in Israeli nationality law (Orthodox rabbis recognize only descent from the mother and reject conversions of convenience). The difference between reactions provoked by the same conduct dictated by similar reasons (to preserve a religious community) clearly shows that it is the nature of those communities that causes the problem and not so much the communitarian phenomenon in itself. The community of practicing Jews is not (or no longer) seen as expanding, and contemporary anti-Semitism is based on myths other than that of demographic expansion (“They are everywhere,” a recurrent theme in the 1930s). But the question of Muslim communitarianism cannot be separated from its demographic dimension.

As a consequence, the problems in general posed by the banlieues, integration (or its failure), communitarianism, and the like are attributed to the religious element, Islam. Far from cordoning off religion, militant laïcité constantly brings it back to the center of the debate and makes it the explanation for social disorders. If banlieues turn in on themselves, if adolescents wear particular costumes to express an identity or use a demand for a particular kind of food to express opposition in school, this is the fault of Islam. Religion is seen as a cause, not a symptom, and as a result the response is made in religious terms, thereby definitively turning it into a mark of identity and of protest.

Laïcité is, above all, an obsession with religion, and it leads to the desire to legislate about religion instead of accepting true separation: hence the tendencies of republicans of every stripe toward Caesaropapism, Gallicanism, or even a restoration of the concordat system (Nicolas Sarkozy, at the time interior minister, went to Cairo to solicit from the mufti of the Egyptian Republic a nihil obstat for the prohibition of the veil), the syndrome of a republic not comfortable in its skin, because it is as fascinated by monarchy as it is by religion.

But we are not talking about just any religion. There is in French laïcité a specific fear of Islam, whether we seek to de-Islamize immigration or, on the contrary, to reject immigration and the generations of the French descended from it in the name of an alleged incompatibility between Islam and Western values. But the only thing that is specifically French is precisely the use of the system of laïcité to domesticate Islam. Other Western countries use other systems, also based on the idea that there is a political rule of the game, but one that is much less intrusive with regard to the belief and the person of the other: multiculturalism, interfaith dialogue, the rights of minorities, and so on. But if the contrast was very sharp in the 1980s between the assimilationist approach à la française—legally based on the principle of laïcité but, in fact, deeply rooted in a political concept of the nation—and the multiculturalist approach of northern Europe, the turn of the century was marked by a crisis of both models: France was brought to recognize a Muslim religious reality that it would rather ignore (positively with the establishment of the Conseil français du culte musulman in 2002 and negatively with the prohibition of the veil in 2004), while Holland, shattered by the assassination of the filmmaker Theo Van Gogh in November 2004 by a young Muslim of Moroccan origin but Dutch citizenship, confronted the failure of positive multiculturalism (cultures are good and should coexist) and turned toward a negative vision of that same multiculturalism (some cultures, like Islam, are difficult to integrate), without calling into question a view based on the issue of culture (whereas very clearly, as I shall show, the radicalism in question is a product of the loss of cultural identity).

In fact, disquiet in the face of Islam is real in all Western countries but is shaped and experienced according to the patterns derived from the political culture of each of them. The elements that are found shocking are completely different from one country to another, but each attributes to Islam an essence that is heterogeneous to the essence of Western culture. Which introduces a slightly paradoxical element: we reject Islam for very different reasons, but they all create a kind of negative European identity. For example, the veil is a focus of French rejection but causes no problems in Great Britain, which, in contrast, prohibits the ritual slaughter of animals (hallal), for the same reasons that it has banned fox hunting, whereas in France the source of the problem is not the form of slaughter (except for Brigitte Bardot) but the lack of organization with which it is carried out. It is probably not an accident that Pym Fortuyn, the Islamophobic Dutch politician, was shot by a defender of animals: the question of the protection of animals in northern Europe seems to activists to be intimately related to the defense of human rights, which seems simply inconceivable in southern Europe. The reaction against Islam is formulated very differently from one European country to the next, which means that, taken one by one, the elements that seem incompatible between Islam and the West (the veil, hallal) are not really so, including those having to do with the woman question: when the Italian nominee to the European Commission in October 2004, Rocco Buttiglione, declared that he thought woman’s place was in the home under the protection of her husband, he spoke like many conservative Muslims. In short, if the various elements that seem to define a Muslim culture, taken one by one, do not pose the same problems to different European countries, then what is at work in the mirror concepts of Muslim culture and Western culture?