Secularism Confronts Islam

The Muslim world is, of course, not alone in having been affected by changes in the relationship between religion and politics. We are perhaps witnessing a new configuration of the relations among religion, state, and society, following a model closer to Anglo-Saxon secularization than to French laïcité. Religion has, in fact, taken up a position in a society decreasingly under the control of the state. The West is now going through a clear balancing between a demand for a tutelary state, one that protects a national community, and the growth of a philosophy of civil society, where the state is only a somewhat distant arbiter. A balancing, because we are not contrasting two antagonistic categories (for instance, the United States under the Republican Party and the French Jacobin state) but reference points that are invoked in alternation. It is on this terrain of the complex relations among the weakening of the state, supranational organizations, civil society, and the democratization of authoritarian regimes that religious revivalism prospers: as the political arena has grown more complex, the old binary opposition of laïcité (state/religion) has found it difficult to incorporate the new forms of religiosity. This is, however, the issue.

Whereas French laïcité was instituted by political choices, secularization in contrast arose from cultural processes that were not decreed, which poses the problem of the relation between explicit religion (dogma and prescriptions) and the internalization of a religious vision of the world in the form of a culture (this religious vision may even be expressed in open unbelief but preserve the intellectual framework of religion, for example, Marxist messianism, secular “saints,” pan-Arabism). Secularization is clearly a societal process; that is, it affects a society deeply, although it cannot be assigned to any particular level of that society (the economy, sociology, the role of intellectuals, and so on). It is the way a society looks at the world that changes, although that is not necessarily expressed in an explicit system of thought. We can assume that there can be no laïcité unless secularization has come first, but secularization does not necessarily lead to explicit laïcité. Secularization by definition affects a society; it is not a system of thought: the secularization of religious behavior has occurred in the Western world without theologians necessarily drawing any conclusions from the process.¹ But secularization automatically brings about a redefinition of religious adhesion (unless we think of it as a mere relic condemned to disappear). Once the religious authorities accept the fact that true believers have become a minority, then the relationship with the “others” has to be reconsidered (until then, they would have been thought of as either sinners or indifferent, while in both cases remaining the concern of the church). But is someone who has been secularized still an unconscious Christian, or is he a pagan who has changed his cultural universe? Secularization brings about a reconstruction of religious identity as a minority identity, except that it may be subsumed in a concept as vague as Judeo-Christian civilization. Having faith or not becomes a criterion of differentiation between two groups. A fairly clear but shifting line can be drawn in Christian churches and Muslim ulema alike between two tendencies, exclusion and co-optation: Who, for example, will be denied a religious funeral, like actors in Europe in the seventeenth century? Secularization brings about the loss of the prominent social presence of religion and the obligation to define oneself explicitly as a believer (or nonbeliever), not because the nonbeliever campaigns against the religious community but because the conditions for belonging to the religious group have become stricter: one’s faith must be displayed. The intensification of signs of religious belonging goes hand in hand with the transformation of the group of believers into a minority (not necessarily in terms of numbers: even in societies in which the majority of the population are believers, like the United States, many believers see themselves as members of a cultural minority in an environment that they see as materialist and immoral).

If a compromise on the role of religion was reached in Europe in the course of the twentieth century, this was not only because the various participants came to an agreement on how to share the same political space but also because believers had finally assimilated the definition of religion provided by laïcité and had become culturally laïque, considering their own observance a private, unostentatious act concerning only the individual person. Political laïcité went along with a thoroughgoing secularization of society, including those countries of northern Europe in which the churches maintained their official status: religious observance declined everywhere. But political laïcité was largely the result of a compromise between two institutional actors: the state and the church. And both of them are in crisis. The nation-state, although it has not exactly disappeared, has been weakened by globalization and the construction of Europe, while the mechanisms for social integration and social cohesion have also been weakened (school, army, labor market, in parallel with increasing urban segregation). But the churches have also been challenged as institutions, not by the state or by secularization but, on the contrary, by a religious revival that has bypassed them. The new believers may very well accept laïcité as the rule of the game in the public square, but they no longer adopt it as a way of living their religion in private. They want to be recognized as religious in the public square. What is at issue, then, is not really a revision of the 1905 law to adapt it to Islam, and there is no challenge to the rules of the game between state and religion; rather, the relation of religion to the public square is no longer seen as being established under the purview of the state. The relationship between religion and politics has become asymmetrical: religious fundamentalism is not interested in political power (even in the United States, except for passing legislation) but in society. This is also true for Muslim neofundamentalism; to argue that the fact that Tariq Ramadan is the heir of the founder of the Muslim Brotherhood means that he has a strategy that is in the final analysis political (an Islamic state in France) is to fail to understand the lack of interest in state institutions that characterizes all contemporary fundamentalist movements: the state in their eyes is not an instrument for the transformation of society; rather, they hold that the return of individuals to faith will make it possible to restore society to a religious foundation. They are in this way surfing the wave of individualism and the prominence of civil society. And this is why the traditional tools of laïcité aimed at the juridical definition of the social bond no longer work (even radicals like Bin Laden have no program for a state).

The rise of Islam is contained within a larger phenomenon: for the past twenty years, the West has been experiencing what has been called a religious revival. We should not be deceived by the term: it does not mean an increase in observance but greater visibility for it, and particularly the appearance of so-called fundamentalist forms of religiosity—that is, when the believer refuses to keep his faith private and is determined to have it recognized as an integral part of his public existence, deeming that religion should govern all his personal conduct. Among these movements, we find all forms of charismatic Christianity (Catholics included), Orthodox Judaism, sects (Jehovah’s Witnesses), and, of course, Islamic fundamentalism. The qualitative change in the form of observance is more important than the quantitative increase in the number of believers: while young people were eager to meet Pope John Paul II at World Youth Day, enrollments in Catholic seminaries have been in steep decline. The new forms of religiosity are individualistic, very mobile (there are frequent moves from one group to another, even from one religion to another), weakly institutionalized (there is mistrust of churches and representative bodies), anti-intellectual (hence unconcerned with theological articulation), and often communitarian, but in the sense in which one joins a community of believers (and not a community of origin).² The community is a choice of belonging and not a cultural heritage.

States have difficulty dealing with what is seen as the revival of religious sentiment with the classic tools of laïcité because the ground on which it stands is in crisis. The Jacobin state has been weakened by the development of supranational bodies but also by the emergence of notions like civil society, which is constructed specifically outside the state. Economic liberalism, the construction of globalized and nonterritorial identities (religious identities, in particular), the mobility of individuals, and the flexibility of identity all by definition change the way in which it is possible to think about the revival of religious sentiment. The new forms of religiosity are much better adapted to globalization: I have studied this for Salafism,³ but it is equally true for all forms of Christian evangelicalism, which have had great success in their proselytism, precisely because they have helped to separate religion from any particular cultural roots and can therefore respond to the needs of populations that have experienced a loss of cultural identity. Conversely, traditional churches (Catholic, Orthodox, Anglican) remain closely tied to particular cultures, sometimes to nation-states (the prevailing case for the Orthodox Church, which is always national), and therefore have much less success in recruiting converts. A religion is all the more fascinating when it is detached from any context, freed of any territory, not to say exotic.⁴

One may, of course, see this development as negative and believe that it should be fought: sovereignists like Jean-Pierre Chevènement are consistent both in their rejection of Europe and in their treatment of religion. This book is not an apology for inevitable globalization. I simply wish to show that the framework of laïcité makes it possible to deal with contemporary religious fundamentalism only in coercive ways, for which indeed its defenders have increasingly become the advocates (or, rather, the prosecutors). But the consequence is a serious one, because it consists of dissociating laïcité and democracy. We know the old saying “No freedom for the enemies of freedom,” but, aside from the fact that this was precisely the slogan that established the Terror, the question really has to do with the effectiveness of such a policy. It was logical for hard-line laïcs to support the “eradicators” of the Algerian army against the Islamists. But it is not certain that the result has been democracy or even the establishment of a modern constitutional state in Algeria. My initial hypothesis here is that the appeal to sovereignty is a rearguard battle.

That being said, in France we perhaps have too great a tendency to view the question of globalization solely through the prism of the Jacobin state. It is not the state itself that is in crisis but a certain model of centralized Jacobin nation-state that is the driving force of French society. It is not certain that one may speak, for example, of a model of the Western state that could be contrasted to the weakness of the state in the Muslim world. The model of state building now proposed to developing countries and implemented by the international community in very diverse forms is not the model of the Jacobin nation-state but that of a technocratic state functioning as an arbiter and on a voluntarily reduced scale. One of the most visible elements is the insistence on the privatization of the economy, but the whole technocratic rather than political approach to the construction of the state points in the same direction: institutions (justice, finance) are set up entirely on the basis of the training of competent personnel, whereas social action is entrusted to nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) or United Nations agencies, which by definition have nothing to do with the question of the nation-state. The activity of the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe in the former Communist countries, the programs of the United Nations Development Programme and the World Bank, the funding of NGOs by the European Union or the U.S. Congress, not to mention the direct action of occupying powers (the Coalition Provisional Authority in Iraq under Paul Bremer in 2003 and 2004)—all international action has gone to build minimum states and foster transnational institutions. The question of democratization is now addressed through the development of civil society. NGOs, French, British, or American, all work in the same direction, so much so that the French state model has no mechanism by which it can be exported, because all rationales for democratization have been constructed following other models. Only relics are left of bilateral cooperation centered on government reform of the former colonies.

The sanctification of the state is obvious in countries in the Roman law tradition but not at all in common law countries like the United Kingdom and the United States. The dominant model of the state underlying the democratization process today is the Anglo-American rather than the Continental European model. An entire school of thought, obviously Anglo-American, sees in Protestantism and the common law the true modernity, where it is a contract between individuals that establishes political bonds, with no delegation of authority to a tutelary state and without making the state the embodiment of the popular will: it remains an arbiter and not an autonomous authority.⁵ It is clear that the common law had nothing to do originally with Protestantism (another myth of the religious origins of political cultures). Established in medieval England beginning with the Plantagenets—that is, with a French dynasty—it was also developed by monks in the abbeys of a still-Catholic England, but following a logic very different from that of the jurists of the French monarchy. But the conjunction of the two (common law and Protestantism) makes up a coherent whole defining a constitutional state on bases very distant from French Jacobinism. The latest modernity has arrived today with the advent of the concept of civil society.⁶ Even though I do not believe for a minute that this civil society—incidentally, rather mythical—has replaced the state, the fact remains that the state model of the Jacobin type is in crisis and that the question of democratization is posed in different terms. We cannot escape from the debate on civil society, communities, group identities, and so forth. Even if we do not support a model of multiculturalism (which is functioning nowhere), we are obliged to take into account what the French Revolution sought to erase: intermediate bodies and coalitions—that is, groups of people who view the individual outside the state, man outside citizenship. In addition, globalization has developed not only transnational, particularly religious, communities but also virtual communities through the Internet, communities that have grown outside the territory of the nation-state. This is no doubt the focus of the dispute between a French and Continental view of the state (the state is the truth of society) and an Anglo-American view where the relationship to the state is contractual and the state is not the bearer of value, apart from the neutral value of tolerance.

In France, we nevertheless continue to think about secularization in the form of laïcité and hence as allegiance to the state. Catholicism has a mediated relationship with the political realm through the intermediary of the church. Islam and Protestantism do not: they are thus in an infrapolitical or overpoliticized state. Being overpoliticized is, of course, a matter of ideology: it is carried out by the mobilization of a theological apparatus, a body of men, as in the Islamic revolution. The real problem in Islam is not laïcité (no more than for the Protestant countries of northern Europe, where the Reformation assumed responsibility for eliminating the church as an institution in rivalry with the state) but secularization: in this sense, Islam is in tune with the contemporary issues of secularization.

The point held in common by Christian and Islamic fundamentalism is that they strive to define a pure religion divorced from any cultural, social, or anthropological reference and hence, of course, from any national reference (although nationalism resurfaces in its way). Let me recall the principal characteristics I set out in chapter 8 of Globalized Islam. Neofundamentalism presupposes a break with previous forms of religious observance: it is a religion of the born again. It rejects the cultural and familial heritage and tends to think that existing forms of worship are lukewarm or tinged with paganism. It believes that salvation is attained immediately through faith and hence outside any theological learning: the Taliban were proud of being only students but thought they could teach the doctors of the law a thing or two by the intensity of their piety. Neofundamentalists see in religion a body of dogma, of rites, and of norms defining a code rather than a body of knowledge. Knowledge is immediately accessible (“Everything you need to know about” Islam, Christ, salvation, the Bible—take your pick—in a few lines), and acquiring it seems a kind of revenge against the difficulty of mastering knowledge in school and university (in this sense, the re-Islamization of many young men in France is often linked to a feeling of educational exclusion). The norms are implemented through admonition or by the religious police. Neofundamentalists believe that culture is either redundant (it is the same thing as religion) or threatening (it adulterates the purity of religion): therefore, the fine arts, novels, music (except for religious music), and entertainment are all banned. Neofundamentalists, Muslims and Protestants alike, are not interested in social and economic questions (they are generally economic liberals). They presuppose a social homogeneity (everyone is equal before God) while disregarding social and economic inequalities; the question of the difference between the sexes is, on the contrary, primordial and constitutes the only true social differentiation, to which is added the boundary between believers and unbelievers, since there is no sharing of a nonreligious common culture with one’s fellow citizens (here we can see that Catholic conservatism is not fundamentalist, because the church of John Paul II fought specifically to have Europe recognize a common Christian culture shared by believers and nonbelievers).

Making an apologia for the loss of cultural identity as a preliminary condition for the attainment of a pure faith, Christian (essentially Protestant) and Islamic (in the form of Salafism) neofundamentalism affects populations that feel they have been uprooted or have lost their cultural identity or both, and it supplies them with compensation for that loss. Hallal fast food and Mecca Cola replace traditional Ottoman or Moroccan cuisine. Neofundamentalism consists of isolating the markers of religious purity (hallal) and then superimposing them on a civilization that is seen as solely materialist and instrumental. Neofundamentalism is thus effective in converting and reconverting the faithful. But contrary to what has been said, Islam is not the only proselytizer: while many black Americans have adopted Islam, hundreds of thousands of Latino immigrants from Catholic backgrounds have shifted to Protestantism in the United States. In Brazil, the Universal (Protestant) Church has made huge inroads among Catholics. More interesting in the context of this book, in Central Asia, Baptists, Pentecostals, and Jehovah’s Witnesses have converted Muslims by the tens of thousands (in France, the Jehovah’s Witnesses have also made inroads among socially dislocated Muslims, such as single mothers from the Maghreb).

Detached from any territory, with no social or economic program, neofundamentalists are not interested in the state, as Sébastien Fath points out, for example, in reference to evangelical movements in the United States.⁷ We need to reconsider the whole theory that sees George W. Bush as the representative of a Christian Right that has a political and strategic program. The Christian Right supports Bush so that he will get certain legislation on morality enacted, but it goes no further than that: the real plan for reshaping the Middle East was developed by neoconservatives who are not at all religious. The same thing goes for Islamist neofundamentalists. It is nonsense to assume that Muslim Brothers detached from any territory have a state program: they had one in Egypt (and some still do), but detachment from territory by definition brings about the end of a vision of the state. To accuse Tariq Ramadan (who is not a pure neofundamentalist, because he sees the norm in terms of values, not constraints) of aiming to create an Islamic state in France is absurd.

In the conflict between church and state around 1900, there were two adversaries and rivals in competition for similar prizes (in fact, the control of values through the educational system). The church was defending its established position. But today the neofundamentalists ask for nothing positive from the state, except abstention: let us wear the veil, eat hallal, not shake hands, and so on. They are absent from the great debates about society because they legislate for themselves, not for society. The church wanted and still wants to impose its values because it believes them to be universal, linked to a natural morality, and expressing the good in general. For neofundamentalists, the law is not the good; it is the law.

But while neofundamentalism may not be interested in the issue of laïcité, it has not escaped from the question of secularization. Neofundamentalism is a paradoxical agent of secularization, as Protestantism was in its time (although this is far from obvious in reading Calvin), because it individualizes and desocializes religious observance. It addresses the individual who explicitly decides to place his life exclusively under the sign of religion and who for that reason breaks with the majority environment. The individual obviously does not see himself as secular or secularized but, on the contrary, like all the born again, as entirely determined and motivated by religion. But because this relationship with religion isolates him from his social surroundings (or leads him to re-create a communitarian space that amounts to isolation shared with several others), he then draws a line on his own between a sanctified world and the rest of society.⁸ This is a configuration that is found in American Protestant fundamentalism as well: a recent work of fiction is built around the distinction between the saved and the “left behind”; one is in or out (the notion of those saved from hell is found in the names of some radical Islamic fundamentalist groups).⁹ The return of religious sentiment in the form of sects and communities is merely the homage virtue pays to vice: secularization has won. This is why the tendency to communitarianism, denounced by the advocates of strict laïcité, is not a challenge to secularization but a participant in the reconstruction of the division between the two realms.

Neofundamentalism is seen today as a social threat—that is, one more element in the disintegration of the social fabric. This has little to do, however, with the “clash of civilizations.” What critics of multiculturalism and communitarianism fail to understand is that the communities reforged by neofundamentalists are not the expression of traditional cultures. Holland was shocked by the assassination of Theo Van Gogh, but although the assassin is of Moroccan origin, he is Dutch, writes in Dutch, and supports a global Islam. He is all the readier to sense that this Islam is in danger because it no longer has territorial boundaries: it is an abstract identity with no roots in a particular society or culture that, in this case, took on concrete form by the act of faith of the believer who drew the border with the thrust of a knife into the neck of the blasphemer. Today’s communitarianism is the reconstruction of an imaginary community located in a realm other than that of the nation-state.

For a secular state like France, the first reaction was to restore territoriality in every domain. The first thing was to homogenize public space by banning religious expression, which was confined to another realm. The prohibition of the veil in school appeared as an extension of the battle to drive the Catholic Church out of it, but it is in fact very different: if a priest in his cassock was a competitor for control over the same space, a student wearing a veil is not involved in a struggle for power but rather expressing the abandonment of that public space. The restoration of territoriality also means the quest for a national Islam. This is a logical and desirable approach, as long as it is understood that there can be no question of defining a liberal and acceptable dogma. Indeed, for a policy of the restoration of territoriality to succeed, it must be one that integrates not excludes; that is, it must offer a place to Islam without raising the question of dogma, only that of the rules of the game. In this connection, symbolism and protocol are important, and this means recognizing the importance of religious figures: receiving local representatives in their official capacity, as for other religions, and no longer in what is often a paternalistic gesture of rewarding the “good” and isolating the “wicked.” Neutrality toward dogma must operate in both directions; there should be neither an effort to have pleasant things said to secular imams nor a grant of authority to religious interlocutors over the segment of the population of Muslim origin that does not recognize itself in them, by giving them a monopoly over the representation of Muslims in general. The danger lies in dealing with immigration through Islam and the banlieues through the mosque. Instead of combating the religious phenomenon, which will make it into an identity marker for organizing protest, it should be treated as purely religious and not as a tool for social management, even negatively—that is, by making militant laïcité that tool (which amounts to consecrating the most fundamentalist of the religious as competitors, as representing an alternative).

In short, nothing should be done with regard to dogma, and representatives of a faith should be considered as religious figures who have only the spiritual authority freely granted to them by the voluntary members of a purely religious community. Yet this means dealing with the fundamentalists, because any a priori exclusion of them would contradict the declared goal. But the campaign in defense of laïcité that we are witnessing today is aimed precisely at defining the neofundamentalists and other revivalists as enemies. But the forms of fundamentalism that are now emerging are far from systematically representing a threat, and in any event they reflect an evolution that has to be dealt with if we want to remain within the framework of democracy and the respect for human rights.

I take the term intégralisme from an excellent, critical, but not polemical article by Dominique Avon on Tariq Ramadan that shows that these questions can be seriously debated.¹⁰ Intégralisme is indeed a form of fundamentalism, but one that no longer concerns society as a whole, for society has been secularized, but the believer who is attempting to live completely (intégralement) his faith as an individual: he attempts to do this not within the confines of a sect or a ghetto but in a process of negotiation with the authorities and the dominant society. Intégralisme looks for compromises but not concessions, because dogma is never put in question. Intégralisme is the modern form of fundamentalism, in the sense that it has integrated the loss of the social prominence of the sacred and its individualization while not calling dogma into question. For the believer, intégralisme consists of sanctifying his everyday life and placing everything under the sign of religion.¹¹ Culture and society are no longer the bearers of religious sentiment, which is based on radical individual reform followed by the establishment of a voluntary community of believers.

This kind of intégralisme is a characteristic of neofundamentalism in all religions. It has an obviously communitarian aspect insofar as believers ask for total respect for their faith, subject to negotiated arrangements to respect public order and the presence of others. A very interesting case occurred in the province of Ontario that carried multiculturalist logic to the extreme (it is, in fact, neocommunitarian, since communities are defined by religion, not ethnic origin). The provincial legislature, in a 1991 law on arbitration, accepted the de facto establishment of community dispute-settlement tribunals (Orthodox Jewish and Muslim, but the list is obviously open-ended) that deal with conflicts and questions of personal status provided that provincial and federal laws are not infringed and the parties involved have agreed to submit their case to the community tribunal (for example, a couple seeking a divorce—it being understood that the real divorce can be pronounced by only an official court). Similarly, in Montreal in 2001, a court authorized the Hassidic community to establish an eruv in an apartment complex that included secular residents in order to demarcate a private religious space within a public one.¹² Unthinkable in France, requests of this kind, in this instance coming from Orthodox Jews, are made by believers of all stripes who claim the right, so to speak, to duplicate profane space with a sacred mark that, meaning nothing to nonbelievers, could not possibly offend or limit them (for example, some Muslims have asked that meat in school cafeterias all be hallal, arguing that it makes no difference for non-Muslims, whereas the difference is essential for believers). We can clearly see that in the case of Ontario, compared with France, it is a completely different conception of the state (based on common law and contract) that makes it possible to accept the idea of community courts: the state does not intervene in a social bond defined by consenting adults. Incidentally, these civil arbitration courts were modeled on commercial arbitration courts, which clearly demonstrates the predominance of civil society over state-centered law but also the importance of economic liberalism in the production of a vision of society.

What we can thus see being reformulated is the very concept of Muslim community in the view of the neofundamentalists; it is closed, to be sure, but explicitly conceived as a minority community in de facto secularized surroundings: they recognize the secularization of the public square, but they want to take their place in it as religious beings. Rather than a conquest of society, this is a form of privatization of public space. In this sense, fundamentalism is not incompatible with secularism but raises a question as to its relationship to the state. The debate on apostasy points in the same direction. It should be noted that in Muslim countries where the question has arisen, eminent fundamentalists have not called for the death of apostates but for their legal exclusion from the category of “Muslims.” In Egypt, for example, they called for the annulment of the marriage of the thinker Nasr Abu Zayd, on the pretext that, since he was no longer a Muslim because of his critical writings on religion, he could not be married to a Muslim woman. In Pakistan, the violent campaign conducted by Abul Ala Maududi against the Qadyanis (or Ahmediyya) in the 1950s was aimed at having them declared a non-Muslim minority (whereas, in contrast, a similar campaign against the Bahai in Iran was aimed at converting them back to Islam, because what was at stake in that country were reasons of state, seen, of course, from the viewpoint of the mullahs, for Bahaism almost triumphed in the nineteenth century and challenged the profoundly national character of Iranian Shiism). Behind the radical flavor of these campaigns there emerges a vision of Muslims forming a purely religious community from which one may exclude oneself (or be excluded). This is to accept de facto a secular space, one where the laws of religion do not apply.

But this neocommunitarian conception, often shared by other religions, poses a problem for laïcité, because it presupposes the establishment of sanctified spaces in the public square. There are two juxtaposed spaces that are no longer separated: the believer lives his religion in a space shared with the nonbeliever, but he inhabits that space in a different way. Laïcité à la française cannot accept that, because it is the state that defines public space, which cannot possibly be polysemous. And this is the source of the current tensions. Simply, this religious occupation of space should not be read as a forerunner of the seizure of political power. It is tied to the mutation of the religious realm in general and not to the extension of Islam, even if its visibility owes a good deal to the demographic weight of Muslims in the West.

Once again, the problem is not dogma but religiosity. Liberal Muslims who accept the idea of a reformation of Islam or the tinkerers who are content to live their religion as they can in parallel with their social integration pose no problem for laïcité and are thus outside the purview of this study.

We should guard against identifying religious reform as a condition for the acceptance of laïcité. Many very conservative Muslims have adapted very well to secularization and to laïcité by reformulating their faith in terms of values rather than norms, along the lines followed by Christian conservatives.¹³ They defend the family, sexual difference, and the criticism of morals; they oppose homosexual marriage and even abortion and divorce (two categories that hardly cause any difficulties in traditional sharia); but they remain within the framework of legality: this is exactly, once again, the position of Rocco Buttiglione, the unfortunate European commissioner, whose positions are, in the end, close to those of Tariq Ramadan (both condemn sexual freedom as contrary to the sacredness of life but reject coercive measures). Centrist but conservative Islam is being restructured following the Catholic, even the Orthodox Jewish, model (for example, on the issue of dietary prohibitions). Of course, we may wonder how all these fundamentalists would have behaved if they had found themselves on the Iberian Peninsula between the tenth and sixteenth centuries, far from the myth of the tolerant and multireligious Andalusia. But the question is abstract, because it is existing political systems that establish the scope of activity for each individual. This movement from legal norm to value is what makes acceptance of the rules of the game possible, which is the basis for laïcité and democracy. It is taken for granted by traditionalist Muslims living in the West, but obviously much less so by the born again and the converts.

Laïcité is seen as a weapon to combat what is called communitarianism, defined at two levels: the neighborhood and the supranational umma—that is, the two levels at which society feels itself to be in crisis. But these two forms of communitarianism are in fact largely virtual and in any case unconnected in reality. The local community imagines itself in relation to the large virtual community of the umma, which exists only in the imagination or on the Internet. The idea that communitarianism might unify all the Muslims of any particular country makes no sense. We can clearly see in France that communitarianism is always established below (banlieues) or beyond society (the virtual umma), never at the level of society itself: there is no Muslim community in France but a scattered, heterogeneous population not very concerned with unifying itself or even with being really represented (evident in the poverty of cultural life; the weakness of voluntary organizations; the lack of Muslim religious schools; indifference to the Conseil français du culte musulman, which is kept going by the state but is not challenged in any way by any other, popular organization; the absence of political mobilization for elections or demonstrations). The Muslim community has even less substance than the Jewish community in France; there are rather very diversified populations, only one segment of which agrees to recognize itself as primarily a religious community.

Communitarianization is not spontaneous: it is the creation of communitarian leaders who claim to speak in the name of all in order to have themselves recognized by the state, which is in search of interlocutors and, in return, backs its interlocutors’ status as representatives of a community (the president of the republic and government ministers systematically speak of the Jewish or Muslim community). The state rejects communitarianization while it has this word “community” constantly on its lips. Institutional communitarianization is an effect of a demand by the state, whereas, in the neighborhoods, it is the consequence of the reestablishment of broken social ties. In any event, if a Muslim community really existed, it would not have taken the government fifteen years to create a representative body for the Muslims of France, which would disintegrate in one day without the state’s backing.

But what does communitarianization mean in local neighborhoods? What is the relationship among the social, ethnic, and religious components? In this area, we lack statistical tools. It is probable that the so-called difficult neighborhoods contain a concentration of immigrants and their descendants higher than was the case in the 1970s and 1980s. It is certain that two phenomena are occurring there in parallel: the establishment of a new form of social control through supervision by others (neighbors, adolescents), which concentrates primarily on girls; and the installation of mosques, some of which are more radical than others. But we are witnessing developments that are far from being homogeneous and leading to the establishment of ghettoized religious communities. The projects (les cités) are caught between the atomization of social relations and attempts to reconstruct social bonds. These attempts may take different forms, but obviously whoever says “social bond” means at the same time restoration of social control; only the models are variable: association of people coming from the same regions, the observance of Ramadan (also by non-Muslims) more as a festive than as a religious expression, the role of groups of young men in the occupation of space and the control of the few cultural organizations. The macho aspect of the young men of the banlieues has been thoroughly described, and the movement Ni putes ni soumises (Neither Whores nor Submissive) was established in defense of the young women of such areas. The community in this instance is seen as the closing of a territory on the basis of religious criteria around a population of foreign origin that has willingly broken with the republic. The fantasy, in fact, goes very far. For instance, the murder of a young woman named Ghofrane by blows from a rock in a Marseille immigrant neighborhood on October 18, 2004, was immediately called a stoning when it was really a crime of passion.¹⁴ In the “RER D” affair, a young woman claimed she was taken for a Jew, a black man painted a swastika on her stomach, and a group of beurs threw her baby on the station platform. Although completely improbable (even if violence and anti-Semitism exist in the banlieues), the story was taken seriously by people who see the banlieues only in abstract reconstructions like the ones Pierre-André Taguieff sets out, where Islamism has become a version of Nazism. Since the young men of the banlieues are described as little Nazis, we expect to see them act like little Nazis. What is developing is a new image of the dangerous classes, like the one that arose in the nineteenth century.

But what these analyses fail to see is the heterogeneity of immigrant neighborhoods, the quite relative character of their isolation, and also the variable strength of religious control. The proliferation of mosques is as much the sign of a fragmentation of Muslims as an affirmation of their identity. The mosques are, in fact, more often than not rivals: on top of the old ethnic divisions (that still exist) among Moroccans, Algerians, Turks, and so on, have now been piled ideological oppositions (Salafi mosque against traditional mosque), generational conflicts (young men who no longer want the imam “from the old country”), and conflicts between groups (the Tabligh mosque, the Ahbash mosque, and so on). In addition, social control is quite relative and does not at all prevent deviant behavior. Macho attitudes are just as prevalent among the young black and Latino men of American inner cities, and they have nothing Muslim about them. Finally, far from being sequestered, young women generally know how to manage their relationships, but outside the space of the neighborhood. One leaves the neighborhood, in fact, precisely when one no longer corresponds to the prevalent stereotypes (in a mixed marriage, for example, particularly when a Muslim girl marries a non-Muslim) but also because of social mobility (acquiring property), which has the paradoxical effect of reinforcing the reputation of the immigrant neighborhood for poverty and social exclusion. The focus on the neighborhoods means that the emergence of a Muslim middle class has not been noticed by politicians. Finally, as is often the case in studies concerning women, they are made into a distinct group, dominated under constraint or reproducing that constraint through the internalization of the norms that justify it: trapped between domination and alienation, women can be liberated only through the law. These analyses forget that most girls who want to wear the veil in school demand it in the name of their freedom and their personal choice and often as a means of asserting themselves without breaking ties with their social milieu. Although violence certainly exists, strategies are varied, and neighborhood identity is often shared by its inhabitants regardless of sex.¹⁵

Because the bulk of the problems of the banlieues is attributed to Islam, authoritarian laïcité has been designated as a tool to deal with these problems while ignoring (or devaluing) other elements. Not only has this policy failed to meet its goals (because the Muslim woman has not been waiting in pained silence for the law to liberate her, especially if she is a single mother, clandestine, or on welfare), but it has had the opposite effect. In thereby making laïcité a repressive device, we have helped both to put religion at the heart of the debate and to present it as an alternative. As a consequence, Islam is set up as the dominant marker among the children of immigrants (consider the terminological slippage of Minister of the Interior Nicolas Sarkozy when he appointed a descendant of immigrants as a prefect, calling him a “Muslim prefect”). The identification between Arab and Muslim is strengthened by leaving aside secular Muslims, to be sure violently opposed to Salafism but finding it difficult to bring forth another identity (see, for example, the Mouvement des maghrébins laïques de France [Movement of Secular North Africans of France]). Because Islam has been made into the prism through which the question of immigration is seen, especially the problems of integration, we are brought, for lack of a global policy, to make intervention in the religious sphere a prerequisite. Rather than a reminder of laïcité, this is a distortion of its very principles.

The term “Islam” is used today to give unity to a complex assemblage of conduct, demands, and identities that really become meaningful only when they are considered laterally, either in relation to other similar attitudes without religious reference points or, on the contrary, in relation to similar behavior in other religions. Islam is thus turned into an essence, as though it has become the invariant that determines attitudes in very different contexts. A murder with blows from a rock is defined as a stoning. The macho attitudes of young men in the banlieues, regrettably similar in very different contexts (from Los Angeles to Moscow), is attributed to Islam. Adolescents’ intentions to assert themselves by wearing provocative clothing is a banality in secondary schools, but the affair of the veil has been experienced as the penetration of the school system by Islamism. A girl wearing the veil wants simultaneously to assert herself as an individual, escape from the social constraint of her milieu by adopting a sign that grants her both value and autonomy, make herself noticed, affirm a form of authenticity, and on and on. There is very clearly an “Islam of the young,” made up of a complex mixture of generational conflict, a search for authenticity going beyond the parents’ generation, and an affirmation of identity and protest.¹⁶ I am not talking about being indulgent, and young people should, in fact, be challenged about the collective meaning of their individual attitudes, about their social responsibility, and about the connotations of what for some of them is a mere banality (anti-Semitic insults). But a systematic attack against Islam can only strengthen them in their identification of revolt, protest, and adolescent crisis with religion. These generational phenomena are by definition transitional, but they are also attributed to an immutable culture, thereby transforming the young person into the object of a manipulation, whereas he wants, on the contrary, to assert himself as a subject.

Many young people of Muslim background have therefore developed complex strategies by themselves, manipulating the reference to Islam. They have exploited Islam as much as their detractors. A typical case, which I have already mentioned, is that of girls: by defining them essentially as victims, we leave them no choice for their emancipation but a break with their family circle, whereas very few of them wish for that (and, besides, some of the social problems of the banlieues stem more from the disintegration of families than from the burden of family structures). The debate on marriage is a sign of this misunderstanding: the press speaks constantly of the number of forced marriages, most of which are not forced but arranged; that is, the girl agrees to play along, while later possibly escaping with profit or at least with honor intact. For example, she will marry a cousin from the old country, which grants him a residence permit, and later divorce him with honor intact. Such complex relations, to be sure, frequently lead to tragedy, but to turn them into a mechanism for enslavement amounts to positing freedom in abstraction, paying no attention to emotional ties, even if they are conflicted, between parents and children, or to the wish of children to take their place in a given family genealogy. The discourse of women’s liberation here comes up against the reality experienced by these young women, which is far from being one of systematic enslavement. We often experience with reference to North African girls a liberation by proxy, a continuation of the battles of the 1960s. In fact, abstractions about Islam, the youth of the banlieues, and the North African woman mask much more complex and contradictory human realities. Improvised expressions of quests for identity are systematically over-Islamized, relegating social actors to an essentialist identity, whereas they are engaged in a dynamic search for themselves.

This same essentialist reading is applied to political violence. There is no doubt that Bin Laden calls for jihad, but the violence he puts into operation (and that he stages) and the attraction he holds for many young men also operates in other registers, particularly that of a quite European extreme leftist anti-imperialism. Every reference to the Koran by Bin Laden, Zawahiri, or Zarqawi is dissected, but as far as I know no one has pointed out that the macabre staging of hostage executions in Iraq (a tribunal, today Islamic, in the past revolutionary, standing behind the victim, beneath a banner bearing the name and logo of the organization, prisoner confessions, the reading of the sentence by a masked man, and so on) is borrowed directly from the extreme Left of the 1970s, in particular from the staging of the “trial” of Aldo Moro by the Italian Red Brigades in 1978.