Muslims today find themselves in a position rather comparable to that of Catholics in the nineteenth century: they have come to terms with laïcité through political steps, not through theological reformation, as can be seen, for example, with the establishment of the Conseil français du culte musulman. As for the Catholic Church, the question of institutional organization has preceded the debate on theology. The acceptance of secular authority by religious leaders and the recognition of the autonomy of religion by state authorities are indeed political decisions. The degree of sincerity or calculation involved is of little importance: it is the political realm that defines the respective positions of religion and politics and not the converse, from Islamic Iran to France.
Politics creates laïcité: this is also true insofar as the West provides broader intellectual freedom for Muslim thinkers along with both less state control and more stimulation. There is no reason to believe that state censorship comes primarily from clerical states like Iran. Authoritarian secular states are often just as hostile to theological innovation as they are to fundamentalism. They almost always favor conservative Islam, as we saw in the Algeria of the Front de libération nationale, because they are suspicious of any form of intellectual freedom and critique, even in the restricted realm of theology. What is positive in the West is its religious indifference, not its willed attempts to control religion.
But, as for Catholicism, political acceptance of laïcité is possible only because a process of secularization has taken place, either acknowledged or disregarded by the participants. For liberated, moderate, or secular Muslims, this ambient secularism is experienced in a positive way. But it is also operative in fundamentalism, through the two major vectors of religious renewal: the individualization of religiosity and the loss of cultural identity, which has prevented the emergence of a natural community of believers and condemned all communitarianization to being only voluntary and hence the realm of a minority. This is why the question of the sincerity of fundamentalists who say they respect laïcité does not need to be asked, because they have no choice: the means that have led to their success presuppose precisely that secularization has been accomplished.
The assertion of a Muslim religious identity in the West assumes a change in the cultural and social anchoring of religion—that is, the establishment of a religious space different from what it was in more traditional societies. This implies a gap between real practices and representations, which obliges the individual to redefine his personal relationship to religion and to adapt practices that no longer have the same meaning in different contexts. Hence the practice of Islam as a minority religion requires thinking through secularization and laïcité rather than experiencing them passively in an illusion of social conformity. It is indeed the concrete practice of Muslims and not a new theology that has shaped a new relationship to secularization and laïcité. One of these concrete practices is indeed political action, which is not confined to the desire to establish an Islamic state. The failure of political Islam—that is, the impossibility (whatever the reasons) of establishing an Islamic state instituting peace, social justice, development, and reconciliation between religious utopia and modernity—has, in fact, been confirmed by most Islamic figures.1 Although many of them have been converted to support for parliamentary government (like the Adalet ve Kalkinma [AK; Justice and Development] Party in Turkey), there was no need for them to have become ideological liberals and democrats (no more than Monsignor Lavigerie was a Christian Democrat before the fact: he was a monarchist before the toast of Algiers, and he remained one afterward). Among new practices has been the experience of Islam as a minority religion, which is true for immigrants and their descendants, but also for Turkish Islamists, who very quickly had to give up their hope of securing a monopoly of political representation for Islam in a country where more than 80 percent of the population define themselves as believing Muslims (observance is something else). The municipal Islamism tried out by the young leaders of the Turkish Refah (Welfare) Party (among whom was Tayyip Erdo˘gan, elected mayor of Istanbul in 1994) led them toward a pluralist political practice, somewhat in the way that municipal Communism in France in the middle of the twentieth century detached many mayors belonging to the French Communist Party from Stalinism. It is, in fact, participation in the political process that leads believers with little inclination toward democracy as a social ideal to accept the rules of the game and often to become strong defenders of those rules. If we had to wait for everyone to become a democrat before creating democracy, France would still be a monarchy. Institutions have a very great capacity for integration provided they make no ideological demands (in France, we guarded against making such demands on Catholics as well as Communists). It can, of course, always be argued that the acceptance of democracy by the Communists and by the Catholic Church was a matter of power relations: the church had everything to lose from a struggle for power, and the strategic balance between the Soviet Union and NATO barred the French and Italian Communist Parties from any possibility of a coup de force. But the same argument holds for Islam: on the strategic and military level, the Muslim world (which has never existed as a bloc) is beaten, crushed, and dominated and is even incapable of using the oil weapon. In fact, the “Muslim world” is not a geostrategic concept, because it has never had a concrete political or military embodiment (the Ottoman Empire was indeed a geostrategic entity, but it was Ottoman before it was Muslim, as China has always been Chinese before being Communist). Although the current strategic context may lead young men to choose to identify themselves with an imaginary community and join the jihad, it is having the deeper and more long-range result of leading Muslims, moderates and neofundamentalists alike, to rethink the way in which they are integrated into Western societies, by recognizing that the radicals have distorted the political imaginative structures they hold in common.
Islam has thus been transformed, on the one hand, by a process of the secularization of society (one of whose manifestations is paradoxically the ambient re-Islamization, because you re-Islamize what has been secularized) and, on the other, by a negotiated political integration, as illustrated by the establishment of the Conseil français du culte musulman. Hence, in every Western country, Islam is being integrated not following its own traditions but according to the place that each society has defined for religion, from Anglo-Saxon indulgence to Gallic suspicion, although the former needs to be less naive and the latter less pathological.
Politics Creates Laïcité:
The Case of the Union des organisations islamiques de France
The question often arises as to how, then, to reconcile laïcité with the fundamentalist positions of the Union des organisations islamiques de France. But it is not the content of the UOIF’s positions that count. As I have said, we do not ask Monsignor Lustiger to declare from the pulpit that abortion is not a crime but that he not incite fundamentalists to attack abortion clinics; in short, we ask him to respect the law and public order, not to adapt his beliefs to the law. This is exactly the same demand that should be addressed to Muslim organizations. Yet they are constantly questioned about sharia. What the state asks of them is what it asks of every citizen: not to incite murder and even less to commit one, under threat of the penalties provided by law. In fact, the state does not have to adapt to Islam: it suffices that it maintain the secular line, understood as a legal tool, not an ideology (which it has tended to become).
And this distinction between the law of the state and the law of God has already been incorporated by the UOIF and by figures such as Tariq Ramadan. When Ramadan proposes a moratorium on the punishments provided by sharia, he is at bottom more secular than the government minister who asks him to declare the veil optional, because he recognizes the distinction between the two orders: public political space and religious space. The moratorium affects the public space without touching dogma. Ramadan, like any other Islamic leader, is required to explain himself only with regard to public space.
We wonder about the sincerity of those involved. This is a naive approach, because the people in question have adopted a political stance (in the strong sense of the word), and politics has little to do with sincerity: when Monsignor Lavigerie called for recognition of the republic, he nonetheless probably remained a sincere monarchist, but he acted in a situation in which the fact of the republic seemed to him unavoidable (we should not forget that the same Lavigerie who recognized the republic founded the order of White Fathers with the goal of converting Muslims—with the approval of that republic). The fact of the secular state is inescapable today, in France as in Turkey, because it has been incorporated by society. Suspicion is kept up by the fact that the UOIF, like Ramadan, belongs, at least by intellectual ancestry, to the current of the Muslim Brotherhood.
But the two aspects that are problematic in the UOIF and Ramadan (Salafism and political Islamism) are precisely means for political integration. Salafism shatters the cultural reference to the Middle East and makes it possible to define a pure religion, detached from its ethnic elements, and hence to adapt it to a loss of cultural identity otherwise experienced as traumatic. By insisting on the individualization of the approach, acting primarily on the young, and promoting a return to Islam, in a way often close to born-again Protestants, Salafists of every kind have helped to break up imported communities to the benefit of another community, that of the believers who have decided to recognize themselves in it. But this is the definition of any church, any community of saints. The question then becomes that of the relationship between a religious community and the state.
And it is here that the second aspect of the UOIF plays a role: its Muslim Brotherhood ancestry. For members of the Brotherhood have always been politicians, what I call Islamists. They dreamed of an Islamic state, but they were transformed by their political practice after confronting states and experiencing social and political constraints (the fact of the nation, for example). It was a failure, and not only because of repression. In more than sixty years of political practice, the Islamists have evolved, like many former Marxist revolutionaries. Today they lead a moderate and pro-European government in Turkey (which rejects, a little hypocritically, any allusion to its Islamist past). In France, their innovation in politics has come from their reflection on the concept of minority. Islam is in the minority. Religious identity is constructed without reference to the state, and the law will never be anything but the law that the believer is willing to adopt. From there, only two directions are possible: toward a sect that places itself on the fringes of a society that it will never control (these are the most fundamentalist groups, but they can be entirely quietist) or else toward a representative organization that demands recognition for the citizen-believer.
The community is a construction that makes sense only if people voluntarily join it. And the creation of voluntary communities had nothing antirepublican about it, even if an old individualistic egalitarianism hovered over the baptismal font of our republic (we recall the Le Chapelier law passed during the Revolution banning all coalitions, including unions). But the Rousseauist myth of a republic where there is nothing between the state and the citizen-individual in his isolation (the “silence of the passions,” for passion is always the other) has long been nothing but a legal and philosophical fiction—to be sure, a founding fiction, but one that means nothing in political sociology.
What does the UOIF want? Recognition of the Muslim citizen. That is, of a citizen who sees himself as Muslim above all but who accepts and recognizes the laws of the republic. Concretely, since the veil is a religious obligation, the UOIF cannot say that it is optional (the UOIF is joined here by the rector of the Paris Mosque, Dalil Boubakeur), but if the veil is banned in school, then the UOIF reserves its right to take legal action in an effort to change the law. The crisis created by the seizure of two French reporters as hostages in Iraq in September 2004 enabled various Islamic organizations in France to put this distinction into practice: the hostage takers demanded the abrogation of the law banning the wearing of the veil in school; the Muslims of France massively rejected this outside intervention and expressed their solidarity with the position of the French government. What more could be asked for? The different spaces are clearly distinguished: the law is a French matter that can and must be challenged within the legal framework of the republic. One may thus disapprove of a law while asserting one’s citizenship: there is no contradiction in that in a democratic state. This is very precisely what one can expect from a religious organization that respects laïcité. It does not compromise its values, but it recognizes the law—that is, the distinction between the two orders: public and political space, on the one hand, and religious space, on the other. Laïcité is nothing but that.
But there can obviously be no question of recognizing anyone as holding a monopoly on the representation of the Muslims of France; the UOIF is only one actor among others. Room for plurality must be preserved.
Laïcité, Secularization, and Theology
There is no direct link, and even less a causal one, among the three levels: secularization of society, political laïcité, and religious reformism. But a deep disturbance of the sociological bases of religion cannot help being reflected at one point or another in religious thought, as we have seen in the case of Catholicism: the aggiornamento came after, not before, the acceptance of laïcité. This is what will happen for Islam. The shock for Islam has been the loss of the social prominence of religion—that is, its embodiment in a culture, and its reduction to a social and political minority, followed by its reconstruction as a pure religion, on an individual basis, even if that leads to the reconstruction of a territorially unattached community of believers.
This kind of upheaval in so short a period of time will necessarily have consequences, and they may be contradictory. The Catholic Church was traversed by very diverse and complex movements after it reluctantly accepted laïcité and secularization. That had consequences that were not only theological but also ecclesiastical (what is the meaning of the church as institution?). The same thing is true for Islam, but here the comparison must be made with Protestantism as well, because, by definition, there is no central authority capable of grasping hold of the process and channeling it by bestowing legitimacy on it (as Vatican II did for Catholicism) or even by censuring it (as with the Vatican’s banning of worker-priests in 1953). Theological liberalization will probably be a consequence of the political acceptance of laïcité by Muslims, but the choice has already been made in practice by the mass of Muslims who have adapted without difficulty, whereas all attention is concentrated on those who pose problems. Theological aggiornamento is not a prerequisite for the emergence of a liberal Islam in practice but will probably be able to give it theological legitimacy after the fact.
The problem in fact lies in the definition of the market for religion: as we have seen, the second generation of French Muslims is not buying an intellectual and complex Islam for many reasons (the most important being that they want to experience immediately a total Islam that has the answers to everything). But the emergence of middle classes has changed things (along, no doubt, with the aging of militants and their settling down to family life) and created a demand for a more sophisticated religious formulation. Behind the label “Islam” there are men and women, Muslims of flesh and blood, with their social and economic expectations and their integration into a complex society, well beyond ghettos, banlieues, and housing projects. They need a more diversified offering, so to speak, of religious products, and it is this diversity that ought to be encouraged. But for that we will precisely have to avoid freezing polarized identities and hence avoid systematically politicizing religion.
Laïcité creates religion by making it a category apart that has to be isolated and circumscribed. It reinforces religious identities rather than allowing them to dissolve in more diversified practices and identities. In the incessant quest for any sign of communitarianization, in order to denounce it, the current campaign being conducted against Islam is helping precisely to reify Islam and turn it in on itself, whereas many of the forms of what has been defined as the revival of religion and of communitarianization are, rather, attempts to escape from that essentialist identity (which claims that Islam is a culture, a religion, and a community all at once). The forms of the return of Islam have to be considered laterally to see that they are also in their way an attempt to respond to the challenges of integration while preserving an identity, sometimes all the more virulent because it is purely formal.
But stigmatizing religion puts many moderate or even nonreligious Muslims in an awkward position; they have the same identity problems as many fundamentalists but have not come up with the same responses, which has led to contrasting attitudes: North African intellectuals fighting against the radical Islam in their countries may also be offended by the demonization of girls wearing the veil in French schools. The individual choice of many French Muslims is precisely not to put their religion forward. They spontaneously live it out in a secular fashion. But, obliged to justify themselves, aware also that the question is not simply about the beard and the veil but that other elements are in play (social structures, racism, integration, sentimental attachment to an Arab identity even though it is not expressed by any activism or any demand for recognition), they feel all the more ill at ease in the radical campaign for laïcité because they do not see the question as a battle between good and evil.
For, while there is a debate about values, that debate is an internal one for the West. The American election campaign and the refusal of the European Parliament to ratify the appointment of Rocco Buttiglione show that the question of values is dividing the West. Against the liberal and open tradition that we like to see as the sign of Europe, there is, in the same West, a conservative reaction that defends the family, wants to limit abortion, rejects same-sex marriage, and is troubled by what it sees as an excessive liberalization of morality. It is opposed to a West that champions the liberation movements of the 1960s, feminism, minority rights, democratization, homosexual rights, and the like. The entry of Islam into the debate has shifted the boundaries. At first accepted by the second group in the name of multiculturalism and the defense of the Third World and of immigrants (hence in a context characterized as minority), Islam was rejected by the first in the name of history (from the Crusades to the Reconquista to the Algerian War) and the Christian identity of Europe. But in the course of the 1990s, the Islamic referent shifted from one domain to the other. Now defending values more than a culture, conservative Muslims find themselves in the camp of the conservative Christians, and they use the same formulation: the defense of family values. But they have not been welcomed with open arms by those Christians, who are firmly focused on the defense of identity. At the same time, the shift from the oppressed immigrant to the demanding Muslim has alienated the progressive Left and made it possible to establish a bridge between that Left and the so-called modern populists (who take the sexual liberation of the 1960s for granted and do not recognize themselves in the old-guard language of the Right and the extreme Right).2 This was typically the position of Pym Fortuyn and Theo Van Gogh in Holland.
This migration of the Muslim reference from the defense of the immigrant (and of multiculturalism) to a defense of conservative values has deeply disturbed the patterns according to which political and moral positions are adopted in Europe. But in all this internal migration in the realm of European representations, Islam has merely aligned itself with Western sets of problems and contributed neither an alternative nor a challenge to what a European identity might be. The example of the coming to power of the former Islamists of the AK Party in Turkey is interesting: in the summer of 2004, the government tried to get a law passed prohibiting adultery. This could be seen as a surreptitious attempt to Islamize a perfectly secular legal system. In fact, however, this law had nothing to do with sharia, because it defined the married couple according to the Western model (a monogamous couple in which the partners are equal); it was more a copy of the revival of religious values, as in the United States (where ten states have and apply a similar law) than a means of getting closer to Saudi Arabia. Believers in Turkey are closer to Christian religious conservatives than to Arab Islamists. We may be worried by the fact, but to every man his Europe. For, more than ever, it is the West that determines the debate about values, a debate within which an Islam detached from any particular culture is being reformulated.
Islam has thus indeed been transformed by both secularization and laïcité. Liberals, moderates, freethinkers, and simple pragmatists have long resolved the question of how to live their faith (or its absence) in Western society. Today’s fundamentalism in all its forms is an attempt to respond to that challenge by putting a religious identity in the forefront. It has developed as a discourse, and it is attempting to re-create a space, a territory, in which the individual can completely live his faith. But this space is virtual, between the myth of an umma that can be encountered only on the Internet and a local community, closed in on itself, that survives only because the outside world appears to it to be hostile. It is indeed Islam that is now confronting the challenge of laïcité and secularism, and the arrogance of a few young neophytes who think that the Western world, bogged down in its materialism, can only massively join the camp of the true believers should not make us forget that that Islam has bowed to the new configurations, from territorial detachment to individualization, not so much because of theological reform as because it has now learned to live as a minority. What I have attempted to show here is that even fundamentalism has at bottom incorporated the religious space of the West (individualism, separation between politics and religion) and is striving to promote its conservative, indeed reactionary, values in a discourse and practice that mirror those of Christian and Jewish conservatives. The problem is not Islam but religion or, rather, the contemporary forms of the revival of religion. This is not a reason to show indulgence in solidarity with those who seem to be excluded but rather an invitation to think about Islam in the same framework as we think about other religions and about the religious phenomenon itself. This is true respect for the other and the true critical spirit.
