Secularism Confronts Islam

The question of laïcité in France has recently given rise to violent polemics going well beyond intellectual debate into the realm of personalities.¹ The law on the veil and the deportation of imams were accompanied by hundreds of editorials and op-ed pieces in the press and a significant number of best-selling books in which the denunciation of fundamentalism soon shifted into a systematic attack on Muslims and Islam in general: the so-called Islamic threat was on the covers of all the magazines.² This polemical violence, which has recently been given the name “Islamophobia” and which comes from very diverse political contexts,³ clearly demonstrates that the problem of Islam in France today is practically an existential one: Islam seems to call into question the very identity of the country, or at least the nature of its institutions. People mobilize for the defense of “republican values” and “laïcité.”

But why has the debate over French identity focused on Islam? Militant laïcité is an old story; it has been at war against private Catholic education at least since 1905 (and there are still no real private Muslim schools). Christian sects and evangelical denominations of every stripe have proliferated far beyond Catholic precincts. Is Islam such a threat, or has French identity reached such a crisis point that a few hundred veiled girls and bearded preachers can overwhelm it? The debate has to be situated in the context of the history of French laïcité, which found its clearest expression in the 1905 law on the separation of church and state. At the time, the enemy was the Catholic Church (“clericalism, that’s the enemy!”), and Islam has now taken the place of Catholicism. But the real question is whether this represents a continuity or a break. In the end, is the debate about Islam concerned with the place of religion in French society, or, despite the apparent continuity, is Islam today seen as a different religion, the bearer of a specific threat? In that case, is this due to the specific character of Muslim theology or, more prosaically, to the fact that Islam is the religion of immigrants, which automatically projects onto France the shadow of conflicts in the Middle East? All of that is obviously mixed together, inevitably, to the extent that Islam in the West is demographically the result of recent, voluntary, and massive immigration from Muslim countries. Demonstrating that there is an old tradition of Muslim presence and contacts with Islam would do little to change the current perception of the problem. But if it is immigration or the Middle East that is the source of difficulty, then that has to be said clearly, and we can stop the endless stream of quotations from the Koran. And if it is only Islam that is at issue, then we have to stop thinking about Islam from the perspective of the banlieue and the banlieue from the perspective of Islam.⁴

But the question goes much further than that. The campaign of Islamophobia we are witnessing today is involved in the reshaping of the French political and intellectual landscape, for we find in it several elements that until now have not gone together. Obviously very hostile to the presence both of immigrants and of Islam are those who think that the Christian heritage is part of French and European identity and thus that Islam cannot be integrated into it, even in a secular form (Oriana Fallaci, Alain Besançon, Alexandre Del Valle). This is the traditional position of the Christian Right and of the extreme Right (the latter often adding an ethnic or even a racist dimension, which is blatant in Oriana Fallaci’s book). But to this hostility toward Islam, which may be called traditional, has been added today that of circles claiming to represent the republic and laïcité, combating not immigrants but what they perceive as a fundamentalism more threatening than its Christian counterpart (this is the tenor of attacks launched against Tariq Ramadan by writers like Caroline Fourest). In this campaign, conducted primarily by figures on the Left, two lines can be discerned: the pessimists, for whom there is no secular Islam, and the optimists, who, on the contrary, want to foster, or even bring into being, an Islam that would be liberal, secular, and truly French. Many politicians on the Left have adopted this stance (Didier Motchane, Manuel Valls). But for some republicans, who have broken with the Left they have long criticized for its fascination with the Third World (Pierre-André Taguieff, Alain Finkielkraut), the problem lies not only with fundamentalism but with its relationship to Third Worldism, anti-Zionism, and even, in their view, anti-Semitism and the extreme Right (what they call the red-green-brown alliance): for them, the banlieues identify with the Palestinians, and communitarianism reflects a global conflict. They denounce the Economic and Social Forum for having invited Ramadan to attend and the notorious conference against racism held by the United Nations in Durban in 2001 for having accused Israel of racism. In this case, the problem is not so much Islam itself as the Arabic—and hence presumably pro-Palestinian and anti-Israeli—component of immigration. In opposition, a part of the Left and the extreme Left has remained faithful to the defense of the Third World and the oppressed, emphasizing the social and neocolonial aspects of current conflicts (Alain Gresh, François Burgat): they obviously reject any assimilation to the extreme Right and see the conflict as one between North and South, developed countries and the Third World, the excluded and the privileged. The debates that stirred the conference sponsored by the Mouvement contre le racisme et pour l’amitié entre les peuples (Movement Against Racism and for Friendship Among Peoples) in December 2004 clearly illustrate the question: Should the struggle against Islamophobia be mentioned in the context of the struggle against racism? Is Islam an element of ethnic and cultural identity, or is it only a religion? The denunciation of Muslim fundamentalism thus masks other targets and other stakes. The label of “fundamentalism,” which is very useful for polemics, is applied from the outside. When Muslims are called on to adopt a reformed and liberal Islam, they are expected to situate themselves in relation to an analytical framework that has been prepared for them without asking questions about the meaning of their practices and the nature of choices involving their identity. But very clearly, everything connected to an open (but not necessarily ostentatious) affirmation of Islam is considered the harbinger of a dangerous fundamentalism.

We are thus witnessing a blurring of traditional divisions and a holy secular alliance between currents that opposed each other in the past. In the early twentieth century, those who saw Europe as a Christian land rejected the stateless Jews and also opposed republican laïcité.⁵ These Christian-identity advocates reject Islam but, in their opposition to homosexual marriage and their criticisms of what they call the excesses of feminism, find themselves in agreement with Muslim fundamentalists against a liberal Left that defends sexual minorities but has now called into question its relationship to religious minorities. Today, a segment of the secular Left that in the 1980s defended the rights of immigrants against the Front National is indignant that the children of those immigrants display a Muslim identity and sometimes holds, despite itself, positions that were those of the Front National, but with the clear conscience of those who still see themselves as antiracist.⁶ Religious practices associated with an immigrant culture were tolerated (the slaughter of a sheep outside an apartment building for the end of Ramadan) but become unbearable when they take their place definitively on the stage of French society as the affirmation of a faith detached from any foreign culture (the hallal supermarket in Evry forced to close under pressure). The universalism of the Left has shattered against Islam. Conversely, another segment of the Left attacks Islamophobia and defends the right to wear the veil in school (the association Écoles pour tous et toutes [Schools for All] and a minority of feminists such as Françoise Gaspard), a defense, by the way, much more tied to individual rights than to the praise of multiculturalism, which remains, whatever its detractors may claim, absent from the French scene. But it must be noted that more and more former assimilationists on the Left now find themselves adopting very right-wing positions.⁷ As for those who see in Islamo-progressivism a new convergence between extreme Left and extreme Right and consider anti-Zionism as an expression of anti-Semitism, they have difficulty defending hard-line laïcité at a time when orthodox religious communitarianism is growing in France and Israeli society is debating the relationship among citizenship, ethnicity, and religion.⁸ In every case, those for whom the underlying problem has always been immigration—that is, the ethnic (if not racial) question—have now joined those for whom the central question is religion: the theme (and the denunciation) of communitarianization is what unites the two currents. Immigration and the place of Islam are linked, even though the link will gradually be loosened in reality, as new generations, the descendants of immigrants, no longer see themselves as the custodians of a native culture.

Another element arises from the fact that in France Muslims have begun to speak as Muslims. The immigrant of the 1970s was silent: others spoke for him. The young beurs of the 1980s,⁹ when they went outside their banlieues, laid claim to the prevailing language of integration instead of defending a difference, except for skin color: they were above all antiracist, that is, against any insignia of otherness; they rejected any communitarianism and made no reference to Islam. This was the very nature of the march of the beurs in 1983, and it remains the line of the association SOS-Racisme, which came out of the 1983 movement but is now disconnected from the banlieues. What appeared later, in the 1990s, was a structured Islamic discourse embodied by two figures: the bearded Salafist preacher, in a white djellaba and with a heavy accent, come from the East to haunt the banlieues that had been transformed into forbidden zones, and the impeccably dressed intellectual speaking perfect French, who spoke in praise of a fundamental difference, a belief that displayed itself without complexes. And if we are to judge by recent publications, it is the latter figure, embodied by Tariq Ramadan, who has created the greatest anxiety. The cliché of dual language for which Tariq Ramadan is constantly criticized is obviously aimed at assimilating the speech of the second figure to the preaching of the first and at denying everything that is a matter of the elaboration and transformation of a discourse that is, to be sure, Salafist in origin.¹⁰ But this work on Salafist discourse, which is Ramadan’s contribution, is paid no heed. And yet it raises a basic question: that of the sudden emergence in all Western monotheistic religions of new forms of religiosity, all of them communitarian (but of a purely religious community), exclusive (a clear dividing line separates the saved from the damned), and inclusive (all aspects of life must be placed by the believer under the aegis of religion). The phenomenon of sects is troubling to French society, and the temptation to legislate against them is as strong as in the case of Islam. Misgivings about Islam are consistent with suspicion of religions, accentuated by the appearance of new communities of believers who do not feel bound by the compromises laboriously developed over the past century between cathos and laïques. At the same time, it is not adequate to compare Muslim religious revivalism with Protestant evangelical movements or the Jehovah’s Witnesses. Because of immigration and the situation in the Middle East, there is a much stronger political dimension in the question of Islam. Finally, as always, the most active participants in the debate are the militants: the great mass of moderates, Muslims who have developed their personal laïcité and who are well established in French society, do not participate in the debate, until the day, of course, when they have thrown in their faces their membership in a group that they have never experienced as conflictual or exclusive.

Although the polemic has gotten off to a bad start, and it is confused, unjust, and partisan and has produced more heat than light, it has raised fundamental problems that cannot be evaded and that this book endeavors to analyze. Everything revolves around one point: Is the problem Islam in particular or religion in general? In other words, did Christianity help to establish the current secular and political order, even though the church itself has been marginalized, whereas Islam is intrinsically resistant to any form of laïcité or even any other variety of secularization? Or are we going through with Islam now what we went through with Catholicism a century ago: a mere question of arrangements, legal constraints, and negotiations, so that a modern, liberal, and European Islam might finally emerge, an Islam that has been domesticated in every sense of the word? Or, rather, has the configuration that gave rise to the assumptions embodied in laïcité (a sovereign state that embodies the political sphere confronting a church that proclaims its universality) entered into crisis, making the current attempt to restore a now mythical laïcité an exercise in futility?

This book does not deal with religious dogma. It is not concerned with providing the proper explication of revealed scripture in any religion. I take for granted the fact that one may not criticize Islam for what is common to every revealed monotheistic religion: there is a truth above humanity; there is a community of believers, known variously as chosen people, umma, church, or communion of saints; and there are religious norms the violation of which entails punishment in the other world. But the believer’s convictions tell us nothing of the place of religion in society. This book employs two concepts that are not synonymous: secularization and laïcité. Secularization is a social phenomenon that requires no political implementation: it comes about when religion ceases to be at the center of human life, even though people still consider themselves believers; the everyday practices of people, like the meaning they give to the world, are no longer constructed under the aegis of transcendence and religion. The final stage of secularization is the disappearance of religion, smoothly and gently accomplished (Europe, for example, experienced a decline in religious observance throughout the nineteenth century). But secularization is not antireligious or anticlerical: people merely stop worshiping and stop talking about religion; it is a process. Laïcité, on the contrary, is explicit: it is a political choice that defines the place of religion in an authoritarian, legal manner. Laïcité is decreed by the state, which then organizes public space (but it does not necessarily cast religion into the private sphere, contrary to a persistent legend; it rather defines, and thus limits in every sense of the word, the visibility of religion in the public space).

The problem of laïcité is that of the separation between the religious sphere and the political sphere at the level of society. A believer obviously does not need to separate the two: his conscience indicates to him the place of each order. Religion does not determine what comes under its own aegis, but the law does with respect to laïcité, as society does with respect to secularization. The problem is to determine how religion redefines itself in the face of this change in social and political space, how it adapts to it, opposes it, or creates its own space.

The responses are, of course, complex. Indeed, it is possible to consider the problem in two ways.

You may adopt the classic techniques of apologetics: dissect the arguments of adversaries by pointing out their internal contradictions and their hidden preconceptions. You then take a series of examples from history, dogma, or contemporary writers to demonstrate that, of course, Islam is compatible with modernity and laïcité. But this looking-glass polemic, on whichever side of it you are located, has the paradoxical disadvantage of agreeing on a shared assumption, which is thus strengthened by the debate—that there is, in fact, a truth as to what Islam does or does not say and that it is that truth that defines the Muslim. The actor is replaced by a text.

Alternatively, you can go outside the confines of the debate by raising a fundamental question: How does a religion function within the social and political realm? How can a religion determine the conduct of its believers, particularly if it lacks a clergy to establish and disseminate the standards? How do believers reconstruct their religion, with or without the help of theologians?

However, and this has been a commonplace in the sociology of religion since Max Weber, there is no causal relation between dogma and conduct. The prohibition against coveting one’s neighbor’s wife never put an end to adultery in the Christian world, even though it certainly affected sexual morality. The link between Protestantism and the capitalist ethic asserted by Max Weber did not keep very good Catholics from being excellent heads of companies.¹¹ Hence what needs to be studied are the operators and mechanisms that enable religion to have an impact on social and political life. Two forms are sometimes confused. On the one hand, there is culture—that is, in the anthropological sense—the entirety of the ways of thinking and acting characteristic of a society. Religion exists only through a culture, which may be perceived as ethnic (Arab culture). In this case, religion has to do with ethnicity, customs, traditions. But how does this culture manifest itself in the conduct of an individual, particularly in a context involving the loss of cultural identity, like that confronted by immigrants? It does not explain the specific conduct of social actors, unless it is understood as some kind of ethnic constant. On the other hand, there is fundamentalism—that is, when religion separates itself from the surrounding cultures and defines itself as pure religion in a system of explicit codes (in its political form, this is called Islamic ideology; in its strictly religious form, it is Salafism). It is this form that appears to be a challenge to laïcité, whereas it was unwillingly constructed on the basis of that laïcité. It is this dimension that will be the focus of my analysis, because it raises the most significant problem, at the risk of an obvious distortion: fundamentalism touches only a minority of believers, and many people defined sociologically as Muslims have no religious practices. But I have deliberately concentrated on what has caused problems.

We therefore have to make a distinction between what has to do with immigration (that is, the importation of foreign cultures, destined to change or disappear in the course of generations) and what has to do with fundamentalism (an attempt to define a pure religion with no link to any particular culture, hence adaptable to the West, even if that may alter the meaning given to the concept of the West) to understand how we can rethink the connections among Islam, democracy, and laïcité. But fundamentalism is systematically associated with the importation of a culture, whereas it is one of the consequences of the crisis of cultures.

The question is therefore not so much to find out what it is possible to learn about the past (the history of the Muslim world) as to understand how Islam has today been reconstructed by Muslims. But this reconstruction is seldom carried out on the basis of work by thinkers, theologians, or philosophers; it is carried out in the concrete practices of Muslims immersed in Western society, but also with the help of organic intellectuals like Tariq Ramadan, who provide a language, formulations that simultaneously make it possible to live concretely and to maintain the identity of a true believer in a secularized world. Such language is ambiguous by definition and not out of malice: dual language is, in fact, a recognition of two spaces, that of religion and that of the order of the world, even if this is done with a longing for unity.

There is no abstract process of secularization: what you are after you have left religion is clearly marked by the particular religion you have left, and the forms and spaces of secularization are defined by reference to each particular religion. These spaces are the product of a history and also of a religious history. Religion inhabits society: religion has shaped society, and it returns either in a secularized form or, on the contrary, in outbreaks of fundamentalism. It is difficult to understand the strength and success of Communist movements in western Europe without seeing in them the ghosts of a thoroughly Christian eschatology and church. Our laïcité and our secularization are both in their way Christian, because they were built on the basis of Christianity: How many major philosophers of the Middle Ages were members of the clergy, including those who, like William of Ockham, argued for the subordination of religious power to temporal authority? How many apostles of laïcité, like Émile Combes, had a thoroughly religious education? But it would be very ethnocentric to make French laïcité the model for the exit from religion: it was first of all the assertion of a strong state, which itself was considered sacred. It makes no sense in English-speaking common law countries, where the state, not at all weak, is not invested with the mission to construct society and embody its thinking. And yet those countries experienced secularization without laïcité. This is even more true for Muslim societies, which have produced their own forms of secularization: nothing in the way in which politics functions is Islamic in itself, but law and customs have been profoundly affected by Islam. The question in the Muslim world has therefore never been the place of the church but that of sharia, but the imposition of sharia tends precisely to divest the state of a part of what is seen in the West as its prerogative: the monopoly of legislation (although in the United States the growing role of the judiciary in the definition of social bonds and the quasi-privatization of the law by the legal profession also point in the same direction). It is therefore clear that it is futile to think of laïcité as a simple relation between state and religion; it sets out the way in which society defines itself politically. Our secularized societies are haunted by religion. There are therefore separate histories of the establishment of laïcité and of secularization, and it would do no good to establish a definitive model. Being greeted at Heathrow by a British customs agent wearing a veil shows the French traveler that it is obviously not the same Islam that poses a problem for British democracy.

The problem arises when globalization introduces a gap among concrete societies, cultural models, and political structures, that is, when a model is detached from the historic conditions in which it was produced: this is the case for the modern state, for the rights of man, and for democracy, which are exportable, but probably not for laïcité, which is deeply rooted in the history of modern France. The question then arises of the compatibility of those forms, now considered universal, with religions and cultures perceived as particularist, especially in the context of Muslim immigration. But what is less noticed is that religion has also become detached from the historical, social, and cultural conditions that brought it into being and rooted it in relatively stable cultures. We therefore continue to think about laïcité and religion as the expression of political cultures, not seeing that their universalization depends precisely on their loss of cultural identity. But religion and laïcité are both invoked today in the name of identity and set forth as opposing mirror images of each other. And yet they are being rebuilt by ignoring their historical roots, which paradoxically makes them less incompatible than one might think, because they are fluctuating, are productive of diverse spaces, and embody principles that sit side by side rather than in opposition to each other.