Allah Mode, Part 2

IN ITS DEALINGS with its Muslim population, the French government, whether out of nobility or naivete, has not reciprocated radical Islam’s distrust. Each of the last four interior ministers has sought to bring Islam into agreement with the country’s 1905 laws, which mandate a separation of church and state so strict that at times in the 20th century they were interpreted as barring professing Catholics from political office. Unlike the American dispensation, which is meant to protect religious practice from political interference, the French one is meant to protect the political system from religious influence. In fact, it is designed to drive religion out of the public square altogether. This is why various controversies over permitting Muslim girls to wear the veil to public schools have been so explosive. Each French government since 1990 has pursued two goals: to give Islam “a place at the French table,” and to wean it from foreign influence. Each has failed. That’s because most of France’s Muslim organizations have sought to be brought into the country’s religious fabric in a way that would allow for more public practice of religion. Under the recently dismissed Jospin government, the UOIF won the ear of interior minister Jean-Pierre Chevenement, who pursued a strategy of negotiating with the “great federations”–shutting lay Muslims out of the discussion and letting the process be hijacked by the Pakistan-influenced Tabligh movement (which, in France, is called Faith and Practice), the UOIF, and Ffaiaca (a consortium of Islamic groups, of varying degrees of radicalism, from France’s former empire). Chevenement’s successor Daniel Vaillant decided that he too wanted these radicals inside the tent pissing out. Dalil Boubakeur–rector of the Algerian-run Grand Mosque of Paris, who is sneered at by young Muslims as a petty bourgeois, and whom the French government therefore clings to all the more desperately as its last hope of pretending that practicing Muslims in France are predominantly liberal–warned that dialogue was delivering Islam into the hands of Saudi Wahhabis, whose faith had nothing to do with the malekite faith of most North Africans. But let’s be very clear about a paradox here: Taken in isolation, it is the Muslim side, and not the French government’s side, that is most consistent with the American way of thinking about the constitutional protection of religion. Fouad Alaoui, secretary-general of the UOIF, okayed a secular agreement, only to stipulate later that he rejected a “definition of secularism that seals off religion in the private sphere.” Thami Breze, president of the same organization, called for a “modification of secularism, in order to respect certain specificities of Islam.” In the French context, the Muslim side is calling for special status–in fact, for its establishment as the only religion that may be practiced in public. Chevenement’s plan was, in fact, the hatching of a social catastrophe, an outcome that was averted only by accident. If it was averted. Chirac’s new interior minister, Nicholas Sarkozy, has promised the same groups he will continue the “national consultation” Chevenement launched. He may mean it. Chirac himself, whether as an alternative to this process or as a complement to it, seems bent on winning the beur vote through a media strategy that has much in common with Karl Rove’s trolling for the votes of California’s Mexicans. Parts of this strategy are already in place: The year 2003, for instance, has been designated “National Algeria Year” in France. But the new centerpiece of the government’s beur policy is affirmative action. Quotas were considered an impermissible breach of French equality of citizenship five years ago, but they are now making their appearance. The prestigious Institut d’etudes politiques has announced that it will forgo its traditional meritocratic examinations in order to take 20 students in its next entering class from “precarious” school districts. Zair Kedadouche still claims to oppose quotas, but he favors a directive from the European council of ministers that would impose disparate-impact hiring criteria on French businesses. Like most people in the French political center, Kedadouche deplores quotas in principle while insisting on them in practice. One of the dubious innovations of former minister of cities Claude Bartholone was a job-discrimination hotline, accompanied by a “reversal of the burden of proof” in any court trial over hiring discrimination. In such cases, it is now the employer who must prove he did not discriminate. Meanwhile, Chirac has appointed two beurs to his new cabinet. Given the inability of beurs to get elected to parliament, it’s probably a good move. THE NATIONAL CONSULTATION on Islam has satisfied almost nobody. No one has been more alarmed by the direction in which French Islam has been tending than the country’s own moderate Muslims. These moderates have tried to show a different, more secular road for Islam in France. It is amazing how lame and unencouraging their arguments are. The most intellectually dazzling of these thinkers is the Tunisian novelist and literary scholar Abdelwahab Meddeb. In his brave and brilliant book La Maladie de l’Islam, which will be published in English by Basic Books next year, Meddeb dismisses the Wahhabi version of Islam as “stupid and dangerous.” He also insists that modern Islamic fundamentalism is a product of an image-conscious, ahistorical, televised worldview that he sums up as “the Americanization of the world.” Meddeb shows that, historically, Islam has been more flexible, more capable of separating religion and state, than the conventional wisdom gives it credit for, and much more so than the caricature promulgated by the new fundamentalists. He notes that in the Mutazilite era of the 9th century, when the caliphate was controlled by rationalists who believed the Koran was created rather than eternal, Islam was open to every sort of liberal possibility. Meddeb also notes that Afghanistan’s Bamiyan buddhas stood unharmed in Islamic territory for 13 centuries before the Taliban blew them up last summer. Unfortunately the Mutazilite interlude lasted all of a couple of decades, never to recur; nor did the Taliban show any receptivity to the Sufi rationale for allowing other religions’ idols to stand. Any humanist would love to study the glories of Islamic civilization with a spirit as genial and free as Abdelwahab Meddeb. But what he totally fails to reckon with is that the caricature he so despises is the really existing Islam that Muslims themselves have put on the worldwide political agenda just now. Meddeb recently told a journalist for Agence France-Presse that the reaction to his book has alerted him that Islamic fundamentalism is a bit more virulent than he had realized. Soheib Bencheikh takes much the same line. The grand mufti of Marseilles, educated at Al-Azhar in Egypt, Bencheikh has a reputation as France’s secular Muslim par excellence, even if he has been given to spouting some of the left’s wilder absurdities concerning the Israel-Palestine conflict. An Islam consistent with France’s lay conditions, Bencheikh says, is within reach, provided Islam can return to the interpretive flexibility of its first four centuries. Like Meddeb’s injunctions, this one is sweet, but absolutely meaningless. Only the worst kind of wishful thinking could contemplate assigning to religious believers an acceptably anodyne moment in their faith’s history–and then asking them simply to dial their way back into the worldview of the time, as if they were in possession of a time machine. Kaci and Kedadouche, meanwhile, are so deeply in sympathy with post-religious French society that they believe merely explaining the illogic of hard-line Islamic belief will open the eyes of the fundamentalists. Neither of them has any sympathy with those Muslim families who, battling France’s secular constitution, have caused one national uproar after another for the past fifteen years by sending their girls to sc
hool veiled. “The veil shouldn’t be a problem,” Kaci says. “We just need to take girls aside and explain to them what the veil is and what it represents.” Kedadouche sees Arab abstention from French sexual norms as a problem–in particular the tendency of beur sons to keep a watchful eye on their sisters’ dates. “Sons often react like fathers,” Kedadouche writes, “even if they’re born in France and understand perfectly well the way young people live in this country. Sexuality is a real problem for the beurs.” BUT WHAT IF none of this suasion works? What if you explain the sexist roots of veil-wearing and a girl still wants to wear one? What if devout brothers, for some strange reason, persist in refusing to offer up their 14-year-old sister’s virginity on the altar of ooh-la-la French hedonism? In short, what if Islam is somehow not assimilable into contemporary French constitutional and moral practice, in the way that Catholicism, Protestantism, and Judaism are? Even to raise these points is to be accused of dealing in amalgames, or stereotypes, and to risk being excommunicated from the country’s intellectual life. Political correctness was largely absent from France five years ago; its absence allowed a great deal of justifiable snickering at the United States. Today, especially on matters concerning Islam and especially since September 11, France’s version of PC is imposed with a ferocity that has no equal in America. The Arab ex-Muslim Ibn Warraq, long a professor in the American Midwest but now resident in Europe, has been granted a certain leeway, because of his ethnic background, to argue in the French press that the Islamists are not necessarily misreading or “perverting” the core of Islamic belief. He goes further, arguing that Islam, properly understood, is incompatible with the Rights of Man as they are understood in France. But those who lack Warraq’s ethnic credentials are dealt with mercilessly. The mildly conservative, formerly anti-American foreign policy expert Alexandre Del Valle is a prolific author, published in Politique internationale and many of France’s more prestigious journals. But after urging a vigilant fight against Islamism, he has been accused of “Islamophobia” in Le Monde, where the editors suspect him of being a “spy” for the Le Pen-ite extreme right. The Italian journalist Oriana Fallaci was taken to court for hate speech for her (admittedly somewhat hysterical) book Anger and Pride, which has sold a million copies in Italy. France’s Movement against Racism and for the Friendship of Peoples (MRAP) sought on the basis of one sentence–“The sons of Allah are breeding like rats”–to have the book banned. The Islamic Center of Geneva has called for banning it, too. Other anti-racist groups have sought merely to require a warning label on the front cover. Meanwhile, even to mention the well-documented attacks by young Arabs on French Jews could be taken as evidence of anti-Arab prejudice, according to MRAP’s secretary-general Mouloud Aounit. “Since September 11,” said Aounit, “the taboo against Islamophobia has been broken. Certain people are jumping to conclusions, as when they designate young Arab-Muslims as a potentially anti-Semitic group.” Notice that Aounit is not “weighing the pros and cons.” He is not looking for a “way for all of us to get along.” He is demanding woospeh, in the uncompromising tone of one who believes he has both right and time on his side. The political philosopher Pierre Manent has written of war’s “pouvoir revelateur” or power to reveal. The ordeal of war, according to Manent, exposes essential truths of a situation that the distractions of peacetime would otherwise have left hidden indefinitely. Viewed in this light, September 11 has made quite clear why certain of France’s Muslims, or at least their political representatives, have refused to be drawn into the existing French order: They believe they have the stronger hand. Against “Allah, the Compassionate, the Merciful,” France proposes to pit its own national ethic, which has now shrunk into little more than tolerance. Let’s not laugh at France for this–it is merely the country where a problem belonging to the West in general has become most clearly visible. It is in France that, under the pressure of Islam, the secular state is most in danger of being exposed as contentless, and therefore not worth fighting for–and where fears should be arising that, if secularism cannot be fought for as religions are fought for, it will not last long. Christopher Caldwell is a senior editor at The Weekly Standard.

Related Content