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2021, Berkley Forum- Berkley Center for Religion, Peace and World Affairs
Since the late 1990s, France has adopted an overarching approach of regulating and reforming Islam through institutionalization and legal integration. The regulation of the religious domain by the French state resulted in not only the transformation of religions but also the reconfiguration of laïcité. This is an important moment when the French state is focusing its policies on integrating Islam legally and institutionally into the existing secular framework. Today, Macron accepts the CFCM as the only Muslim representative body and expects it to take responsibility for things like the organization of worship and imam training. Macron still heavily relies on liberal reformist techniques to realize the goal of building a secularized Islam, or French Islam that is in harmony with Republican ideals.
This chapter outlines an analytical approach to the study of French secular politics (laïcité) and Islam since 1989. This approach emphasizes the heterogeneous logics of French secularism and argues against an orderly vision of secular politics. An orderly vision of politics refers here to an understanding of secular politics where the question of the object of politics (here “Muslims” and “Islam”) is seen as basically unproblematic. Put differently, the question of how power exercise is connected to secular knowledges is granted minor analytical importance. In fact, those who ask this question are almost exclusively interested in processes of racialization of Islam and the spread of Islamophobia. Meanwhile, the focus in studies on French secularism tends to be on various normative frameworks and their usage, and on how they specify the place of religion in modern society, the functioning of the public sphere, conditions of citizenship, etc. I want to argue the case for a much more important and more complex connection between knowledge and secular politics. It is more complex in the sense that the knowledges in question cannot be as easily disqualified as illegitimate as can racializing and Islamophobic discourses. This connection is constituted by institutionalized bodies of thought – i.e. social, historical, and aesthetic rationalities – which allow diverse members of the public to describe and analyse “Islam” and “Muslims” in a variety of in principle legitimate ways. These rationalities allow them to make diverse statements about policies which are held to be necessary, desirable, or feasible with regard to Muslims. These political rationalities need to be taken into account if the aim is to analyse French secular politics, its modes of reasoning and legitimating policies, and if the aim is to analyse how Muslims engage with ‘the secular context’ of France or, rather, what exactly they engage with. These rationalities – which are secular in the sense that their authority does not depend upon any kind of religious tradition – constitute an essential part of the secular discursive context. This conceptualization of secular politics highlights the insufficiency of the secular-religious dyad as an analytical matrix for politics. Through the rationalizations examined here, “Islam” is configured as ‘more’ (or ‘less’) than a matter to be classified in the legal category “worship”, and a similar observation can be made about “Muslims”. Moreover, these processes are not simply concerned with drawing boundaries between the secular and religious. These diverse processes of rationalization are not conjunctural, nor can they be reduced to particularities of the debate on Islam, the racialization of Muslims or Islamophobia. Ultimately, the multiple rationalities of secularism lead up to a question about how to conceive of secularism’s unity. Put differently, they indicate that the question whether one can imagine a power “that unites in itself a what, a why, and a how” (Foucault 2000:336) also deserves to be asked about secular politics in France.
Is Islam compatible with laïcité, the particular French version of secularism? And conversely, does French laïcité permit the free exercise of religion under a neutral regime, or is it a code word masking Islamophobia? If I have posed these questions in these simplistic and somewhat Manichean terms, such are the terms of the “debate” (perhaps “dialogue des sourds” is a better qualification) often heard in French political discourse, in the media (French and non-French), and elsewhere. Fortunately, more nuanced approaches to these questions abound as well: indeed, laïcité has become a cottage industry for scholars, French and non-French, in sociology, history and political science. And a large number of articles and books have been published by politicians, militants, and religious leaders: some of it polemical, but much of it nuanced and thoughtful. The purpose of this brief article is not to try to break new conceptual ground in the subject, nor to do full justice to the plethora of books and articles in the field, but to make available to the (largely US) readership of the Georgetown Journal of International Affairs an idea of how laïcité has emerged and evolved in French society and its relation to established religions, in particular Islam.
The 1905 law on the separation of church and state is often touted as being the hallmark of French laïcité. While it seems a simple enough concept, there are multiple meanings attached to laïcité. The purpose of this paper therefore lies beyond that of a textual analysis of the law. What I seek rather is to explore how such a broad concept as laïcité has been and is currently being appropriated by the state in the discourse of a French identity, the French identity some might say, in juxtaposition with the place of Islam in France. Or to pose the issue in another way: What does it mean to be French? What does it mean to be Muslim? And is it possible to be both? These are questions the French state has found itself struggling to answer. This paper will examine a few key actions taken by the state – the creation of the Grand Mosquée de Paris and the Conseil Français du Culte Musulman, its current immigration policy, and of course, the headscarf controversy – to show that the supposed confrontation between Islam and the ideals of the French republic have little to do with secularism, but rather with power and the state’s obsession with a monolithic “French identity.”
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