Author: Elaine Sciolino
Publication: The New York Times
Date: May 7, 2003
The French interior minister, Nicolas
Sarkozy, was booed and whistled at when he said at the annual conference
of one of this country's most important Muslim groups last month that Muslim
women would have to go bareheaded when posing for pictures for their identity
cards.
He did not seem to notice - or perhaps
chose to ignore - that a vast majority of the women in the audience were
wearing head scarves. A few of them had even swathed their faces in black
and hidden their hands under black gloves.
And perhaps the law-and-order interior
minister can be forgiven for overlooking the shopping bags on sale at a
score of kiosks, the ones with the silhouette of a woman wearing a veil
and the phrase "I love my veil" in English and Arabic.
In a largely secular continent still
trying to come to grips with Islam, France, with its large Muslim population
and long colonial history with Algeria, is something of a bellwether. But
even here, it is unclear how - or even whether - the tensions between secularism
and Muslim piety will be resolved.
In a sense, France's center-right
government is trying to create a model Muslim citizenry. President Jacques
Chirac has spoken about his vision of a "tolerant" Islam. Mr. Sarkozy said
recently, "There is no room for fundamentalism at the Republic's table."
For them, model Muslims would be
French-speaking and law-abiding. They would celebrate the 1905 French law
that requires total separation between church and state. They would attend
mosques presided over by clerics who are French-trained and avoid politics
in their sermons.
Model Muslim women would not try
to wear head scarves in the workplace; model Muslim girls would not try
to wear head scarves to school. Most important, model Muslims would call
themselves French first and Muslim second.
The thinking goes something like
this: Muslims must be integrated into French society to avoid a culture
clash that could contribute to terrorism. So the French government has
embarked on a two-pronged strategy that will give Muslims what French leaders
call "a place at the table," but monitor and regulate their activities
at the same time.
This strategy lay behind Mr. Sarkozy's
campaign to put together an official Islamic council led by a "moderate,"
suit-and-tie-wearing mosque rector to interact with the French state. It
also underlies Mr. Sarkozy's belief that the only way France can stop radical
foreign clerics from preaching on French soil is to create a home-grown
variety that identifies more with French culture and tradition. It is the
reason French intelligence has assigned operatives to monitor sermons in
mosques and prayer centers every Friday.
The idea of the French state regulating
a religious community is rooted in Napoleon's bold concordat concluded
with the papacy in 1802. While the concordat recognized Catholicism as
the "preferred religion" of France, it also forced the pope to accept nationalization
of church property in France, gave the state the right to appoint bishops,
police all public worship and make the clergy "moral prefects" of the state.
A few years later, the French state
sought to transform the Jewish population into better French citizens by
controlling their behavior, going so far as to propose briefly that every
two marriages between Jews be matched by a marriage between a Jew and a
non-Jew.
But in an era in which the French
state enjoys less and less direct control over its citizenry, transforming
a Muslim population into an ideal citizenry may be too much of a stretch.
"It is very difficult to say it
openly but this is a very troubling situation, a crossroads," said Pierre
Birnbaum, professor of politics and philosophy at the Sorbonne and author
of "The Idea of France."
"The state, which is no longer the
center of the nation, may not be in a position to rule on religion from
above," he said. "It may not have the power to integrate."
France is home to about five million
Muslims, about 7 percent of the population. But that figure is hopelessly
unreliable because under French law, people are not officially counted,
polled or classified according to religion.
Officials say they do not know whether
there are any Muslims among France's 577 members of the National Assembly,
although a Muslim cultural organization affiliated with the Paris Mosque
says there are none. There are no Muslim ministers, although there are
two Muslim state secretaries, one for long-term development, another for
veterans affairs.
The driving force behind France's
campaign to make its Muslim citizens more French is to curb political radicalism
and terrorism, both inside and outside the country. The problem is that
mainstreaming Muslims into European society does not necessarily translate
into an embrace of European ideals.
France - like the rest of Europe
- was stunned when the perpetrator of a suicide bombing in Israel late
last month was identified as Asif Hanif, a 21-year-old middle-class Briton
of South Asian origin. Another Briton, Omar Khan Sharif, the 27-year-old
son of a successful businessman originally from Kashmir, reportedly fled
the scene. Both came from comfortable, Westernized suburban neighborhoods.
The French are aware as well of
the power of a protest leader like Dyab Abou Jahjah, the Lebanese-born
son of university teachers, who speaks five languages and founded an Arab
pride movement for immigrants in Belgium. He demands affirmative action
in schools, the workplace and housing, and calls assimilation "cultural
rape."
So even as France struggles to "integrate,"
as French officials call it, its Muslim population, the nightmare is that
the strategy may fail. Radicalism and terrorism sometimes may have less
to do with religion and more to do with an overwhelming sense of alienation
and rage linked to economic and political realities, like discrimination,
joblessness and the open-ended war between Israel and the Palestinians.
