Can Islam Be French

Bowen asks not the usual question--how well are Muslims integrating in France?--but, rather, how do French Muslims think about Islam? In particular, Bowen examines how French Muslims are fashioning new Islamic institutions and developing new ways of reasoning and teaching. He looks at some of the quite distinct ways in which mosques have connected with broader social and political forces, how Islamic educational entrepreneurs have fashioned niches for new forms of schooling, and how major Islamic public actors have set out a specifically French approach to religious norms. --from publisher description.

The French government's 2004 decision to ban Islamic headscarves and other religious signs from public schools puzzled many observers, both because it seemed to infringe needlessly on religious freedom, and because it was hailed by many in France as an answer to a surprisingly wide range of social ills, from violence against females in poor suburbs to anti-Semitism. Why the French Don't Like Headscarves explains why headscarves on schoolgirls caused such a furor, and why the furor yielded this law. Making sense of the dramatic debate from his perspective as an American anthropologist in France at the time, John Bowen writes about everyday life and public events while also presenting interviews with officials and intellectuals, and analyzing French television programs and other media. Bowen argues that the focus on headscarves came from a century-old sensitivity to the public presence of religion in schools, feared links between public expressions of Islamic identity and radical Islam, and a media-driven frenzy that built support for a headscarf ban during 2003-2004. Although the defense of laïcité (secularity) was cited as the law's major justification, politicians, intellectuals, and the media linked the scarves to more concrete social anxieties--about "communalism," political Islam, and violence toward women. Written in engaging, jargon-free prose, Why the French Don't Like Headscarves is the first comprehensive and objective analysis of this subject, in any language, and it speaks to tensions between assimilation and diversity that extend well beyond France's borders.

The standing of French Muslims is undercut by a predominant and persistent elite public discourse that frames Muslims as failed and incomplete French citizens. This situation fosters the very separations, exclusions, and hierarchies it claims to deplore as Muslims face discrimination in education, housing, and employment. In Constructing Muslims in France, Jennifer Fredette provides a deft empirical analysis to show the political diversity and complicated identity politics of this relatively new population. She examines the public identity of French Muslims and evaluates images in popular media to show how stereotyped notions of racial and religious differences pervade French public discourse. While rights may be a sine qua non for fighting legal and political inequality, Fredette shows that additional tools such as media access are needed to combat social inequality, particularly when it comes in the form of unfavorable discursive frames and public disrespect. Presenting the conflicting views of French national identity, Fredette shows how Muslims strive to gain recognition of their diverse views and backgrounds and find full equality as French citizens.

This book provides a detailed analysis of the political arguments about the place of Muslims in contemporary France, and also discusses the ideas put forward by a range of Muslim thinkers. France has become the setting for one of the most important conflicts in the modern world. On the one hand, it possesses a rigidly organized, centralized state, whose bureaucrats and civil servants are animated by a code of secular activism. On the other hand, France is also the home for Europe's largest Muslim minority, variously estimated at numbering between four and six million people. This means that in terms of simple numbers, France can be counted as the world's fifteenth Islamic power. Previous conflicts with religion have left a deep impression on French political culture: from the sixteenth and seventeenth-century conflicts between Catholics and Protestants played to the formation of the collaborationist Vichy government in 1940. In recent decades, Muslims have been stigmatized as an irreconcilable minority unable to adapt to the secular culture of the majority of French citizens. This work draws out the political implications of the current conflict. It is based on events and publications produced in a single five year period, beginning with the shock of the 2002 Presidential elections, in which Le Pen was the second most successful candidate, ranging through the legislation of March 2004 which banned the Islamic headscarf from French state schools, and which sparked off a series of bad-tempered exchanges between left and right-wing French nationalists, anti-racism campaigners, secularists, anti-clericals and a variety of Muslim authors.

Will Islam be able to adapt to France's secularity and its strict separation of public and private spheres? Can France accommodate Muslims? In this book, Frank Peter argues that the debate about “Islam” and “Muslims” is not simply caused by ignorance or Islamophobia. Rather, it is an integral part of how secularism is reasoned. Islam and the Governing of Muslims in France shows that understanding religion as separate from other aspects of life, such as politics, economy, and culture, disregards the ways religion has operated and been managed in “secular” societies such as France. This book uncovers the varying rationalities of the secular that have developed over the past few decades in France to “govern Islam,” in order to examine how Muslims engage with the secular regime and contribute to its transformation. This book offers a close analysis of French secularism as it has been debated by Islamic intellectuals and activists from the 1990s until the present. It will influence the study of secularism as well as the study of Islam in the French Republic, and reveal new connections between Islamic traditions and secular rationalities.

Since the beginning of the 1980s France has witnessed intensive preaching activity in Muslim quarters. Hitherto studies of Islamic preaching by the Muslim community that has settled in France for some decades has been rare. This book tries to bring out the significance of this phenomenon of reislamization and mobilisation of the Muslim community in France. It also analyses how the preaching of Islam is modified palpably as it evolves in the Western context.

This book examines the thought of Abdennour Bidar, MalekChebel, Leïla Babès, AbdelwahabMeddeb and Dounia Bouzar. In doing so it investigates how these five figures allcontribute in their diverse and varying ways to broader understandings of therelationship between Islam and secularism in contemporary French society.