France and the Challenge Posed by Islam
Even though only about one-tenth of the French population is Muslim, only a small number practice their religion in what are mostly improvised places of worship.
"Ah, les Arabes!" - it may be a relatively harmless phrase, but it is one that is frequently uttered by French people as a way of venting their daily anger and frustration at the consequences of undigested immigration from North Africa. Very few of them know that the people of whom they are speaking, especially those who live in Paris and its suburbs, are in fact Berbers.
After all, most people don't know the difference, a difference that once allowed the former colonial power to "divide and conquer" while simultaneously promoting ethnic minorities. The man on the street tars them all with the same brush - they're all foreign Muslims - quite forgetting that many of "them" are French citizens or are second- or even third-generation immigrants from North Africa.
Twenty years ago, a little joke about a supposed historical paradox did the rounds: Karl Martell beat and banished the Arabs near Poitiers in 732, "mais ils sont tous revenus en 404" (but they all came back in 404). The figure here does not refer to a year, but to an old Peugeot, which many immigrants used to get around.
One-tenth of the population
So how many Muslims are there in France? No-one really knows because it is against the lay republic's basic principle of religious neutrality to register the religious beliefs of its citizens. This is why one has to make do with vague guesses ranging from four to six million. Whatever the correct figure may be, France is considered to be the country with the largest Muslim population of all EU Member States.
If the second, higher estimate is to be believed, Muslims make up almost one-tenth of the total population. After Christianity, the religious denomination to which the vast majority of French citizens belong, and of which almost all are Catholics - hardly surprising in a country where the Ancien Régime referred to itself as the "fille aînée de l'Eglise" (the eldest daughter of the Church) - Islam is the second largest religion in France.
In terms of numbers alone, there are about ten times as many Muslims in France as there are members of the Jewish minority. The Conseil français du culte musulman (CFCM, French Council of the Muslim Faith), which was modelled on the Representative Council of French Jews, was established in spring of last year. The former Minister of the Interior, Nicolas Sarkozy, was the driving force behind the project.
Unlike his predecessors, who successfully put the project on hold for a decade because of fears that radical Islamists could take over the organisation, Sarkozy managed to push though the creation of an Islamic body that would act as a contact for the French state after Jean-Pierre Raffarin's government came to power. Over 4,000 delegates from 995 mosques and places of worship elected the over three dozen members of the Islamic Representative Council.
The Muslim Council
The concern about the dominance of the radicals did not prove unfounded; the "Union des organisations islamiques en France" (UOIF, Union of Islamic Organisations of France), which is considered radical - if not Islamist, as a result of its links to the Muslim Brothers - won as many seats on the council as the more moderate Moroccan-backed "Fédération nationale des musulmans de France" (FNMF, National Federation of Muslims).
Most significantly, the supporters of the Paris Mosque, which has links to Algeria, fell far behind with only half a dozen members on the council. Nevertheless, their leader and the rector of the Paris Mosque, Dalil Boubakeur, assumed the role of chairman of the Muslim Council for two years. At Sarkozy's instigation, this decision was made before the vote even took place.
At the end of the summer, the Muslim Council was more frequently in the public eye because it spoke out in favour of the release of the two French journalists Christian Chesnot and Georges Malbrunot, who were kidnapped by Islamist terrorists in Iraq on 20 August 2004.
Even though its attempts to influence the hostage-takers remained fruitless, the Muslim Council's rejection of terrorist blackmail and its decision to thereby toe the French government's line triggered premature reports of the "birth of a French Islam". The council categorically rejected the kidnapper's demands for a repeal of the ban on headscarves.
Even though the Muslim Council and many of its groupings had expressed their reservations about the headscarf law and had even voiced loud protests about it, its official representatives remained silent on the matter in view of the hostage-taking.
But the official harmony could not cover up the different opinions within the CRCM for long. Soon the different groupings were at loggerheads again: the leader of the UOIF Islamists enraged the moderate members of the council by making contact with the exiled founders of the "Algerian Front islamique du salut" (FIS, Islamic Salvation Movement).
Secular majority
Only a fraction - about ten percent - of France's Muslim community, which isn't actually a homogenous community at all, are practicing Muslims. When the ban on the wearing of conspicuous religious symbols in public schools came into force in the autumn, France's Muslims did not rise up in a wave of protest.
The vast majority of them would appear to be just as secularised as the majority of French Catholics, almost all of whom have been baptised and got married in a church, but do not attend mass on a regular basis.
In terms of their countries of origin, the Muslims from Algeria and Morocco account in virtually equal parts for the majority of Muslims in France. After them, in terms of numbers, come the Tunisian Muslims. There are also a small number of Turkish and Kurdish immigrants and their offspring.
Nevertheless, the average French citizen does not differentiate between these two distinct peoples and often refers to them both as Arabs because of their religion. Muslims from African countries south of the Sahara and those hailing from the Lebanon and other states of the Middle East, on the other hand, are usually discounted altogether.
The pun "Le FIS est en Algérie, la famille est en France" (the FIS is in Algeria, the family is in France) is based on the fact that the pronunciation of the French word for "son" (fils) is the same as that of the acronym for the Islamic Salvation Movement (FIS).
The pun was not only adopted by the right-wing extremist Jean-Marie Le Pen to fan the flames of resentment and xenophobia, it is also used by some angry French people living in the Midi region who complain that their part of the country has become "French Algeria" as a result of “excessive immigration".
A generation ago, Friedrich Sieburg published his legendary book Is God a Frenchman? If we examine what still appears to be the strange question as to whether Allah is a Frenchman, we come to the conclusion that if he is, he must be leading an underground existence. While there are very few real mosques like the one in Paris, there are many places of worship in barracks, warehouses, back yards, and basements.
Improved supervision through "gallicisation"?
Three-quarters of the over 1,200 imams in France are non-nationals and just under one-third of them cannot even speak French. The idea of fostering a "French Islam" hovered over the Sarkozy-induced birth of the Muslim Council like a watchful guardian.
Now, Sarkozy's successor, Dominique de Villepin, is planning special university training courses for Islamic preachers to teach them French law, civic knowledge, and the institutions of the country.
On the other hand, Sarkozy's suggestion to amend the 1905 law on the separation of church and state to allow state subsidies to be paid for the construction of mosques in France has been broadly rejected thus far.
The idea was that a partial departure from strict laicism would put a stop to the current practice of foreign funding in this area: Algeria provides most of the funding for the Paris mosque and related groups; Morocco subsidises the Islam Federation; and it is plausible that the money that flows into the coffers of the radical UOIF comes from the Gulf states.
In the interests of transparency, de Villepin would now like to set up a public Islam Foundation through which all financial donations from inside and outside France would have to be channelled and monitored by the Muslim Council.
If we ask ourselves how France should rise to the growing Islamist challenge, the so-called "gallicisation" of Islam is at best only part of the answer.
The most visual part of this debate is the recent ban on the wearing of Islamic headscarves in schools. The value and justification of this reinforcement of the laicist principle, which was requested by the teaching profession, is certainly a moot point; even the Catholic Church expressed its reservations.
While the law does not exclusively target the wearing of Islamic headscarves, it was successfully portrayed by Islamists as an act of discrimination against Muslims. It seems unlikely that a rational discussion can be conducted with the Islamists. This is why it is astonishing that the heated debate has almost completely ceased for the moment.
Integration crisis
Even the construction of the most splendid mosques would not stamp out the breeding ground for Islamist propaganda. In fact, the crisis of the French integration model, about which an official comprehensive report was recently published by the French Auditor-General's office, cultivates this breeding ground.
"Racial segregation", or the ghettoization of the suburbs populated by immigrants, has been characteristic of developments over the past thirty years. The phenomenon of above-average unemployment, poverty, and crime is certainly not limited to the Muslim minority. However, Muslims do account for a large part of the "underprivileged".
According to statistics - one of the rare cases where such statistics are useful - two-thirds of the minors sentenced for criminal offences in Grenoble (department of Isère) between 1985 and 2000 were fathered by non-nationals; in the case of 60 per cent, the mother was also born outside France.
In half of all cases, at least one parent of the accused came from North Africa. Immigration currently stands at 6.1 per cent in Isère. According to national statistics, a quarter of all inmates in French prisons four years ago were fathered by men from the Maghrib.
The example of juvenile delinquents illustrates why in current French usage, use of the term "young person" in reports about misdemeanours or crimes are increasingly being interpreted by the average television viewer as "Arab".
The inversion of the French word for "Arab" to form the word "Beur" according to school slang would appear to be going out of fashion and is being replaced by relatively aggressive argot phraseology.
"Positive discrimination"
During Sarkozy's tenure as Minister of the Interior, it was decided to approve an admission and integration agreement that foresees the organisation of language training and courses teaching the basic principles on which French society is founded.
After President Chirac sang the praises of the ideal of laicism, which served as an overture to the ban of headscarves, a High Council for Integration was set up.
At the same time, Sarkozy called for "positive discrimination" in favour of French citizens of a non-French origin, in other words, the offspring of North African immigrants. This variation on the American "affirmative action" theme would inevitably lead to the introduction of quotas.
But the president had already rejected the notion of quotas, saying that they would undermine the foundation on which the republic is built. Just under a year ago he had to concede the nomination of Aïssa Dermouche, an Algerian who came to France as a small child, as the prefect of the department of Jura.
As he did, however, he insisted on referring to Dermouche as a "prefect who was the product of immigration", thereby countering Sarkozy's announcement that a "Muslim prefect" had been nominated.
"Communitarism" as a threat
Dermouche is not the first Berber from Algeria to become a prefect; the other one retired just under ten years ago and has been long forgotten. The same fate awaited Tokia Saifi, a former secretary of state for sustainable development.
Born into a family of North African immigrants, she became a symbolic figure and consequently attracted much attention when she was elected to the first cabinet of Prime Minister Raffarin.
Nevertheless, she disappeared from the public eye, which had long stopped taking any notice of her anyway, in spring of this year. Hamlaoui Mekachera, the Minister Delegate for War Veterans, could relate a similar story.
While Mekachera, a former officer in the French army, has managed to retain his post in the cabinet, he really is only eking out a shadowy political existence there.
But a few token Arabs are not enough to hide the fact that the integration of the Muslim minority has progressed very poorly. In the presidential election run-off between Chirac and Le Pen, the majority of French Muslims naturally voted for the incumbent president and not the leader of the Front National.
The sight of a Moroccan flag at the victory celebrations on the Place de la République was subsequently a shock for many French people; alongside the tricolour, the Moroccan flag that was boldly waved directly in front of the French president seemed to augur the dawn of "communitarism", an imminent splintering of the French population according to ethnic and religious criteria.
Recruiting terrorists
At present, however, this threat is not immediate. Almost all of the rising number of Anti-Semitic attacks in France over the past four years were perpetrated by North African Muslims: a transfer of the Middle Eastern conflict to France.
On the other hand, fanatical Islamic preachers in France would appear to be succeeding in their efforts to recruit young Muslims as terrorists in Iraq where to date, five French citizens have been killed and an estimated one hundred more are active.
Prior to this, dozens of French Muslims made their way from Koranic schools to the Taliban's terrorist training camps in Afghanistan; several would appear to have made brief excursions to Chechnya while they were there.
In view of this exportation of terrorist fighters, it is likely that some people in the Caucasus or between the Euphrates and the Tigris ask themselves a variation on the title of the English translation of Siegburg's book "is Allah a Frenchman?"
Christian Müller
© Qantara.de 2005
This article was previously published by the Swiss daily Neue Zürcher Zeitung.
Translation from German: Aingeal Flanagan