1.1 Introducing Banality, Essentialism and French Muslims
On 7 January 2015, two masked men entered the offices of the French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo and, after killing 12 people, declared that they had avenged the prophet Mohamed in the name of Al-Qaida in the Yemen. It transpired that these two men, the Kouachi brothers, were French citizens born in Paris to Algerian parents. One of them had indeed travelled to Yemen to study Arabic and to train with Al-Qaida affiliated militants. However, this event did more than simply illustrate the international nature of Islamist inspired terror attacks, it also placed Franceâs Muslim population even more firmly in the spotlight that it had been subjected to repeatedly over recent decades.
Here, the symbolic importance of an attack on a satirical magazine by two French citizens claiming to defend the legacy of a holy man over 1300 years dead, on behalf of a fundamentalist religious organisation based in the Arabian Peninsula, is hard to overstate. Indeed, while Charlie Hebdo had hardly been popular in France up to this point, having nearly folded several times, it suddenly became the symbol of all that was right about liberal values. On the flip side, the attack then became epitomic of all that is wrong with fundamentalist religion. Such an attack on a satirical magazine only in existence to test the boundaries of free speech was too neat a fit with the âclash of civilisationsâ paradigm not to add fuel to the already raging fire of anti-Islam rhetoric both in France and in Europe more widely. By the time this attack happened, the so-called âfailure of multiculturalismâ was already old news (Kimlicka, 2010), and bordered on being a political and intellectual tenet of unquestionable truth. However, it would be wrong to think that the focus created by this incident draws on debates that discuss âreligionâ and âculturalâ problems in Europe in abstract and universal terms. Rather, it has become clear that Muslims are the focus of constructions of the securitised âotherâ within this discourse (Cesari, 2013). Here, Muslims are constructed as presenting European states with âcommunities of fearâ, portrayed as outside the remit of European values that require integration and regulation (Kaya, 2009). Thus, Muslims have become the threatening internal other par excellence, who present not only an existential threat to physical security through terror attacks, but also a far wider and diffuse threat to the liberal democratic order of things in a Europe that still struggles with home-grown, nativist fascism.
However, what has been obscured by the horrific violence and bloodshed of recent terror attacks in France has been how exceptional individuals such as the Kouachi brothers actually are. It is hard to comprehend, given the disproportionate space dedicated to Muslims as threats to security and liberal values in discursive realms such as the mass media (Brown, 2006), just how fringe such individuals and acts are to the daily Muslim experience. The number of French Muslims is estimated to be nearly 6 million, with violent extremists estimated to be only in the few thousands at most (DellâOro, 2015). At 11:30 that morning, while gunshots rang out in the Charlie Hebdo offices, the rest of this community of 6 million individuals from a diverse set of ethnic, racial, cultural and doctrinal backgrounds would have been getting on with far less exceptional, but sociologically important, daily lives. Whether working in banks, or in the case of Ahmed Marabet, who was killed outside the offices by the gunmen, patrolling the streets of Paris as a French policeman, defending with his life the values of freedom, democracy and security so dear to European democracies. On a more banal level, the staff in the many excellent couscous restaurants of my adopted home city of Marseille would have been frantically preparing for the lunchtime rush, where they would warmly serve French customers of all religious, political and cultural backgrounds the tasty, simple meal of grain, vegetables and slow cooked meat that has become a French favourite. In many of these establishments in Marseille and across France an extensive wine list is offered, with the Muslim waiting staff refilling the glasses of their customers as they clear away the dirty plates. Indeed, many other French Muslims would be in the process of fulfilling a large variety of social roles explicitly condemned by the religious extremists bringing a premature end to the lives of satirists in Paris. No doubt some French Muslims would have been making rap music, selling drugs in the open air drug markets of the large French housing estates, and even playing roles in the production of the adult movies openly and enthusiastically advertised and sold in the kiosks dotted around French streets. Magazines that would have carried erotic depictions of French Muslims, interviews with French rappers of Muslim origin and exposĂ©s about the state of the suburbs would have jostled for shelf space alongside the very issue of Charlie Hebdo which contained cartoons depicting the prophet Mohamed that triggered the hostility. The paradoxes, nuances and diversity of the French Muslimsâ experience highlighted by this ârogues galleryâ of magazine publications should not be dismissed lightly as polemic. Rather, they set the tone for the basis of this bookâs attempts to draw a broad narrative arc across a diverse panorama of the multitude of ways in which French Muslims exist in French society.
Thus, these opening paragraphs are not simply an idle wander through my musings on more than a decade of living, working and holidaying in various parts of the hexagon, and indeed eating a lot of couscous. Rather, they make a fundamentally important, yet in these times of dramatic events, neglected, sociological pointâthat the presence of Muslims in France has been, and remains to be, marked by overwhelmingly banal forms of existence across all social domains and functions of French society. Banal here should not be interpreted as âboringâ or unimportant, as there are indeed many important sociological insights to be made by taking this banal approach, if indeed this book does justice to them. Paradoxically, adopting this problematic and mis-deployed socio-political category of âMuslimâ and connecting it to a thorough investigation of the numerous and often banal ways that it interacts with French politics, norms, culture and social relations is actually an important and contrary stance to take. This is because of the plethora of voices across all shades of politics, and indeed even within the academy, that seem to be convinced that the terms âFrenchâ and âMuslimâ are somehow destined to never be reconciled. Here, they are juxtaposed like two English neighbours that have fallen out over a boundary fence or ill executed loft extension. However, while Nicolas Sarkozy was preoccupied with creating the ministry of national identity to formalise what Frenchness actually means, Marine Le Pen was lambasting praying in the streets as akin to Nazi occupation and Andrew Hussey was busy writing about a âlong war between France and its Arabsâ (Hussey, 2014), the lived experience on the streets of Paris, Lyon, Marseille and across towns, cities and villages across France tells a very different story.
This brief and woefully incomplete sketch of the daily lives of French Muslims and the importance of narratives of banality within it is not simply included to entice readers to dip further into this book, which I hope it does, but to make a very serious sociological point that will be one key thread that will weave through what will be an interdisciplinary and mixed methods account of a social grouping. This is the all too often neglected empirical reality that French Muslims and their historical, cultural and social realities are extremely diverse and require a nuanced treatment. This approach enables both understanding from a scholarly perspective and also for this understanding to be disseminated into the public realm, where in France and overseas this realm often gets to peak only into the dark, exceptional and salacious aspects of the French Muslim experience. Within this, it is important to look beyond the overtly and obviously âMuslimâ issues such as the regulation of religious symbols or womenâs dress. While these are undoubtedly important facets of understanding the French Muslim experience, and extremely worthy of scholarship, they can only illuminate small parts of a much bigger story. Reuters made a very valid journalistic point during the 2005 riots where, regardless of pressure from some of their readership to label the riots as âMuslimâ riots, the lack of any overtly âMuslimâ claims from the Muslims who participated in the unrest meant that they did not feel justified in labelling them âMuslim riotersâ, but simply rioters (Heneghan, 2007). Journalistically, this argument undoubtedly has merit and is commendable for its commitment to truth and rejection of salaciousness. However, the sociological logic of this book seeks to take a countervailing logic in that it makes the argument that one can only begin to understand the experiences and lives of Muslims anywhere in the world by looking beyond the obviously âIslamicâ facets of their lives and into the much broader social contexts in which they exist. The Reuters article makes the important argument that Muslims are also men, women, music fans and football supporters (Heneghan, 2007), and should be examined at times by putting these identifications in front of any conception of being Muslim. This may sound obvious, but these are facets of Muslim experiences across the globe which are unfortunately neglected in favour of the more dramatic, and perhaps within the political economies of the news media, policy circles and perhaps even academic funding bodies, more profitable aspects of the Muslim experience such as security, terrorism and radicalisation. Recent attention lavished on French Muslims is no exception. However, this book seeks to make important points by putting these secular categories into an analysis of French Muslims to demonstrate the diversity of their social roles and functions. Thus, rather than inaccurately labelling rioters as Muslims and further securitising a minority population, this books demonstrates that Muslims are also police officers, musicians and indeed porn stars.
However, not all journalists and public intellectuals have taken this path in trying to be nuanced and empirically grounded when discussing French Muslims. The anti-Islam rhetoric of the far-right leader Marine Le Pen of the âReassemblement Nationalâ, the former âFront Nationalâ, is well documented. Indeed, a wide range of sentiments that view French Muslims and Islam more generally with suspicion exist across French society. There even exists a political youth movement, âGĂ©nĂ©ration Identitaireâ, which overtly claims to battle against mass migration and the âIslamisationâ of France. Looking deeper into how Islam and Muslims are constructed in France it is important to argue that these sentiments are not limited to the fringes, but rather have become rather mainstream pillars of intellectual life. An example of a public intellectual who has pushed such an agenda is Eric Zemmour, who has written numerous books in the reactionary right-wing tradition, and has criticised Muslims in France numerous times. His works include books which address the existential anxiety about the âself-destructionâ of France (Zemmour, 2009, 2014, 2018). Zemmour sets this argument against a far broader context than simply the presence of Muslims in the hexagon, following in the typical right-wing trajectory of mixing post-colonial nostalgia with anti-globalisation and even viewing feminism as a key force destroying the fabric of French society. A sense of an âimpotenceâ in the face of the Muslim threat has become a common trope in this French intellectual vein, as it has across much of Europe, where arguments are made that a form of cultural insecurity is being caused by immigration, globalisation, Islam and the âelitesâ (Bouvet, 2015). This is also argued as extending as far as âIslamaphobiaâ being a lie (Bruckner, 2006, 2018), and the resulting guilt being an important means by which Muslims are manipulating the West into its own destruction.
Other authors in this intellectual vein have gone on to make several kinds of arguments that seek to depict a France, and indeed a âWestâ or a âEuropeâ, as under attack from a wide range of Muslim aggressions (Caldwell, 2014). These include those who discuss the lost territories of the republic that situate the suburbs as Islamised places, vectors of threat, which exist outside of French control and where anti-semitism and sexist acts run rife (Brenner & Bensoussan, 2015). What is important here is not denying that the suburbs have security problems, but rather than seeing them constructed as banal, structural problems of a lack of policing or municipal neglect (as correctly highlighted in works such as Wacquant, 2007), it is the religion of Islam, and French Muslims, who are to blame for creating a kind of ideologically driven insecurity. However, the truth about the nature of xenophobia is much more nuanced in Franceâin the case of anti-semitism the roots are long, and include such abhorrent events as the Dreyfus affair and the deportation of French Jews to the death camps of the Second World War by French collaborators. Indeed, in 2018 the number of anti-semitic events in France was said to have risen by 74%. This increase was due to a wide range of issuesâincluding Islamist inspired incidents, but also due to the French nationalist far right, and also even as a product of action by some of those involved in the yellow vest (gilets jaunes) protest movement (Couvelaire, 2019). This demonstrates the necessity of being empirically grounded when discussing anti-semitism in France or in any other context, and not simplifying JewishâMuslim relations due to the recent history of the Israel-Palestine conflict. In Belsunce, an immigrant-rich area of central Marseille, Jewish and Muslim merchants have shops side by side and sell similar items...
