For the Muslims

Islamophobia in France

Edwy Plenel, David Fernbach

• Publisher: Verso
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN:
  9781784784867
• eBook ISBN:
  9781784784874
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Political Philosophy
• Index: Politics & International Relations

At the beginning of the twenty-first century, leading intellectuals are claiming "There is a problem with Islam in France," thus legitimising the discourse of the racist National Front. Such claims have been strengthened by the backlash since the terrorist attacks in Paris in January and November 2015, coming to represent a new 'common sense' in the political landscape, and we have seen a similar logic play out in the United States and Europe.

Edwy Plenel, former editorial director of Le Monde, essayist and founder of the investigative journalism website Mediapart tackles these claims head-on, taking the side of his compatriots of Muslim origin, culture or belief, against those who make them into scapegoats. He demonstrates how a form of "Republican and secularist fundamentalism" has become a mask to hide a new form of virulent Islamophobia. At stake for Plenel is not just solidarity but fidelity to the memory and heritage of emancipatory struggles and he writes in defence of the Muslims, just as Zola wrote in defence of the Jews and Sartre wrote in defence of the blacks. For if we are to be for the oppressed then we must be for the Muslims.

1

‘There is a problem with Islam in France,’ I heard one morning in June 2014 on the main French public radio station. This was not a marginal statement but that of a major contemporary commentator, invited by the editors to spout without contradiction the obsession that takes the place of thought with him. This ‘problem with Islam’ is nothing less than a ‘concern for civilization’, he added, regretting that such concern has been ‘abandoned to the National Front’. With the moral authority that his status as an esteemed guest speaker conferred, he thus invited the government parties of both right and left to recklessly take up the agenda of the far right.

As we know, the devil is in the detail, in this case the vagaries of the calendar. It happened to be the Monday after Whitsun, the Christian festival that commemorates the descent of the Holy Spirit onto the apostles of Jesus of Nazareth, thus annexing Shavuot, one of the three pilgrimage feasts of Judaism, which itself arose from the age-old harvest cycle. In Christian tradition, the Holy Spirit takes the form of tongues of fire that descend from the sky in a tumultuous wind and by alighting on each of the apostles transform them into polyglots, able to speak all the languages on earth. Despite our awareness of the dominating and oppressive universalism that would follow, how can we not hear in this scene of early Christianity the echo of a world of diversity, respect and concern for others?

There was nothing of this that morning, when I heard just one language closed to all others, a language of rejection and exclusion, of astounding violence beneath its apparent restraint. It was the decorous language of discrimination: a language of ignorance, that on the grounds of their religion views with the same wholesale disapproval men, women and children, no matter their diversity and plurality; a language of prejudice, that manufactures the foreigner as foreign by essentializing groups of human beings on the basis of their origin, culture, faith, belonging and birth.

Celebrity can be disastrous even more often than old age. There are honours that conceal defeat, distinctions that tell of renunciation. The words I heard, both baneful and detestable, were those of a member of the Académie Française, Alain Finkielkraut, just recently promoted to this ‘immortal’ status. The self-proclaimed spokesperson of the ‘French born and bred’ [Français de souche], against the threat of a ‘great replacement’¹ theorized by his accomplice in xenophobic regression, Renaud Camus, Finkielkraut is not only the standard-bearer of a conservative thought that vituperates against modernity in all its forms. He has also become a respectable authority for the most commonplace racist clichés, accompanied by a blind reduction of anti-racist vigilance to anti-Semitism alone, renunciation of which is apparently enough to transform the far right into a respectable political party.

Yet he has in the past been less careful, particularly at the time of the urban riots in 2005, whose social causes were widely documented by journalists and researchers, along with the police actions that sparked them off. In an off-thecuff interview with the Israeli daily Haaretz, confirmed by the newspaper despite Finkielkraut’s subsequent attempt at retraction, the future academician expressed his alarm at seeing the ‘barbarians’ at our gates, and denounced ‘a revolt of an ethno-religious character’. ‘The generous idea of a war on racism’, he concluded, ‘has gradually undergone a monstrous transformation into a lying ideology. Anti-racism will be to the twenty-first century what communism was in the twentieth.’ By which he means, a criminal ideology.

No accident then if, faced with the outrage that this declaration provoked, Nicolas Sarkozy, still only interior minister, but whose incendiary attitude was not without its effect on the spread of the rioting, hastened to come to the aid of this ‘intellectual who is a credit to French intelligence’. Sarkozy added his own descant against the ‘dictatorship of fine feelings’, an evocative formula which actually sounds like an invitation to support a regime of bad feelings, proud of its hatreds and exclusions, mocking kindness and disqualifying generosity. ‘An indispensable intellectual’, chorused the académiciens who elected the author of L’Identité malheureuse to join their number in 2014. ‘One of our most brilliant intellectuals’, Sarkozy added in approving their decision – Sarkozy who despite the various legal cases against him will be remembered as the inventor of a ministry of ‘national identity’.

Origin gives no protection from anything. Only lives, their paths and coherence, stand as evidence. We once knew a different Finkielkraut. A long time ago, in 1980, he launched in Le Juif imaginaire a ‘plea for the indeterminable’, urging people to ‘think the world in its totality’ rather than reduce it to pre-assigned identities, predetermined places, immutable origins, nations closed in on themselves. Very likely this is the common individual tragedy of an unsatisfied quest for recognition, which sometimes haunts a persecuted minority and even its heirs: the fatigue produced by the uncomfortable position of pariah, giving way to the zeal of the parvenu. A parvenu who can never do enough in his yearning to be at last distinguished and accepted, at the risk of losing himself. Losing his history, his memory, his inheritance.

_________________

1 ‘The great replacement’ [le grand remplacement] is a far-right conspiracy theory, rooted in neo-Nazi theories of the 1950s, regarding an alleged policy promoted by the French state, élites and the like to systematically replace the white French population with North and Sub-Saharan African populations, through mass immigration and demographic growth. The theory has been popularized by Renaud Camus (formerly a member of the Socialist Party), who has come under fire for the anti-Semitism expressed in his texts, such as his diaries published by Éditions Fayard [translator].

2

‘There is a problem with Islam in France …’ It was hearing for the nth time this refrain which, unchallenged, sets France at war against a religion, acclimatizing it to prejudice, accustoming it to indifference – in short, habituating it to the worst, that decided me to write this book. Faced with the growing acceptability of a discourse similar to that which, before the European catastrophe, maintained the existence of a ‘Jewish problem’ in France, I wanted to respond by resolutely taking the side of our compatriots of Muslim origin, culture or faith, against those who make them into scapegoats for our disquiets and uncertainties.

My particular concern is with those in high places, as xenophobic passions are never generated spontaneously, but always aroused and maintained by more basic defeats, defeats of thinking. People who, given their own social comfort, have no excuse for their blindness such as their condition or their environment, their misery or their distress, however unpardonable this ultimately may be. People who should enlighten, educate and elevate, and not stupefy, excite or enervate. People who claim to know, who assure us that they reflect upon matters, who want to rule; yet whom the present time, with its challenges and uncertainties, has rendered ignorant, stupid and dangerous. For want of knowledge, thought and ability, they have nothing else to propose than a mortifying passion concealed beneath obsessive Islamophobia: the sorry passion for inequality, hierarchy and discrimination. A destructive passion which, at the end of the day, will not spare anyone in its ineluctable mission to sort, separate and select among our common humanity. A regressive and destructive passion that undermines and ruins the hope of emancipation, whose motor has always been the equality of rights.

It took the European catastrophe of two world wars and their crimes against humanity for the French Constitution – initially that of the Fourth Republic, maintained by its successor – to inscribe in the first article of its preamble: ‘In the wake of the victory achieved by free peoples over regimes that sought to enslave and degrade the human person, the French people proclaim once more that every human being, without distinction of race, religion or belief, possesses inalienable and sacred rights.’ It is this promise, this wisdom painfully acquired, that is today endangered by the habituation to hatred, discrimination, exclusion, rejection, violence, etc., that has established itself in France with the ever greater acceptance of anti-Muslim discourses and actions.

In 2013, the National Consultative Commission on Human Rights (CNCDH) referred in its annual report on racism, anti-Semitism and xenophobia to an ‘upsurge of violence’. And, in this upsurge, the rise of anti-Muslim intolerance and polarization against Islam was the most constant and well-established aspect. ‘If our epoch is compared with the pre-war period, it could be said that today the Muslim, closely followed by the North African, has replaced the Jew in the representations and construction of a scapegoat,’ commented the sociologists and political scientists whose views were solicited by the Commission.

A year later, in 2014, the same CNCDH raised the level of its warning, observing the resurgence in France of a ‘brutal, biology-inflected racism that scapegoats the foreigner’, accompanied by a sharp rise in anti-Muslim incidents. It is no coincidence that the steady fall in the global index of tolerance measured by this Commission, of twelve points in the course of four years, began in 2009, the year of the supposed debate on national identity, a consecration of two years of Sarkozy’s miseducation. Racism and xenophobia are not generated spontaneously; they are the product of a policy that yields to them. ‘The way in which we speak about immigrants and minorities, along with alacrity in defending them and coming down hard on xenophobic statements, are essential in preventing individuals from (re)lapsing into prejudice,’ stressed this annual report for 2014, expressing alarm above all at the trivialization of Islamophobia under cover of a supposed struggle for ‘secularism’. The CNCDH went on to observe:

Racism has undergone a profound change of paradigm in the postcolonial period, with a slippage from biological racism to cultural racism. Hiding in this new guise, the term ‘Islamophobia’ has been used by political groups to mobilize a wider electorate and demand the right to express its hatred of Muslims and the Islamic religion. Still more disturbing, a certain radical fringe is taking the step from speech to action. According to them, Islamophobia is a matter of freedom of opinion and expression, and on these grounds the expressions of hatred it may inspire, whether towards the Islamic religion or its believers, do not fall under the scope of the criminal code. Following this dangerous line of argument, aggression against a veiled woman is simply a political act against a practice seen as a form of oppression of women.

Setting itself against this vicious tendency, the CNCDH sought therefore to ‘name what we denounce and wish to combat’. Islamophobia, in other words the phenomenon that targets Islam and Muslims and is expressed ‘by way of negative opinions and prejudices, often giving rise to rejection, exclusion and discrimination, insulting or defamatory expressions, incitement to hatred, damage to property with a symbolic value, and sometimes even aggression’.

It is necessary therefore to raise one’s voice, since these institutional warnings failed to prevent the propagation of anti-Muslim prejudice on the airwaves of Radio France or from the armchairs of the Académie Française. To raise one’s voice, in defence not only of Muslims but of all other minorities that this habituation to hatred of the Other places in danger, exposes and renders vulnerable. The anti-Semitic crimes, aggression against black people and anti-Roma violence that in recent years have attested to a deadly intolerance cannot be disassociated from a growing tolerance of everyday speech and mundane acts of discrimination and exclusion towards French Muslims.

Racism is like a monstrous set of Russian dolls, a Pandora’s Box that, once opened, spares no target. And it is by the routine targeting of Muslims, in the guise of a rejection of their religion, that it has once more found a home and become acceptable. Tolerable, respectable and socially within the pale. The extension of the domain of hatred that we are stunned witnesses of today springs from this decorous spread of anti-Muslim racism to occupy the place left vacant by the unacceptability of anti-Semitism – an appreciable victory despite being so belatedly won.

Since the end of the last decade, argues the researcher and historian Valérie Igounet, author of Histoire du négationnisme en France, a standard work on the far right, ‘the enemy of the National Front is no longer the Jew but the French Muslim.’ ‘The Islamophobic marker’, she went on to explain in an interview with Mediapart, ‘has replaced that of anti-Semitism. The message is recontextualized and can be conveyed in a few words: the Islamist danger is opposed to the secular values that are championed by our country and are the foundation of the French Republic. It is also a way of getting round anti-racist legislation: to speak of Islam is a way of speaking of immigration without risking legal sanction.’

The trap is a crude one, but sadly it works. The far right has in no way modified its stock-in-trade which consists in fuelling fears and hatreds, in designating scapegoats. But it has changed its target, with the intuition that, in the confusion of the time and the disturbance of minds, a xenophobic movement can obtain respectability if it takes its distance from anti-Semitism. That was ‘the thing to get rid of’, as Louis Aliot, vice-president of the National Front, explained to Igounet. Pulling no punches, he explained that ‘de-demonizing only concerns anti-Semitism.’ ‘When passing out leaflets in the street, I saw that neither immigration nor Islam was a glass ceiling. Other people are worse than we are on those topics. It is only anti-Semitism that prevents people from voting for us. The moment you get rid of that ideological catch, you free up the rest.’

The ‘rest’, then, all the rest that we allow to be said and done, abandoning its targets to silence, indifference and invisibility. Time is short, and we cannot say that we had not been forewarned. Our country has today become a European exception, with a far right ensconced at the centre of public debate to the point of preparing itself for the conquest of power, an ‘official’ right in moral decomposition, beset by ideological disarray and financial corruption, and a left crushed to pulp, more of a minority than ever, more divided than ever, and in still greater disarray. Elsewhere in Europe, particularly in Greece, Spain and Italy, the financial, economic, social, ecological, European, etc., crisis has unleashed a variety of new alternatives, giving strength to the confrontation between rediscovered progress and stoked-up fear that is both necessary and inevitable. France, however, has an empty space there, facilitating an unexpected return of the inegalitarian ideologies which, protected by identitarian retrenchment, ravaged our continent last century.

For the first time since their defeat in 1945, which compelled the French right to convert to the Republic, now constitutionally proclaimed ‘democratic and social’, they have now firmly emerged from being a marginal minority and can impose on all the rest of the political field the hegemony of ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Halftitle Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface: Against Hatred
• 1
• 2
• 3
• 4
• 5
• 6
• 7
• 8
• 9
• 10
• Postscript