Secularism Confronts Islam

Olivier Roy, George Holoch

• Publisher: Columbia University Press
• Year: 2007
• eBook ISBN: 9780231511797
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Middle Eastern History
• Index: Politics & International Relations

The denunciation of fundamentalism in France, embodied in the law against the veil and the deportation of imams, has shifted into a systematic attack on all Muslims and Islam. This hostility is rooted in the belief that Islam cannot be integrated into French—and, consequently, secular and liberal-society. However, as Olivier Roy makes clear in this book, Muslim intellectuals have made it possible for Muslims to live concretely in a secularized world while maintaining the identity of a "true believer." They have formulated a language that recognizes two spaces: that of religion and that of secular society.

Western society is unable to recognize this process, Roy argues, because of a cultural bias that assumes religious practice is embedded within a specific, traditional culture that must be either erased entirely or forced to coexist in a neutral, multicultural space. Instead, Roy shows that new forms of religiosity, such as Islamic fundamentalism and Christian evangelicalism, have come to thrive in post-traditional, secular contexts precisely because they remain detached from any cultural background.

In recognizing this, Roy recasts the debate concerning Islam and democracy. Analyzing the French case in particular, in which the tension between Islam and the conception of Western secularism is exacerbated, Roy makes important distinctions between Arab and non-Arab Muslims, hegemony and tolerance, and the role of the umma and the sharia in Muslim religious life. He pits Muslim religious revivalism against similar movements in the West, such as evangelical Protestantism and Jehovah's Witnesses, and refutes the myth of a single "Muslim community" by detailing different groups and their inability to overcome their differences.

Roy's rare portrait of the realities of immigrant Muslim life offers a necessary alternative to the popular specter of an "Islamic threat." Supporting his arguments with his extensive research on Islamic history, sociology, and politics, Roy brilliantly demonstrates the limits of our understanding of contemporary Islamic religious practice in the West and the role of Islam as a screen onto which Western societies project their own identity crisis.

FRENCH LAÏCITÉ AND ISLAM

Which Is the Exception?

Secularization Is Not the Same Thing as Laïcité

How is it possible to define the relationship between two terms as vague and controversial as laïcité and “Islam”? We know that laïcité is a characteristically French phenomenon, incomprehensible in Great Britain, where customs agents and police officers are permitted to wear veils, as well as in the United States, where no president can be elected who does not speak of God. And yet both those countries are Western secular democracies. The question of laïcité thus raises two distinct problems: one is the identity and particularity of France and the other the relationship between Islam, on one side, and “secularization” and democracy, on the other. At the outset, we must draw a distinction between secularization, whereby a society emancipates itself from a sense of the sacred that it does not necessarily deny, and laïcité, whereby the state expels religious life beyond a border that the state itself has defined by law.¹ In fact, situations differ considerably, depending on variations in two parameters: the separation of church and state (yes or no) and the position of religion in society (strong or weak). A country may be secular but not laïque, because it has an official religion (Great Britain, Denmark); it may even be laïque (strictly asserting the separation of church and state) while simultaneously recognizing the role of religion in the public sphere (the United States, where the Supreme Court recently upheld the recitation of “under God” in the Pledge of Allegiance in public schools); in a state described as laïque like Turkey, where the law contains no reference to Islam, there is, in fact, no separation of church and state, because imams are government employees, as are pastors in Denmark.

Likewise, when we speak of Islam, what are we referring to? The dogma? But that is a matter of debate and a variety of interpretations among Muslims themselves: they all assert that there is only one Islam, but each has his own personal analysis, ranging from a liberalism that rejects the veil and would not turn down a drink to a fundamentalism that kills the spirit in the name of the letter. It is thus always possible to identify polemically the “true” Islam of one’s choosing: fundamentalist, liberal, even secular.² Are we referring to the culture and history of the Arab Muslim world? But as a matter of fact, Islam has now left the Middle East, and that is why the question of its relationship to French laïcité has arisen. We can, of course, consider democratization in the Middle East and the relationship between democracy and Islam, but we ought not to forget that the principal obstacles to democracy in the Middle East are posed by secular regimes (Tunisia, Baathist Syria, the Front de libération nationale [National Liberation Front] and the army in Algeria, Egypt) and that their political model (one party and president for life) is borrowed from European fascism or Third World socialism, very distant from the Koran and the tradition of the Prophet. Moreover, does speaking of Islam as a unitary phenomenon really enable us to understand the concrete practices of people known as Muslims? In what way is the element “Islam” relevant to an understanding of the underlying motive forces of modern societies, even Muslim societies? All this leads to little but the rehashing of a few tired clichés.

Of course, when we speak of the relationship between Islam and laïcité in the Western world, we always have in mind the symmetry with (or opposition to) Christianity. For the West, secularization and laïcité alike were established alongside, or rather against, Christianity. Is the same story being repeated with Islam as in 1905, when veiled women were driven from public places by force of arms (then it was Catholic nuns), or is there something specific about Islam that makes it incompatible with our laïcité? A parallel is often drawn between the way the French Republic manages Christianity or Judaism and its current confrontation with Islam, but usually to show the irreducible difference that Islam embodies. But if there is a structural incompatibility between Islam and laïcité, we would need to explain in what way that is not true for other religions. We would, for example, like Islam to experience a religious reformation like Protestantism, while we forget that Catholicism has laboriously adapted to modernity and neglected any such reformation. It is argued that Christianity has always accepted a secular space (“Render unto Caesar …”), while forgetting that the churches (from Gregory the Great to Calvin) claimed the right to define and control that space. The establishment of such a space is first of all a political act: French laïcité was indeed built against the Catholic Church, but not necessarily against religion, although for the most dedicated rationalists the two went hand in hand, and for many secular people today the expression of religious feeling remains a threat and a scandal, as we saw in the rejection of Rocco Buttiglione as European commissioner because he openly expressed very conservative religious positions.

Instead of getting lost in cultural and theological debates that might shed light on the past but are irrelevant to what is meaningful today, we ought to reconsider the constant oscillation between secularization, whereby society gradually emancipates itself from religion without necessarily denying it, and laïcité, in which the political authority closes off the space of religion the better to define public space as its opposite. We have to say clearly what is the problem for our laïcité: Some particular religion or all religion? And to do that, we have to reconsider the very matrix of the relationship between the republic and religion in general.

French Laïcité: A Legal and Political Principle

Why is laïcité such a burning subject in France? The first reason is probably that the debate touches on what is considered the heart of French identity, at a moment when that identity has been challenged from above by European integration. Consequently, we cling to a pseudoconsensus on republican and national values, which seem to be dissolving from below, in the banlieues and the schools. At bottom, Islam is not the cause of the crisis of the French model but the mirror in which society now sees itself. France is experiencing the crisis of its identity through Islam. The second reason is that different meanings are attached to the concept of laïcité. But the problem here is not so much to define the true meaning of laïcité as to determine how it creates meaning in our society. The supporters of laïcité are far from sharing a single view; there is a large distance between advocates of an open and modest laïcité, like Jean Baubérot, and defenders of laïcité defined as a comprehensive project (Henri Peña-Ruiz).³ I see three registers in which the word is used.

Laïcité as a Philosophy

This goes far beyond the separation of church and state and implies a conception of values, of society, of the nation, and of the republic, based on the philosophy of the Enlightenment, the idea of progress, and finally advocacy of an ethics not rooted in religion but proclaimed as rationalist. This philosophy has, of course, imbued the teaching profession and school textbooks since Jules Ferry and has become the consensus view of the Left.⁴ A good contemporary expression of the view can be found in the works of Henri Peña-Ruiz and the writings of Didier Motchane (who was an adviser to Jean-Pierre Chevènement when he was interior minister).⁵ It will not be discussed here, because it is in fact an opinion, a perfectly respectable one, but one that it would be groundless to set up as a standard or an official truth. Ideologies are like religions: there are those that appear more amiable, more open, more tolerant or that are more familiar to us because they are rooted in our upbringing, but they are conceptually closed systems, because they define themselves as hegemonic (since religion is acceptable in this instance only if it is integrated into this system of values); the limit of the hegemony is tolerance, but tolerance presupposes hierarchy—you tolerate by including, by making the other’s thinking a subset of the whole. By definition, there can be no consensus on laïcité as a philosophy, because many believers—whatever their religion—cannot recognize themselves in it. If we want to leave the religious realm, we must not make laïcité into a religion. I see no reason to combat one ideological discourse with another, when my intention is to determine under what conditions it is possible to refrain from ideological discourse.

Many advocates of political laïcité have developed philosophical thinking on the subject, but a study of the secular coalition that finally imposed the separation of church and state in 1905 shows that it was never driven by a consensus on a philosophical or an ideological conception of laïcité and that its members had very varied allegiances and motivations.⁶ Secular thinking is an afterthought that does, of course, have a philosophical history, but it is not the origin of the politics of laïcité.⁷ Laïcité is a body of laws before being a system of thought.

Laïcité as an Effect of the Law

The notion of laïcité as a legal principle is open to question, because it is never defined as such by the text of a law.⁸ The 1905 law establishing separation did not use the word laïcité. It was not until the Constitution of 1946 that the word appeared explicitly as a constitutional principle entailing legal effects, but without being further specified. The reality of laïcité is, however, clearly legal, because, after all the debates, parliament by passing laws and the courts by applying the laws and through jurisprudence define what is required of citizens: laïcité is known through the law. We may therefore conclude that laïcité is defined by the body of statutes making up the French law of religion, interpreted by jurisprudence. Laïcité is what may be inferred as the common principle of all the laws that have regulated the place of religion in the French public square since the assertion of the principle of the separation of church and state. In the eyes of the law, laïcité is neither a state of mind nor a philosophy nor even a principle, but a body of laws that derive their validity—of course—from the will of the legislature: its truth is thus political.⁹

Laïcité as a Political Principle

Laïcité in France is tied to a precise historical and political context: the determination to disengage the state and society from the influence of the Catholic Church, more than from religion in general. The republic was finally constructed in opposition to the Catholic Church. French laïcité is historically a matter of dispute between the republican state and the Catholic Church, founded on anti-clericalism. It is thus a combative laïcité marked by verbal violence and anathema, which has recurred today in the polemics on Islam. Broadly speaking, this conflict lasted from 1790, the year of the imposition of the Civil Constitution of the Clergy, to 1924, the year when the church accepted the 1905 law. It has persisted in the sphere of education. The atmosphere of ideological civil war that France experienced from 1790 to 1981 (or, rather, 1984, with the huge demonstration in favor of private schools) hinged almost entirely on the question of the political position of the Catholic Church; in fact, the defense of laïcité has probably been the only common denominator of all the parties of the Left. In parallel with this political establishment of laïcité, the church’s acceptance of the republic and of laïcité was political, not theological. The recognition of the republic by the Catholic Church (the “toast of Algiers” delivered at the pope’s instigation by Cardinal Lavigerie in November 1890) had nothing to do with new theological speculation; it was a purely political decision, motivated by political considerations. The Vatican’s belated acceptance of the 1905 law (in 1924), once the republic had agreed to recognize the hierarchical structure of the Catholic Church—that is, the bishop’s control over parishes through the diocesan organization—was also a political decision. It was through the dissociation between the political and the theological that the separation became acceptable, but this dissociation was not a matter of course: the popes at first condemned it, but the fear that Catholics would be marginalized or that they would undertake the construction of a Catholic party, dragging the church into partisan disputes, persuaded the papacy and the majority of the clergy to accept the new political order precisely so that it would be neutral and not an instrument for the imposition of a vision of the world. The question of laïcité is primarily political.

The subsequent emergence of Christian Democracy signaled the real—not opportunistic—adhesion of Catholics to the republic. The church attempted to rediscover common ground for the definition of moral values with nonpracticing citizens, clinging sometimes to the notion of natural law, sometimes to that of the Christian culture of Europe (as Pope John Paul II did in 2004 when he asked that a reference to Christian culture be incorporated into the preamble of the European Constitution), and even, for the Catholic Left, by developing what is known as liberation theology. But the peace treaty was not immediately concluded: twentieth-century France, in its unions, civic associations, and schools—that is, in civil society—was deeply divided between laïcs and cathos (and only Catholics, because Jews and Protestants were on the side of the laïcs). Behind the false unanimity of the public school, there were two kinds of networks for sociability, union organization, and even leisure activities (sports clubs, holiday celebrations, summer camps, scouting, youth groups, informal universities, lecture series, and so on): the secular and the church-sponsored, with greater or lesser antagonism depending on the region. Of course, there were sometimes mixed marriages, as there are today, but people lived in two different worlds. The French Communist Party had, in its way, sectarianized the banlieues (and hardly shared certain republican values, such as parliamentary democracy). Even though the political choices made by each group grew less distinct (with the Resistance and the development of a Catholicism of the Left), the split affected ways of thinking (we know how little the “second Left,” often led by men from Christian backgrounds, was ever able to make itself acceptable to the Socialist Party). This conflict focused on the question of education, which faded only between 1984 (the year when the Left accepted private schools) and 1994 (the year when the Right stopped seeking the revenge of the private school). One might wonder, moreover, whether the end of the conflict over education is connected with the rise, if not of Islam, at least of violence in the banlieues, with leftist members of the middle classes finding in private schools a means of getting around the rigidities of the residential assignment of schools, which they had always supported. In any event, at the very moment when a split that was two centuries old was fading, a new one appeared: laïcité against Islam (or vice versa). It was as though the old pattern of conflict were inherent in French identity and only the religious agent had changed.

Laïcité thus refers back first of all to the structuring of French political space, which was carried out in conflict and polemics but helped to forge and stabilize French identities, which went well beyond the ballot (from the Communist to the Catholic, including the Radical Socialist along the way). French laïcité is inseparable from the construction of the republican state from the Revolution on. It also no doubt served to create a “class alliance” to sidestep the troublesome social question.¹⁰ It certainly still plays the same role of blurring social divisions to the extent that the criticism of Islam cuts across class lines and touches very varied political, social, and religious circles but also to the extent that it adopts a primarily cultural perspective on the complex realities of the banlieues. This very close bond between republic and laïcité is a product of French history, but it has been so far internalized that we have invented the myth of a consensus on republican values. Political choice has logically been expressed by a body of laws, but it has also been surrounded by a philosophical (others would say ideological) elaboration of laïcité, which there is even less reason to make into a normative system because it is, in fact, very complex (many laïcs, especially in the nineteenth century, thought of themselves as the defenders of a certain religious idea against Catholic clericalism).

Oddly enough, then, today’s laïcité is based on the myth of consensus, particularly the consensus on republican values. This is doubly a myth because one wonders, first of all, about what there was a consensus about (between a Stalinist of the 1950s and a Catholic opposed to Vatican II, for example) and, second, since it is obvious that there are citizens who do not seem to join in the consensus, whether the latter should be considered excluded from the political order (or excluding themselves, which amounts to the same thing). Civil war is not far off because, while the republic is founded on a consensus, which remains to be demonstrated, whoever does not adopt it is not inside the republic.

But Jules Ferry’s consensus was negative: the elementary-school teacher was to say nothing that might shock a father (laïcité was also patriarchal; today we would add the mother).¹¹ Laïcité aimed not to exclude believers but to define a space of neutrality. If there is a consensus, it is not on values but on respect for a rule of the game, insofar as it is ratified by the popular will. ...

Table of contents

• Cover 
• Half title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents 
• Preface
• Introduction: Laïcité and the Identity of France
• 1: French Laïcité and Islam: Which Is the Exception?
• 2: Islam and Secularization
• 3: The Crisis of the Secular State and the New Forms of Religiosity
• 4: De Facto Secularization
• Notes
• Index