ANTHROPOLOGY TODAY VOL 31 NO 5, OCTOBER 2015 21

We know perfectly well that we do not have the right to say everything, that we cannot speak of every-thing in whatever circumstance, that not everybody, finally, can speak about whatever. (Foucault, M. 1971. L’ordre du discours. Paris: Gallimard, p. 11).

In this article I discuss the tragic attack on the French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo in Paris on 7 January 2015. Didier Fassin’s article on this subject in the April issue of ANTHROPOLOGY TODAY is not only highly informative but, given its circumstances, also courageous. I particularly applaud the connection he suggests between the ‘national and international context of degradation of Muslims that one has to take into account when trying to understand the reactions to the caricatures of the Prophet’ (2015: 7) as well as his point that, ‘[t]he caricatures were one more affront in a long list’ (ibid.). Fassin persuasively argues that Muslims in France are ‘the most respectful of the Republican principle of laïcité’ (ibid: 5).

However, he maintains that two other principles of the Republic – equality and fraternity – are not applied to Muslims. He then goes on to argue that ‘[t]o understand this lack of equality and fraternity towards Muslims, it is, however, necessary to realize that the reason for it is not only religious, as one would assume and as the term Islamophobia wrongly implies: it is historical and polit-ical’ (ibid: 5-6). It is here that I disagree with him. My disa-greement is not about what the term Islamophobia means or implies, but about Fassin’s view that the lack of equality and fraternity he observes is due to religious, political, and historical reasons.

Questioning the RepublicFirst, I would like to draw attention to the fact that Fassin’s argument is predicated on a solid secular idea, according to which ‘religion’ and ‘politics’, even if not opposed, are at least neatly separated in such a way as to make them clearly distinct. Politics is politics, and religion is religion. This separation is part and parcel of secular ideology and thus a core idea of the secular state. Etienne Balibar (2004: 356) was right, however, when he stated that ‘the two terms have never been, and now less than ever, “exterior” to one another’. It is this inherent nesting of the one in the other I would like to discuss here. And it is this discussion that will allow me to mark my difference with Fassin on the issue of laïcité, and to further explain the condition of the Muslim population that Prime Minister Manuel Valls has described as ‘apartheid’, but with which Fassin does not agree.

When Muslim leaders in colonial Algeria repeat-edly asked the colonial authorities to apply the 1905 law of separation between religion and state, were these Muslim leaders secular or religious? When the colonial state refused to apply this secular principle to its ‘colonial subjects’, was it still a secular state? When the colonial state allocated rights of full citizenship on purely ‘reli-gious grounds’ to one specific local population and not to another, was it playing politics or religion?

The request to separate religion and the state was repeated again in post-colonial France by Muslim leaders who wished to have the first and final say in appointing their leaders (who had previously been chosen by the Ministry of the Interior). Is a state that manages Muslim affairs and appoints its leaders still a secular state? The principle of separation was applied to Muslims in France again in 2004 with the law banning the veil (and the

wearing of conspicuous religious symbols in French public schools) was a cover up for discrimination than a real separation of religion and politics (Scott 2007). The Stasi commission report, analysed by Talal Asad, clearly shows that the state intervened in ‘religion’ to define the veil and fix its ‘religious’ meanings (Asad, 2006). Is this lack of separation observed in relation to Muslims (in colonial Algeria as well as post-colonial France) then an exception or a paradigm?

Secularism not only developed historically in a spe-cific space where the Church reigned for centuries, but the triumphant bourgeois state redefined its parameters, inventing the categories of the secular and the religious whose contents it also defined (Asad 1996, 2001). The very concepts of secularism, Hans Blumenberg argues, were avatars of Christian concepts (1985). Here, Michel de Certeau’s classic remark is apt – Christianity is that which is disavowed in France (le refoulé). But this may not just be a refoulé, as de Certeau maintains. The heavy Christian heritage of the state appears transparently in its rituals and its holidays as well as in its policies within and outside of the hexagon, i.e. France proper (e.g. its treat-ment of citizens presumed to be of Muslim faith, its stance towards Turkey, the declaration by the head of state that ‘Europe has Christian roots’, the refugee status offered to the Christians – not just the people – of Syria and Iraq). This insular religious heritage inspired philosopher and politician Luc Ferry to contend that the Declaration of Human Rights and the Citizen of 26 August 1789 ‘is often nothing but a laicized and rationalized Christianity’. However, a laicized and rationalized Christianity is still Christianity.

There is more. The Christian heritage of the secular state animates its highly negative view of Islam. From medieval times all through the Renaissance, Christianity in Europe had developed a highly negative image of Islam as for-eign, different, and above all threatening and dangerous, as Norman Daniel (1960) and Edward Said (1978) have shown. ‘The Christian concept of Islam was integral and self-sufficient’ (Daniel 1960: 252). It is also this negative image that Nietzsche viciously attacked in a language that was believed to be parabolic and self-serving (and thus incorrect and manipulative). Christianity, he wrote, ‘destroyed for us the whole harvest of Mohammedan civilization. The wonderful culture of the Moors in Spain, which was fundamentally nearer to us and appealed more to our senses and tastes than that of Rome and Greece, was trampled down – I do not say by what sort of feet’ (Nietzsche 1920: 175).

It is the Christian legacy (with its concept of Islam) that played out in colonial times and continues to do so in France today. Of course Muslims were ‘not just that’, as Scott – cited by Fassin – put it. The problem was (and still is) that Muslims were (and still are) perceived as just that by the secular state. This is evident in their strategy of naming (a potent form of power) which is bestowed upon a particular segment of the population. One group of French citizens (now encompassing four generations) are still identified by ‘their religion’. They are French Muslims or Muslims of France (musulmans de France). There is no other equivalent to this name, such as les Chrétiens de France or les Juifs de France, or les Boudhistes de France.1

This religious naming by the post-colonial state and its various institutions (including its French mosques) is

Abdelmajid HannoumAbdelmajid Hannoum teaches anthropology at the University of Kansas. He works on colonial and post-colonial relations between France and the Maghreb. He is completing a book manuscript titled, Living Tangiers: Migration, cosmopolitanism, and citizenship in a Mediterranean city which examines inequality and everyday life of Europeans and Africans in the city. His email is hannoum@gmail.com.

I originally wrote this article in the immediate aftermath of the Charlie Hebdo attack to discuss the reactions of the French media and intellectuals to the event and to examine some aspects of the issue of laïcité and Islam within post-colonial racial dynamics in France. I subsequently revised this in the light of Didier Fassin’s (2015) remarkable article ‘In the name of the Republic’, published while mine was still under consideration, to focus more clearly on points where Fassin’s and my own views on laïcité differ.

Cartoons, secularism, and inequality

22 ANTHROPOLOGY TODAY VOL 31 NO 5, OCTOBER 2015 ANTHROPOLOGY TODAY VOL 31 NO 5, OCTOBER 2015 23

‘I am not a Jew of France’; ‘No one had distinguished us, we Jews, by our religion, since Vichy and Petain’; ‘These words gave me a brutal feeling of exclusion’. See Le Monde, 23 January 2015. For more reactions, see M blogs http://mediateur.blog.lemonde.fr/2015/01/23/la-france-est-plus-forte-quand-elle-est-plurielle-multiple-et-genereuse/ (Last accessed 18/8/2015).

2. Le Figaro, 8 January 2015.

3. The New York Times, 10 January 2015.

4. Rodinson’s book (1961) is a scholarly work seeking to understand the phenomenon of prophecy. Rodinson, a highly respected and learned Orientalist, did not seek to ridicule Islam, or the Prophet, or to foster a climate of racism or Islamophobia, but only to explain an historical phenomenon – the advent of a world religion by one man. In an interpretation of a hadith explaining the state of revelation, Rodinson argues that revelation is a form of epilepsy. The idea itself was not original; one finds it in the work of 19th-century novelist Fyodor Dostoevsky, who himself suffered from epilepsy (see The idiot). He also maintained that the Prophet Mohamed might have died from poisoning by his Jewish wife, Safiyya Bint Huhayy. Other than that, one finds in Rodinson’s book an extremely interesting Marxist sociological study of the time prior to the advent of Islam in Arabia, most of it based on Tabari’s history.

5. Le Monde, 15 January 2015.

6. Le Monde, 15 January 2015.

7. Le Monde, 11 December 2003.

8. Le Monde, 26 January 2015.

9. http://www.parismatch.com/Culture/Livres/Mon-livre-n-est-pas-islamophobe-693498. The theme of Muslims taking over France and possibly surfaced by October 1989 at the very beginning of the veil affair and only few months after the Salman Rushdie affair.

Asad, T. 1996. Genealogies of religion. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.

— 2001. Formation of the secular. Stanford: Stanford University Press.

— 2006. French secularism and the ‘Islamic veil affair’. Hedgehog Review (Spring/Summer): 93-106.

Balibar, E. 2004. Dissonances within laïcité. Constellations 11(3): 353-367.

One could argue that what happened was not simply the result of caricatures of the Prophet, or the numerous car-toons about Muslim men and women produced by Charlie Hebdo. Nor was it really about freedom of expression as such. The caricatures were not a case of blasphemy, since the cartoonists were not Muslims. Rather, it was about the same issue that French laïcité has long been struggling with in relation to religion in general and Islam in par-ticular, which in a (post)colonial context has been exac-erbated by global events in which France is an actor, not a bystander.

A few years after France’s highly publicized banning of the veil in 2010, described as a ‘laïcité of exclusion’ by philosophers Paul Ricoeur and Monique Canto-Sperber7– in short, a form of religious harassment – Charlie Hebdo re-emerged as a major source of cultural racism targeting Muslims, Arabs, and people of colour. Humour is one of the favourite idioms of racism. The caricatures of the Prophet were only one example in a system of racist sym-bols that extend the themes of an entire vulgar repertoire of colonial racism. In other words, if Charlie Hebdo had not produced any cartoons of the Prophet and still published everything else that it did, it would still have remained a paper at high risk because of its deep involvement in a post-colonial, racial conflict within France.

French artists such as comedian Guy Bedos, philoso-phers such as Chantal Delsol, and former Charlie Hebdo contributor Olivier Cyran, saw in the paper an expres-sion of the most vulgar Islamophobia and racism. And some of them, such as Chantal Delsol, denounced the paper even after the attacks and argued that it did indeed incite religious hatred. It is not surprising that a lawsuit brought against the paper by Muslims was dismissed, since the judiciary system is an integral part of the sec-ular and post-colonial institutions that make France what it is now: a country not with an immigrant problem, as it used to be, but one with a Muslim problem. It is the gravity of this problem that made anthropologist Talal Asad note: ‘For a long time, and for many, Jews were the “internal other”. In a complicated historical readjustment this status has now been accorded to Muslims instead’ (2006: 102).

This is not the first time France has experienced ter-rorism. There have been terrorist acts throughout the past few decades, perpetrated by various actors. In the 1980s, in the midst of the Iran-Iraq war, these actors were for-eigners with ideologies linked to the Iranian Revolution; during the 1960s and 1970s, they were French citizens

with far-left ideologies. In the 1950s, they were FLN (Front de Libération Nationale) militants fighting for the independence of Algeria. Today, they are French youth from the suburbs, who grew up in foster homes or in abject poverty in a post-colonial society and are still the victims of a colonial gaze. The most recent terrorist acts in fact did not come out of mosques, but were fabricated in jails; they were not the deeds of foreigners, but of French citizens with colonial roots, living in degrading suburban condi-tions described by Manuel Valls as ‘apartheid’.8

The problem, then, is the post-colonial structure of the French state, not only because it has created disenfran-chised citizens willing to commit crimes against their compatriots, but also because the state tolerates – under the pretext of freedom of expression – racist communications towards Muslims which it does not tolerate towards other minority groups. Consequently, the state, still bearing the weight of a recent heavy colonial legacy, does not view that segment of its population presumed to be of Islamic faith as equal, despite its acclaimed motto of égalité.

It is within this sad state of affairs that students – in over 200 cited incidents in French schools – were unwilling to observe a minute of silence and identify themselves by the slogan ‘Je suis Charlie’. In his article, Fassin reports of incidents where anything seen to be deviating from ‘Je suis Charlie’, even carelessly, was severely punished. It was a remarkably paradoxical situation: in the midst of a patriotic celebration of freedom of expression, one could witness one of the most repressive moments in French society – an eloquent demonstration that expression is never free. On the contrary, power is always constitutive of expression.

Many French Muslims and non-Muslims see the state as having a double standard. One can see evidence of this in the online comments left by readers of Le Monde. Islamophobia is rampant in France, and is more tolerated in the media, in political discourse and in popular discourse, than anti-Semitism and homophobia which lie across lines that cannot be transgressed without swift and severe sanc-tions. Consider the statement of Michel Houellebecq, the author of a novel entitled Soumission (2015) in which he portrays Muslims taking over France in ways reminiscent of the caricatures of Jews taking over the world found in Nazi Germany prior to the Holocaust. He says, ‘My novel is not Islamophobic, but we definitively have the right to write an Islamophobic book’. His statement, while unthinkable for other groups, was reported without inci-dent by the media.9

Fig. 1. Place de la Republique, Paris, 11 January 2015.

1. On the rare occasions that such names have been used, they have been vigorously contested and rejected. Thus, when Le Monde published an article titled ‘Juifs de France : La tentation du départ’ on 21 January 2015, the reaction was swift and categorical:

rejected by many of the people of Muslim background, and even those who may not object to it in principle, do not use it to refer to themselves or others. It is the religi-osity of the state that prevented Algerians during the colo-nial period (also called les musulmans de l’Algérie) from acquiring French citizenship unless they reneged their faith – a condition that was not required of the rest of the Europeans (presumed to be all Christians) or of Algeria’s Jewish population. Ironically, as Fassin himself noticed, even when some did renege their faith, the state still clas-sified them as Muslims.

The medieval Christian concept of Islam has been inher-ited by the modern state. As Joan Scott notes, the ‘negative portrayal of Islam’ remains important for the Republic. She writes, ‘depending on particular national histories, the ide-alization of the nation has taken various forms. In France, it has taken the form of the realization of the principles of the Enlightenment in their highest, most enduring form. This image is mythical: its power and appeal rest, to a large degree, on its negative portrayal of Islam’ (2007: 7).

Whereas Fassin argues that the lack of equality towards Muslims endures because of politics and religion, I see no distinction between the two and maintain that such inequality is the direct result of Christian politics of the state, which perceives its Muslim population through the lens of a highly negative image of Islam rooted in centu-ries of deep mistrust and intense hostility. Therefore, the idea is not that Islam is not French enough in France – as Latour and others mistakenly suggested in the context of the tragedies in Paris – but rather that French laïcité is not secular enough.

John Bowen’s most recent ethnographic study has con-vincingly demonstrated that Islam in France is French, and totally in line with the principles of the Republic (Bowen 2010). The conclusion, then, is that the problem in France is that French laïcité needs to be de-Christianized in order that all religions may be seen as the same, and in order that ‘there should be no more choice between Islam and Christianity than there is between an Arab and a Jew’ as Nietzsche wished long ago in relation to the practices of the Church, the predecessor of the modern state (Nietzsche 1920: 176).

A final point: both my article and Fassin’s are part of the discourse of the ‘counterpublic’, to be sure. Its for-mulation is important, but it is authorized and safe. The discourse of the counterpublic is by definition part and parcel of the discourse of the public. Even politically, this critical discourse is important to genuine public debate, not only because it gives it meaning (as opposites usually do), but because it confers a plural democratic character on the state.

However, what is most important (and less safe) is to bring to bear the discourse of what I call the ‘sub-public’. The sub-public is a space of discourse of those who whisper their disagreements, like the trolls who write anonymously in internet chatrooms and whose non-violent comments are deleted as soon as they are posted, even on the blogs of Le Monde, Le Figaro, and Libération. The sub-public is indeed the space of those who endure the violence of the discourse of the public in silence, like the Maghrebi newspaper kiosk merchant who gave me a look, disapproving of my purchase of an issue of Charlie Hebdo (sold by the millions) as an act of betrayal – not of ethnicity or faith, but of solidarity. The sub-public is located in the zone of ‘no rights’ (of expression) in a society that has defined itself as a society of those ‘rights’, exercised often (as symbolic violence) against the zone of the sub-public.

Certitude of laïcitéOn display once again in the aftermath of the tragedies in Paris, was the Republic’s laïcité (‘our’ ability to be bound

by reason as opposed to ‘their’ inability to detach from religion). Almost every commentator cited freedom of expression as a major principle of the Republic; one that must be upheld and defended against all threats – real or imagined. The lines of argument seemed clear – we are free in our expression; they are not. They have rules about blasphemy, a transgression of the sacred; we do not. They are unliberated. One commentator, a professor of history, proudly stated (as if it were true), ‘there is no sacred in France and therefore no sacrilege’. Ironically, this state-ment is itself an assertion of a core sacred value of French laïcité.

Other commentators pointed out that blasphemy is not sanctioned by law, and that one has the right to express oneself as long as one does not defame or attack persons or incite hatred – arguing, of course, that Charlie Hebdo did none of those. Others said that if the cartoons were hurtful to the feelings of some, those people could simply choose not to look at them. Former president Nicolas Sarkozy meanwhile drew a dire conclusion: ‘This is a war against civilization’, he said.2 Prime Minister Manuel Valls was more cautious and thus more responsible when he blamed what happened not on Islam but rather on ‘terrorism’, ‘jihadism’, and ‘radical Islam’.3 Valls did not venture to say, however, whether or where the line might be drawn between ‘radical’ and ‘Islam’.

Tahar Ben Jelloun, the Moroccan writer, represented the francophone position when he stated in a media debate that the violence was not only against freedom of expression, but freedom tout court. He then went on to explain that the issue was not representation, but rather artistic representa-tion, as in the case of The satanic verses author, Salman Rushdie. For Ben Jelloun, the book Mahomet by Maxime Rodinson is more extreme than the Charlie Hebdo comics but has been spared because it is an academic work, not literature.4 This argument frames those incited to anger by the comics as enemies of the arts and advocates of barba-rism – an argument reiterated by Fleur Pellerin, the min-ister of culture. Speaking before the national parliament, she cited a significant number of attacks against culture by its enemies (that is, the barbarians) in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Nigeria. From this, one can only infer that what happened in France on 7 January 2015 was exported from ‘barbaric’ lands (exclusively Islamic) held by enemies of art and civilization. Meanwhile, the assassination of significant numbers of people that same day in various other parts of the world did not enter the debate, despite President Hollande’s comment that Muslims are ‘the primary victims of extremism’.5 What was discussed, at least in that first week following the attack, was freedom of expression, for which the journalists of Charlie Hebdo paid the ultimate price.

Several philosophers and commentators suddenly became experts on Islam. Bruno Latour, a sociologist, called for the reform of Islam (to be done by whom?) and urged that a ‘critical theology’ of the religion be presented (as if that were indeed absent). He reiterated the old idea of religion versus modernity, overlooking the fact that modernity too has a long and bloody record of extreme violence – perhaps the bloodiest (Giddens 1990; Hannoum 2010). ‘Modernity’, he wrote with certitude, ‘begins when religion loses its certitude’.6 Yet, French laïcité has never lost its certitude – not in the midst of old or even recent tragedies.

On the legacy of the colonial stateThe most recent of these tragedies did not result from some-one’s inability to accept humour and understand freedom. The type of ‘humour’ generated by Charlie Hebdo was not new and was itself an effect of a larger cause: the colonial legacy of the French state.

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22 ANTHROPOLOGY TODAY VOL 31 NO 5, OCTOBER 2015 ANTHROPOLOGY TODAY VOL 31 NO 5, OCTOBER 2015 23

‘I am not a Jew of France’; ‘No one had distinguished us, we Jews, by our religion, since Vichy and Petain’; ‘These words gave me a brutal feeling of exclusion’. See Le Monde, 23 January 2015. For more reactions, see M blogs http://mediateur.blog.lemonde.fr/2015/01/23/la-france-est-plus-forte-quand-elle-est-plurielle-multiple-et-genereuse/ (Last accessed 18/8/2015).

2. Le Figaro, 8 January 2015.

3. The New York Times, 10 January 2015.

4. Rodinson’s book (1961) is a scholarly work seeking to understand the phenomenon of prophecy. Rodinson, a highly respected and learned Orientalist, did not seek to ridicule Islam, or the Prophet, or to foster a climate of racism or Islamophobia, but only to explain an historical phenomenon – the advent of a world religion by one man. In an interpretation of a hadith explaining the state of revelation, Rodinson argues that revelation is a form of epilepsy. The idea itself was not original; one finds it in the work of 19th-century novelist Fyodor Dostoevsky, who himself suffered from epilepsy (see The idiot). He also maintained that the Prophet Mohamed might have died from poisoning by his Jewish wife, Safiyya Bint Huhayy. Other than that, one finds in Rodinson’s book an extremely interesting Marxist sociological study of the time prior to the advent of Islam in Arabia, most of it based on Tabari’s history.

5. Le Monde, 15 January 2015.

6. Le Monde, 15 January 2015.

7. Le Monde, 11 December 2003.

8. Le Monde, 26 January 2015.

9. http://www.parismatch.com/Culture/Livres/Mon-livre-n-est-pas-islamophobe-693498. The theme of Muslims taking over France and possibly surfaced by October 1989 at the very beginning of the veil affair and only few months after the Salman Rushdie affair.

Asad, T. 1996. Genealogies of religion. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.

— 2001. Formation of the secular. Stanford: Stanford University Press.

— 2006. French secularism and the ‘Islamic veil affair’. Hedgehog Review (Spring/Summer): 93-106.

Balibar, E. 2004. Dissonances within laïcité. Constellations 11(3): 353-367.

One could argue that what happened was not simply the result of caricatures of the Prophet, or the numerous car-toons about Muslim men and women produced by Charlie Hebdo. Nor was it really about freedom of expression as such. The caricatures were not a case of blasphemy, since the cartoonists were not Muslims. Rather, it was about the same issue that French laïcité has long been struggling with in relation to religion in general and Islam in par-ticular, which in a (post)colonial context has been exac-erbated by global events in which France is an actor, not a bystander.

A few years after France’s highly publicized banning of the veil in 2010, described as a ‘laïcité of exclusion’ by philosophers Paul Ricoeur and Monique Canto-Sperber7– in short, a form of religious harassment – Charlie Hebdo re-emerged as a major source of cultural racism targeting Muslims, Arabs, and people of colour. Humour is one of the favourite idioms of racism. The caricatures of the Prophet were only one example in a system of racist sym-bols that extend the themes of an entire vulgar repertoire of colonial racism. In other words, if Charlie Hebdo had not produced any cartoons of the Prophet and still published everything else that it did, it would still have remained a paper at high risk because of its deep involvement in a post-colonial, racial conflict within France.

French artists such as comedian Guy Bedos, philoso-phers such as Chantal Delsol, and former Charlie Hebdo contributor Olivier Cyran, saw in the paper an expres-sion of the most vulgar Islamophobia and racism. And some of them, such as Chantal Delsol, denounced the paper even after the attacks and argued that it did indeed incite religious hatred. It is not surprising that a lawsuit brought against the paper by Muslims was dismissed, since the judiciary system is an integral part of the sec-ular and post-colonial institutions that make France what it is now: a country not with an immigrant problem, as it used to be, but one with a Muslim problem. It is the gravity of this problem that made anthropologist Talal Asad note: ‘For a long time, and for many, Jews were the “internal other”. In a complicated historical readjustment this status has now been accorded to Muslims instead’ (2006: 102).

This is not the first time France has experienced ter-rorism. There have been terrorist acts throughout the past few decades, perpetrated by various actors. In the 1980s, in the midst of the Iran-Iraq war, these actors were for-eigners with ideologies linked to the Iranian Revolution; during the 1960s and 1970s, they were French citizens

with far-left ideologies. In the 1950s, they were FLN (Front de Libération Nationale) militants fighting for the independence of Algeria. Today, they are French youth from the suburbs, who grew up in foster homes or in abject poverty in a post-colonial society and are still the victims of a colonial gaze. The most recent terrorist acts in fact did not come out of mosques, but were fabricated in jails; they were not the deeds of foreigners, but of French citizens with colonial roots, living in degrading suburban condi-tions described by Manuel Valls as ‘apartheid’.8

The problem, then, is the post-colonial structure of the French state, not only because it has created disenfran-chised citizens willing to commit crimes against their compatriots, but also because the state tolerates – under the pretext of freedom of expression – racist communications towards Muslims which it does not tolerate towards other minority groups. Consequently, the state, still bearing the weight of a recent heavy colonial legacy, does not view that segment of its population presumed to be of Islamic faith as equal, despite its acclaimed motto of égalité.

It is within this sad state of affairs that students – in over 200 cited incidents in French schools – were unwilling to observe a minute of silence and identify themselves by the slogan ‘Je suis Charlie’. In his article, Fassin reports of incidents where anything seen to be deviating from ‘Je suis Charlie’, even carelessly, was severely punished. It was a remarkably paradoxical situation: in the midst of a patriotic celebration of freedom of expression, one could witness one of the most repressive moments in French society – an eloquent demonstration that expression is never free. On the contrary, power is always constitutive of expression.

Many French Muslims and non-Muslims see the state as having a double standard. One can see evidence of this in the online comments left by readers of Le Monde. Islamophobia is rampant in France, and is more tolerated in the media, in political discourse and in popular discourse, than anti-Semitism and homophobia which lie across lines that cannot be transgressed without swift and severe sanc-tions. Consider the statement of Michel Houellebecq, the author of a novel entitled Soumission (2015) in which he portrays Muslims taking over France in ways reminiscent of the caricatures of Jews taking over the world found in Nazi Germany prior to the Holocaust. He says, ‘My novel is not Islamophobic, but we definitively have the right to write an Islamophobic book’. His statement, while unthinkable for other groups, was reported without inci-dent by the media.9

Fig. 1. Place de la Republique, Paris, 11 January 2015.

1. On the rare occasions that such names have been used, they have been vigorously contested and rejected. Thus, when Le Monde published an article titled ‘Juifs de France : La tentation du départ’ on 21 January 2015, the reaction was swift and categorical:

rejected by many of the people of Muslim background, and even those who may not object to it in principle, do not use it to refer to themselves or others. It is the religi-osity of the state that prevented Algerians during the colo-nial period (also called les musulmans de l’Algérie) from acquiring French citizenship unless they reneged their faith – a condition that was not required of the rest of the Europeans (presumed to be all Christians) or of Algeria’s Jewish population. Ironically, as Fassin himself noticed, even when some did renege their faith, the state still clas-sified them as Muslims.

The medieval Christian concept of Islam has been inher-ited by the modern state. As Joan Scott notes, the ‘negative portrayal of Islam’ remains important for the Republic. She writes, ‘depending on particular national histories, the ide-alization of the nation has taken various forms. In France, it has taken the form of the realization of the principles of the Enlightenment in their highest, most enduring form. This image is mythical: its power and appeal rest, to a large degree, on its negative portrayal of Islam’ (2007: 7).

Whereas Fassin argues that the lack of equality towards Muslims endures because of politics and religion, I see no distinction between the two and maintain that such inequality is the direct result of Christian politics of the state, which perceives its Muslim population through the lens of a highly negative image of Islam rooted in centu-ries of deep mistrust and intense hostility. Therefore, the idea is not that Islam is not French enough in France – as Latour and others mistakenly suggested in the context of the tragedies in Paris – but rather that French laïcité is not secular enough.

John Bowen’s most recent ethnographic study has con-vincingly demonstrated that Islam in France is French, and totally in line with the principles of the Republic (Bowen 2010). The conclusion, then, is that the problem in France is that French laïcité needs to be de-Christianized in order that all religions may be seen as the same, and in order that ‘there should be no more choice between Islam and Christianity than there is between an Arab and a Jew’ as Nietzsche wished long ago in relation to the practices of the Church, the predecessor of the modern state (Nietzsche 1920: 176).

A final point: both my article and Fassin’s are part of the discourse of the ‘counterpublic’, to be sure. Its for-mulation is important, but it is authorized and safe. The discourse of the counterpublic is by definition part and parcel of the discourse of the public. Even politically, this critical discourse is important to genuine public debate, not only because it gives it meaning (as opposites usually do), but because it confers a plural democratic character on the state.

However, what is most important (and less safe) is to bring to bear the discourse of what I call the ‘sub-public’. The sub-public is a space of discourse of those who whisper their disagreements, like the trolls who write anonymously in internet chatrooms and whose non-violent comments are deleted as soon as they are posted, even on the blogs of Le Monde, Le Figaro, and Libération. The sub-public is indeed the space of those who endure the violence of the discourse of the public in silence, like the Maghrebi newspaper kiosk merchant who gave me a look, disapproving of my purchase of an issue of Charlie Hebdo (sold by the millions) as an act of betrayal – not of ethnicity or faith, but of solidarity. The sub-public is located in the zone of ‘no rights’ (of expression) in a society that has defined itself as a society of those ‘rights’, exercised often (as symbolic violence) against the zone of the sub-public.

Certitude of laïcitéOn display once again in the aftermath of the tragedies in Paris, was the Republic’s laïcité (‘our’ ability to be bound

by reason as opposed to ‘their’ inability to detach from religion). Almost every commentator cited freedom of expression as a major principle of the Republic; one that must be upheld and defended against all threats – real or imagined. The lines of argument seemed clear – we are free in our expression; they are not. They have rules about blasphemy, a transgression of the sacred; we do not. They are unliberated. One commentator, a professor of history, proudly stated (as if it were true), ‘there is no sacred in France and therefore no sacrilege’. Ironically, this state-ment is itself an assertion of a core sacred value of French laïcité.

Other commentators pointed out that blasphemy is not sanctioned by law, and that one has the right to express oneself as long as one does not defame or attack persons or incite hatred – arguing, of course, that Charlie Hebdo did none of those. Others said that if the cartoons were hurtful to the feelings of some, those people could simply choose not to look at them. Former president Nicolas Sarkozy meanwhile drew a dire conclusion: ‘This is a war against civilization’, he said.2 Prime Minister Manuel Valls was more cautious and thus more responsible when he blamed what happened not on Islam but rather on ‘terrorism’, ‘jihadism’, and ‘radical Islam’.3 Valls did not venture to say, however, whether or where the line might be drawn between ‘radical’ and ‘Islam’.

Tahar Ben Jelloun, the Moroccan writer, represented the francophone position when he stated in a media debate that the violence was not only against freedom of expression, but freedom tout court. He then went on to explain that the issue was not representation, but rather artistic representa-tion, as in the case of The satanic verses author, Salman Rushdie. For Ben Jelloun, the book Mahomet by Maxime Rodinson is more extreme than the Charlie Hebdo comics but has been spared because it is an academic work, not literature.4 This argument frames those incited to anger by the comics as enemies of the arts and advocates of barba-rism – an argument reiterated by Fleur Pellerin, the min-ister of culture. Speaking before the national parliament, she cited a significant number of attacks against culture by its enemies (that is, the barbarians) in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Nigeria. From this, one can only infer that what happened in France on 7 January 2015 was exported from ‘barbaric’ lands (exclusively Islamic) held by enemies of art and civilization. Meanwhile, the assassination of significant numbers of people that same day in various other parts of the world did not enter the debate, despite President Hollande’s comment that Muslims are ‘the primary victims of extremism’.5 What was discussed, at least in that first week following the attack, was freedom of expression, for which the journalists of Charlie Hebdo paid the ultimate price.

Several philosophers and commentators suddenly became experts on Islam. Bruno Latour, a sociologist, called for the reform of Islam (to be done by whom?) and urged that a ‘critical theology’ of the religion be presented (as if that were indeed absent). He reiterated the old idea of religion versus modernity, overlooking the fact that modernity too has a long and bloody record of extreme violence – perhaps the bloodiest (Giddens 1990; Hannoum 2010). ‘Modernity’, he wrote with certitude, ‘begins when religion loses its certitude’.6 Yet, French laïcité has never lost its certitude – not in the midst of old or even recent tragedies.

On the legacy of the colonial stateThe most recent of these tragedies did not result from some-one’s inability to accept humour and understand freedom. The type of ‘humour’ generated by Charlie Hebdo was not new and was itself an effect of a larger cause: the colonial legacy of the French state.

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Blumenberg, H. 1985. The legitimacy of the modern. Cambridge: MIT Press.

Bowen, J. 2010. Can Islam be French? Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Daniel, N. 1960. Islam and the West: The making of an image. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.

Fassin, D. 2015. In the name of the Republic. Anthropology Today 31(2): 3-7.

Foucault, M. 1971. L’ordre du discours. Paris: Gallimard.

Geertz. C. 1964. Islam observed. Chicago: Chicago University Press.

— 1975. The interpretation of cultures. New York: Basic Books.

Giddens, A. 1990. The consequences of modernity. Stanford: Stanford University Press.

Hannoum, A. 2010. Violent modernity: France in Algeria. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.

— 2013. De l’historiographie coloniale à l’historicisme national, ou comment le Maghreb fut inventé. Hespéris-Tamouda 68: 59-79.

Nietzsche, F. 1920. Antichrist. New York: A.A. Knopf.

Rodinson, M. 1961.Mahomet. Paris: Seuil.

Sadek, S. 2006. La France et ses musulmans. Paris: Fayard.

Said, E. 1978. Orientalism. New York: Vintage Books.

Scott, J. 2007. The politics of the veil. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

What happened in Paris in January 2015 were indeed horrific, inexcusable and unjustifiable crimes, but they were not inexplicable. Crimes are undoubtedly products of societies. Bernard Tapie, a politician who knows the youth of the suburbs perhaps better than any other after years of work in these locations, wisely states that if Islam did not exist, these young people would have resorted to other beliefs. But there is Islam in France, and one needs to question why, or rather how, they resorted to it.

First, let us clarify two points. If, as many anthropologists have observed, Islam is a system of meanings embedded within a local culture (notably Geertz 1964, 1975), then there are as many Islam(s) as there are societies. France too has its own Islamic traditions, the result of a long his-tory of both migration and conversions dating back to the 19th century (Sadek 2006). French Islam (as we should call it) is by no means monolithic, as was clarified by the various interventions of French imams and French Muslim intellectuals in the debate about the Charlie Hebdo car-toons and freedom of expression. Second, even in the French language itself, and contrary to the statement of Bruno Latour, there is indeed an entire body of critical work on Islam, penned by Malek Bennabi, Muhammad Hamidullah, Mohammed Arkoun, Abdel Majid Turki, Abdallah Laroui, Fatema Mernissi, Hecham Djait, and more recently Tariq Ramadan and Malek Chebel, among others. But, again, the fatal attacks in January did not come out of French mosques, but French prisons. They came out of a shadowy, combative Islam that feeds on marginali-zation, poverty, lack of education and racism. They came out of subaltern criminal and extremist milieux, which are themselves the product of French post-colonial policies.

This is not to say naively (or apologetically) with others that ‘Islam is a religion of peace’. All religions – and sec-ular ideologies – can be harnessed for violence. But the magnitude of this violence depends on the circumstances, not on some inherent characteristic of the ideology itself. History, including our present moment, has witnessed wars and destruction in the name of democracy, and in the name of civilization and of modernity. The sacred and non-sacred (that is, exegetical) texts of Islam should also be interrogated and critiqued to understand how certain interpretations of them can function as justifications for murder.

Such an endeavour is essential in the face of any ide-ology. But to do so, one cannot just go to the Qur’an and search for verses pertaining to violence and point to them as if they are absolutes with fixed meanings. One needs to explain how and why texts lend themselves to be inter-

preted in a particular manner – and how this appeals to a disenfranchised, poor, uneducated, racialized youth in a global context of new, exceptionally violent disorder, inaugurated by the invasion of Iraq in 2003. As impor-tant as this investigation might be, it will undoubtedly be insufficient in the face of an unexamined laïcité of exclu-sion, rooted in an Enlightenment philosophy that was not only anti-clerical but also highly antagonistic to ‘religion’. However, the history of laïcité with Islam is different: it is largely unwritten, and thus unthought, because it is closely intertwined with the colonial question – a question that remains highly controlled and partly censored. l

Fig. 2. Wreath left outside the Hyper Cacher kosher supermarket in Paris, France, by US Secretary of State John Kerry and French Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius as they stopped across the city on 16 January 2015, to pay homage to the victims of the shootings the week before.

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On secularism and politics: A reply to Hannoum

Abdelmajid Hannoum here revisits, in the aftermath of the Charlie Hebdo attack, the relation of the French state’s relation with Islam and with Muslims. He does so with strong statements and in a convincing way. Since his article comes after mine was published in these pages earlier this year, to engage my argument is an editorial compulsory figure (to use an ice skating metaphor). I willingly agree to act as his provisional sparring partner (to borrow another sports analogy).

Dr. Hannoum discusses the term ‘secularism’, and rightly affirms that the notion is a modern creation of the Church and the state. I agree, and my use of the French term laïcité precisely stressed the distance I tried to establish from the official rhetoric of the ‘Republic’, just as I referred to the triad of liberty, equality and fraternity, which serves as a motto to remind Muslims their obligations toward the French nation.

Dr Hannoum also insists on the permanence of the Christian legacy in the supposedly secular state. I concur with his idea and provide several examples to which could be added the little-known fact that French presidents are still granted by the pope the title of sole honorary canon of Saint John Lateran inherited from the time when France was deemed ‘the elder daughter of the Church’. One could in fact go further and con-sider that many of our political ideas and institutions keep a trace of Christianity and I have shown else-where that it is possible to analyze humanitarianism from the perspective of a political theology.

If, in my essay, I invite a shift from the religious to the political and the historical – a move Dr. Hannoum disapproves of – I do it for strategic reasons, as the dominant focus of French commentators regarding Muslims obscures both the inequality that affects them and its colonial and post-colonial genealogy. By con-sidering the latter in the light of religion, one runs the risk of missing its racial and often racist basis. This is the useful ambiguity that the word ‘Islamophobia’ allows one to maintain.

In this regard, Talal Asad’s ‘internal other’ does not differ much from my ‘enemy within’. And it is a merit of Dr Hannoum’s article that it emphasizes how this ‘other’ suspected of being an ‘enemy’ constitutes itself as an inaudible, yet expressive, counterpublic, which he calls a sub-public, composed of those who know that they cannot afford to express what they think out loud lest they be reproved, rejected or even punished. His text and mine, I hope, open a space where their voice can be heard.

Didier FassinInstitute for Advanced Study, Princetondfassin@ias.edu