French Lessons in London is Tan, Kepel

8/8/2019 French Lessons in London is Tan, Kepel

1/10

| More

Published on The National Interest(http://nationalinterest.org)Source URL (retrieved on Oct 2, 2010): http://nationalinterest.org/article/french-lessons-in-londonistan-3384

French Lessons in Londonistan

[1]

|February 23, 2010Gilles Kepel [2]

MUSLIMS HAVE been landing on theshores of Britain and France for decades. And, as these populations arrived and settled inthe Republic, Paris pursued a policy it believed would eventually lead immigrants to fullcultural integration into French society. Meanwhile, London, facing a similar influx offoreigners, attempted to create a full-fledged multicultural polity. The former emphasizedthat what was shared between the new arrivals and their native hosts was crucial, theirdifferences secondary. The latter argued that the British needed to respect the uniquenessof their immigrant neighbors-whether national, religious or ethnic-and that such a stance

was at the core of a harmonious political system. In color-blind France, built on a longtradition of a strong, centralized state and the successful assimilation of southern andeastern Europeans-who have been migrating to the country since the nineteenth century-religious identity was not to interfere in public life. Under the French tricolor, state andnation were fused into the cradle of the one and indivisible Republic. In race-aware Britain,with Anglicanism as its established church, there was always room for differentnationalities-English, Welsh, Scottish, Irish-under the Union Jack.

The French and British experience as colonizers-and the ways in which those underimperial rule would come to see their occupiers-haunt the place of Muslim immigrants on

both sides of the Channel. The Moslems of the British Raj lived as a minority amongHindus and struggled to maintain a separate identity through religious movements like theDeobandis (founded in India in 1867 and ancestors of the present-day Taliban). Thepolitical economy of the Raj was based on communalism, with Hindus, Sikhs and Muslims(and Sunni and Shia) fighting against each other. London fanned the embers of religiousdiscord to keep military expenses low and the number of redcoats at a minimum. Divide


2/10

and conquer.

At the end of the day, the British approach led to the bloody partition of the Raj betweenIndia and Pakistan; Karachi was homogeneously Muslim (though sectarian strife wouldsoon rise among Sunni and Shia, and civil war would pit liberals against extremists), NewDelhi became multicultural with a caste flavor.

The French colonies were something altogether different. Unlike the Deobandis of India,North and West Africa possessed no similar religious movements that struggled tomaintain a separate Islamic identity in the face of a hostile non-Muslim majority. TheFrench policed, at a high cost, every village of Algeria and Senegal, just as the gendarmesdid in Provence and Corsica. Thus, France's immigrants were ignorant of the kind of self-imposed apartheid that could be transported and implemented on French soil. The Northand West Africans who migrated to France after World War II came from Muslim-majoritycountries and felt no need to enhance their religious peculiarities. Bachelors perceivedthemselves as temporary migrants. Families, most of them coming from Algeria, had no

special claim to be religiously different. And after the end of the Algerian War in 1962,immigrants quietly and smoothly acquired the French citizenship to which they wereentitled-to the furor of their leaders back home. For the musulmanswho comprised amajority of the French colonial empire, the best possible future, according to the dominantFrench narrative, was to become French one day.

Such a grand rcitwas, of course, not implemented in colonial days-for the promise ofcitizenship was part and parcel of a workable imperial dominion. But in the end, as soonas the former colonized set foot on French soil in their new migrant-worker garb, they tookParis at its word, and France paid its colonial debt through a process of cultural andpolitical integration that ran parallel to the process of turning earlier immigrants-Italians,Spaniards, Portuguese, Poles, et al.-into members of the Republic.

No such transformation was possible, however, for those British subjects moving from theperipheries of the empire to its island center. In Britain, one is born English, end of story.When Muslims started to migrate en masse from the former colonies, they becameCommonwealth subjects with voting rights, and their "Islamness" turned out to be a kind ofnationality of its own, albeit under the umbrella of what would later become Britishcitizenship. Clearly, one could never hope to become English.

America-immigrant nation extraordinaire-is facing its first experience with homegrown

Islamist extremism. How the United States conceives of and approaches the threat on itsshores will clearly etch out the future of its relationship with its Muslim population in all ofits complexity. Washington has much to learn from its European ancestors, who havestruggled with, fallen victim to and at times overcome jihadists in their own lands. At itscore, this is a question of culture-the approach to "other."

THE IMPERIAL experience serves as a backdrop to the markedly contrasting ways thatLondon and Paris have approached the immigration dilemma. France has created anintermingled culture, which is being forged on a daily basis between the native Gaul andthe immigrant Arab and Berber. It revolves around two French obsessions: the bed andthe dinner table. Your average young Muslim girl is interested in living and having childrenwith a French gouer, a North-African colloquial term meaning "infidel"-i.e., non-Muslim.(Goueris itself a corruption of the classical Arabic kuffar, used in immigrant slang todesignate a French native. They are also known as fromage, or "cheese"-ironically the


3/10

same synecdoche that was used in the neocon-coined "cheese-eating surrendermonkeys.") These women would loathe the very idea of an arranged marriage to a fellah(peasant) cousin from the far away bled(North Africa) with his unrefined manners andpedestrian French. By the same token, the most popular national dish of France-thecountry of gastronomy par excellence-regularly confirmed by opinion polls, is couscous,the semolina-based traditional dish of North Africa, now fully assimilated by Frenchpalates. And even beyond the confines of culture and marriage, what is Catholic France'sholy trinity of the most popular heroes, in survey after survey? The soccer player ZinedineZidane (of Algerian-Berber descent), tennis player Yannick Noah (of mixed Cameroon-Alsatian descent) and filmmaker Dany Boon (of North-African-Muslim descent), whoconverted to Judaism at the time of his wedding to his Sephardic wife.

For the most part, this emphasis on integration-though not without its faults-has workedpretty well in France. Western Europe's biggest "Muslim country" (the current numbershover around 6 million people) has not seen a successful terrorist attack on its territorysince 1996. All plots were uncovered; their perpetrators jailed or deported. An efficient

intelligence service, well trained in Arabic and Muslim politics, played an important role,and special legal rules-such as the ability to keep terror suspects in custody-allowed for

great ad hoc efficiency.1 This successful counterterrorism policy could never have workedwithout the cultural acquiescence of the vast majority of French citizens and residents ofMuslim descent. They cooperate because they would simply never trade their decades-long effort and investment in becoming full-fledged French citizens-even in the face oflatent xenophobia and social discrimination-for the vagaries of Islamist radicalism, whichwould make all of them suspect, and offer a political space for the extreme Right.

Much of this French success has to do with how the term "Muslim" is used in political

parlance, where the preference is for expressions like "of Muslim descent" or "from Muslimculture." This stems from the French notion of lacit-loosely translated as "secularism"-which has been a backbone of French culture ever since its implementation under theThird Republic in the early twentieth century. To resist the overwhelming influence of aVatican-aligned, reactionary Catholic church that interfered in both education and politics,the French government passed a law separating church and state in 1905, severing thehistoric link between Paris and Rome. The French conception of religion in the publicsphere is thus quite different from the ascriptive understanding of religion found in Britainor America-a difference illustrated by the fact that the British national census asksrespondents to define themselves in religious terms. By contrast, its French laquecounterpart merely defines religion in sociological and cultural terms, provided theconcerned individuals agree on that identity to which they are, by the by, entitled to beindifferent-even hostile.

Thus, in France, a community that would encompass all "Muslims" a priori is politicallyimpossible-and without that, there can be no political brokers or "community leaders" whomonopolize representation of "Muslims" (or at least pretend to do so). This was no moreevident than in the French government's attempt to reconcile the differences betweenIslamic factions by creating the French Council of the Muslim Faith (CFCM) in 2003. Thehope was to make peace between different Islamic groupings so as to facilitate the freeexercise of Muslim religion, organize pilgrimages to Mecca, ensure access to halal

foodstuffs in the army, corporations and restaurants, and build mosques by whichpracticing Muslims would have the same rights and advantages as believers in otherfaiths. At the same time, then-Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy, who professed an "open"understanding of lacitthat relied more on religious leaders as role models, wanted to use

the CFCM as a go-between with practicing Muslims.2 But the differences between Islamic


4/10

factions, be it because of their doctrinal tenets or the fierce competition between theforeign states that influence some of them (Algeria, Morocco, Saudi Arabia, Iran, etc.),never allowed the CFCM to emerge and find a role that would resemble other unitedreligious mouthpieces, whether the Bishops' Conference or the Representative Council ofFrench Jewish Institutions (CRIF). Overall, the dominant narrative in France has alwaysbeen to be French first and foremost. Religious identity continues to take a backseat tocitizenship in the Republic.

IN THE UK, things were happening quite differently. From the beginning of mass migrationin the 1950s, British Muslims organized as such and started to establish mosques onBritish soil. The segregated experience of the Muslim community under the Raj wasduplicated in Britain, except this time the majority population was not Hindu, but the whiteEnglish working class with its beer-on-tap-and-bacon culture. Meanwhile, intra-Muslimsectarian and denominational strife led different groups to create their own enclaves. The

Deobandis wanted to have their own places of worship, as did the Barelvis, a Sufi-orientedsect considered heretic by its rivals, with a special reverence for the Prophet Muhammad.The same went for the Ahl-i-Hadith, a puritanical group close to Saudi Wahhabism. WhenBritish authorities tried to provide brick-and-mortar mosques to replace makeshift prayerrooms, they faced upheaval. The Deobandis, for instance, refused to pray behind a Barelviimam who sang the praises of the Prophet in terms the Deobandis saw as close toidolatry, and things degenerated into fistfights as the disparate sects tried to control thepulpit in the so-called cathedral mosques. Though this might seem to echo Sarkozy's futileattempts to mediate between the different Muslim groups in France, there is one keydifference: for British Muslims, that religious identity has always come before all others,whatever the infighting between different sects may be. In France, it was the wide array ofavailable identities-Islamic, Algerian, working class, unionized, leftist, laqueand whathave you-that made the concept of Muslim categorization secondary at best.

This secluded British-Muslim religious identity led to a far more introverted social life thanwas the case for North Africans in France. Though curry may have replaced fish and chipsin British stomachs, the practice of seeking a consort in the extended family (biradariinUrdu)-which led fathers to travel yearly to Mirpur or Punjab so as to bring back toManchester or Bradford suitable, non-Anglophone husbands for their British-born and -educated daughters-perpetuated a cultural isolation.

It is this insular Muslim practice that led to Salman Rushdie's TheSatanic Verses; a frontalattack on that immigrant seclusion. The book aimed to undermine it with a vitriolic criticismof the religious tenets of Islam. In particular, it mocked the Prophet and his many wives,describing his abode as a brothel. Though the names were changed, and the novel was awork of fiction, Rushdie wanted to rock the foundations of British-Muslim life, and force hiscoreligionists to reconsider their self-segregation and begin to integrate into Britishsociety. But his ambitious project backfired. Far from serving as a liberating cri de coeur,The Satanic Versesonly reinforced the grasp of radical mullahs on their communities. Theparochial old-timers who knew little English and who had no real interaction with Britishauthorities (except when they traded their vote banks for community control) proved

incapable of taking up Rushdie's challenge. And they gradually were replaced by better-groomed, younger preachers, some of whom had links to radicalized international Islamistorganizations.

The book burning of TheSatanic Versesby the Bradford Council for Mosques in front ofthe city hall of that derelict Yorkshire Victorian city in 1989 was originally intended to


5/10

express to the larger public the pain and suffering of Muslims who felt insulted byRushdie's blasphemy of the Prophet Muhammad. But it produced quite the opposite effecton TV viewers: book burners were seen as fanatics performing an auto-da-f tantamountto the Spanish Inquisition or Nazi Germany, and they got no sympathy from the press.British perceptions of Islam's fanatical response were cemented a month later on February14, when Ayatollah Khomeini sent a valentine to Britain in the form of a fatwa condemningRushdie, his publishers and his translators to death. The leader of the Islamic Republicwas attempting to regain his status as the champion of oppressed Muslim massesworldwide-a status that had been seriously challenged by the victory of U.S.-backed Sunnijihadists in Afghanistan, who had compelled the Red Army to pull out of the country on thefollowing day-February 15. On the British political stage, the infamous fatwa meant that allof a sudden, the UK (and the rest of Europe and the world by the same token) hadbecome part of a virtual Dar al-Islam(abode of Islam) where the rules of sharia-or MuslimGod-inspired law-would apply, punishing blasphemy (or, for that matter, "insult to theProphet") with death.

The Rushdie affair was in a way quintessentially British. It happened in the context of apolitical scene divided along communalist lines, and it triggered reactions from communityleaders and ordinary believers who felt threatened in their imposed and self-imposedseclusion, a situation that made them unable to distance themselves from the defensiveattitudes of their peers.

On the other side of the Channel, where men and women of Muslim descent were notorganized in this way, and where imams retained far less influence than their oppositenumbers in Great Britain, the Rushdie affair did not mobilize any Islamic outbursts, savefor a tiny group of radicals led by two recent converts to Islam, the grandchildren ofMaurice Thorez, the deceased strongman of the French Communist Party, who took to thestreets in front of journalists who widely outnumbered them.

NEVERTHELESS, 1989 was also a watershed year for Islam in France, and it pinpointedthe difficulties of the traditional republican and cultural-integration model. While the Frenchwere supposed to be celebrating the two hundredth anniversary of the fall of the Bastilleand the triumph of Enlightenment, and the rest of the world was focused on the end of theCommunist era, the French press was obsessed with an entirely different affair. Threeteenage female pupils of Muslim descent had entered their classes at a middle school in a

northern Paris banlieuewearing hijabs, the Salafist "Muslimwear" that was steadilyimposed on Muslims worldwide-through the expansion of Wahhabism and the Muslim

Brother subculture-into the expression of Islam in the public sphere.3 This piece of clothplaced hijab-wearing French public-school students in a cultural cluster and separatedthem from their classmates-on the basis of a proclaimed religious identity.

It seemed the decades-long French philosophy of lacithad come back to haunt thecountry. Its detractors saw this policy as insensitive to cultural differences. And this viewwas not confined to Muslims in France. Americans and Brits alike mocked the country asclosed to the other, draped in the rags of its past glory, an obsolete singleton in a

globalized world. And the goal of cultural integration was lambasted as "assimilation"-aterm with particularly bad connotations, no more so than in some Jewish circles, where it istantamount to "cultural genocide." The stakes were high, the debate highly political. Boththe French branch of the Tablighi Jamaat-an Indian Islamist movement preaching culturalseclusion from the non-Muslim environment-and the local Muslim Brothers supported the


6/10

girls, and in the case of the latter, used the affair to pretend that they were the choicerepresentatives of a "Muslim community" that was in the making on French soil. Theychanged their name from the Union of Islamic Organizations in France (UOIF) to the Unionof Islamic Organizations ofFrance, in an attempt to show the professed new stage thegroup had reached in its process of asserting Islamic identity in France. As one of itsleaders explained to me, they no longer considered France a land of temporary residencefor "Muslims"; many now called it home. Hence, it was no more a part of Dar al-Solh(or"abode of contract"), a foreign territory where Muslims could stay temporarily and wheresharia was irrelevant. It had become part of Dar al-Islam, where sharia applied for Muslimswho so wished.

If sharia was not state implemented, it was the right of every French "Muslim" to enact thelaws. The three hijab-wearing pupils were the first manifestation of the UOIF's new policy-its bid to be the community leader of the "Muslims of France" and the champion of anexemplary cause.

As much as the Rushdie affair was evidence of the contradictions of Britain's relationshipwith its Muslim citizens, the hijab affair was typically French. It could never have takenplace in the UK, where it had long been common practice for schools to welcome thehijab, segregate Muslim female pupils from sporting and swimming classes with their malecounterparts, and so on and so forth.

The question then for Paris was whether "liberty" should come first, or was education toprovide a space free from political, religious and similar statements-based on the othertenet of the Republic: "equality"? When the UOIF and their fellow travelers from themulticultural Left-along with the allies they made on that occasion among the Catholicclergy, Protestant pastors and some conservative rabbis-made their claim in the Frenchpublic sphere, they used the political language of freedom. They cast themselves as theopposition to the authoritarianism of the Jacobin, laquefundamentalist, assimilationiststate. Some Islamist militants even took to the streets wearing a yellow star under theirhijab or beard, implying they were persecuted like the Jews had been by the Nazis (thatline was difficult to carry on and introduced confusion into the minds of some otherwiseanti-Semitic and anti-Israeli radicals). Yet, when Muslim youths were instructed to wearthe hijab by the Tablighis, Salafis or Muslim Brothers, it was not a matter of freedom, butof religious obligation. Notwithstanding such internal contradictions (of which the Frenchpress and public debate were largely unaware), the hijab affair poisoned the educationalenvironment. Endless litigation and demonstrations that benefited radicals who portrayed

themselves as victims of state repression followed. However, in spite of all this apparentdistaste for lacit, in the end there was very little support for the hijab cause, and certainlyno mobilization of an improbable "Muslim community" that the UOIF and its ilk wanted tobring to life. The fact that during this time the Algerian civil war-which subsequently spilledover into France-was fully aflame, and still French Muslims largely ignored the call tojihad, is the starkest evidence of how little sway these radicals held over the so-calledMuslim community.

SUCH WAS the backdrop for 9/11 on each side of the Channel. In France, the trauma ofthe Algerian civil war-with the casualties caused by Algerian-linked terrorism on Frenchsoil, the terrible death toll in Algeria itself, and the political and military defeat of Islamistinsurgents in 1997-had three main consequences. First, there was little love lost on thepart of French citizens or residents of Muslim descent for the kind of radicalism andterrorist attacks they had both experienced and suffered. In France, 9/11 was viewed as


7/10

Act II of the same play. Second, the repression of the Islamist rebels in Algeria haddestroyed networks and movements that might otherwise have spilled over into France.And third, French security and intelligence forces were trained in vivo to trace andeliminate Islamist terrorist networks. They had a sound, direct and on-the-spot knowledgeof such groups and of their international connections, and state policy would not allowforeign radical Islamists to obtain political asylum in France.

In the UK, on the other hand, where Muslim communities were organized and representedby leaders and brokers who had sizable followings, the state had minimal direct interactionwith such populations, mirroring the days of the Raj when communalism was a mode ofgovernment. As opposed to the French, who had banned foreign Islamist leaders fromentering their country, British authorities granted asylum to a vast array of them-includingthe Egyptian Abu Hamza al-Masri (aka, "Hook"), Abu Qatada al-Filistini from Palestine,Syria's Abu Musab al-Suri and many others-who acted as important contributors to theproduction and dissemination of Salafist-jihadist literature, and audio, video and Internetpropaganda. All were veteran jihadist fighters from Afghanistan in the 1980s who had

supported jihad in Egypt, Algeria, Bosnia and Chechnya in the 1990s. They created anunderworld of sorts, labeled "Londonistan" by the Arab press.

Their presence in Britain was rationalized; politicians argued that the former jihadistswould abstain from radicalizing local British-Muslim youth. The asylum seekers wereArabs, the British Muslims were from the subcontinent, so it looked as if there would be amajor cultural gap between them in any case. More so, continuing the long-held Britishtradition, cultural identification of Muslim communities with their new homeland was by nomeans a priority in the multicultural-tinged "cool Britannia" of the Blair years. More thanever, Muslim immigrants retained ties to their countries of origin-something that wouldprove disastrous as Pakistan experienced a steady Talibanization from the mid-2000sonward, and Britons of Pakistani descent visited the country every year to revive familynetworks, shop for consorts for their children and partake in the political strife of Pakistan.Worse, an activist minority spent time in radical madrassas of the Deobandi sect, and inthe training camps of the Taliban and other jihadist guerillas.

BUT THIS is not to say that all was well in France. The hijab issue remained an irritant,and in the spring of 2003, then-President Jacques Chirac convened a committee ofexperts, the Stasi Commission (named for its president, French politician Bernard Stasi,

and of which I was a member), to examine whether lacitwas threatened, and how todeal with the issue in a society much changed from the Third Republic that mandatedseparation of church and state almost a century before. The commission recommendedthat the wearing of ostentatious religious signs (whether it be hijab, cross or yarmulke) beforbidden in schools benefiting from state funds (public or private). The ban was limited tostudents who were minors. Once in college or university, they were deemed matureenough to dress as they liked.

The hijab prohibition was met with incomprehension. Paris passed the law in the spring of2004 to take effect in September, a decision that produced an outcry in Islamist andmulticulturalist circles worldwide. In France, the UOIF organized demonstrations that werewidely covered and hyped on Al Jazeera-where a Muslim Brother was at that point editorin chief. In late August, the "Islamic Army in Iraq" took two French journalists hostage, andthreatened to kill them unless the "anti-hijab law" was rescinded. Much to the surprise ofthose who believed the Al Jazeera coverage, the wide majority of French citizens ofMuslim descent supported the hijab ban. Many took to the streets and went on the air to


8/10

express their total rejection of a terrorist group that had hijacked their voice. And the UOIFwas compelled to backpedal, its spokeswoman offering on TV to take the place of thehostages so that her hijab would not be tainted by innocent blood. That was the end of thehijab turmoil. To date it is no longer worn in schools, and the UOIF decided to drop itsefforts to overturn the law (in any case, its campaign has lost steam since 2004).

So France's policy of lacitseemed to be vindicated. But a year after the 2004 hijabdispute, the banlieuesoutside Paris exploded in violence. It was as if all the French had tosay for the success story of their cultural-integration model fell short. Upward socialmobility was nowhere to be found for many of the migrant youth living in the banlieues-theonly contemporary French word that has since made its way into international idiom and

needs no translation!4 When young people of migrant descent (some, but not all, Muslims)started burning cars in these infamous neighborhoods in the autumn of 2005, it providedFox News with vivid coverage ("Paris Is Burning") filled with "Muslim riots" and "Baghdad-on-the-Seine" nonsense. Meanwhile, pro-war-on-terror pundits ridiculed then-PresidentChirac and then-Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin for their opposition to the Iraq War

using a chickens-come-home-to-roost logic. Yet all academic studies in the aftermath ofthe riots amply demonstrated that they had little if anything to do with Islam per se;instead, they were due to a lack of social integration and economic opportunities. Therioters wanted to get the public's attention drawn to these issues-a far cry from any urge toestablish a radical "Islamistan" in the banlieues. The riots, then, were an appeal for furthersocial integration, something that the same controversy-ridden Stasi Commissionunderstood well, and proposed to deal with via new urban planning to destroy the ghettosand the institution of Yom Kippur and Eid al Kabiras school holidays-these and other

attempts to respect diversity were summarily ignored.5 Media interest soon moved on tothe next story, and there was little public awareness of these findings.

IN BRITAIN, where Tony Blair had planned to invade Iraq since 2002 alongside GeorgeW. Bush, the prime minister felt confident that government support of domestic Islamistcommunalism would grant him immunity from British-Muslim criticism of the "invasion of aMuslim land by infidel armies," and would not lead to retaliation in the form of jihadi-inspired terrorist action. Alas, this was not to be. Pakistani radical networks lambastedBritish (and American) policy. So too did al-Qaeda and the Taliban. Scores of theseBritish-Muslim activists, who had spent time in the Taliban's schools and camps, rallied tothe extremist cause. Deputies of radical Islamist groups in the UK stopped all collaborationwith British authorities, and as Her Majesty's security services' grassroots knowledge ofIslamist whereabouts had relied to a large extent on community leaders, there weresuddenly a number of blind spots in the general surveillance of radical groups andindividuals, particularly in provincial areas removed from London. Agencies discoveredbelatedly that the Arab luminaries of Londonistan had learned English and were bondingwith the subcontinental English-speaking youth from Bradford to East London. Thisdangerous environment provided the background for the July 7, 2005, attacks. The suicidebombings in London were perpetrated by English-educated British Muslims fromYorkshire. Their prerecorded will, broadcast by al-Qaeda and introduced by no less thanAyman al-Zawahiri, starred the chief of the group, Mohammed Siddique Khan, declaring in

heavily accented working-class Yorkshire English that he was a fighter in the war againstinfidels who had invaded Iraq and Palestine. By the end of July 2005, another suicideattack was narrowly avoided. In the summer of 2006, a major plot to bomb transatlanticflights between London and New York with liquid explosives was foiled at the eleventhhour. In 2007, another plot half-succeeded when a car laden with explosives (which failed


9/10

to detonate) barreled into the entryway of the Glasgow airport.

Since 2007, and Tony Blair's departure, there has been a major review of British policy.The government of Gordon Brown has painstakingly tried to fashion a concept of"Britishness" as part of its "deradicalization" policy aimed more at integrating Muslimyouths into the wider British community. The shift from multiculturalism coupled with the

intelligence-agencies-issued report Preventing Extremism Togetherdefinitely bringspolicies on both sides of the Channel much closer than they ever were in the past. Theissue of social-cum-cultural integration remains a crucible for populations of Muslimdescent as they seek to identify politically with their Western country of residence,adoption and, increasingly, birth.

AS THE United States now faces homegrown terrorism, in the form of Nidal Hasan's FortHood massacre and the "underwear bomber" Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab's near

detonation of a plane bound for Detroit, it is certainly worthwhile to analyze Europe'srelationship with its Muslim residents in a less patronizing way than was the case both inthe warmongering parlance of the neocons and President Obama's naive Cairo speechlast year. While the present administration just granted a long-denied entry visa to Islamistintellectual Tariq Ramadan, and so seems to be following the Tony Blair model (whichcounted on Ramadan to pacify the Muslim ranks in Britain after 7/7, that is, until the primeminister and the preacher had a falling out), it might indeed be wise to evaluate theEuropean experience in all its dimensions. The "special relationship" may not be all that ison offer. Old Europe has, after all, been the neighbor of the Muslim world, has colonizedsome of it and now has integrated part of that world into its very identity. While somepredict that, in a few decades, Europe will be but the northern part of the Maghreb, onemay equally surmise that North Africa and the Middle East will be far more Europeanized.

Gilles Kepel is a professor and chair of Middle East and Mediterranean Studies at theSciences-Po, Paris, and the Philippe Roman Professor in History and InternationalRelations at the London School of Economics.

1

The French legal term Association de malfaiteurs en vue d'une entreprise terroriste(criminal association with a terrorist aim) allows the judiciary to keep terrorism suspects incustody for seventy-two hours before they are charged or freed (as opposed to twenty-four hours in other cases), which increases the chances that suspects will be destabilizedenough to give away their networks, and allows the police enough time to take action.Such emergency measures are taken under the control of an antiterrorism-habilitatedjudge. Judge Jean-Louis Bruguire, one of the most successful French antiterrorismjudges of the 1990s and early 2000s, told me that this legal measure was the key toFrench success, and also made any Guantnamo-type decisions unnecessary.

2

In his visit to Saudi Arabia in January 2008, President Sarkozy addressed the SaudiMajlis al- Shura (nonelected Parliament), praising religious figures-including imams-fortheir role in society, one that he considered unmatched by secular educators and the like.Though it is true that the French state-school system is undergoing a crisis with regard toits former central role toward cultural and social integration of youth from all walks of life


10/10

and inherited cultures, the advocacy of its replacement with religious figures was met withan uproar in many French circles.

3 Wahhabism is a puritanical understanding of Islam that follows the teachings ofMuhammad Ibn Abd al Wahhab, a late-eighteenth-century preacher. Wahhabis alingedtheir sect with the Saud family, allowing for the creation of the Saudi Arabian state. It wasmarginal in the wider Muslim world until oil wealth fuelled its export as a means to fightsocialism in the postwar Arab and Muslim countries. "Wahhabis" prefer to call themselves"Salafis" ("following the ancestors," i.e., strictly observant of pristine Islam). They abhorany kind of worship of a human being. But all Salafis are not Wahhabis. The society of theMuslim Brothers was founded in Egypt in 1928, with the political aim of establishing aMuslim state, abiding by sharia laws. In spite of their diverse interpretations of Islam,Wahhabis, Salafis and Muslim Brothers share the same subculture that makes the tenetsof Islam permeate every dimension of daily social and cultural life.

4 In 1987, when I published a study on Islam in France entitled Les banlieues de l'islam

(Paris: Editions du Seuil), I had to translate the title as "The outskirts of Islam" to make itunderstandable to the English-speaking public, and explain that such outskirts were notsuburbia, rather "inner cities" (UK) or "ghettos" (United States). All that confusion stoppedwhen Anglophone media pundits started using banlieuesas a catchword for lambastingFrench policies of integration, in particular during and after the so-called "Muslim riots" ofthe fall of 2005. See chapters 4 and 5 of my Beyond Terror and Martyrdom(Cambridge,MA: Harvard University Press, 2008) for more information.

5 Though the French government foolishly rejected the commission's proposals at thetime, it subsequently espoused a number of the Stasi Commision's additional policy

suggestions. By then it was too late to affect the situation.

More by

Source URL (retrieved on Oct 2, 2010): http://nationalinterest.org/article/french-lessons-in-londonistan-3384

Links:[1] http://www.addthis.com/bookmark.php?v=250&username=nationalinterest[2] http://nationalinterest.org/profile/gilles-kepel

French Lessons in London is Tan, Kepel

Documents

Transcript of French Lessons in London is Tan, Kepel