| 
Suburb
of Marseille. (Markus Kirchgessner/laif/Redux)
|
The
2004 law banning �conspicuous� religious symbols
(read, headscarves) in French public schools cast
France as an intolerant and radically secular state
hostile to the manifestation of difference, especially
Muslim difference, in the public sphere. During
debates about the new law, a clear distinction was
drawn between French republicanism and an �Anglo-Saxon�
multiculturalism decried by many French as a sure
path to national disintegration. President Jacques
Chirac even declared that France �would lose her
soul� if she went the way of an Anglo-American pluralism
that recognizes and accepts internal difference.
Despite this rhetoric, however, the French state
has simultaneously undertaken a very public campaign
to recognize the Muslims of France as equal citizens
and to give them a place �at the table of the Republic.�
Part
of this process was the creation in May 2003 of
the French Council of the Muslim Faith (CFCM), a
national elected body, to serve as an official interlocutor
with the state in the regulation of Islamic worship
and public ritual practices like the mass slaughtering
of sheep during A�d el Kebir, the allocation of
public cemetery space facing Mecca, the garnering
of municipal permits to construct mosques and the
accreditation of imams. Both the state and French
Muslims stood to gain from the council. The creation
of the CFCM constituted part of the state�s ongoing
effort to institutionalize, monitor and domesticate
Islam, an effort begun more than a decade earlier
with state-sponsored initiatives�like the writing
of a �Muslim Charter� and the regulation of halal
certification�intended to create an �Islam of France.�
For their part, many Muslims considered the CFCM
an opportunity to legitimize and normalize the presence
of Islam in France.
Only
two years later, the future of the CFCM is already
in jeopardy. On January 4, 2005, Dounia Bouzar,
an anthropologist and a practicing Muslim, resigned
from the CFCM�s 16-member executive board. In her
letter of resignation (made public a day earlier),
Bouzar lamented that she had waited patiently for
a �profound� discussion of what it means to be a
Muslim in a secular society and what French Islam
(islam de France) would look like, only to
find to her consternation that the CFCM was more
interested in jockeying for political power. Bouzar�s
resignation came on the heels of major political
infighting between the different federations that
comprise the CFCM, forcing elections that had been
scheduled for April 2005 to be put off until June,
and even possibly until the next year. Her disillusionment
may seem misplaced: after all, rather than debating
doctrinal or theological matters, the stated function
of the CFCM is to regulate and ameliorate the conditions
of Muslim worship. Nonetheless, Bouzar�s resignation
points to inherent tensions and unresolved questions
regarding the CFCM. Is the function of the CFCM
theological, bureaucratic or representative? What
or who (Islam or Muslims) does the CFCM represent?
In
Search of an Islamic Interlocutor
| 
Muslims
arrive at the dedication of a new mosque in
Bondy, a suburb north of Paris, on March 15,
2005. (AFP/Stephane de Sakutin) |
The
establishment of the CFCM is partly grounded in
French fears about the rise of political Islam and
Islamist terrorism, in particular the possibility
that Algeria�s civil war might cross the Mediterranean
Sea into France. The idea to create a representative
council for Islam first emerged in the late 1980s
under Pierre Joxe, then minister of the interior
and, therefore, minister of faiths (cultes).
In 1989, the same year as the first �headscarves
affair,"[1]
he created the Working Council on Islam in France
(CORIF), to which he appointed six well-known imams,
who in turn appointed another nine members. All
members were chosen to ensure regional and ethno-national
diversity. The CORIF met a few dozen times until
1992 at Joxe�s behest, and at the offices of the
Interior Ministry.
In
the mid-1990s, at the height of the Algerian civil
war, the state pursued the establishment of a Muslim
council with more urgency. When Charles Pasqua became
interior minister in 1993, he drew a deliberate
distinction between �foreign Islam� (islam �tranger)
and �French Islam� (islam de France), enacting
a series of measures�including the writing of a
Muslim Charter�that he felt would entrench a domestic
and domesticated Islam on French soil, with the
Algerian Grand Mosque of Paris as its cornerstone.
After a change in government in 1996, Jean-Pierre
Chev�nement of the Socialist Party was installed
as interior minister. Chev�nement made a concerted
effort to install what he considered a more �representative�
consultation committee, widening his focus beyond
the Grand Mosque of Paris to include the Union of
French Islamic Organizations (UOIF), which controls
a number of mosques across France, and the National
Federation of French Muslims (FNMF), thought to
best represent �the Moroccan sensibility,� as well
as the pietist Tabligh movement and one of the major
Turkish Muslim organizations. In addition to these
large federations, Chev�nement brought in a number
of influential �grand� mosques. He also chose six
individuals as �qualified personalities� to represent
a more �modernist� Islam.
Drawing
on Pasqua�s idea of a Muslim charter, the ministry�s
Bureau of Faiths formulated a text to be signed
by the �invitees to the table of the Republic,�
as Chev�nement had put it during his inaugural address
to the consultation committee. A number of �invitees�
balked, and Chev�nement was roundly criticized for
proposing what seemed to be a colonially inspired
�test of allegiance� for Muslims in France, many
of whom were already citizens of the republic. In
the face of such criticism, Chev�nement soon withdrew
the text, and on January 28, 2000, made the consultation
committee official, renaming it �Istichara,� an
Arabic word that means dialogue between two parties�in
this instance, one assumes, between Muslims and
the state. In consultation with Chev�nement, the
Istichara agreed that a national elected Islamic
council was necessary and recommended a procedure
for its establishment. The members decided that
Muslim places of worship would be represented by
delegates, with the number of delegates proportional
to the size of the place of worship. After a Ministry
of the Interior census of France�s Muslim places
of worship, 992 of them were accorded delegates�about
4,000 in all�to vote for the general assembly of
what was to become the French Council of the Muslim
Faith.
By
this time, the government had changed again, and
in May 2002, Nicolas Sarkozy, a Rudolph Giuliani-esque
figure and the self-proclaimed �chief cop� of France,
had become interior minister under the center-right
Raffarin government. Sarkozy made the election of
the CFCM one of his major goals as minister. He
convened the main players of Chev�nement�s consultation
committee for two days in December 2002, at the
end of which he emerged triumphant, declaring that
a working agreement had been reached and that elections
would soon be held for the CFCM and its 25 regional
counterparts. Sarkozy then chose the CFCM�s 16-member
executive board before any elections were held.
Dalil Boubakeur, rector of the Grand Mosque of Paris,
was appointed president for the following two years,
while the UOIF and FNMF were given the two vice
presidencies. On April 6 and 13, 2003, elections
for the CFCM and the regional councils were held.
On April 13, the results of the elections were made
official: the FNMF emerged victorious, with the
UOIF a close (and unexpected) second. The Grand
Mosque of Paris came in a distant third, making
Sarkozy�s appointment of Boubakeur to the CFCM presidency
somewhat awkward.
During
preparations for new elections, Boubakeur, predicting
the electoral annihilation of his federation, announced
in September 2004 that the Grand Mosque and its
satellite mosques would not participate in the new
elections unless the electoral process was amended,
and criteria other than mosque size were taken into
consideration, criteria (such as the presence of
accredited imams and the �quality of services� offered
to the faithful) that would clearly favor Boubakeur�s
organization. The UOIF and the FNMF refused, accusing
Boubakeur of �undemocratic� tactics. Faced with
the CFCM�s implosion, the state stepped in. Dominique
de Villepin, the current interior minister, called
a series of emergency meetings throughout the fall
of 2004 to try to convince the main players to find
a solution amenable to all. Elections were pushed
back to June 2005, although the FNMF recently called
for another postponement.
�At
the Table of the Republic�
Non-French
readers may be astonished by the level of state
involvement in the creation and maintenance of the
CFCM, but it is in keeping with the legal and political
framework of la�cit� (state secularism).
Despite a 1905 law that officially separated church
and state, guaranteeing freedom of worship and the
state�s neutrality in religious matters, the state
maintained relations with the Catholic, Protestant
and Jewish institutions that had served as the state�s
�privileged interlocutors� in matters of religion
since Napoleon. The Council of Bishops, Protestant
Federation and Central Consistory represent their
respective faiths to the state and serve as the
state�s consultants in the management of religious
life, such as the regulation of the chaplain system
in prisons and hospitals and the organization of
public rituals and holidays. Thus, for example,
the justice minister chooses Catholic, Protestant
and Jewish �chaplains� for prisons, in consultation
with the �competent religious authorities.� The
state also subsidizes religious schools �under contract�
with the state and pays for the upkeep of religious
edifices built before 1905. Since the majority of
Muslims arrived in metropolitan France after 1905,
Islam did not profit until very recently from the
institutional benefits of state recognition. This
situation, and especially the lack of a representative
body for Islam, was considered to be at odds with
the guarantee of religious liberty and state neutrality
under the legal framework of la�cit�, prompting
calls to properly �recognize� and �represent� Islam�France�s
�second religion��and thereby �include� Muslims
in the republic on an equal basis with other faiths.
This effort culminated in the state�s creation of
the CFCM, strengthening the state-centered paradigm
of la�cit� by creating a Muslim interlocutor
for the state.
Notwithstanding
its place within the framework of la�cit�,
the CFCM is also the expression of other forms of
state recognition. As critics have pointed out,
the state�s contemporary management of Islam through
the creation of the CFCM echoes older, colonial
forms of governance. In Algeria, for example, the
French colonial administration centralized and bureaucratized
the indigenous Islamic justice system, bringing
previously autonomous judges (qadis) and
legal scholars (ulema) under the purview
of the state. The establishment of the CFCM also
draws on colonial and contemporary forms of recognition
and organization based on ethnicized notions of
community and difference. After all, despite public
rhetoric that rejects any official recognition of
groups or group identity, France has a colonial
history of organizing and governing indigenous communities
through ethnic and racial categories. In the more
recent past, the republic has regulated and managed
non-white immigration according to ethnic and racial
criteria. The use of ethnic quotas in housing allocation,
for example, was a widespread practice in the 1970s.
Moreover, France has instituted a number of policies
in the past few decades that seemingly recognize
ethnic and racial particularity in distributing
political and financial resources to disadvantaged
communities.
The
creation of the CFCM also draws on a new paradigm
advocating the recognition and tolerance of religious
and cultural difference and its inclusion in the
republic. The same presidential commission that
recommended banning �conspicuous� religious symbols
in public schools also recommended designating A�d
el Kebir and Yom Kippur as national school holidays,
arguing that it was necessary to realize that �the
French spiritual landscape has changed� and that
making these two additional holy days into holidays
would mark the Republic�s �respect for the plurality
of spiritual opinions."[2] Politicians on the left and right
increasingly speak of the need for tolerance, diversity
and the inclusion of different religious and cultural
communities�especially the Muslim community��at
the table of the Republic.� In a May 2003 speech
to the National Assembly, Nicolas Sarkozy asserted
that �there cannot be two categories of citizens:
those who can live their faith and the others, the
Muslims.� The creation of a representative body
for Islam has thus come to be regarded as the full
extension of citizenship rights to Muslims in France
and an essential element of their inclusion in the
Republic.
Who
Is a Muslim?
The
position of the CFCM at the intersection of an ethnicized
politics of difference, which recognizes communities,
and the republican paradigm of la�cit�, which
recognizes religions, has raised a number of questions
regarding what (or who) the CFCM represents and
what its function is and should be. Does the CFCM
represent individual Muslims, the �Muslim community�
or Islam in France? What constitutes the �Muslim
community� and who counts as a Muslim? Is �Muslim�
a religious/theological category or a cultural/demographic
one?
In
October 2002, in one of his first addresses to the
Istichara formed under Chev�nement, Sarkozy emphasized
that the CFCM-to-be �concerns the Muslim faith (le
culte musulman) and not Muslim culture (la
culture musulmane)�and [is] even less the representation
of the French Muslim community.� At the same time,
Sarkozy and other Interior Ministry officials, the
press and many Muslims themselves often speak of
the CFCM as the representative body for �the Muslim
community� (la communaut� musulmane). In
a Europe 1 radio interview on April 15, 2003, immediately
after the election of the CFCM, Sarkozy and journalist
J. P. Elkabbach alternated among numerous appellations.
Elkabbach noted that �the practicing Muslims (les
musulmans pratiquants) of France have at last
elected�their council of faith.� Sarkozy agreed
that �finally there is an organ that represents
the Muslims (les musulmans) in all their
diversity.� �Religious Muslims (les musulmans
religieux),� Elkabbach chimed in. �The Muslim
faith (le culte musulman),� Sarkozy replied.
Sarkozy has also repeated numerous times that �the
five million Muslims in France have finally become
full citizens.� Such a figure seems to represent
�Muslim� as a cultural or ethnic category of �origin,�
since numerous polls have shown that only 10�30
percent of the five million people counted as Muslims
consider themselves �practicing.� Yet the government�s
decision to organize elections for the CFCM around
mosques links a form of practice�mosque attendance�to
the right to a voice in the election, and therefore
to what constitutes a �Muslim� for the purposes
of the CFCM.
The
2003 election itself was also a major source of
contention over whether the CFCM was the representative
of the Muslim faith or of Muslims. The election
of the CFCM was heavily criticized by Muslims and
non-Muslims alike for being undemocratic (because
indirect, and because delegates were chosen by mosques)
and, therefore, unrepresentative. But rather than
invoking a religious tradition, these critics� notion
of democratic representation invokes a population
to be represented, with concomitant forms of democratic
legitimacy, authority and due process quite different
from the bases for religious legitimacy and authority.
Making things even more complicated were a number
of �secular� (la�c) Muslims who criticized
the presence of the �fundamentalist� UOIF in the
CFCM and claimed to represent �the silent majority�
of Muslims in France. Thus were formed a number
of short-lived secular representative bodies, such
as the French Council of Secular Muslims. But as
the sociologist Vincent Geisser pointed out in an
interview with Le Monde, in creating the
CFCM, the interior minister limited the Muslim community
to believing and practicing Muslims. When an association
claims to represent secular Islam (l�islam la�que),
the basic unit of representation is no longer the
practicing Muslim but anyone and everyone of Arabo-Muslim
origin.[3]
The
CFCM�s defenders, including members of the government,
maintained that democratic representativeness was
in fact not the issue, since the council represented
not Muslims but Islam. Yet the structure of the
CFCM is quite different from that of other religious
representative institutions, such as the Catholic
Council of Bishops and the Jewish Central Consistory
and Grand Rabbinate, whose respective members are
neither popularly elected nor chosen by the state
but accede to their positions through the traditional
channels of authority and hierarchy within their
faiths. In contrast, the CFCM is comprised for the
most part not of religious authorities but of large
federations and associations. Neither the president
nor the vice presidents of the CFCM are formally
trained religious scholars. Although few doubt the
piety of Mohamed Bechari, the president of the FNMF,
and Fouad Alaoui, the secretary-general of the UOIF,
their qualification for leadership positions in
the CFCM stems from their experience running the
two largest Muslim federations in France. Moreover,
while the Central Consistory represents and manages
the Jewish faith (le culte juif) and the
Representative Council of French Jewish Institutions
(CRIF) represents the Jewish community (la
communaut� juive), such a distinction
is collapsed in a CFCM expected to encompass doctrinal,
bureaucratic and community-relations functions.
The government has called upon the CFCM to give
a doctrinal opinion on whether or not the hijab
(headscarf) is a religious obligation for Muslim
women as part of its efforts to enact the headscarf
ban. It has asked the CFCM to organize the slaughter
of thousands of sheep for A�d el Kebir. It has also
called on the CFCM to consider issues like the conflict
in Israel-Palestine, Islamist terrorism and inner-city
violence�all of which are apparently, according
to a Bureau of Faiths official, �questions related
to Islam, even though Muslim worship is not directly
concerned." [4]
This
confusion regarding the function of the CFCM, and
who or what it is supposed to represent, arises
in part from an increasingly ethnicized understanding
of Islam. In many ways, �Muslim� has replaced �Arab,�
�Maghrebi� and �immigrant��all ethnicized identities
in their own time. A perfect example of this is
Nicolas Sarkozy�s recent call for a �Muslim prefect�
as part of his campaign for affirmative action policies
(discrimination positive). Although Sarkozy
was criticized for seeming to advocate the entry
of religious affiliation into the public sphere,
thereby contravening one of the principles of the
Republic, his use of �Muslim� in this instance is
part of an ethnicized logic of difference and recognition
rather than an invocation of a properly religious
category. Sarkozy justified his remark about a Muslim
prefect by stressing that �the Muslims of France
are also capable of producing high functionaries,
researchers, doctors and teachers� and thus should
be supported in this goal.[5]
He was clearly not referring to practicing Muslims,
but rather to the �five million Muslims� he often
invokes�in other words, to Muslims as an ethnicized
minority community.
Is
There an �Islam of France�?
As
much as the state�s creation of the CFCM was undertaken
to properly recognize and include a significant
minority community and �the second religion� of
France, it was also part of the state�s effort to
construct and monitor a domestic, and domesticated,
form of Islam, or an �Islam of France� (islam
de France). By creating a Muslim representative
body in dialogue with the French state, the republic
explicitly attempted to cut the links between Muslim
immigrants and their countries of origin, bringing
Islam in France under the purview of the French
state rather than that of �foreign powers.� In keeping
with this effort to extricate �French� Islam from
�foreign� influences, the state has made the regulation
of imams one of its and the CFCM�s major concerns,
and has tried (with some success) to deport imams
accused of preaching �fundamentalist� Islam. Nicolas
Sarkozy has called for imams to be trained in France,
stating on numerous occasions that French Muslims
�should not have to depend on foreign countries
to obtain imams who do not speak a word of French.�
This call for an �Islam of France� has been echoed
by a number of Muslims as well, especially those
born and raised in France. For example, the Collective
of French Muslims, a group of second-generation
Muslims close to the Swiss Muslim intellectual Tariq
Ramadan, identify themselves as �French of Muslim
faith� (fran�ais de confession musulmane),
signifying an equal commitment to their faith and
to their Frenchness. Moreover, both the UOIF and
the Collective have actively sought to �adapt� the
Islamic tradition to the French context through
ijtihad (independent reasoning) and the development
of a European fiqh (jurisprudence).
Yet
attempts to engender an �Islam of France� have been
undermined by the state�s own approach in dealing
with Islam, as well as by the structure of the CFCM.
In 2003, during debates about the proposed law banning
conspicuous religious symbols from public schools,
Sarkozy met in Egypt with the grand sheikh of Cairo�s
al-Azhar University and obtained a fatwa
(religious edict) allowing that Islamic headscarves
were not obligatory if prohibited by a national
law. In doing so, Sarkozy effectively circumvented
the recently created CFCM�s role as �privileged
interlocutor� in the management of Islam in France.
Sarkozy also publicly announced that he had discussed
the formation of the CFCM with the ambassadors of
Algeria, Morocco, Tunisia and Turkey, all of whom
had expressed their hope for the council�s success.
The state has also consistently chosen to work on
a national, regional and municipal level with associations
affiliated with the consulates of Morocco, Algeria
and Turkey, rather than with associations linked
to transnationally oriented federations like the
UOIF, the Tabligh wa Dawa and Muslim Presence (an
organization founded by Tariq Ramadan). Likewise,
the state has time and again designated the Grand
Mosque of Paris as the privileged representative
of Islam in France, in spite of the fact that the
mosque�s rector is remunerated by the Algerian government
(hence the widespread feeling among many French
Muslims that Dalil Boubakeur is a mouthpiece for
the Algerian state). Not surprisingly, the Grand
Mosque often clashes with the FNMF, which is supported
by Morocco and was formed in part as a counterweight
to Algerian dominance of the French Islamic landscape.
This kind of nationally inspired political infighting
erupted recently when Boubakeur vigorously protested
a meeting in Qatar between Mohamed Bechari, head
of the FNMF and vice president of the CFCM, and
Abassi Madani, head of the Islamic Salvation Front,
the now defunct Algerian Islamist party.
The
division of Islam in France along national lines
is not restricted to North African Islam; the other
federations that comprise the CFCM include the Turkish
DITIB and Milli Gor�s, and the French Federation
of African, Comorian and Antillean Associations.
Nor is this division along ethno-national lines
all that surprising, given that until the 1990s,
the practice of Islam in France largely concerned
immigrants and foreign students. Many of the aforementioned
organizations were born out of social welfare associations
(amicales) run by labor-exporting countries
like Algeria, Morocco and Turkey, who used these
associations as a way to aid their respective emigrant
workers as well as to maintain a certain amount
of influence over them in France. Even the UOIF,
which positions itself against these �national�
tendencies and claims to represent �French� Islam,
is led by Muslim men who came to France as foreign
students from Morocco, Algeria and Tunisia.
In
such an institutional landscape, Islamic associations
run by second- and third-generation Muslims born
and/or raised in France have found it hard to gain
acceptance by the French state as legitimate interlocutors.
Groups like the Collective of French Muslims, as
well as other more local associations, complain
that the CFCM, supposed to embody the establishment
of an �Islam of France,� is in fact unrepresentative
of the millions of French citizens of Muslim faith
(fran�ais de confession musulmane) whose
cultural affinities lie with France rather than
with North Africa or Turkey. They argue that the
CFCM, and the ethno-national associational structure
on which it is built, is ultimately unconcerned
about the needs of young French Muslims, who are
less interested in waging proxy battles between
�home country� states and more interested in constructing
a viable way of life as both fully Muslim and fully
French. Dounia Bouzar�herself a French-born Muslim
and an anthropologist of second- and third-generation
Muslim youth�signaled this discontent in her letter
of resignation, writing: �I have no reason to remain
a member of this body on �French Islam,� where it
is never a question of Muslims born in France.�
Her resignation thereby serves notice to the state
and to the CFCM not only that unanswered questions
remain about the CFCM�s function, but also that
an unresolved generational gap divides the �Muslim
community� from within. If the state is to include
French Muslims at the �table of the Republic� in
its effort to recognize and incorporate cultural
and religious difference, Bouzar suggests, then
it must take into account the needs of those citizens
who have already been sitting, unheard, at the Republic�s
table all their lives. In its insistence on managing
Islam as a foreign phenomenon even as it attempts
to institutionalize an �Islam of France,� the state
has ironically overlooked the most likely vector
of a truly French Islam: French-born Muslims themselves.
Endnotes
