Can Islam Be French? is an anthropological examination of how Muslims are responding to the conditions of life in France. Following up on his book Why the French Don't Like Headscarves, John Bowen turns his attention away from the perspectives of French non-Muslims to focus on those of the country's Muslims themselves. Bowen asks not the usual question--how well are Muslims integrating in France?--but, rather, how do French Muslims think about Islam? In particular, Bowen examines how French Muslims are fashioning new Islamic institutions and developing new ways of reasoning and teaching. He looks at some of the quite distinct ways in which mosques have connected with broader social and political forces, how Islamic educational entrepreneurs have fashioned niches for new forms of schooling, and how major Islamic public actors have set out a specifically French approach to religious norms. All of these efforts have provoked sharp responses in France and from overseas centers of Islamic scholarship, so Bowen also looks closely at debates over how--and how far--Muslims should adapt their religious traditions to these new social conditions. He argues that the particular ways in which Muslims have settled in France, and in which France governs religions, have created incentives for Muslims to develop new, pragmatic ways of thinking about religious issues in French society.
Can Islam Be French? is an anthropological examination of how Muslims are responding to the conditions of life in France. Following up on his book Why the French Don't Like Headscarves, John Bowen turns his attention away from the perspectives of French non-Muslims to focus on those of the country's Muslims themselves. Bowen asks not the usual question--how well are Muslims integrating in France?--but, rather, how do French Muslims think about Islam? In particular, Bowen examines how French Muslims are fashioning new Islamic institutions and developing new ways of reasoning and teaching. He looks at some of the quite distinct ways in which mosques have connected with broader social and political forces, how Islamic educational entrepreneurs have fashioned niches for new forms of schooling, and how major Islamic public actors have set out a specifically French approach to religious norms. All of these efforts have provoked sharp responses in France and from overseas centers of Islamic scholarship, so Bowen also looks closely at debates over how--and how far--Muslims should adapt their religious traditions to these new social conditions. He argues that the particular ways in which Muslims have settled in France, and in which France governs religions, have created incentives for Muslims to develop new, pragmatic ways of thinking about religious issues in French society.
Can Islam Be French?: Pluralism and Pragmatism in a Secularist State
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Overview
Can Islam Be French? is an anthropological examination of how Muslims are responding to the conditions of life in France. Following up on his book Why the French Don't Like Headscarves, John Bowen turns his attention away from the perspectives of French non-Muslims to focus on those of the country's Muslims themselves. Bowen asks not the usual question--how well are Muslims integrating in France?--but, rather, how do French Muslims think about Islam? In particular, Bowen examines how French Muslims are fashioning new Islamic institutions and developing new ways of reasoning and teaching. He looks at some of the quite distinct ways in which mosques have connected with broader social and political forces, how Islamic educational entrepreneurs have fashioned niches for new forms of schooling, and how major Islamic public actors have set out a specifically French approach to religious norms. All of these efforts have provoked sharp responses in France and from overseas centers of Islamic scholarship, so Bowen also looks closely at debates over how--and how far--Muslims should adapt their religious traditions to these new social conditions. He argues that the particular ways in which Muslims have settled in France, and in which France governs religions, have created incentives for Muslims to develop new, pragmatic ways of thinking about religious issues in French society.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781400831111 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Princeton University Press |
| Publication date: | 09/08/2009 |
| Series: | Princeton Studies in Muslim Politics , #43 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 248 |
| File size: | 1 MB |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
Can Islam Be French?
PLURALISM AND PRAGMATISM IN A SECULARIST STATEBy John R. Bowen
PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS
Copyright © 2010 Princeton University PressAll right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-691-13283-9
Chapter One
Islam and the Republic
My title, of course, rests on an indefensible premise. Islam cannot be exclusively French any more than it can be American or Egyptian, because its claims are universal. Although inflected and shaped by national or regional values, Islam, like Catholicism and Judaism, rests on traditions that cross political boundaries.
Let me try another way to understand the question: Can Islam become a generally accepted part of the French social landscape? Of course, it will not have the background status of Catholicism anytime soon-Parisians may not notice a cross or a church; they certainly notice a headscarf or a minaret. But could it become accepted-more or less grudgingly, more or less intuitively-as one among many normal components of the normal social world? Quick off the mark there are signs that suggest yes, perhaps, and others that indicate no, maybe not.
Among the positive signs: A 2006 survey found that French people as a whole think Islam can fit into France. When asked if there is a conflict between being a devout Muslim and living in a modern society, 74 percent of all French people said no, there was not. Only about half as many other Europeans or Americans deny such a conflict. Indeed, French people are more positive about modern Islam than are people in Indonesia, Jordan, or Egypt! This positive answer may be related to an equally hopeful finding of the survey: French Muslims are about as likely to emphasize their national identity over their religious one as are U.S. Christians-and they are much more likely to do so than are other European Muslims. So, at least when talking to pollsters, goodly numbers of French Muslims and non-Muslims seem to think that Islam could be French.
But increasingly, public figures criticize some Muslims as harboring values incompatible with French citizenship, even if they neither break laws nor contravene norms of public behavior. Two incidents from 2008: A court approved a request to annul a marriage on grounds that the wife had lied to the husband about something he judged essential to their marriage. The judgment was in accord with French jurisprudence, but because the "something" was the wife's virginity and the couple was Muslim, public figures denounced Muslims who harbored "archaic" notions about women, and the annulment eventually was overturned. At about the same time, the government successfully kept a married woman with children from obtaining French citizenship because she wore a face covering and stayed at home, proof that her "radical religion" had prevented her from "assimilating" French values.
And consider what Parisians read. I dropped into the Virgin Megastore in Saint-Denis, tucked in behind the famous cathedral and in a largely Muslim corner of town. Free for the taking was the store's magazine, with a picture of a naked woman on the cover and with "pleasure" as the issue's theme. When I entered the store I saw books on Islam, the Qur'an, and how to pray; we were in the month of Ramadan. But the table holding new, small-format books placed near the cash register featured thirteen titles, ten of which approached Islam and Muslims from quite a different point of view. Dishonored and Mutilated each concern violence by Muslim men against Muslim women. Sultana describes the horrible life of a Saudi princess. Both The Sold Ones and The Fatiha (referring to the first verse of the Qur'an, recited at a marriage) treat forced marriages. Muslim But Free is Irshad Manji's story; Disfigured is Rania al-Baz's, each about Muslim misogyny. Gang-Rape Hell tells of violence against women in the largely Muslim, poor outer cities of Paris. Souad, Burned Alive and Latya, Her Face Stolen complete the picture. (I do not count no. 11, a translation of Reading Lolita in Teheran, which suggests that without Nabokov, the Persians might have found themselves bereft of literature.)
Things are not that different on the North American side of the Atlantic, from where Irshad Manji comes and where another denouncer of Islam from within, Ayaan Hirsi Ali (Submission; The Caged Virgin), sometimes lives, and where books on Islam's threat to Europe have taken off: "they're asleep; we're next," we, over here, are warned in While Europe Slept, Eurabia, and the latest, They Must Be Stopped.
Now, in the so-called "public sphere" dominated by such books and their sensationalist televised counterparts (Fox News, Envoyé Spécial), very seldom do we hear from Muslims who are not in the business of denouncing their own kind-save the well-intentioned but not very effective pleas that "Islam is a religion of peace," as if that were a satisfying response to Disfigured and Submission and unceasing reports of terrorism training. ("Whom do you believe, me or your own eyes?") Left largely to the side-either out of their own prudence or out of the "public sphere's" decision that their voices are less interesting-is a broad middle group of Muslims who do not wish to renounce the possibility of just war (yes, jihâd) and do wish to remain true to Islam's norms (yes, sharîa), and who do tune in to scholarly opinions (yes, fatwâs)-and who, all the while, live ordinary, nonterrorizing lives. They do so at the same time that many of their Catholic fellow citizens subscribe to doctrines of the just war, wish to enter heaven, and listen to what the pope has to say (as do, mutatis mutandis, their Jewish and Baptist and Mormon neighbors).
It is a subset of these Muslims to whom I have been listening in France: scholars and educators and public figures who are trying to configure a set of teachings and norms and institutions that will anchor Islam in France, for now but especially for the next generation, and without renouncing the traditions of Islam. Theirs is the question that I intend in this book's title: Can Islam become a workable reality for Muslims who wish to live fulfilling social and religious lives in France? This book concerns some of their answers to that question.
In an earlier book, in some ways a companion to this one, I explored the ideas and anxieties of some non-Muslim French men and women about the visible presence of Islam on their soil. I did so largely through one particular lens, the conflicts over the wearing of Islamic scarves in public schools, but I touched on a broader array of issues, from racism (also aimed at non-Muslim people of color) to the shape of the urban built environment. That study posed the question of whether Muslims who wish to publicly practice their religion can make their way in French society without having to pretend to be something other than Muslims. Can they become citoyens à part entière rather than citoyens entièrement à part, "complete citizens" of France rather than "citizens completely on the sidelines"? Particularly thorny are the issues implied by the phrase "pretend to be something other than Muslims." How far will the French state go in requiring not just obedience to the law and correct public comportment, but assimilation to a particular set of (post-) Christian practices and values?
Although in the final chapter I return to those issues, throughout most of this book I focus on the Islamic side of the same issue: what forms of Islamic ideas and institutions will enable those Muslims wishing to practice their religion to do so fully and freely in France? I explore the development of mosques and of Islamic schools and institutes and, simultaneously, the Islamic reasoning that subtends and suffuses these institutions as it answers such questions as the following: What should an Islamic secondary school look like in a secularist society? How does one teach Islam in a way that remains connected with global deliberations and also provides guides for French living? What should mosques do? Should a marriage be conducted in a religious manner or at city hall? May I borrow money at interest from a bank to buy my home?
As in my previous books on France and on Indonesia, I set out to practice an "anthropology of public reasoning." The "anthropology" part of that phrase means that I look whenever possible at ongoing interactions in social life: at how a teacher reasons or an imam persuades or a city official justifies his actions. I bring in written texts when these enter into social life, when they are used in teaching or read widely, but I begin from social interactions in mosques, schools, public meetings, and Internet exchanges. The "public reasoning" part means that I highlight the ways in which people deliberate and debate in these public settings. It is in these practices of deliberation-justifying one's beliefs and seeking areas of agreement-rather than in a static notion of an achieved consensus that I find hope for pluralistic forms of civic integration.
A critical component of the anthropology of public reasoning is the study of justifications: on what grounds do speakers advance one position rather than another? What kinds of argument do they pursue, and how are these received? In the Islamic context these questions often turn on sources of authority: which past authorities or scriptural texts are cited? Does an argument emphasize the distinctive demands placed on Muslims in France, the universal character of God's call to walk along the straight path, or both? Through these questions I wish to highlight the specific forms taken by Islamic reasoning in these particular French social contexts.
This attention to Islamic justifications should, I believe, extend current social science analyses of how people in different societies justify their positions on policy issues. Some of these analyses have discerned distinct sociomoral conceptions of worth or value that underlie specific acts of justification and that, in weighted combinations, form national (or subnational) "repertoires of evaluation." Parisians and New Yorkers may both recognize that material success, social solidarity, and personal morality are legitimate bases for judging the actions of others, but the two groups will assign different weights to these three values. Repertoires, therefore, can be mapped onto particular territories.
The problem faced in this book is a bit different. Muslims who are engaged in deliberating about Islam in France must navigate between two spatially distinct realms of justification: a transnational one, based on the norms and traditions of Islam, and a national one, based on the civic values of France. The repertoires of evaluation at use in these two realms are not differentially weighted versions of each other but refer to entirely different foundations: God in the one case, the Republic in the other. Each repertoire is a distinct assembly of norms and values that delimits acceptable from unacceptable ways of explaining and justifying actions.
In much of this book, I focus on a handful of individuals, Islamic public actors who find themselves at the intersection of these two realms as they teach and deliberate about how best to create Islamic institutions in France. As Islamic actors, they find themselves engaged in exchanges with scholars who live in Syria, Senegal, Turkey, or Egypt, some of whom post articles on Web sites, have their books translated into French (and other languages), and appear in public discussions in Paris, Lyon, or Lille. Each of those scholars commands his own type of authority-the professor at an established Islamic university, the scholar who commands an impressive range of scriptural texts, or the inspirational leader of a Sufi order-usually at a level far beyond that of any Islamic public actor living in France. As French Islamic actors formulate their own opinions, they must keep in mind the commentaries and judgments that might be delivered by those transnational authorities-and as we shall see, sometimes those authorities deliver quite negative judgments on certain opinions developed in France.
At the same time, these Islamic actors live in France and must respond to the experiences and exigencies of life in that country. On the one hand, they must craft their opinions to the lives of French Muslims, whose questions concern how to live in a secular society: how to worship, work, or marry in the absence of Islamic institutions. On the other hand, they must try and adapt what they say and do to French norms and understandings about religion and social life, lest they be attacked as insufficiently secularist or as overly communalist.
Now, if those French understandings were clear and unambiguous, this task might not be so difficult, but France contains a tension, if not a contradiction, between its Republican political model and the way religion-minded citizens organize their lives. In the ideal world of Republican France, everyone develops similar values and orientations by participating in public institutions, starting from their education in state schools. This direct, sustained contact between the state and the individual underwrites the dual capacity to live together and to deliberate in rational fashion, because everyone lives and reasons starting from the same first principles. On this view, intermediate institutions such as voluntary associations, private schools, and religious practices are to be discouraged, lest they nourish divergent values and create social divisions. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, perhaps the emblematic figure of this philosophy, affirmed the ultimate identity of citizens' interests in the general will, to be expressed through the state and reproduced through its institutions.
But Rousseau also upheld the rights of citizens to form voluntary associations in order to carry out their diverse interests. When in the first few years of the twentieth century the state got out of the business of subsidizing religions, it intended to turn religious life over to private associations of French citizens, who would then, in turn, leave schooling to the state. The Catholic Church resisted these measures, and a series of compromises led to new laws extending governmental support to religious buildings and permitting religious private schools-even financing them if they taught the national curriculum. These compromises never fully satisfied those who saw religious institutions as compromising Republican unity. Struggles for women's rights during the 1960s and 1970s were waged against a Church unwilling to allow freedom of control over women's bodies. State support to religious schools continued to excite passions on both sides well into the 1980s.
When, beginning in the 1980s, Muslims sought to follow the example of other religions by forming religious associations, building houses of worship, and seeking state funding for religious schools, they encountered a double source of resistance and suspicion: as one more religious body threatening Republican unity, and as one element in a global movement threatening the West. Were they trying to resist integrating into the rest of French society? Did they harbor values distinct from those held by others in France? To some degree these questions imply a reluctance to acknowledge the degree of religion-based associative life already basic to France, but they also point to the special difficulties faced by Islamic public actors in finding a stable equilibrium between the French rules of the game and a respect for Islamic norms.
Above, I narrowed the book's title question to, What can Muslims can do to create a workable Islamic reality in France? And yet even in this reduced form the question opens up two more specific sets of queries: given the transnational nature of Islamic public reasoning, how far can or should French Muslims adapt the norms and institutions of Islam to local norms and institutions? And how far will they be allowed to follow a Republican path that is itself internally contradictory?
Neither question is limited to France. From Morocco and Nigeria to Pakistan and Indonesia, we find Muslims wrestling with how to adapt Islamic texts and traditions to local, contemporary ways of life. The issue is posed most profoundly for matters of gender equality, religious pluralism, and the right to choose to leave Islam. In Indonesia, for example (where I have worked for many years), some scholars have contrasted what they see as an overly Arabic-cultural and patriarchal bias in Islamic legal teachings to the more gender-equal nature of Indonesian life, and they have drawn on that contrast to develop a new code of Islamic law for Indonesia.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Can Islam Be French? by John R. Bowen Copyright © 2010 by Princeton University Press. Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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Table of Contents
Acknowledgments xiPart One: Trajectories 1
Chapter One: Islam and the Republic 3
Chapter Two: Fashioning the French Islamic Landscape 15
Migration Pathways 16
Residence and Boundaries 19
Religion Rising 21
Authorities 24
State Responses 25
Where to Sacrifice? 27
Where to Pray? 29
Distinctive Features 32
Part Two: Spaces 35
Chapter Three: Mosques Facing Outward 37
In the Unruly Suburbs (Clichy-sous-Bois) 37
Inside the Networks (Saint-Denis) 44
The Work of an Everyday Imam (Lyon) 51
Mosques and Social Divisions 58
Chapter Four: Shaping Knowledge to France 63
Rules, Schools, Principles 63
Hichem El Arafa's CERSI 66
The Science of Hadith 75
The Objectives of Scripture 81
Chapter Five: Differentiating Schools 85
Dimensions of Pedagogical Difference 85
Hichem's View 86
The Great Mosque of Paris 87
Teaching the "Middle Way" 89
Teaching the Four Traditions 92
Objectives and Imam M"lik 95
Foregrounding God's Objectives 96
What Nullifies Prayer--for a Maliki 100
When May a Judge Pronounce a Divorce? 102
Practical Training in an Islamic Ambiance 105
The Future 105
Institute of Useful Knowledge 106
Chapter Six: Can an Islamic School Be Republican? 110
Dhaou Meskine's Success School 111
A Teacher's Trajectory 112
School as Symbol 115
How to Teach a Secular Curriculum in a Muslim School 117
Civics and Gay Couples 118
Religion versus Culture 120
Evolution and Islam? 121
An Islamic Ambiance 124
Muslim Family Camp 125
Arrest 129
Part Three: Debates 133
Chapter Seven: Should There Be an Islam for Europe? 135
Thinking about Riba 137
Different Rules for Different Lands? 143
Confrontations in the Mosque 149
The Transnational Islamic Sphere 153
Chapter Eight: Negotiating across Realms of Justification 157
Between Hal"l and the Hôtel de Ville 158
Why the "Halal" Marriage? 162
Convergence I: From Islam to the Secular 165
The Objectives of Halal Rules for Food 169
Convergence II: From French Civil Law toward
Islamic Practices 173
Chapter Nine: Islamic Spheres in Republican Space 179
Do Religion-Based Associations Impede Integration? 180
Return to School 182
A National Islamic Sphere at Le Bourget 185
On Priorities and Values 188
The Primacy of Secularism 188
"Assimilation Defects" 191
Toward a Pragmatics of Convergence 196
Notes 199
Bibliography 217
Index 227
What People are Saying About This
John Bowen has written one of the most insightful books on Islam in France. He has done extensive field research in the sensitive suburbs of Paris and inside little-known Islamic institutions that are shaping the future of the religion in France. Bowen admirably shows how French Muslims are struggling not for minority status or multiculturalism, but for value pluralism, conciliating the secular Republican tradition while asserting a new faith community.
— Olivier Roy, European University Institute, Florence
"John Bowen has written one of the most insightful books on Islam in France. He has done extensive field research in the sensitive suburbs of Paris and inside little-known Islamic institutions that are shaping the future of the religion in France. Bowen admirably shows how French Muslims are struggling not for minority status or multiculturalism, but for value pluralism, conciliating the secular Republican tradition while asserting a new faith community."—Olivier Roy, European University Institute, Florence"Through a rich ethnography of normative practices such as pedagogies and legal reasonings, John Bowen has produced a rare and invaluable analysis of the making of a French Islam that owes as much to French legal and political constraints as to Muslims' engagement with the Islamic tradition. A required reading for scholars interested in religion and religious minorities in secularist states."—Malika Zeghal, University of Chicago"Can Islam Be French? is utterly fascinating and engagingly written. Together with his previous book, Why the French Don't Like Headscarves, John Bowen has produced an unparalleled oeuvre on Islam in France."—Paul Silverstein, Reed College
Through a rich ethnography of normative practices such as pedagogies and legal reasonings, John Bowen has produced a rare and invaluable analysis of the making of a French Islam that owes as much to French legal and political constraints as to Muslims' engagement with the Islamic tradition. A required reading for scholars interested in religion and religious minorities in secularist states.
— Malika Zeghal, University of Chicago
Can Islam Be French? is utterly fascinating and engagingly written. Together with his previous book, Why the French Don't Like Headscarves, John Bowen has produced an unparalleled oeuvre on Islam in France.
— Paul Silverstein, Reed College