The riots of banlieues – rethinking ideological secularism
by Dr. Mazeni Alwi
It was amusing that at the height of the riots in the suburbs of Paris, one of France’s largest muslim organizations, reacting to official suggestions that Islamic militants might be orchestrating some of the protests, issued a Fatwa against the unrest. Needless to say this was ignored by the rioters and the violence reached new levels the following night. In modern suburban France, as anywhere else, disaffected youths or youths in general don’t listen to their religious leaders as religion takes a back seat in society. But above all, the riots has nothing to do with Islam, which happens to be the religion of many of the rioting youths.
“As a number commentators have remarked, these riots are a recurrent phenomenon. Even if relative calm returns, the deeper problems revealed by the insurrection of France’s disaffected urban youth won’t go away. The anger and grievances pouring out of the banlieues (suburb) will persist until French society and those who represent it, take the measure of the crisis and become ready for imaginative solutions that go much further than the familiar combination of law-and-order plus financial palliatives” (Patrice de Beer, “The Message in France’s Explosion”, OpenDemocracy.com, 14/11/05).
Until quite recently, people who have never visited France probably still held the idea that the French are a white european people with fierce cultural and intellectual pride, take glamour and chicness as life’s essentials, and have a studied sophistication in tastes. That might still be true of the elite who form a small minority of French society. From France’s football team that won the 1998 World Cup, we know today that it is a country that has many immigrants. Among the banners hoisted above Paris’ famous avenue in the euphoric celebration of that victory read “Zidane for President”. It took something like a World Cup victory to momentarily forget the deep fractures within French society. For the vast majority of France’s black and Arab youths, the only way to lift themselves out of their decaying social environment seems to be an extraordinary gift of talent and prowess in sports. For visitors to France this is not difficult to see. If one takes the RER lines (suburban trains that serve the Paris region) in a North-South direction, one would pass through numerous “nouvelles villes” (new towns) – grim suburban estates, in essence a high-rise wasteland long abandoned by the whites. Today they are mostly inhabited by immigrants from francophone countries of the carribean and sub-Saharan Africa (blacks), and north African arabs. Largely excluded from mainstream society, they are made to survive on their own wits in an environment where rates unemployment, poverty and crimes are high. Accompanying a friend many years ago on an evening visit to an afro-carribean convert to Islam in the suburb of Grigny, one of the recent sites of rioting, I thought I was walking through the set of “A clock work orange”. Unlike many in the estate, my friend’s friend had vocational education and worked as technician. But being divorced and having a teenaged boy living with him, he was naturally very concerned about the future of his son.
Apart from contributing to France’s success in the sporting field, her immigrants and their families have also been a source rich stories of human warmth in literature and film. A delightful recent film “Monsieur Ibrahim et les fleurs du Coran” (Mr. Ibrahim and the flowers of the Quran) narrates the friendship and bonding between a lonely Jewish teenager living with a depressive father and an “Arab” shopkeeper, played wonderfully by an ageing Omar Sharif. The Arab shopkeeper is actually Turkish with an inclination towards Sufism who imparted valuable lessons on life to the Jewish teenager.
In the 1977 hit film “Madame Rosa”, an old Simone Signoret shortly before her death played the role of an ageing Jewish prostitute who rescued an Arab teenager from a life of the streets. She made sure he received a proper education in the hope of getting him into normal society. But such bittersweet stories could perhaps take place in the old vibrant inner city quarters of central Paris.
In the banlieues today, the film “La Haine” (the hatred) is a more accurate representation, which was actually based on the riots of 1991 in Mantes-la-Jolie, an estate in the North West of Paris. It is a film brimming with racial tensions not helped by outbursts of police violence against teenagers from immigrant families in these depressing environments. The film narrates a day in the lives of 3 youths, Vinz a white Jew, Said an Arab (beur) and Hubert, a black African. The 3 friends are shown living by their wits, surviving on petty crimes and small-time drug deals in a housing estate outside Paris. But it was no ordinary day for a riot has just taken place in their estate and a friend was laying in a coma after being assaulted by the police in custody.
Such is the grim reality which condemns a segment of French society, hidden from the hordes of tourists who throng popular Parisian monuments. From time to time it blows its lid in the form or riots. Except that this time it spread to other provincial cities and was only be quelled by invoking an emergency law that was passed during Algerian war of independence.
It hardly escapes anyone’s notice that the French riots of the banlieues came not long after the London bombings. Both are European countries that take in a large number of immigrants from their former colonies but differ greatly in how they each attempt to integrate the newcomers.
In the aftermath of the London bombing an article in Open Democracy.com (29/9/05), “Remaking multiculturalism after 7/7” by Tariq Modood led to a lively debate on the merits and failings of Britain’s multiculturalism policy. For many the bombing is seen as the ultimate evidence of the failure of the policy – something that started as cautious whispers after September 11 which gradually became open pronouncements that eschewed any notion of political correctness even from those who had initially supported the idea. Tariq Madood promoted the idea of improving the policy which has resulted in relatively successful ethnic pluralism, by making progress towards the goal of multicultural equality and acceptance, and embracing plural ways of belonging to Britain, developing what he termed “multicultural Britishness”, as he wrote in a book published just before 7/7 “Multicultural politics : Racism, Ethnicity and Muslims in Britain”. Given the ambitiousness and optimism of Modood’s vision and enormity of the 7/7 tragedy, needless to say many were cautious or even skeptical. But even before Modood’s article, Gilles Keppel, a Professor at the Institut d’Etudes Politiques in Paris and an expert on political Islam, derided Britain’s multiculturalism policy. Britain’s 7/7 and the murder of film director Theo Van Gogh in Netherlands, the other champion of multiculturalism in Europe, are very good reasons to question and abandon the policy for something that perhaps the whole of Europe need to embrace – the French model. “France was ridiculed abroad when Bernard Stasi’s commission recommended a ban on the display of all religious symbols in schools and when the advice was implemented by law. This policy has since excited the interest of observers … . These observers remark that the combined results of secularism, conscious integration and a preventative security policy in France – the inverse terms of multiculturalism, has meant the country has been spared terror attacks for a decade” (Europe’s answer to Londonistan, OpenDemocracy.com, 24/8/05).
In the many analyses on the 3-week riots of the banlieues that spread to France’s major cities, a number of Keppel’s compatriots would not agree with his indicator of successful integration of immigrant population (especially muslims) – the absence of terror attacks. In the first place, even if such terror attacks have not occurred on French soil, France is not free from producing people who are accused of being terrorists. A small number of inmates at Guantanamo are French nationals, and the alleged twentieth hijacker of September 11, Zacharia Moussaoui, is also one.
Quite refreshingly, after the recent riots there appears to be much more readiness among French commentators themselves to question the ideological foundation of the French state – la?cit? (the French term is used to distinguish it from the secularism practiced in modern states such as Britain and Germany to accommodate political and religious pluralism). They argued that it is not a rosy as Keppel had painted it. Central to this state principle is concept of “republican values” or “republican virtues” where France trumpets its model of colour blind equality. This ideological framework of “integration” of foreign immigrants in the mould of republican egalitarianism have worked with previous waves of immigrants who shared European features, culture and religion, i.e. the Italians, Spaniards, Portuguese etc. “But a conjunction of massive immigration from France’s former colonies in Africa and the Arab world and large scale unemployment of the 1990’s has made it unmarkable, obsolete, even harmful – for it blinds the society to the reality that no longer fits the state’s founding principles” (De Beer as above). Human impulses, good or bad, like a sense of community and belonging among people sharing the same faith or culture among non white immigrants, and on the other hand among a small minority of white French people – the impulses of racism, xenophobia and lingering islamophobia in the European psyche that had its origins in the conflict between Islam and Christianity in the medieval times, were things that the founding fathers of la?cit? did not take into consideration when they constructed the grand vision of a la?que republic. For poorly educated migrants from Algeria escaping poverty and oppression at home, “republican virtues” is just too abstract a concept.
La?cit? as state ideology is deeply ingrained among the French political establishment (both left and right) and its intellectual elite. “France’s political culture makes it impossible for anyone who does not completely embrace the values of the republic to access the public sphere. The problem is that defenders of human rights and anti-racists tend to belong to that very French group of “intellectuals” whose lives in the affluent centres rarely coincide with those in the distant banlieues. France’s public education system instills a belief that the values of liberty, equality and fraternity are universally accessible through a principle of meritocracy. The logic is that those who fail to find a place in the system are professing anti-republican values such as the much dreaded communautarisme of which France’s religious muslims are accused” (the Intifada of the banlieues, by Alana Lentin, OpenDemocracy.com, 17/11/05).
That together the London bombings and the riots by France’s disaffected youths have stimulated a somewhat intense questioning on the meanings of secularism, pluralism, tolerance and integration in europe is a welcome development. But these issues are just as valid almost any where else in this modern age of migration and globalization. For muslims, either as a minority group or in countries where they form a majority, understanding these issues are also crucial, for they’re at present in the sustained, intense gaze of others for reasons that may be justifiable or otherwise.
While muslims in Britain may complain that not enough is being done and they suffer exclusion from mainstream society as their French co-religionists do through to a far less degree, the picture of Abu Hamza Al Misr (now in detention fighting extradition to the US) giving Friday Khutba in the streets with messages of hate towards the west while the London police on the sidelines maintained the peace has become a caricature of British multiculturalism that rightly drew criticisms from people like Gilles Keppel. The radical group Al Muhajiroun and its leader Omar Bakri for far too long had been allowed to spew rhetorics of hate, that it took a tragedy the magnitude of 7/7 to do something radically sensible about it.
The law of the separation of Church and State which forms the basis of France’s ideological secularism (la?cit?) and its republican values was passed a hundred years ago in 1905. The overwhelming vote in Parliament recently for the law on religious signs that bans the hijab from French state schools seemed to indicate that this founding principle is unassailable. Hence the lively debate that challenged this sacred republican principle by a number of French commentators themselves in the wake of the riots the banlieues is as unprecedented as it is refreshing.
1905, the law was passed to curb the power and influence of the Catholic Church in public affairs. Part of the impetus was the way the Church had exerted its influence, alongside the military establishment and the nationalist elite in the “Dreyfus affair” (Alfred Dreyfus was a Jewish officer in the French army who was accused of spying for Germany) that had bitterly split French society. In that historical context, the victory of the republicans and the birth of French style secularism was a victory for moral politics, justice and fairness. At its centenary, as French society has been radically transformed by large scale immigration of muslims and black Africans, the ravages of the new economy – that very secularism has become a cover for institutionalizing “exclusion” of those who are not welcome, those unable to pass the test of republican virtues. Before 2004 the courts had uphold the right of girls to wear headscarves in school. Today they had to create a new law to ban them.
Now that calm has returned to the banlieues, will the questioning of this seemingly ideological secularism also die down? As the political landscape is rapidly transforming in Turkey, the other bastion of ideological secularism, and the world becoming increasingly borderless, we could hope for a more sober form of secularism as an instrument of politics for managing and accommodating diff?rence.
Dr. Mazeni Alwi