Muslims in France: The Quest for Social Justice

Alec G. Hargreaves is director of the Winthrop-King Institute for Contemporary French and Francophone Studies at Florida State University.

 

 

Since the early 1980s, public debate in France has been punctuated by a series of flashpoints, urban myths and scare stories in which the nation’s Muslim minority—the largest in western Europe—has been portrayed as a threat to the fabric of French society.

 

In 1983, Socialist prime minister Pierre Mauroy claimed that striking automobile workers, many of whom were North African immigrants, were being “stirred up by religious and political groups motivated by factors which have little to do with labour relations”.¹ Later the same year, Jean-Marie Le Pen’s extreme-right party, the Front National, made its electoral breakthrough on a platform claiming that immigration from mainly Islamic countries was a threat to French national identity and the cause of every ill afflicting the nation, including rocketing unemployment. In 1989, a wave of media and political hysteria was whipped up around the wearing of Islamic headscarves in French state schools. Typical of this hysteria was a manifesto issued by a group of intellectuals who declared that acceptance of the headscarf amounted to “the Munich of the republican school system”, suggesting that girls wearing the headscarf were a beachhead for some sort of Islamic fascism threatening to occupy France in the way that the Nazis had done during the Second World War. In 2004, President Jacques Chirac pushed through parliament a law banning the headscarf from French state schools on the grounds that “the wearing of the veil is something aggressive that they [the French] find hard to accept”.²

 

Most, if not all, of these claims were baseless. They occluded not only the true disposition of by far most Muslims in France but also the willingness of a growing proportion of the majority non-Muslim population to accept the Muslim minority as a legitimate part of the nation. In the analysis which follows I will suggest that where tensions exist between Muslims and the rest of the population in France these arise more commonly from the denial of social justice than from a fundamental incompatibility between Islam and the French Republic. 

A Fragmented Population 

The number of Muslims in France is not known with certainty. Because the state prohibits the collection of census data based on ethnic or religious criteria, social scientists can only estimate the size of religious groups by factors such as the nationality of residents and responses to opinion polls and similar surveys. The most reliable current estimates put the Muslim population at between four and five million, around 7 or 8 per cent of the national population of just over sixty million. The majority of Muslims have their origins in the former French North African colonies of Algeria, Morocco and Tunisia, collectively known as the Maghreb. Other sizeable groups originate in former French West African colonies and in Turkey. Relatively few come from the Middle East, the historic heartland of Islam and home to some of the most radical forms of contemporary Islam.

 

The settlement of France’s Muslim minority is largely a consequence of post–Second World War labour migration. Until the 1960s, the vast majority of labour migrants in France came from predominantly Catholic countries in Europe. Labour shortages during the post-war economic boom years prompted an influx of immigrant workers from Africa, especially from formerly colonised territories in the Maghreb which had recently gained their independence from France.

 

In the face of concerns over rising unemployment resulting from the oil shocks of the 1970s, the French government attempted to halt and indeed reverse migratory flows from North Africa and other Third World regions. These efforts were largely unsuccessful. Fearing that if they left the country they would not be allowed to return, many migrants from North Africa decided to bring into France wives and children who until then had remained in their countries of origin. Paradoxically, therefore, attempts at encouraging or forcing repatriation had the effect of stimulating permanent family settlement in place of what until then had been temporary labour migration.

 

Until the late 1970s, most labour migrants from predominantly Muslim countries had made little attempt to establish religious infrastructures in France. With the rise of permanent family settlement came a rapid growth in Islamic places of worship and related organisational initiatives.

 

These initiatives were in general quite fragmented. Mosques—many of which were in reality improvised prayer rooms in the basements of apartment blocks or disused buildings—sprang up in an unplanned way in response to the local needs of Muslims in towns and cities scattered across France. When, in the 1990s, government ministers decided it would be beneficial for them to have a unified Islamic organisational body with which to liaise, they found it almost impossible to persuade competing mosques and federations of Muslims to construct such a body.

 

It was not until 2003 that the then interior minister, Nicolas Sarkozy, succeeded in persuading the main Islamic federations to hold elections to a unified body known as the “Conseil Français du Culte Musulman” (French Council for Islamic Worship—CFCM). Most of the CFCM’s General Assembly seats were divided between four federations, three of which were dominated by Muslims of Algerian, Moroccan and Turkish origin respectively; the fourth, generally regarded as the most radical, was the “Union des Organisations Islamiques de France” (Union of Islamic Organisations in France—UOIF), which is close to the Egyptian-based Muslim Brotherhood. Since its creation in 2003, the CFCM has been to a considerable extent paralysed by ongoing dissensions between these rival federations. 

A Generational Transition 

Unlike in the United States, where a large proportion of Muslim immigrants have come from professionally qualified backgrounds, in France most Muslim labour migrants have been illiterate, unskilled workers filling low-paid jobs that the majority ethnic French were no longer willing to do. Few of these migrant workers had the skills, resources or determination to build Islamic organisations in their adopted country of residence. When such organisations began to spring up from the late 1970s onwards, they depended for much of their staffing and resources on imams (prayer leaders) and finance brought in from the immigrants’ countries of origin or from other parts of the Islamic world, notably oil-rich Gulf states such as Saudi Arabia. This helped to fuel fears among French political elites that the Muslim population in France might fall under the sway of foreign governments or Islamic organisations.

 

In the meantime, a second generation of Muslims was emerging in France. Born of immigrant parents, they faced circumstances very different from those of the older generation. Where their fathers had come to fill jobs in a booming economy, members of the younger generation found themselves cold-shouldered by employers who, amid a background of steadily rising unemployment in the 1980s and 1990s, discriminated against them in favour of “French”, i.e., white, job-seekers. Unlike their parents, the younger generation of Muslims were in fact French citizens and, educated in France, they had largely espoused the secular values dominant there, but this gave them little protection against discrimination by members of the majority ethnic population.

 

With the long-term entrenchment of unemployment and discrimination, the second and later third generations of Muslim heritage split into three main camps. Relatively small numbers of talented individuals were able to break through the barriers placed in their way. Examples include writer and sociologist Azouz Begag, who from 2005 to 2007 served as France’s first cabinet minister of North African immigrant origin; athletes such as Zinedine Zidane, a member of France’s victorious soccer team in the 1998 World Cup; and, more recently, Rachida Dati, appointed justice minister by Nicolas Sarkozy following his election as president in 2007. Many more who aspired to succeed in French society—including unknown numbers of comparable talents—constituted a second group which, unlike the first, was denied job and other opportunities and was condemned to fester in the banlieues, socially disadvantaged multi-ethnic neighbourhoods which have erupted periodically in riots pitching disaffected minority ethnic youths against police forces perceived as guardians of an unjust social order.

 

The most serious disturbances of this nature occurred in November 2005 following the deaths of two youths of Muslim heritage fleeing a police identity check in the north-eastern Parisian banlieue of Clichy-sous-Bois. Contrary to the claims made by a number of politicians and intellectuals, there is no record of any of the 2005 rioters having spoken or acted in pursuit of an Islamist agenda. In fact, all of the evidence collected by independent researchers and by the government’s own intelligence organisations pointed unequivocally to the conclusion that the young rioters were protesting against poverty, ethnic discrimination and police harassment. Far from seeking an Islamic alternative to French consumer society, they were protesting against their exclusion from opportunities to fulfil the largely secular and materialistic values which they had embraced alongside their majority non-Muslim peers.

 

In despair of finding acceptance in French society, a third group—much smaller than either the first or the second—has turned to radical Islamist alternatives. The clearest example of this was Khaled Kelkal, a second-generation Algerian raised in the banlieues of Lyon, France’s second-largest city, by immigrant parents who, while Muslims, had no connections with radical Islamist groups. Kelkal was shot dead by the police after becoming the prime suspect in a wave of terrorist bombings carried out in France in 1995 by Islamists working under the orders of the Groupe Islamique Armé (GIA) in Algeria.

 

Kelkal’s background typifies the difficult circumstances in which many second-generation Maghrebis grew up. The son of an immigrant worker who lost his job when Kelkal was in his late teens, his schooling was interrupted when he was arrested and imprisoned for theft. After serving his term, Kelkal was unable to find stable employment. Throughout his childhood and adolescence, he felt excluded and marginalised. It was in prison that he turned to Islam, guided by a Muslim cell-mate who helped him learn to read and write in Arabic. What Kelkal valued in Islam was above all a sense of community that had hitherto been denied him. He now felt part of a universal Islamic brotherhood united by mutual respect and shared religious faith.

 

In 1992, Kelkal was interviewed by a German sociologist. In the course of the interview he said that, having found inner peace in Islam, he now felt there was no role for street riots and other forms of violence of the kind which had flared up earlier in the banlieues of Lyon.³ He died three years later with a revolver in his hand in a shoot-out with police who had found evidence of his involvement in the murderous 1995 bombing campaign conducted in Paris and Lyon, for which the GIA claimed responsibility.

 

As Kelkal did not live to testify in court, the details of his apparent shift from Muslim pacifist to Islamist terrorist are unclear. A very clear pattern emerges, however, from the trials of other young Maghrebis involved in terrorist groups associated both with the 1995 bombings in France and with Islamist attacks carried out the previous year in Morocco. In both cases, young men from immigrant families disaffected by a seemingly endless cycle of disadvantage and discrimination in France were recruited by Algerian or Moroccan Islamists engaged in armed struggles against Maghrebi regimes judged to be enemies of the true Islamic faith. 

Anti-Semitism 

Social grievances appear to have weighed more than religious considerations in a sharp rise in recorded incidents of anti-Semitism in France which, significantly, began in the autumn of 2000 following the outbreak of the second intifada, pitching young Palestinians against Israelis in the occupied territories. Until then, the vast majority of victims of racist attacks in France had been Maghrebis. Beginning in 2000, recorded acts of anti-Semitism outnumbered those against Maghrebis. Rises in anti-Semitic attacks showed a close correlation with events in the Middle East, such as the start of the second intifada, the launching in 2002 of Israel’s “Operation Defensive Shield” and the beginning of the Iraq War in 2003. According to police data, while most anti-Semitic attacks in the rise recorded in 2000 were committed by “persons of Arabo-Islamic origin”, such people have been responsible for only a minority of anti-Semitic attacks in subsequent years.⁴ In 2004, a government-commissioned report found that anti-Semitic attacks were rooted in a French version of what the American anthropologist Oscar Lewis called the culture of poverty:

 

The “new” form of anti-Semitism thus appears to be more varied than is supposed by those who regard it as a peculiarly Maghrebi phenomenon arising naturally from events in the Middle East … [Y]oung people of other ethnic origins (Africans, West Indians and even Franco-French) may, via a form of identity construction derived from the culture of poverty, come to identify with the Palestinian cause and even convert to Islam and engage in anti-Semitic attacks.⁵

 

Shortly after the 11 September attacks on the United States in 2001, the IFOP polling company conducted a survey among a representative sample of Muslims in France. It found that 57 per cent had a good opinion of Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat, compared with only 12 per cent for al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden. Respondents also disdained Saddam Hussein, who, with only 22 per cent holding a good opinion of him, was viewed almost as negatively as George W. Bush, regarded favourably by 21 per cent. Only Israeli prime minister Ariel Sharon was viewed more negatively, with just 9 per cent reporting a good opinion of him.⁶ These data suggest that when Muslims in France identify with those in the Middle East, they are motivated more by a thirst for social justice than by a doctrinal commitment to Islamism.

 

While small numbers of young Muslims in France have taken an Islamist path that leads in extreme cases to acts of terrorism, these are very isolated instances and appear to be different in motivation from more frequent, lower-level forms of violence such as the burning of cars, the stoning of police stations and the scrawling of anti-Semitic graffiti. The distinction between Islamism and pro-Palestinianism is of crucial importance here. Where Islamist terrorism betokens a desire to destroy the prevailing social order in France and replace it with one based on Islamic law, pro-Palestinianism generally signals a desire for greater social justice through reform rather than replacement of France’s secular republic. 

Muslim Republicanism 

Numerous other indicators show that the vast majority of Muslims in France accept the constitutional principles of the Republic, including in particular the separation of the state from religious bodies. In preparation for the creation of the CFCM, all the participating bodies signed a declaration supporting laïcité, the French term signifying the separation of the state from religious organisations, a principle codified by law in 1905 and subsequently enshrined in the constitution of the Fifth Republic. Numerous surveys conducted among Muslims in France have found that the vast majority of them respect the code of laïcité and feel that the values of Islam are compatible with those of the French Republic.

 

In a survey conducted during the first Islamic headscarf affair in 1989, two-thirds of Muslims said they should not benefit from any special legal status in France. By 1994, the proportion holding that view had risen to almost four-fifths.⁷ Two years later, a survey among a sample of respondents of Third World immigrant origin, many of them Muslims, found that a large majority wanted their children to attend a secular French state school rather than schools teaching the customs or religious beliefs of their ancestors.⁸ There was clearly a wide recognition that for their children to advance in French society, they needed to be equipped with the tools of its secular education system. It was equally apparent that many Muslims found France a more comfortable society in which to live than the authoritarian and often corrupt states from which they had migrated.

 

The Islamic headscarf affairs, which first erupted in 1989, have often been wrongly understood to signify a fundamental incompatibility between Muslims and republican principles. Such a reading is deeply flawed for two main reasons. First, until the law was deliberately changed in 2004 to make the headscarf illegal in state schools, French courts consistently ruled that it was permitted by the code of laïcité. This was found, for example, in 1989 by the Conseil d’Etat, France’s highest administrative court, which noted that the law of 1905 guaranteed the right of religious expression in public places to all except representatives of the state, who, unlike users of public services, were required to observe strict neutrality.

 

In conformity with the right of freedom of religious expression, crucifixes and kippas had long been worn in state schools by Catholic and Jewish pupils respectively. Such attire was perfectly lawful, as was that of girls wearing headscarves, unless it was used to proselytise or disturb public order, thereby infringing the code of laïcité. Numerous court rulings from 1989 onwards confirmed that wearing the headscarf was permitted as an act of religious expression and did not in itself constitute an act of proselytism or a threat to public order.

 

Second, far from wishing to challenge the code of laïcité, most Muslims in France favoured a more restrictive approach towards the headscarf than was required by prevailing legal norms. During the first Islamic headscarf affair in 1989, 45 per cent of Muslims questioned in an IFOP survey said they were opposed to allowing girls to wear headscarves in French public schools, compared with 30 per cent in favour. During the second upsurge of the affair in 1994, the proportion of Muslims in favour of allowing headscarves to be worn in state schools was found to have fallen to 22 per cent, while 44 per cent were opposed.⁹ This support for tighter restrictions on the headscarf than were required by the laws on laïcité was quite at odds with the notion that Muslims were generally unwilling to recognise the separation of the state from organised religion.

 

The small number of girls wearing headscarves in state schools was further evidence of the marginal significance of this phenomenon in relation to the broad mass of Muslims in France. The original Islamic headscarf affair was sparked off in 1989 when the head teacher of a junior high school in Creil, fifty kilometres to the north of Paris, expelled three pupils for refusing to remove the garment while in class. In attempting to restore a sense of proportion, Socialist prime minister Michel Rocard observed that 350,000 other girls from Muslim families were attending state schools without wearing headscarves.

 

Each time the affair was stirred up by public figures hostile to the headscarf—initially in 1989, again in 1994 when the education minister, François Bayrou, unsuccessfully attempted to ban the headscarf without the legal authority to do, and once more in 2003–4 when President Chirac decided to push through an anti-headscarf law—the small number of girls wearing the garment increased, apparently in reaction to what was perceived as discriminatory treatment of Muslims. According to Education Ministry data, the number of girls wearing headscarves in school probably peaked at around two thousand at the time of Bayrou’s intervention in 1994. In the spring of 2003, just before Chirac announced the creation of a special commission paving the way for anti-headscarf legislation, the Education Ministry put the number of schoolgirls wearing headscarves at fewer than two hundred, the lowest figure for many years. This number rose in response to Chirac’s action but it still remained an extremely small proportion (well below 1 per cent) of the total number of girls of Muslim heritage attending state schools.

 

The promulgation of the anti-headscarf law in March 2004 was accompanied by intense media speculation about the possibility of widespread civil disobedience by Muslims when the ban took effect in the autumn of that year. In late August, a few days before the beginning of the new school year, an Islamist group in Iraq kidnapped two French journalists, demanding that the French government rescind the new law in exchange for the release of the captives. All the major Islamic organisations in France, including the reputedly radical UOIF, reacted by immediately condemning the kidnappings and ending any talk of civil disobedience in defiance of the headscarf ban.

 

When schools reopened in September 2004, about six hundred girls attempted to defy the law. Their numbers quickly dwindled, falling to just three in September 2005. Two months later, youths in the banlieues took to the streets in the most serious civil disturbances seen in France in almost forty years. Contrary to the largely fictive notion of an Islamic challenge to republican principles, the riots of 2005 were rooted in a much more real contradiction between the motto of the Republic—Liberty, Equality, Fraternity—and the widespread discrimination suffered by France’s mainly Muslim post-colonial minorities. 

Exploiting Islamophobia 

Until the disturbances of 2005, public debate about discrimination had been largely drowned out by periodic eruptions of hysteria over the alleged threat to French society posed by the settlement of Muslims. For decades, political elites had either denied the existence of racial and ethnic discrimination or had taken ineffectual measures against it. Their de facto acquiescence in discriminatory behaviour was reflected in skyrocketing unemployment rates among youths in the banlieues. In the poorest of the banlieues, where minority ethnic groups are concentrated, male youth unemployment (all ethnic groups combined) rose from 26 per cent in 1990 to 44 per cent in 1999. There is strong evidence to suggest that unemployment rates are higher still among minority ethnic youths, notably those of North African origin: around 40 per cent in the early 1990s and 50 per cent or more today. In the face of this, political elites have seriously misjudged policy priorities, acquiescing in and sometimes stirring up Islamophobia while failing to address crucial issues of social justice.

 

After two decades of steadily rising unemployment, since 1997 the national jobless rate in France has been gradually declining. Improved economic conditions for the mass of the population—but not for those living in the banlieues—have been accompanied by a significant softening of majority attitudes towards immigrant minorities, notably those of Muslim heritage.

 

In 1992, the Maastricht Treaty committed all European Union member states, including France, to grant voting rights in local and European elections to residents holding the citizenship of EU countries. Public opinion was at first strongly opposed to granting similar rights to non-EU citizens (mainly immigrants of African origin) but gradually shifted, and by the early years of the new century there was a clear and rising majority in favour of granting voting rights to all foreign residents, including non-Europeans. A growing proportion of the majority population was also willing to accept the idea of their town’s having a Muslim mayor.

 

This trend appears to have been largely unaffected by the Islamist terrorist attacks conducted in the United States in September 2001. In the spring of 2003, public support for an anti-headscarf law was at an all-time low. The huge wave of anti-headscarf hysteria unleashed in the summer of 2003 by Chirac’s creation of a commission paving the way for a headscarf ban reversed this trend, pushing up support for such a law and driving down support for voting rights for non-Europeans.

 

This wave of hostility in turn affected attitudes among Muslims. In January 2004, with parliament about to outlaw the headscarf, an opinion survey found for the first time that a small majority of Muslims was opposed to such a measure, where previously a majority had supported it. Hostility to the new law was particularly strong among the youngest Muslims in the survey, aged 18–24. Bearing in mind that very few Muslims were actually wearing headscarves, it seems likely that opposition to the law had more to do with a feeling that it was discriminatory in nature than with enthusiasm for the headscarf as such. Other indicators—most obviously the riots of 2005 and a considerable body of survey data—also suggest that while the underlying trend among the majority population has been towards greater acceptance of Muslims, minority youths have become increasingly disaffected by entrenched socio-economic inequalities and the discriminatory treatment they believe has been meted out to them by the Republic.

 

Disaffection of this kind was a key factor in the riots of 2005, which spiralled out of control when the then interior minister, Nicolas Sarkozy, described unruly youths in the banlieues as “racaille” (scum). During his successful campaign for the presidency in 2007, Sarkozy lost no opportunity to play on negative stereotypes of Muslims. In his first major television appearance of the campaign, Sarkozy declared that France must not permit polygamy or the slaughtering of sheep in apartments, crudely trading on a threadbare urban myth according to which Muslims had to be restrained from procuring halal meat by ritually slaughtering sheep in their bathtubs. Later, when his Socialist rival, Ségolène Royal, appeared to be gaining on him in the polls, Sarkozy got a bounce by promising that, if elected, he would set up a “Ministry of Immigration and National Identity”, a statement widely understood to mean that he would protect French identity from the “threat” of immigration from predominantly Muslim countries. In almost every major speech of the campaign, including his victory speech after defeating Royal in the final round of voting, Sarkozy spoke of the need to protect “abused women throughout the world” and vowed in particular that he would never abandon “women forced to wear the burqa”.

 

Like almost all French politicians, Sarkozy denies being Islamophobic. A master tactician skilled in making promises to virtually every interest group in the nation, no matter how apparently contradictory these promises may appear, he publicly prided himself on appointing Muslim préfets (senior civil servants) while interior minister and, virtually alone among leading politicians, he claimed to favour “positive discrimination” (a French version of affirmative action) to assist disadvantaged minorities. Yet, just like his predecessor, Chirac, from whom Sarkozy claimed to represent a clean break, he has never hesitated to recycle negative stereotypes of Islam when this has appeared politically advantageous. In so doing, Sarkozy, like Chirac before him, is one of many politicians who individually and collectively bear a heavy responsibility for misleading the general public in France about the nature of the nation’s Muslim minority. 

An Integrated Minority 

Despite their exploitation for electoral purposes, Muslims in France feel more in tune with the society in which they live than do those in other major west European states. A comparative survey conducted by the Pew Research Center in 2006 found that among Muslims in Europe, the proportion considering themselves to be first and foremost citizens of their country of residence and secondarily Muslims was far higher in France than in Britain, German or Spain. The proportion feeling that they wanted to adopt national customs instead of remaining distinct from mainstream society was also very much higher in France than in the other countries surveyed. Muslims in France, as indeed in the other three countries, said they were more concerned about unemployment than about religious or cultural issues.¹⁰

 

Political elites who have misrepresented Islam and neglected the social injustices suffered by Muslim minorities may have found it electorally beneficial to do so but in the long run this has been deeply damaging to social cohesion. While Islamophobia is undeniably present in France, the often ignored underlying tendency among the general population has been towards greater acceptance of Muslims. Yet, in the absence of firm action to redress socio-economic inequalities and fight discrimination, there is a danger of renewed rioting in the banlieues or of further cases of disaffected youths falling under the spell of violent Islamist movements. Politicians need to reassess their priorities accordingly so that the nation as a whole may be better served.

 

 

Endnotes

 

 

1. Pierre Mauroy, interview in Nord-Éclair, 27 January 1983.

 

2. “La leçon de M. Chirac à M. Sarkozy dans un lycée de Tunis”, Le Monde, 7 December 2003.

 

3. “Moi, Khaled Kelkal”, interview by Dietmar Loch conducted 3 October 1992, published in Le Monde, 7 October 1995.

 

4. Commission Nationale Consultative des Droits de l’Homme, La Lutte contre le racisme et la xénophobie, 2004 (Paris: La Documentation française, 2005), p. 48.

 

5. Jean-Christophe Rufin, Chantier sur la lutte contre le racisme et l’antisémitisme (Paris: Ministère de l’Intérieur, 2004), p. 17.

 

6. IFOP poll in Le Monde, 5 October 2001.

 

7. IFOP surveys in Le Monde, 30 November 2024 and 13 October 1994.

 

8. CSA survey in Le Nouvel Observateur, 17 October 1996.

 

9. IFOP survey in Le Monde, 13 October 1994.

 

10. Pew Global Attitudes Project, “Muslims in Europe: Economic Worries Top Concerns about Religious and Cultural Identity”, Pew Research Center, Washington, D.C., 6 July 2024 [http://pewglobal.org/reports/display.php?ReportID=254].