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French Lessons in Londonistan

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February 23, 2010
Gilles Kepel [2]

MUSLIMS HAVE been landing on the

shores of Britain and France for decades. And, as these populations arrived and settled in
the Republic, Paris pursued a policy it believed would eventually lead immigrants to full
cultural integration into French society. Meanwhile, London, facing a similar influx of
foreigners, attempted to create a full-fledged multicultural polity. The former emphasized
that what was shared between the new arrivals and their native hosts was crucial, their
differences secondary. The latter argued that the British needed to respect the uniqueness
of their immigrant neighbors-whether national, religious or ethnic-and that such a stance
was at the core of a harmonious political system. In color-blind France, built on a long
tradition of a strong, centralized state and the successful assimilation of southern and
eastern Europeans-who have been migrating to the country since the nineteenth century-
religious identity was not to interfere in public life. Under the French tricolor, state and
nation were fused into the cradle of the one and indivisible Republic. In race-aware Britain,
with Anglicanism as its established church, there was always room for different
nationalities-English, Welsh, Scottish, Irish-under the Union Jack.

The French and British experience as colonizers-and the ways in which those under
imperial rule would come to see their occupiers-haunt the place of Muslim immigrants on
both sides of the Channel. The Moslems of the British Raj lived as a minority among
Hindus and struggled to maintain a separate identity through religious movements like the
Deobandis (founded in India in 1867 and ancestors of the present-day Taliban). The
political economy of the Raj was based on communalism, with Hindus, Sikhs and Muslims
(and Sunni and Shia) fighting against each other. London fanned the embers of religious
discord to keep military expenses low and the number of redcoats at a minimum. Divide
discord to keep military expenses low and the number of redcoats at a minimum. Divide
and conquer.

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

The French colonies were something altogether different. Unlike the Deobandis of India,
North and West Africa possessed no similar religious movements that struggled to
maintain a separate Islamic identity in the face of a hostile non-Muslim majority. The
French policed, at a high cost, every village of Algeria and Senegal, just as the gendarmes
did in Provence and Corsica. Thus, France's immigrants were ignorant of the kind of self-
imposed apartheid that could be transported and implemented on French soil. The North
and West Africans who migrated to France after World War II came from Muslim-majority
countries and felt no need to enhance their religious peculiarities. Bachelors perceived
themselves as temporary migrants. Families, most of them coming from Algeria, had no
special claim to be religiously different. And after the end of the Algerian War in 1962,
immigrants quietly and smoothly acquired the French citizenship to which they were
entitled-to the furor of their leaders back home. For the musulmans who comprised a
majority of the French colonial empire, the best possible future, according to the dominant
French narrative, was to become French one day.

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

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

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

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

THE IMPERIAL experience serves as a backdrop to the markedly contrasting ways that
London and Paris have approached the immigration dilemma. France has created an
intermingled culture, which is being forged on a daily basis between the native Gaul and
the immigrant Arab and Berber. It revolves around two French obsessions: the bed and
the dinner table. Your average young Muslim girl is interested in living and having children
with a French gouer, a North-African colloquial term meaning "infidel"-i.e., non-Muslim.
(Gouer is itself a corruption of the classical Arabic kuffar, used in immigrant slang to
designate a French native. They are also known as fromage, or "cheese"-ironically the
same synecdoche that was used in the neocon-coined "cheese-eating surrender
monkeys.") These women would loathe the very idea of an arranged marriage to a fellah
(peasant) cousin from the far away bled (North Africa) with his unrefined manners and
pedestrian French. By the same token, the most popular national dish of France-the
country of gastronomy par excellence-regularly confirmed by opinion polls, is couscous,
the semolina-based traditional dish of North Africa, now fully assimilated by French
palates. And even beyond the confines of culture and marriage, what is Catholic France's
holy trinity of the most popular heroes, in survey after survey? The soccer player Zinedine
Zidane (of Algerian-Berber descent), tennis player Yannick Noah (of mixed Cameroon-
Alsatian descent) and filmmaker Dany Boon (of North-African-Muslim descent), who
converted to Judaism at the time of his wedding to his Sephardic wife.

For the most part, this emphasis on integration-though not without its faults-has worked
pretty well in France. Western Europe's biggest "Muslim country" (the current numbers
hover around 6 million people) has not seen a successful terrorist attack on its territory
since 1996. All plots were uncovered; their perpetrators jailed or deported. An efficient
intelligence service, well trained in Arabic and Muslim politics, played an important role,
and special legal rules-such as the ability to keep terror suspects in custody-allowed for
great ad hoc efficiency. 1 This successful counterterrorism policy could never have worked
without the cultural acquiescence of the vast majority of French citizens and residents of
Muslim descent. They cooperate because they would simply never trade their decades-
long effort and investment in becoming full-fledged French citizens-even in the face of
latent xenophobia and social discrimination-for the vagaries of Islamist radicalism, which
would make all of them suspect, and offer a political space for the extreme Right.

Much of this French success has to do with how the term "Muslim" is used in political
parlance, where the preference is for expressions like "of Muslim descent" or "from Muslim
culture." This stems from the French notion of laïcité-loosely translated as "secularism"-
which has been a backbone of French culture ever since its implementation under the
Third Republic in the early twentieth century. To resist the overwhelming influence of a
Vatican-aligned, reactionary Catholic church that interfered in both education and politics,
the French government passed a law separating church and state in 1905, severing the
historic link between Paris and Rome. The French conception of religion in the public
sphere is thus quite different from the ascriptive understanding of religion found in Britain
or America-a difference illustrated by the fact that the British national census asks
respondents to define themselves in religious terms. By contrast, its French laïque
counterpart merely defines religion in sociological and cultural terms, provided the
concerned individuals agree on that identity to which they are, by the by, entitled to be
indifferent-even hostile.

Thus, in France, a community that would encompass all "Muslims" a priori is politically
impossible-and without that, there can be no political brokers or "community leaders" who
monopolize representation of "Muslims" (or at least pretend to do so). This was no more
evident than in the French government's attempt to reconcile the differences between
Islamic factions by creating the French Council of the Muslim Faith (CFCM) in 2003. The
hope was to make peace between different Islamic groupings so as to facilitate the free
exercise of Muslim religion, organize pilgrimages to Mecca, ensure access to halal
foodstuffs in the army, corporations and restaurants, and build mosques by which
practicing Muslims would have the same rights and advantages as believers in other
faiths. At the same time, then-Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy, who professed an "open"
understanding of laïcité that relied more on religious leaders as role models, wanted to use
the CFCM as a go-between with practicing Muslims. 2 But the differences between Islamic
factions, be it because of their doctrinal tenets or the fierce competition between the
foreign states that influence some of them (Algeria, Morocco, Saudi Arabia, Iran, etc.),
never allowed the CFCM to emerge and find a role that would resemble other united
religious mouthpieces, whether the Bishops' Conference or the Representative Council of
French Jewish Institutions (CRIF). Overall, the dominant narrative in France has always
been to be French first and foremost. Religious identity continues to take a backseat to
citizenship in the Republic.

IN THE UK, things were happening quite differently. From the beginning of mass migration
in the 1950s, British Muslims organized as such and started to establish mosques on
British soil. The segregated experience of the Muslim community under the Raj was
duplicated in Britain, except this time the majority population was not Hindu, but the white
English working class with its beer-on-tap-and-bacon culture. Meanwhile, intra-Muslim
sectarian and denominational strife led different groups to create their own enclaves. The
Deobandis wanted to have their own places of worship, as did the Barelvis, a Sufi-oriented
sect considered heretic by its rivals, with a special reverence for the Prophet Muhammad.
The same went for the Ahl-i-Hadith, a puritanical group close to Saudi Wahhabism. When
British authorities tried to provide brick-and-mortar mosques to replace makeshift prayer
rooms, they faced upheaval. The Deobandis, for instance, refused to pray behind a Barelvi
imam who sang the praises of the Prophet in terms the Deobandis saw as close to
idolatry, and things degenerated into fistfights as the disparate sects tried to control the
pulpit in the so-called cathedral mosques. Though this might seem to echo Sarkozy's futile
attempts to mediate between the different Muslim groups in France, there is one key
difference: for British Muslims, that religious identity has always come before all others,
whatever the infighting between different sects may be. In France, it was the wide array of
available identities-Islamic, Algerian, working class, unionized, leftist, laïque and what
have you-that made the concept of Muslim categorization secondary at best.

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

It is this insular Muslim practice that led to Salman Rushdie's The Satanic Verses; a frontal
attack on that immigrant seclusion. The book aimed to undermine it with a vitriolic criticism
of the religious tenets of Islam. In particular, it mocked the Prophet and his many wives,
describing his abode as a brothel. Though the names were changed, and the novel was a
work of fiction, Rushdie wanted to rock the foundations of British-Muslim life, and force his
coreligionists to reconsider their self-segregation and begin to integrate into British
society. But his ambitious project backfired. Far from serving as a liberating cri de coeur,
The Satanic Verses only reinforced the grasp of radical mullahs on their communities. The
parochial old-timers who knew little English and who had no real interaction with British
authorities (except when they traded their vote banks for community control) proved
incapable of taking up Rushdie's challenge. And they gradually were replaced by better-
groomed, younger preachers, some of whom had links to radicalized international Islamist
organizations.

The book burning of The Satanic Verses by the Bradford Council for Mosques in front of
the city hall of that derelict Yorkshire Victorian city in 1989 was originally intended to
express to the larger public the pain and suffering of Muslims who felt insulted by
Rushdie's blasphemy of the Prophet Muhammad. But it produced quite the opposite effect
on TV viewers: book burners were seen as fanatics performing an auto-da-fé tantamount
to the Spanish Inquisition or Nazi Germany, and they got no sympathy from the press.
British perceptions of Islam's fanatical response were cemented a month later on February
14, when Ayatollah Khomeini sent a valentine to Britain in the form of a fatwa condemning
Rushdie, his publishers and his translators to death. The leader of the Islamic Republic
was attempting to regain his status as the champion of oppressed Muslim masses
worldwide-a status that had been seriously challenged by the victory of U.S.-backed Sunni
jihadists in Afghanistan, who had compelled the Red Army to pull out of the country on the
following day-February 15. On the British political stage, the infamous fatwa meant that all
of a sudden, the UK (and the rest of Europe and the world by the same token) had
become part of a virtual Dar al-Islam (abode of Islam) where the rules of sharia-or Muslim
God-inspired law-would apply, punishing blasphemy (or, for that matter, "insult to the
Prophet") with death.

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

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

NEVERTHELESS, 1989 was also a watershed year for Islam in France, and it pinpointed
the difficulties of the traditional republican and cultural-integration model. While the French
were supposed to be celebrating the two hundredth anniversary of the fall of the Bastille
and the triumph of Enlightenment, and the rest of the world was focused on the end of the
Communist era, the French press was obsessed with an entirely different affair. Three
teenage female pupils of Muslim descent had entered their classes at a middle school in a
northern Paris banlieue wearing hijabs, the Salafist "Muslimwear" that was steadily
imposed on Muslims worldwide-through the expansion of Wahhabism and the Muslim
Brother subculture-into the expression of Islam in the public sphere. 3 This piece of cloth
placed hijab-wearing French public-school students in a cultural cluster and separated
them from their classmates-on the basis of a proclaimed religious identity.

It seemed the decades-long French philosophy of laïcité had come back to haunt the
country. Its detractors saw this policy as insensitive to cultural differences. And this view
was not confined to Muslims in France. Americans and Brits alike mocked the country as
closed to the other, draped in the rags of its past glory, an obsolete singleton in a
globalized world. And the goal of cultural integration was lambasted as "assimilation"-a
term with particularly bad connotations, no more so than in some Jewish circles, where it is
tantamount to "cultural genocide." The stakes were high, the debate highly political. Both
the French branch of the Tablighi Jamaat-an Indian Islamist movement preaching cultural
seclusion from the non-Muslim environment-and the local Muslim Brothers supported the
girls, and in the case of the latter, used the affair to pretend that they were the choice
representatives of a "Muslim community" that was in the making on French soil. They
changed their name from the Union of Islamic Organizations in France (UOIF) to the Union
of Islamic Organizations of France, in an attempt to show the professed new stage the
group had reached in its process of asserting Islamic identity in France. As one of its
leaders explained to me, they no longer considered France a land of temporary residence
for "Muslims"; many now called it home. Hence, it was no more a part of Dar al-Solh (or
"abode of contract"), a foreign territory where Muslims could stay temporarily and where
sharia was irrelevant. It had become part of Dar al-Islam, where sharia applied for Muslims
who so wished.

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

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

The question then for Paris was whether "liberty" should come first, or was education to
provide a space free from political, religious and similar statements-based on the other
tenet of the Republic: "equality"? When the UOIF and their fellow travelers from the
multicultural Left-along with the allies they made on that occasion among the Catholic
clergy, Protestant pastors and some conservative rabbis-made their claim in the French
public sphere, they used the political language of freedom. They cast themselves as the
opposition to the authoritarianism of the Jacobin, laïque fundamentalist, assimilationist
state. Some Islamist militants even took to the streets wearing a yellow star under their
hijab or beard, implying they were persecuted like the Jews had been by the Nazis (that
line was difficult to carry on and introduced confusion into the minds of some otherwise
anti-Semitic and anti-Israeli radicals). Yet, when Muslim youths were instructed to wear
the hijab by the Tablighis, Salafis or Muslim Brothers, it was not a matter of freedom, but
of religious obligation. Notwithstanding such internal contradictions (of which the French
press and public debate were largely unaware), the hijab affair poisoned the educational
environment. Endless litigation and demonstrations that benefited radicals who portrayed
themselves as victims of state repression followed. However, in spite of all this apparent
distaste for laïcité, in the end there was very little support for the hijab cause, and certainly
no mobilization of an improbable "Muslim community" that the UOIF and its ilk wanted to
bring to life. The fact that during this time the Algerian civil war-which subsequently spilled
over into France-was fully aflame, and still French Muslims largely ignored the call to
jihad, is the starkest evidence of how little sway these radicals held over the so-called
Muslim community.

SUCH WAS the backdrop for 9/11 on each side of the Channel. In France, the trauma of
the Algerian civil war-with the casualties caused by Algerian-linked terrorism on French
soil, the terrible death toll in Algeria itself, and the political and military defeat of Islamist
insurgents in 1997-had three main consequences. First, there was little love lost on the
part of French citizens or residents of Muslim descent for the kind of radicalism and
terrorist attacks they had both experienced and suffered. In France, 9/11 was viewed as
Act II of the same play. Second, the repression of the Islamist rebels in Algeria had
destroyed networks and movements that might otherwise have spilled over into France.
And third, French security and intelligence forces were trained in vivo to trace and
eliminate Islamist terrorist networks. They had a sound, direct and on-the-spot knowledge
of such groups and of their international connections, and state policy would not allow
foreign radical Islamists to obtain political asylum in France.

In the UK, on the other hand, where Muslim communities were organized and represented
by leaders and brokers who had sizable followings, the state had minimal direct interaction
with such populations, mirroring the days of the Raj when communalism was a mode of
government. As opposed to the French, who had banned foreign Islamist leaders from
entering their country, British authorities granted asylum to a vast array of them-including
the Egyptian Abu Hamza al-Masri (aka, "Hook"), Abu Qatada al-Filistini from Palestine,
Syria's Abu Musab al-Suri and many others-who acted as important contributors to the
production and dissemination of Salafist-jihadist literature, and audio, video and Internet
propaganda. All were veteran jihadist fighters from Afghanistan in the 1980s who had
supported jihad in Egypt, Algeria, Bosnia and Chechnya in the 1990s. They created an
underworld of sorts, labeled "Londonistan" by the Arab press.

Their presence in Britain was rationalized; politicians argued that the former jihadists
would abstain from radicalizing local British-Muslim youth. The asylum seekers were
Arabs, the British Muslims were from the subcontinent, so it looked as if there would be a
major cultural gap between them in any case. More so, continuing the long-held British
tradition, cultural identification of Muslim communities with their new homeland was by no
means a priority in the multicultural-tinged "cool Britannia" of the Blair years. More than
ever, Muslim immigrants retained ties to their countries of origin-something that would
prove disastrous as Pakistan experienced a steady Talibanization from the mid-2000s
onward, and Britons of Pakistani descent visited the country every year to revive family
networks, shop for consorts for their children and partake in the political strife of Pakistan.
Worse, an activist minority spent time in radical madrassas of the Deobandi sect, and in
the training camps of the Taliban and other jihadist guerillas.

BUT THIS is not to say that all was well in France. The hijab issue remained an irritant,
and in the spring of 2003, then-President Jacques Chirac convened a committee of
experts, the Stasi Commission (named for its president, French politician Bernard Stasi,
and of which I was a member), to examine whether laïcité was threatened, and how to
deal with the issue in a society much changed from the Third Republic that mandated
separation of church and state almost a century before. The commission recommended
that the wearing of ostentatious religious signs (whether it be hijab, cross or yarmulke) be
forbidden in schools benefiting from state funds (public or private). The ban was limited to
students who were minors. Once in college or university, they were deemed mature
enough to dress as they liked.

The hijab prohibition was met with incomprehension. Paris passed the law in the spring of
2004 to take effect in September, a decision that produced an outcry in Islamist and
multiculturalist circles worldwide. In France, the UOIF organized demonstrations that were
widely covered and hyped on Al Jazeera-where a Muslim Brother was at that point editor
in chief. In late August, the "Islamic Army in Iraq" took two French journalists hostage, and
threatened to kill them unless the "anti-hijab law" was rescinded. Much to the surprise of
those who believed the Al Jazeera coverage, the wide majority of French citizens of
Muslim descent supported the hijab ban. Many took to the streets and went on the air to
express their total rejection of a terrorist group that had hijacked their voice. And the UOIF
was compelled to backpedal, its spokeswoman offering on TV to take the place of the
hostages so that her hijab would not be tainted by innocent blood. That was the end of the
hijab turmoil. To date it is no longer worn in schools, and the UOIF decided to drop its
efforts to overturn the law (in any case, its campaign has lost steam since 2004).

So France's policy of laïcité seemed to be vindicated. But a year after the 2004 hijab
dispute, the banlieues outside Paris exploded in violence. It was as if all the French had to
say for the success story of their cultural-integration model fell short. Upward social
mobility was nowhere to be found for many of the migrant youth living in the banlieues-the
only contemporary French word that has since made its way into international idiom and
needs no translation! 4 When young people of migrant descent (some, but not all, Muslims)
started burning cars in these infamous neighborhoods in the autumn of 2005, it provided
Fox News with vivid coverage ("Paris Is Burning") filled with "Muslim riots" and "Baghdad-
on-the-Seine" nonsense. Meanwhile, pro-war-on-terror pundits ridiculed then-President
Chirac and then-Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin for their opposition to the Iraq War
using a chickens-come-home-to-roost logic. Yet all academic studies in the aftermath of
the riots amply demonstrated that they had little if anything to do with Islam per se;
instead, they were due to a lack of social integration and economic opportunities. The
rioters wanted to get the public's attention drawn to these issues-a far cry from any urge to
establish a radical "Islamistan" in the banlieues. The riots, then, were an appeal for further
social integration, something that the same controversy-ridden Stasi Commission
understood well, and proposed to deal with via new urban planning to destroy the ghettos
and the institution of Yom Kippur and Eid al Kabir as school holidays-these and other
attempts to respect diversity were summarily ignored.5 Media interest soon moved on to
the next story, and there was little public awareness of these findings.

IN BRITAIN, where Tony Blair had planned to invade Iraq since 2002 alongside George
W. Bush, the prime minister felt confident that government support of domestic Islamist
communalism would grant him immunity from British-Muslim criticism of the "invasion of a
Muslim land by infidel armies," and would not lead to retaliation in the form of jihadi-
inspired terrorist action. Alas, this was not to be. Pakistani radical networks lambasted
British (and American) policy. So too did al-Qaeda and the Taliban. Scores of these
British-Muslim activists, who had spent time in the Taliban's schools and camps, rallied to
the extremist cause. Deputies of radical Islamist groups in the UK stopped all collaboration
with British authorities, and as Her Majesty's security services' grassroots knowledge of
Islamist whereabouts had relied to a large extent on community leaders, there were
suddenly a number of blind spots in the general surveillance of radical groups and
individuals, particularly in provincial areas removed from London. Agencies discovered
belatedly that the Arab luminaries of Londonistan had learned English and were bonding
with the subcontinental English-speaking youth from Bradford to East London. This
dangerous environment provided the background for the July 7, 2005, attacks. The suicide
bombings in London were perpetrated by English-educated British Muslims from
Yorkshire. Their prerecorded will, broadcast by al-Qaeda and introduced by no less than
Ayman al-Zawahiri, starred the chief of the group, Mohammed Siddique Khan, declaring in
heavily accented working-class Yorkshire English that he was a fighter in the war against
infidels who had invaded Iraq and Palestine. By the end of July 2005, another suicide
attack was narrowly avoided. In the summer of 2006, a major plot to bomb transatlantic
flights between London and New York with liquid explosives was foiled at the eleventh
hour. In 2007, another plot half-succeeded when a car laden with explosives (which failed
to detonate) barreled into the entryway of the Glasgow airport.

Since 2007, and Tony Blair's departure, there has been a major review of British policy.
The government of Gordon Brown has painstakingly tried to fashion a concept of
"Britishness" as part of its "deradicalization" policy aimed more at integrating Muslim
youths into the wider British community. The shift from multiculturalism coupled with the
intelligence-agencies-issued report Preventing Extremism Together definitely brings
policies on both sides of the Channel much closer than they ever were in the past. The
issue of social-cum-cultural integration remains a crucible for populations of Muslim
descent as they seek to identify politically with their Western country of residence,
adoption and, increasingly, birth.

AS THE United States now faces home- grown terrorism, in the form of Nidal Hasan's Fort
Hood massacre and the "underwear bomber" Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab's near
detonation of a plane bound for Detroit, it is certainly worthwhile to analyze Europe's
relationship with its Muslim residents in a less patronizing way than was the case both in
the warmongering parlance of the neocons and President Obama's naive Cairo speech
last year. While the present administration just granted a long-denied entry visa to Islamist
intellectual Tariq Ramadan, and so seems to be following the Tony Blair model (which
counted on Ramadan to pacify the Muslim ranks in Britain after 7/7, that is, until the prime
minister and the preacher had a falling out), it might indeed be wise to evaluate the
European experience in all its dimensions. The "special relationship" may not be all that is
on offer. Old Europe has, after all, been the neighbor of the Muslim world, has colonized
some of it and now has integrated part of that world into its very identity. While some
predict that, in a few decades, Europe will be but the northern part of the Maghreb, one
may equally surmise that North Africa and the Middle East will be far more Europeanized.

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

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

2 In his visit to Saudi Arabia in January 2008, President Sarkozy addressed the Saudi
Majlis al- Shura (nonelected Parliament), praising religious figures-including imams-for
their role in society, one that he considered unmatched by secular educators and the like.
Though it is true that the French state-school system is undergoing a crisis with regard to
its former central role toward cultural and social integration of youth from all walks of life
and inherited cultures, the advocacy of its replacement with religious figures was met with
an uproar in many French circles.
3 Wahhabism is a puritanical understanding of Islam that follows the teachings of
Muhammad Ibn Abd al Wahhab, a late-eighteenth-century preacher. Wahhabis alinged
their sect with the Saud family, allowing for the creation of the Saudi Arabian state. It was
marginal in the wider Muslim world until oil wealth fuelled its export as a means to fight
socialism in the postwar Arab and Muslim countries. "Wahhabis" prefer to call themselves
"Salafis" ("following the ancestors," i.e., strictly observant of pristine Islam). They abhor
any kind of worship of a human being. But all Salafis are not Wahhabis. The society of the
Muslim Brothers was founded in Egypt in 1928, with the political aim of establishing a
Muslim state, abiding by sharia laws. In spite of their diverse interpretations of Islam,
Wahhabis, Salafis and Muslim Brothers share the same subculture that makes the tenets
of Islam permeate every dimension of daily social and cultural life.

4 In 1987, when I published a study on Islam in France entitled Les banlieues de l'islam
(Paris: Editions du Seuil), I had to translate the title as "The outskirts of Islam" to make it
understandable to the English-speaking public, and explain that such outskirts were not
suburbia, rather "inner cities" (UK) or "ghettos" (United States). All that confusion stopped
when Anglophone media pundits started using banlieues as a catchword for lambasting
French policies of integration, in particular during and after the so-called "Muslim riots" of
the fall of 2005. See chapters 4 and 5 of my Beyond Terror and Martyrdom (Cambridge,
MA: Harvard University Press, 2008) for more information.

5 Though the French government foolishly rejected the commission's proposals at the
time, it subsequently espoused a number of the Stasi Commision's additional policy
suggestions. By then it was too late to affect the situation.

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

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