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Instead of fighting systemic racism, France wants to ‘reform Islam’
Another gruesome terrorist attack has intensified anti-Muslim sentiment.
French President Emmanuel Macron walks past the coffin of slain teacher Samuel Paty during a memorial service Wednesday. (Francois Mori/Reuters)
By
James McAuley
James McAuley is Paris correspondent for The Washington Post. He holds a PhD in French history from the University of Oxford, where he was a Marshall Scholar.
Oct. 23, 2020 at 7:27 p.m. GMT+3:30
PARIS
When a terrorist in the Paris suburb of Conflans-Sainte-Honorine beheaded Samuel Paty, a middle school teacher who’d shown his students caricatures of the prophet Muhammad, he was transformed from an educator into a national symbol. Paty is the latest of more than 260 French killed in similar attacks since 2012. As with Jacques Hamel, an 85-year-old priest whose throat was slashed by Muslim fundamentalists in 2016 in a small stone church in the village of Saint-Étienne-du-Rouvray, Paty’s killing was portrayed as an attack on the soul of France. He “has become the face of the republic,” President Emmanuel Macron said at a memorial service Wednesday.
After years of brutal attacks by Muslims who’d been radicalized at the margins of French society, the government has finally had enough. Early this month, Macron unveiled his long-awaited plan: reforming the practice of Islam in France. The proposals would restrict the funds that Muslim communities receive from abroad, supposedly limiting foreign influence, and create a certificate program for French-trained imams, among other things. Paty’s killing made this matter much more urgent. The French Interior Ministry added this past week that officials will target for potential dissolution more than 50 French Muslim associations if they’re found to be promoting hatred, including a mainstream group devoted to combating Islamophobia. Macron wants to build “an Islam in France that can be an Islam of the Enlightenment,” as he put it, and to halt “repeated deviations from the values of the republic and which often result in the creation of a counter-society.”
The objective, backed by popular sentiment, appears sensible: to protect the French from further attacks. “What we need to fight is Islamist separatism,” Macron said. But the method seems designed to solve a different problem than terrorist violence. Instead of addressing the alienation of French Muslims, especially in France’s exurban ghettos, or banlieues — which experts broadly agree is the root cause that leaves some susceptible to radicalization and violence — the government aims to influence the practice of a 1,400-year-old faith, one with almost 2 billion peaceful followers around the world, including tens of millions in the West. It’s an odd answer to the problem (although one that echoes the way Napoleon regulated the practice of Judaism). But it’s perhaps the only one France can contemplate in a universe where it will not commit to measuring the systemic discrimination that fuels so much of the “separatism” it seeks to combat.
European centrists are tacking right on immigration. It’s a dangerous strategy.
The French republic is avowedly laïque, or secular. Enshrined by a 1905 law, this notion forces the state to remain neutral — to neither support nor stigmatize any religion. In the United States, a religiously pluralistic society, the separation of church and state is seen as the freedom to choose one’s religious belief. In France, historically dominated by Catholicism, it is largely understood as the freedom from oppressive religious authority. But this clear and seemingly uncontroversial vision of secularism is a product of a vastly different time, when the country was far more culturally and ethnically homogenous than it is today. At the turn of the century, it was predominantly Catholic, with a small Protestant minority and an even smaller Jewish population. The collapse of the French empire after World War II meant that metropolitan France soon became home to many former colonial subjects and their descendants from North Africa, West Africa, the Caribbean and South Asia. Islam had officially arrived.
With these changes gradually came a new interpretation of laïcité, one that often positions the country against public displays of Islam and that has no basis in the law. After France’s humiliating defeat in Algeria in 1962 — a trauma that remains largely unprocessed — French citizens began to see public traces of Islam as aggressions against the country’s secular essence, even if the state still closes for business on every major Catholic holiday.
Democrats, get a grip: Emmanuel Macron is not your progressive savior
The veil, and where it can be worn, has become one of the most fraught questions in public life. The French often see criticizing its use as a means of liberating their fellow citizens from religious oppression. A law enacted in 2004 prohibits the veil from being worn in high schools, and a 2010 law banned the face-covering burqa on national security grounds. When Muslim women wear the headscarf in public, they often come under fire, even when they do so legally, and even when they attempt to be part of French society. Last year, for instance, then-health minister Agnès Buzyn decried a runner’s hijab marketed by the French sportswear brand Decathlon, because of the “communitarian” threat it apparently posed to France’s secular universalism. “I would have preferred a French brand not to promote the veil,” she said. Likewise, Jean-Michel Blanquer, France’s education minister, conceded that although it was technically legal for mothers to wear headscarves, he wanted to avoid having them chaperone school trips “as much as possible.” These were examples of Muslim women attempting to participate in public life rather than withdraw from it; still, they were censured.
The result of this vitriol, and of prejudice among some White French, particularly on the right, is that many French Muslims do live in the sort of “counter-society” Macron fears, withdrawn from the mainstream — a position not all have chosen. Conservative commentators are not wrong when they call some of the banlieues that surround Paris, Lyon and Marseille “territories lost to the Republic,” in the words of the historian Georges Bensoussan. These communities are often rife with radical interpretations of Islam, anti-Semitism and gang activity that, together, can incubate terrorist violence.
But the question is why these territories have been lost. One explanation is structural. The descendants of immigrants who live in the crowded housing projects often struggle to achieve the social mobility promised by the officially color-blind republic. Applications for jobs and certain housing options can still require pictures, and people of color are often overlooked because of unconscious (or even intentional) bias. When minorities, and especially Muslims, voice opinions critical of establishment dogma, the French press often accuses them of terrorist complicity. In a television debate Wednesday, for instance, the author Pascal Bruckner said the well-known journalist Rokhaya Diallo — whom he identified as a “Muslim and black woman” — abetted the 2015 attack on Charlie Hebdo because she had once signed an open letter against the paper.
Yet despite the public scrutiny Muslims face here, it can also be extremely difficult to prove that discrimination exists. Since 1978, French law has largely prohibited the collection (even by private or academic social scientists) of statistics on race, religion or ethnicity, primarily in response to World War II, when the country’s classification of Jewish citizens made it easier to round them up and deport them. But banning race has not banned racism, and without an empirical basis, it can be difficult to prove where disparities exist and to what extent — let alone to know how to undo them.
Macron’s mission: Rescue France and unite Europe
All of this contributes to the phenomenon of “separatism” in France’s Muslim community, says the Franco-Tunisian scholar Hakim El Karoui, the author of “L’islam une religion française,” a popular 2018 book that influenced Macron’s Islam reform project. Especially among third-generation immigrants, “there is an important minority who have this problem of identity, who don’t feel French — either because they’ve been rejected or because they don’t have the desire,” he said. “Islam fills that void.” The radical and violent version practiced by attackers over the past eight years represents only a fringe of what is thought to be just under 10 percent of France’s population. But it is enough to threaten public safety.
The problem, then, isn’t Macron’s understandable desire to address an actual threat. And his proposed law may block the most toxic strains of foreign preaching from reaching French worshipers, and it may limit the diffusion of hatred on social media, two factors that were thought to have animated Paty’s killer. But these issues are only adjacent to the problem of isolation and anomie that the country has helped to foster — deliberately in some cases, inadvertently in others. The truth is that the counter-society has as much to do with France as with Islam.
The raw anger that Paty’s killing elicited allows little room for reflection. Most French politicians have doubled down on a hard-line interpretation of France’s secularism. Interior Minister Gérald Darmanin went on national television and identified ethnic food in supermarkets as “communitarian cuisine” that fosters the sort of separatist sentiments that led to the attack. Days after Paty’s killing, two female attackers stabbed two Muslim women in headscarves and called them “dirty Arabs” as they walked near the Eiffel Tower. “There is a hysterical climate,” says Rachid Benzine, a French political scientist.
One person who did not share the exclusive vision of secularism was Samuel Paty, who was sensitive to the potential concerns of his Muslim students and who offered anyone in his class who might be offended by the Muhammad cartoons the option to look away. He was clearly fascinated by Muslim culture, signing up for training courses at Paris’s Arab World Institute and organizing an Arab music concert for his students’ benefit. But those aspects of Paty as the “face of the republic” appear already to have been forgotten. He was the victim of an unspeakable barbarity, but he may end up a martyr to someone else’s cause.
Twitter: @jameskmcauley
Read more from Outlook:
Follow our updates on Facebook and
France, the way to Islamic reformation is to challenge institutions — not stigmatize Muslims
French President Emmanuel Macron at the Élysée Palace in Paris on Monday. (Gonzalo Fuentes/Reuters)
Opinion by
Ezzedine C. Fishere
Oct. 20, 2020 at 9:56 p.m. GMT+3:30
Earlier this month, French President Emmanuel Macron announced plans to regulate Islam in France and clamp down on so-called Islamic separatism. His statement drew criticism immediately, obscuring a deeper point. Recent events underscore the need for a reformed reading of Islam. But such reformation will not be brought about by stigmatizing Islam or Muslim communities, as the French president did. What is needed is to challenge Muslim institutions to take a clear position on Islamic jurisprudence justifying violence.
Macron’s speech of Oct. 2 wasn’t supposed to be a criticism of Islam. It was a policy statement about cracking down on “radical Islamist” influence among French Muslims to prevent their transformation into a “counter-republican” community. However, Macron’s bizarre remark that Islam “is in crisis all over the world today” unsurprisingly got most of the attention in the Middle East. The response was swift.
Countless voices in the Middle East and beyond decried French anti-Muslim bias, both now and during its colonial past, and warned that Macron’s remarks would trigger a far-right anti-Muslim backlash. Al-Azhar, Egypt’s leading religious authority, slammed Macron’s “racist” “hate speech” that will “inflame the feelings of two billion Muslim followers” around the world, and “block the path to constructive dialogue.” Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan didn’t miss the opportunity to belittle his French nemesis, with phrases such as “beyond disrespect,” “an open provocation” and “like a colonial governor.”
What was meant to be a debate about combating Islamic radicals in France turned into an outcry against “Macron’s stigmatization of Islam.” Nuanced Muslim voices got lost in the noise.
The Macron fiasco didn’t overshadow the problem of violence in the name of Islam for long. The beheading of a schoolteacher, Samuel Paty, on Oct. 16 for showing his students images of a caricature depicting Islam’s prophet came as a crude reminder of the problem. Calling it an isolated act, as the grand mufti of Egypt did, doesn’t cut it any longer. Nor does the lamentation over French atrocities in Algeria half a century ago. The problem of violence motivated by a certain interpretation of Islam is real.
Twenty-six years before Paty’s beheading, Nobel laureate Naguib Mahfouz narrowly escaped the same fate in Cairo for “insulting Islam” in one of his novels. The attacker who stabbed him was following a ruling by a leading Muslim cleric. Mahfouz and Paty are neither the first nor the last victims of this interpretation of Islam.
Three key premises held by the Islamic Salafist tradition lie at the source of the problem. First, the idea that sovereignty lies with “God,” not the people, restricts the role of legislatures to enacting Islamic law, which is also understood in its most literalist interpretation. Rulers who don’t uphold this principle are deemed idolatrous. Second, Muslims’ “apostasy,” often defined as having a different interpretation of their faith, is punishable by death. Third, when Muslim leaders fail to enact these rules, individual Muslims have a duty, under certain conditions, to carry them out themselves.
These interpretations of Islam underpin most of the violence in its name, since the Egyptian scholar Sayyid Qutb wrote his call for Jihad more than half a century ago, all the way to the Islamic State and “lone wolves” violently punishing those who “insult Islam” today. Islamic institutions such as Al-Azhar often denounce that violence and insist that its perpetrators do not represent “true Islam,” as Egypt’s mufti just did. Yet they rarely address the intellectual foundations of these belligerent interpretations of Islamic texts.
Independent-minded Islamic thinkers have long been advocating more clement readings of Islam, its laws and its relationship with non-Muslims. From Muhammad Abduh in the 19th century to Nasr Abu Zayd, Mohammed Arkoun and many others more recently, thinkers have critically reviewed Islamic jurisprudence to show its emphasis on reason, individual freedom and equality. But religious institutions and movements did not follow their lead. And political leaders, including those of the so-called secular regimes, hedged their bets and walked a fine line between reformers and Salafists. Decades of social, economic and political decay, foreign encroachment and military interventions, along with Saudi support, helped Salafi thought grow. Today, Salafi thought is no longer a fringe: It has penetrated mainstream religious institutions as well as the Islamist movements that had started off as modernist, such as the Muslim Brotherhood.
Those who are interested in promoting a reformist vision of Islam should challenge the foundations of Salafism within these institutions and movements — not “Islam” as a whole, as Macron did, nor the already stigmatized Muslim minorities who are struggling with racism and discrimination in Western countries.
Instead, Islamic institutions and movements should be pressed to come up with unambiguous answers to the key questions that Salafism poses: Does their interpretation of “true Islam” allow Muslims to use violence against others? Does it allow Muslims to uphold modern political institutions and their laws? Does it allow Muslims to live peacefully with people they consider apostates or infidels?
Challenging these institutions and movements will help, not undermine, the debate among Muslims over what Islam is — the debate that will shape the future of Islam.
Read more:
Ezzedine C. Fishere: The Middle East’s leaders are continuing their march to self-destruction
Rokhaya Diallo: French Islamophobia goes global
Ezzedine C. Fishere: Jamal Khashoggi symbolized the promise of reconciling political Islam and democracy
Sonny Bunch: The Charlie Hebdo trial serves as a reminder that we can’t have freedom without solidarity
Nabila Ramdani: France must reckon with its dark history in Algeria. It’s not too late.
Another gruesome terrorist attack has intensified anti-Muslim sentiment.
French President Emmanuel Macron walks past the coffin of slain teacher Samuel Paty during a memorial service Wednesday. (Francois Mori/Reuters)
By
James McAuley
James McAuley is Paris correspondent for The Washington Post. He holds a PhD in French history from the University of Oxford, where he was a Marshall Scholar.
Oct. 23, 2020 at 7:27 p.m. GMT+3:30
PARIS
When a terrorist in the Paris suburb of Conflans-Sainte-Honorine beheaded Samuel Paty, a middle school teacher who’d shown his students caricatures of the prophet Muhammad, he was transformed from an educator into a national symbol. Paty is the latest of more than 260 French killed in similar attacks since 2012. As with Jacques Hamel, an 85-year-old priest whose throat was slashed by Muslim fundamentalists in 2016 in a small stone church in the village of Saint-Étienne-du-Rouvray, Paty’s killing was portrayed as an attack on the soul of France. He “has become the face of the republic,” President Emmanuel Macron said at a memorial service Wednesday.
After years of brutal attacks by Muslims who’d been radicalized at the margins of French society, the government has finally had enough. Early this month, Macron unveiled his long-awaited plan: reforming the practice of Islam in France. The proposals would restrict the funds that Muslim communities receive from abroad, supposedly limiting foreign influence, and create a certificate program for French-trained imams, among other things. Paty’s killing made this matter much more urgent. The French Interior Ministry added this past week that officials will target for potential dissolution more than 50 French Muslim associations if they’re found to be promoting hatred, including a mainstream group devoted to combating Islamophobia. Macron wants to build “an Islam in France that can be an Islam of the Enlightenment,” as he put it, and to halt “repeated deviations from the values of the republic and which often result in the creation of a counter-society.”
The objective, backed by popular sentiment, appears sensible: to protect the French from further attacks. “What we need to fight is Islamist separatism,” Macron said. But the method seems designed to solve a different problem than terrorist violence. Instead of addressing the alienation of French Muslims, especially in France’s exurban ghettos, or banlieues — which experts broadly agree is the root cause that leaves some susceptible to radicalization and violence — the government aims to influence the practice of a 1,400-year-old faith, one with almost 2 billion peaceful followers around the world, including tens of millions in the West. It’s an odd answer to the problem (although one that echoes the way Napoleon regulated the practice of Judaism). But it’s perhaps the only one France can contemplate in a universe where it will not commit to measuring the systemic discrimination that fuels so much of the “separatism” it seeks to combat.
European centrists are tacking right on immigration. It’s a dangerous strategy.
The French republic is avowedly laïque, or secular. Enshrined by a 1905 law, this notion forces the state to remain neutral — to neither support nor stigmatize any religion. In the United States, a religiously pluralistic society, the separation of church and state is seen as the freedom to choose one’s religious belief. In France, historically dominated by Catholicism, it is largely understood as the freedom from oppressive religious authority. But this clear and seemingly uncontroversial vision of secularism is a product of a vastly different time, when the country was far more culturally and ethnically homogenous than it is today. At the turn of the century, it was predominantly Catholic, with a small Protestant minority and an even smaller Jewish population. The collapse of the French empire after World War II meant that metropolitan France soon became home to many former colonial subjects and their descendants from North Africa, West Africa, the Caribbean and South Asia. Islam had officially arrived.
With these changes gradually came a new interpretation of laïcité, one that often positions the country against public displays of Islam and that has no basis in the law. After France’s humiliating defeat in Algeria in 1962 — a trauma that remains largely unprocessed — French citizens began to see public traces of Islam as aggressions against the country’s secular essence, even if the state still closes for business on every major Catholic holiday.
Democrats, get a grip: Emmanuel Macron is not your progressive savior
The veil, and where it can be worn, has become one of the most fraught questions in public life. The French often see criticizing its use as a means of liberating their fellow citizens from religious oppression. A law enacted in 2004 prohibits the veil from being worn in high schools, and a 2010 law banned the face-covering burqa on national security grounds. When Muslim women wear the headscarf in public, they often come under fire, even when they do so legally, and even when they attempt to be part of French society. Last year, for instance, then-health minister Agnès Buzyn decried a runner’s hijab marketed by the French sportswear brand Decathlon, because of the “communitarian” threat it apparently posed to France’s secular universalism. “I would have preferred a French brand not to promote the veil,” she said. Likewise, Jean-Michel Blanquer, France’s education minister, conceded that although it was technically legal for mothers to wear headscarves, he wanted to avoid having them chaperone school trips “as much as possible.” These were examples of Muslim women attempting to participate in public life rather than withdraw from it; still, they were censured.
The result of this vitriol, and of prejudice among some White French, particularly on the right, is that many French Muslims do live in the sort of “counter-society” Macron fears, withdrawn from the mainstream — a position not all have chosen. Conservative commentators are not wrong when they call some of the banlieues that surround Paris, Lyon and Marseille “territories lost to the Republic,” in the words of the historian Georges Bensoussan. These communities are often rife with radical interpretations of Islam, anti-Semitism and gang activity that, together, can incubate terrorist violence.
But the question is why these territories have been lost. One explanation is structural. The descendants of immigrants who live in the crowded housing projects often struggle to achieve the social mobility promised by the officially color-blind republic. Applications for jobs and certain housing options can still require pictures, and people of color are often overlooked because of unconscious (or even intentional) bias. When minorities, and especially Muslims, voice opinions critical of establishment dogma, the French press often accuses them of terrorist complicity. In a television debate Wednesday, for instance, the author Pascal Bruckner said the well-known journalist Rokhaya Diallo — whom he identified as a “Muslim and black woman” — abetted the 2015 attack on Charlie Hebdo because she had once signed an open letter against the paper.
Yet despite the public scrutiny Muslims face here, it can also be extremely difficult to prove that discrimination exists. Since 1978, French law has largely prohibited the collection (even by private or academic social scientists) of statistics on race, religion or ethnicity, primarily in response to World War II, when the country’s classification of Jewish citizens made it easier to round them up and deport them. But banning race has not banned racism, and without an empirical basis, it can be difficult to prove where disparities exist and to what extent — let alone to know how to undo them.
Macron’s mission: Rescue France and unite Europe
All of this contributes to the phenomenon of “separatism” in France’s Muslim community, says the Franco-Tunisian scholar Hakim El Karoui, the author of “L’islam une religion française,” a popular 2018 book that influenced Macron’s Islam reform project. Especially among third-generation immigrants, “there is an important minority who have this problem of identity, who don’t feel French — either because they’ve been rejected or because they don’t have the desire,” he said. “Islam fills that void.” The radical and violent version practiced by attackers over the past eight years represents only a fringe of what is thought to be just under 10 percent of France’s population. But it is enough to threaten public safety.
The problem, then, isn’t Macron’s understandable desire to address an actual threat. And his proposed law may block the most toxic strains of foreign preaching from reaching French worshipers, and it may limit the diffusion of hatred on social media, two factors that were thought to have animated Paty’s killer. But these issues are only adjacent to the problem of isolation and anomie that the country has helped to foster — deliberately in some cases, inadvertently in others. The truth is that the counter-society has as much to do with France as with Islam.
The raw anger that Paty’s killing elicited allows little room for reflection. Most French politicians have doubled down on a hard-line interpretation of France’s secularism. Interior Minister Gérald Darmanin went on national television and identified ethnic food in supermarkets as “communitarian cuisine” that fosters the sort of separatist sentiments that led to the attack. Days after Paty’s killing, two female attackers stabbed two Muslim women in headscarves and called them “dirty Arabs” as they walked near the Eiffel Tower. “There is a hysterical climate,” says Rachid Benzine, a French political scientist.
One person who did not share the exclusive vision of secularism was Samuel Paty, who was sensitive to the potential concerns of his Muslim students and who offered anyone in his class who might be offended by the Muhammad cartoons the option to look away. He was clearly fascinated by Muslim culture, signing up for training courses at Paris’s Arab World Institute and organizing an Arab music concert for his students’ benefit. But those aspects of Paty as the “face of the republic” appear already to have been forgotten. He was the victim of an unspeakable barbarity, but he may end up a martyr to someone else’s cause.
Twitter: @jameskmcauley
Read more from Outlook:
Follow our updates on Facebook and
France, the way to Islamic reformation is to challenge institutions — not stigmatize Muslims
French President Emmanuel Macron at the Élysée Palace in Paris on Monday. (Gonzalo Fuentes/Reuters)
Opinion by
Ezzedine C. Fishere
Oct. 20, 2020 at 9:56 p.m. GMT+3:30
Earlier this month, French President Emmanuel Macron announced plans to regulate Islam in France and clamp down on so-called Islamic separatism. His statement drew criticism immediately, obscuring a deeper point. Recent events underscore the need for a reformed reading of Islam. But such reformation will not be brought about by stigmatizing Islam or Muslim communities, as the French president did. What is needed is to challenge Muslim institutions to take a clear position on Islamic jurisprudence justifying violence.
Macron’s speech of Oct. 2 wasn’t supposed to be a criticism of Islam. It was a policy statement about cracking down on “radical Islamist” influence among French Muslims to prevent their transformation into a “counter-republican” community. However, Macron’s bizarre remark that Islam “is in crisis all over the world today” unsurprisingly got most of the attention in the Middle East. The response was swift.
Countless voices in the Middle East and beyond decried French anti-Muslim bias, both now and during its colonial past, and warned that Macron’s remarks would trigger a far-right anti-Muslim backlash. Al-Azhar, Egypt’s leading religious authority, slammed Macron’s “racist” “hate speech” that will “inflame the feelings of two billion Muslim followers” around the world, and “block the path to constructive dialogue.” Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan didn’t miss the opportunity to belittle his French nemesis, with phrases such as “beyond disrespect,” “an open provocation” and “like a colonial governor.”
What was meant to be a debate about combating Islamic radicals in France turned into an outcry against “Macron’s stigmatization of Islam.” Nuanced Muslim voices got lost in the noise.
The Macron fiasco didn’t overshadow the problem of violence in the name of Islam for long. The beheading of a schoolteacher, Samuel Paty, on Oct. 16 for showing his students images of a caricature depicting Islam’s prophet came as a crude reminder of the problem. Calling it an isolated act, as the grand mufti of Egypt did, doesn’t cut it any longer. Nor does the lamentation over French atrocities in Algeria half a century ago. The problem of violence motivated by a certain interpretation of Islam is real.
Twenty-six years before Paty’s beheading, Nobel laureate Naguib Mahfouz narrowly escaped the same fate in Cairo for “insulting Islam” in one of his novels. The attacker who stabbed him was following a ruling by a leading Muslim cleric. Mahfouz and Paty are neither the first nor the last victims of this interpretation of Islam.
Three key premises held by the Islamic Salafist tradition lie at the source of the problem. First, the idea that sovereignty lies with “God,” not the people, restricts the role of legislatures to enacting Islamic law, which is also understood in its most literalist interpretation. Rulers who don’t uphold this principle are deemed idolatrous. Second, Muslims’ “apostasy,” often defined as having a different interpretation of their faith, is punishable by death. Third, when Muslim leaders fail to enact these rules, individual Muslims have a duty, under certain conditions, to carry them out themselves.
These interpretations of Islam underpin most of the violence in its name, since the Egyptian scholar Sayyid Qutb wrote his call for Jihad more than half a century ago, all the way to the Islamic State and “lone wolves” violently punishing those who “insult Islam” today. Islamic institutions such as Al-Azhar often denounce that violence and insist that its perpetrators do not represent “true Islam,” as Egypt’s mufti just did. Yet they rarely address the intellectual foundations of these belligerent interpretations of Islamic texts.
Independent-minded Islamic thinkers have long been advocating more clement readings of Islam, its laws and its relationship with non-Muslims. From Muhammad Abduh in the 19th century to Nasr Abu Zayd, Mohammed Arkoun and many others more recently, thinkers have critically reviewed Islamic jurisprudence to show its emphasis on reason, individual freedom and equality. But religious institutions and movements did not follow their lead. And political leaders, including those of the so-called secular regimes, hedged their bets and walked a fine line between reformers and Salafists. Decades of social, economic and political decay, foreign encroachment and military interventions, along with Saudi support, helped Salafi thought grow. Today, Salafi thought is no longer a fringe: It has penetrated mainstream religious institutions as well as the Islamist movements that had started off as modernist, such as the Muslim Brotherhood.
Those who are interested in promoting a reformist vision of Islam should challenge the foundations of Salafism within these institutions and movements — not “Islam” as a whole, as Macron did, nor the already stigmatized Muslim minorities who are struggling with racism and discrimination in Western countries.
Instead, Islamic institutions and movements should be pressed to come up with unambiguous answers to the key questions that Salafism poses: Does their interpretation of “true Islam” allow Muslims to use violence against others? Does it allow Muslims to uphold modern political institutions and their laws? Does it allow Muslims to live peacefully with people they consider apostates or infidels?
Challenging these institutions and movements will help, not undermine, the debate among Muslims over what Islam is — the debate that will shape the future of Islam.
Read more:
Ezzedine C. Fishere: The Middle East’s leaders are continuing their march to self-destruction
Rokhaya Diallo: French Islamophobia goes global
Ezzedine C. Fishere: Jamal Khashoggi symbolized the promise of reconciling political Islam and democracy
Sonny Bunch: The Charlie Hebdo trial serves as a reminder that we can’t have freedom without solidarity
Nabila Ramdani: France must reckon with its dark history in Algeria. It’s not too late.
