Is France’s radical view of secularism hindering the fight against terrorism?

Just over five years ago, in Paris on the evening of Friday 13 November 2015, in three almost simultaneous attacks, terrorists claiming to act in the name of Islam killed 130 French citizens. Ninety died and a hundred were injured at a rock concert in the Bataclan theatre; several died at the Stade de France where France and Germany were playing a friendly football match; and others died or were maimed in attacks on cafés. Only eleven months had passed since another Da’esh-inspired group attacked the magazine Charlie Hebdo, and a Kosher supermarket, taking seventeen lives. 

Then came a wave of “lone wolf” atrocities – the worst in 2016 when a 19-tonne truck ploughed through Bastille Day crowds on the Nice seafront, killing 86 and injuring 458. Since November 2019, there have been ten such further attacks – some at random, others aimed at Christians and priests. France feels that it is a nation whose very identity is threatened by these assaults on its way of life. Last week President Macron re-affirmed in speeches that laïcité, a radical form of secularism, is the essence of French identity and that the Muslim community must conform to a “Charter of Republican values”. But is this definition of French identity a solution to the problem of terrorism or a provocation?

“All my life I have held a certain idea of France.” “Toute ma vie, je me suis fait une certaine idée de la France”, wrote General Charles de Gaulle as the opening sentence of his first volume of war memoirs, (The Call) L’Appel:1940-1942. The General, reflecting his own heroic martial virtues, was always preoccupied with grandeur. So President Macron’s somewhat grandiose deportment and attempts to muster the French people around the Republican flag against terrorism, is not unprecedented. But he can’t reinvent himself as de Gaulle any more than Boris Johnson can reinvent himself as Churchill. Macron needs his own idea of France. And he found what he needed to hand: republican values and laïcité, the backbone of French identity.

A few years ago, at a government interfaith conference in Pristina, capital of Kosovo, I gave a well-received talk which very gently suggested that banning the headscarf, hijab, in state schools was a bad idea. Towards the end of lunch, I was informed that the French ambassador wanted to speak to me. I was escorted to her table where she delivered a long harangue on the oppression of Muslim women. According to the ambassador, Muslim women were oppressed by Islam and did not wish to wear the hijab. Laïcité liberated Muslim women and was civilisation’s answer to backward religious practices. No ifs or buts, no room for dialogue or nuance. I’d just encountered “une certaine ideé de la France”. A rather different emphasis from de Gaulle’s, but foreshadowing Macron’s.

France’s population contains Western Europe’s largest Muslim minority. The Pew Research Foundation puts the number of Muslims in France, mainly from North Africa but also from the Middle East, at 5.7 million which makes them 8.8 per cent of the population (the CIA estimate is between 7-9 per cent). Of these about 100,000 are converts. 

In France, the hijab is the subject of long running controversy. President Chirac extended an existing government ban on all wearing of ‘ostentatious religious symbols’ in state schools to every secondary education establishment and this was quickly voted into law in March 2004. In 2010, full-length burqās and face-concealing niqābs, which barely left wearers’ eyes visible, were banned from public places. In August 2016, the mayor of Cannes opened up a beachhead in the apparel-wars with a ban on “burkinis”, body- concealing swimsuits, a ban upheld by the French Council of State which presumably viewed them as un-Republican. Criticism of this ruling from non-Muslims has been ineffectual.

In the middle of November this year, the French Council of the Muslim Faith (CFCM), under growing pressure from Macron, announced its proposal for a National Council to vet foreign-born imams. Macron plans additional legislation this December to ban home-schooling and to monitor mosque finances. This is laïcité in practice. It’s not the procedural secularism, the separation of church and state, as in the US. And it’s not secular Britain with its established church where very few would consider the Jewish kippa or a head-scarf or a cross an “ostentatious” religious symbol – though occupational restrictions by employers involving wearing of crosses have been upheld in court. The difference is that French secularism, enshrined legally in law separating church and state in 1905, is prescriptive and ideological.

But in September, the French Minister of Education, Jean-Michel Blanquer, did attempt to formulate an inclusive female standard of dress de façon républicaine (in a republican fashion) for state schools. He condemned both short skirts – indécence – and the wearing of hijabs by mothers accompanying school trips. The anti-clericalism of the French Revolution is shown in France’s hostility to religion in the public domain. There is no acknowledgement that culturally the hijab for many Muslims is an expression of modesty, just as longer skirts are for non-Muslims.

In France, since 9/11, conflict over women’s dress seems to be in step with the growth of terror in the name of Allah. And it is easy to assume that ‘conspicuous’ religiously approved clothing is somehow a link in a causal chain leading to violence, as well as being a breach of laïcité that undermines the foundations of the Fifth Republic. Such a view may indeed coincide with the social perceptions of French governments. But not with the perceptions of France’s disadvantaged and increasingly alienated Muslim communities, who are bombarded with extremist recruitment material online, and who protest against their government’s hardline laïcité.

Such a preoccupation with how women dress does not easily admit to reasonable distinctions. Seeing the face of a person is a major part of human communication, not just a security concern. In this sense the niqāb and burkā which seclude and exclude women – unlike the hijab – are anti-social and might reasonably be considered a direct challenge to French values, more a form of what Macron calls “separatism” than an expression of modesty and dignity. France’s adopted Lithuanian Jewish philosopher of ethics, Emmanuel Lévinas, a champion of dialogue, symbolically grounded his idea of ethical human relationships in face-to-face encounters. 

Britain’s Muslim communities, unlike France’s, trace their roots to the Indian sub-continent and Britain’s approach to cultural differences has been less doctrinaire than France’s. But we have had our own tragedies and failures. The 2017 Manchester bombing in which 22 died still has the power to shock. So we can readily and deeply empathize with our friends across the Channel. Multi-culturalism is no panacea. There are dangers of social divisions and tolerating what should not be tolerated. But because we aren’t deducing policy from a rigid set of ideological principles, we are able to see what works and what doesn’t, and, at best, adjust policy to changing circumstances. France’s tragic losses suggest that the answer to the failures of laïcité is not more laïcité.

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