Why do so many French Muslims now want to leave?

Soumaya has worn the hijab since she was an adolescent. After moving to France a year ago, hostility to her Islamic headscarf has prompted the Moroccan student to remove what she considers to be a mark of her faith and cultural identity.

Veiled Muslim women account for most cases of Islamophobic physical aggression, according to data from The Collective for Countering Islamophobia in Europe. Islamophobia frequently combines racial, religious and gendered discrimination, with women making up 81% of the victims of Islamophobic acts in 2022.

Successive French governments have been clamping down on Islamic religious symbols in public spaces, citing laïcité, the country’s tradition of legally enforced secularism. In his previous role as education minister Gabriel Attal, France’s new Prime Minister, introduced a classroom ban on the abaya, a long robe worn by women in parts of North Africa and the Middle East. This marks the latest in a series of prohibited garments since the 2004 law banned symbols including headscarves, kippahs and large crosses from public institutions.

The majority of bans in recent years have targeted Islamic dress, and the heightened visibility of women who wear a headscarf means they are disproportionately impacted by laicité laws, says Professor Juliette Galonnier, a sociologist at Sciences Po, Paris. Among French private employers, only 42% approve of women wearing a headscarf to work, according to a 2015 study by Inagora, which provides consulting advice on religion in the workplace.

For Soumaya, removing her hijab outweighed missing out on opportunities for jobs, internships, and visits to French state buildings with her university course. All these opportunities would otherwise have been out of reach because of what she refers to as “the piece of tissue on my head”.

After the French Revolution, the separation of church and state was crucial to the new Republic, and symbols of the Catholic faith were banned in public spaces. Originally laïcité was supposed to be about the rejection of the political dominance of the Church in favour of liberal values and freedom for French citizens.

However, the law has now developed to focus on Islam rather than Catholicism, says Galonnier, citing debates around the abaya, modest clothing, turbans and beards which have come to the forefront of laïcité policy in recent years. This shift is a result of the historically secular Left being joined by a more conservative group, who were initially anti-laïcité when it targeted Catholicism, but now oppose Muslim symbols, says Galonnier, “not because it is religion but because it is Islam.”

Because of its recent focus on Islam, laïcité is accused by many Muslims of sanctioning Islamophobia and anti-Muslim prejudice. Institutional Islamophobia is even causing Muslims to leave the country, according to Olivier Esteves, a Professor researching immigration and ethnicity at the University of Lille. Of French Muslims who have moved abroad, 70% did so “to face racism and discrimination less frequently”, according to Esteves’ survey of 1074 participants.

The alienation of Muslims from their French identity was also highlighted by the survey. Only 8% felt they were “perceived as French” whilst in France, whereas 35% feel they have been perceived as French since leaving. Participants “rediscovered their Frenchness” (French identity) abroad, says Esteves, as it was no longer a “subject of contest and negotiation”.

The widespread discrimination against Muslims in France makes the prospect of moving abroad appealing, according to Salah, a 22-year-old French Muslim. He recalls how an unknown man verbally assaulted his mother, unprovoked, in a French supermarket about a month ago. “He said the hijab was a disease that Oriental people have,” Salah says. “It made me so angry.”

Displaying an active symbol of Islam, like Salah’s mother and sister, can prevent individuals from advancing in the workplace. Almost two-thirds of women who always wear a veil are “inactive” (ie. not working, looking for a job, or studying) according to a 2023 report from the Toulouse School of Economics. This compares to less than 20% for non-veiled women, “indicating significant barriers to integration linked to the veil,” said the researchers. “My sister takes her hijab off for work,” says Salah. “She knows she can’t work in our small town in the countryside in the South with her hijab.”

But Salah has also experienced his own forms of racism in France. He has decided to leave: “I want to work in another country. I don’t want to live in France any more.”

He recalls a particular experience during Ramadan when he was on a train from Paris back to his home in the South of France. It was after sunset and time for Salah to eat, so he placed his bag on the table in front of him. Before settling down he went to check on a friend in another carriage, but when he returned he found his bag surrounded by security checking for a bomb threat. This was an incident he thinks was connected to his Arabic origins, as he recalls multiple experiences of being regarded with suspicion which he says are not familiar to his white French peers.

“I am in a strange situation,” he says with a dry laugh. “I am not Moroccan and I am not French. I grew up thinking I was French, but now with the climate in France, it cannot be possible for me to even feel like I’m French.”

Identity struggle was a common occurrence for those interviewed in this report. “Many of us grew up learning in the French system, and now we are left wondering, what is the point in learning a language and being in a culture that will always see you as less,” says Passainte, an Egyptian woman who was educated at a French international school in Egypt and now studies Law at Pantheon Sorbonne in Paris.

Passainte does not plan to stay and work in France, a country she “hates”. While there she has felt uncomfortable enough to omit the part of her name (“Mohammed”) which would identify her as both Arab and Muslim.

Highly educated Muslims like Passainte, who is preparing for her PhD application next year, are leaving France at an ever-increasing rate, according to Esteves. He asserts that a combination of discrimination within the job market and the restrictions of laicité laws mean France is paying to train and educate its Muslim population before losing them to less discriminatory countries like the UK and Canada.

The image of a woman in a hijab heading up the Canadian work permit site illustrates this dynamic at work. This is a “direct attempt” says Esteves, to encourage alienated young professionals in France to bring their skills to the more tolerant Canada, where hijabi women are the face of the new immigrant workforce.

“Ultimately in France, you have a situation where Islamophobia is stronger than capitalism, whereas in other countries capitalism is larger than Islamophobia,” says Esteves. Islamophobia, like any form of discrimination, is, as Esteves puts it, “bad for business”.

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