Postcolonial minorities in Britain and France: In the hyphen of the nation-state 9781526108302

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Postcolonial minorities in Britain and France

Postcolonial minorities in Britain and France In the hyphen of the nation-state S HA IL JA S HA R MA

Manchester University Press

Copyright © Shailja Sharma 2016 The right of Shailja Sharma to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. Published by Manchester University Press Altrincham Street, Manchester M1 7JA www.manchesteruniversitypress.co.uk

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ISBN 978 1 7849 9399 3 hardback

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One becomes a refugee if one is persecuted, expelled, and driven away from one’s homeland; one becomes a minority if the political majority in the polity declares that certain groups do not belong to the supposedly “homogeneous” people … (Seyla Benhabib, 2004. The Rights of Others: Aliens, Residents, and Citizens, p. 55. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press) Citizenship in the nation-state is inevitably bound up with nationhood and national identity, membership of the state with membership of the nation. Debates about citizenship in France and Germany are debates about what it means to belong to the nation-state. The politics of citizenship today is first and foremost a politics of nationhood. As such, it is a politics of identity, not a politics of interest. … The central question is not ‘Who gets what?’ but rather ‘who is what?’ (Rogers Brubaker, 1992. Citizenship and Nationhood in France and Germany, p. 182. Cambridge, MA, and London: Harvard University Press)

Contents

Acknowledgements Introduction: migrants into minorities

page viii 1

1 Challenges to national citizenship

23

2 Postcolonial minorities and securitization

39

3 Race by any other name: Islam and the contestation of citizenship

68

4 The nation-state’s wobbly hyphen: the backlash against multiculturalism 104 5 Bearers of tradition or oppressed minority?: women as citizens

147

Index 185

Acknowledgements

Many of the people who have supported this project over the years deserve much more than an acknowledgement. But an acknowledgement is a good place to begin. At DePaul University, the College of Liberal Arts and Social Sciences summer grant program and the departments of English and International Studies have been stalwart in their support. My fellow associate deans Warren Schultz and Mark Pohlad have happily left me to my scribbling in my office. Chuck Suchar and Lucy Rinehart, my bosses, have encouraged me in every conceivable way to finish. Mike McIntyre in the International Studies department has been my partner in summer writing camps to keep me going. Shiera Malik and Gil Gott have been supportive as I juggled my many responsibilities during this period. Kalyani Menon has given me much useful advice during this period, as well as kept me in Chinese food. Gita Rajan at Fairfield University has always been there when I needed her. Ajay Agrawal has always shown me that hard work does pay off. My friends Archana Kumar at the International Monetary Fund and Madhu Dubey at the University of Illinois at Chicago have both talked me through many a crisis. Mona Narain at Texas Christian University has commiserated and comforted, while Keya Ganguly has been an inspiration to finish. Tim Brennan helped me clarify my ideas as I was struggling in the initial stages of this manuscript. Above all, my sister, Shveta Kumaria, and my husband, Michel Hendriks, have been absolute pillars of support through these many years. Thank you for your constant belief in my ability to finish this project.

Introduction: migrants into minorities

Since the mid-1980s Europe has seen deep economic and demographic changes that have upset the postwar consensus about a unified national culture and identity. Postwar migration, globalization and the expanding European Union (EU) have all led to a common-sense assumption that national has lost a consensus definition. Academic writing has explored this idea most fully through cultural studies, particularly of film and migration (Chapman, 2005; Hargreaves, 2007). Some of these changes arose out of the Cold War, others from increasing economic neo-liberalization and cutbacks related to the welfare state. Still others are rooted in postwar migration and demographic changes. The establishment of a common market and expansion of the EU have profoundly affected the traditional model of the Westphalian nation-state. These changes have forced a rethinking of core social concepts like the nation-state, secularism, religious tolerance, diversity and modernity. Since the 1980s, debates on national identity have become increasingly couched in rhetoric against immigration and the presence of non-Europeans within European nation-states (Joppke, 1998). Xenophobic discourses have increased in politics even as many political parties have shifted to the right as a whole, both economically and socially. French parties like the UMP (Union pour un mouvement populaire), which had an absolute majority in the National Assembly from 2002 to 2012, and the RPR (Rassemblement pour la République) as well as New Labour in Britain are the most visible examples of this rightward turn. However, primary labour immigration decreased drastically in the mid-1970s after the worldwide oil shock. Family reunification formed the bulk of migration into Western Europe in the next decade. In the 1990s, asylum seekers formed the largest group of migrants, followed by workers from Eastern Europe. Eurostat, which publishes annual statistics on the EU, estimates that, ‘The EU-27 foreign

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population [people residing in a EU-27 member state with citizenship of a non EU-27 member state] on 1 January 2012 was 20.7 million, representing 4.1 per cent of the EU-27 population.’1 Eurostat points out that since citizenship can change, the preferred method is to count the foreign-born as both citizens and non-citizens. Thus, these numbers include both citizens and non-citizens. Britain and France had roughly equal percentages of foreign-born people in 2011: 11.3 per cent of the French population was foreign-born, and 12.11 per cent of Britain’s. These numbers don’t count the so-called “second generation” – children of postwar migrants. Including them, a significantly larger proportion of the populations in France and Britain are racial, religious and, sometimes, linguistic minorities. Though legal citizenship varies over generations, the ­settlement patterns of minorities have defied those people who thought labour migrants would eventually return to their homelands. Moreover, although more than three generations have lived as citizens in the adopted country, often the second and subsequent generations are still not seen as part of national society, but are considered “immigrants”. Lastly, the perception of immigration as a problem has persisted, despite the economic benefits of immigration. In 2008, immigrants and their descendants made up about ten per cent of the population in both countries.2 Britain’s 2011 census put the British population at 56.1 million, 14 per cent of which were ethnic (defined as non-white Britons) citizens, comprising 6.8 per cent Asians, 3.4 per cent blacks and 2.2 per cent of mixed race. Foreign-born residents in England and Wales numbered 13 per cent, and came predominantly from India, Poland and Pakistan, in descending order (Office of National Statistics (ONS), 2013). In more than 91 per cent of households, all members spoke English, which suggests that they had assimilated in an important way. However, among Muslims linguistic assimilation was complicated by other factors such as high unemployment and high levels of religiosity (Lewis and Kashyap, 2013). A Government report based on the 2011 census but containing figures from the Labour Force survey (LFS), released in November 2014, was not optimistic. For white Britons in England and Wales, employment was 75 per cent. But for Bangladeshi and Pakistani men, unemployment (labour inactivity) was over 60 per cent. More than half (54 per cent) of the Bangladeshi men worked only part time, less than 30 hours per week (ONS, 2014). France has a more complicated method of counting minority data than Britain. The French National Institute of Statistics and Economic Studies (INSEE) defines immigrés as those either born abroad or born into another nationality (Bouvier and Borrel, 2012, p. 15). Second and subsequent generations are called descendants d’immigrés, which designates citizens only as those who voluntarily choose French citizenship at reaching the age of majority. Given these caveats, INSEE estimated in 2012 that immigrants and their descendants numbered about 8.7 per cent of the total population of 56 million. Among these, the largest minorities were Algerians, Moroccans, Turks and Africans, mostly from

Introduction: migrants into minorities3 ex-colonies. INSEE estimated that the average immigrant’s standard of living was approximately 30 per cent below that of French citizens; immigrants scored much lower than native-born French on almost all benchmarks of well-being, from education to jobs to housing. Second and third generation minorities, although assimilated, scored about 12 per cent lower across the board, largely attributable to their lack of social capital as well as to discrimination. Bouvier (2012, p. 11) describes ‘Les difficultés sur les chemins de l’intégration résultant des interactions entre éducation, emploi et résidence, que ne font qu’accentuer des particularités reliées aux origines’ (the difficulties on the path to integration resulting from a combination of education, employment and housing, which cannot help but underline facts related to origins). Thus, a deficit in social and educational capital corresponds in fairly direct ways with race, religion and country of origin. Given this complex picture of high population numbers but low levels of social mobility and employment, minorities in both countries have initiated and been the subject of debates concerning critical social concepts of secularism, the place of religion, control of women’s bodies and sexuality, membership and access to the national community, the openness of a plural culture, and multiculturalism. Global events like 9/11 and the Iraq war have added to these debates as well. At a time when national debates were reaching a crisis point, as young French and British minorities fought for a fuller citizenship, they were also interpellated by these events as being a “problem”. The identification with Islamic or Hindu or Sikh fundamentalist causes or the politics of what Robin Cohen has called “reterritorialization” has not served young minorities well. For one thing, minorities often find themselves being subject to forces outside their control. For another, extreme politics within the immigrants’ homelands hinders their acculturation and social mobility in both their own and their host countries. This transnational identification often becomes an escape from their real circumstances. Finally, it leads to public stigmatization of young males, in particular, as dangerous or radical, which in turn can suppress civil liberties. This alienates an already marginalized group. Often, as in the case of Britain, highly publicized police actions, such as those in Manchester in April 2009, turn out to be based on flimsy evidence.3 But the underlying issue is thornier than its particular manifestations: how do Britain and France, given their different political histories, handle the new religious and racial diversity which has become a fact of life in both countries? Data alone cannot answer these questions. Historical modes of subject and group formation are just as important. I argue that since these migrants are now European minorities, and European citizens, their stories are now part of Europe; their histories, the history of Europe itself. More specifically, I contend that the nation and the state are often at odds with one another over the subject of minorities and migrants. The state may desire foreign labour or encourage settled minorities, but the realm of the nation, which includes ideology, culture,

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language and tradition, has resisted change. Moreover, minorities themselves require time to define their relationship to their new country, and are slow to change and adapt. The struggle between minority and majority groups has destabilized the hard-won stability of the nation-state. In the chapters that follow, I will show how postcolonial minorities are caught between the nation and the state, thus calling into question the homology between the two. Instead, they are situated in the hyphen, enjoying legal, juridical status, but not social and ideological acceptance. Migrants and the nation-state Europe’s postwar, mostly postcolonial, minorities have yet to be accepted as integral parts of society. The reasons for this non-acceptance vary from the threat of terrorism to different forms of racism, from post-imperial attitudes to economic resentment and class prejudice, and the spectre of religious intolerance. I focus on France and Britain, but much of my argument is applicable to the Netherlands and, to a lesser extent, Germany. (A crucial difference is that in the Netherlands and Germany, labour migration did not come exclusively from colonial territories. Therefore, the dynamics of citizenship and incorporation are different. (Soysal, 1996).) In looking at the sometimes contrasting situations in multicultural Britain and republican France, I argue that the struggle for full national citizenship and inclusion occurs particularly around the axes of cultural issues, especially those that blur the line between public and private identities. Citizenship is as much about cultural inclusion as legal status. However, the former can take longer and be more difficult to mandate than the merely legal. According to Ayhan Kaya (2009), societal security is increasingly defined by excluding “dangers” to identity and group cohesion. ‘Such discourses of danger seem to distance migrant communities from incorporating themselves into the political, social, economic and cultural spheres of life of majority society in a way that prompts them to invest in their ethno-cultural and religious identities’ (Kaya, 2009). In the social sciences, questions about marginalization tend to suggest economic and structural answers, yet ideological hostility to difference often plays an equal, if not a greater, role. While nation-states manage macro migration flow through immigration law, they cannot easily police individuals at the micro level or groups at the mesolevel; nor should they. But it is precisely at the meso-group level that the hyphen between nation and state is most unstable. Issues like religion, gender roles, dress and education, all issues of public roles and rights yet deeply private and atavistically linked to identity, are central to defining “us” communities in distinction to “others”. These issues are not traditionally the realm of the nation-state in modern Westphalian democracies. The state takes a “neutral” position on belief

Introduction: migrants into minorities5 and religious practice (though not on education). Issues in the private sphere are left to the individual. Nevertheless, many of these so-called private issues also comprise public identities that communicate one’s religious or gender identity. How minorities signal, display, maintain and police those identities are all public acts. They can conform to majoritarian social norms, in which case they signal an acceptance of existing practices, or they can represent their difference, signalling a lack of acceptance and a desire to maintain that difference. The display of difference, however, can elicit different reactions. Historically, both Britain and France have domesticated their traditional minorities and ascribed “British” or “French” national identities to them, instead of designating them as, for example, Welsh, Cornish or Provençal (Hall, 2004). It is important to remember that this was the result of a long process, often achieved through war, generations of land reform and education, as well as the fruits and labour of overseas colonialism (Sessions, 2011). Within Britain, the Scots and the Welsh still display varying degrees of political separatism. Yet their loyalty or right to belong is never questioned, nor are they seen as outsiders. While broadly similar, Britain and France have historically chosen different methods for absorbing their regional populations. Britain’s political system under the Crown commanded loyalty and fealty to the monarch even though the actual power of the monarchy waned. France developed the definition of a modern republican citizen to redefine citizenship as comprising both rights and duties. Although historically more open to granting citizenship to outsiders, France has since lagged behind Britain in actually accepting its postcolonial citizens. Among the many reasons for this is the French state’s insistence on assimilation. It is also because France has willingly ignored economic causes of minority marginalization. But increased ease of travel and communication has strengthened homeland ties and weakened quick assimilation. The postcolonial identity of modern French minorities also contributed to their marginalization, as did their class status as postwar labourers. The legacy of colonialism, racism and low social status meant that immigrants and their families were not seen as part of the social fabric for many years. Related to that were assumptions by the migrants themselves as well as the host society that they would return to their homelands once labour levels returned to normal. However, that did not happen. Though Britain addressed the social effects of postcolonial migration earlier than France, it has also flirted with a system of cultural “divide and rule” among different minority groups by classifying certain groups as more amenable – those who spoke English, possessed family values, etc. – in order to prevent internal solidarity. This has produced rivalries between African-Caribbeans and South Asians, Hindus and Muslims, and Sikhs and Punjabis. While this may work in the short-term, it has not prevented minority ghettoization and marginalization from arising. While much early organizing by migrant groups in Britain was around labour equity issues, including the right to unionize, later groups

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coalesced around issues involving local schools, racial targeting and, eventually, religion (Gilroy, 1991). How has the presence of minorities forced a change in citizenship? I propose a three-part argument: first, that both France and Britain, despite different national and state formations, have had an inconsistent attitude towards their postcolonial minorities, which has relegated their postcolonial minorities to a marginal status. Second, national integration and substantial citizenship, not state-based formal citizenship, will remain the locus of the many debates around inclusion, access and equality for national minorities. Third, public debates around integration policies often hinge on the hyphen between the cultural nation and the political state, the last refuge of those nostalgic for a pre-immigration past. Issues of identity, cultural assimilation, religion and education all occupy this in-between, both/and space between the law-making, policing state and the family, neighbourhood, social and cultural spaces that govern how people settle and feel at home. One approach to full citizenship is through the concept of cultural citizenship. Both Aihwa Ong and Renato Rosaldo tie cultural citizenship to efforts to remake the national community (Rosaldo, 1994; Ong, 1999). Religion, culture, the role of women in society, education: these issues are closely tied to cultural modes of living and transmission, yet they are not the unique prerogative of the state nor uniform across region, class, language or ethnicity to be consensual. In other words, cultural citizenship is tied to full citizenship but retains the right to be different. Rosaldo says, ‘[cultural citizenship] claims that, in a democracy, social justice calls for equity among all citizens, even when differences such as race, religion, class, gender, or sexual orientation potentially could be used to make certain people less equal or inferior to others. The notion of belonging means full membership in a group’ (Rosaldo, 1994, p. 412). However, cultural citizenship or its lack are insufficient to explain why minorities suffer from inequality. That requires an examination of the historical components of race, religion, class, gender and sexual orientation – the features of identity that Rosaldo mentions above, which occupy the intersection of public, social and private identities. Culture and national belonging, likewise, define us both communally and individually, both our public and our private selves. Scholars studying European minorities, from Jürgen Habermas to Christian Joppke, and reports by the European Commission emphasize that minorities suffer from the wide, existing gap between formal, legal and substantial citizenship (Bertossi, 2003). The first part of my argument considers demographic diversity and the challenges it has posed to national homogeneity – the rise and fall of the discourses of hybridity, the recent “death” of multiculturalism and the “new” racism of the 1990s. I examine the specifics of the complex debate – religion, gender, community, difference and race. Beginning in the late 1980s, the “Rushdie affair” in Britain and the affaire des foulards (the headscarves affair) in France were

Introduction: migrants into minorities7 public events that polarized public opinion around the hyphen that separates the nation from the state. At stake were the right to free speech and the right of female students in state schools to wear a headscarf. Both issues occupy the nebulous boundary between the private (opinions, dress, religion) and the public; between offending a community, contravening state laws and practising religion freely; between individual and state; between civil liberties and the state’s role in providing equality and access to all citizens. The movements and discourses these debates engendered brought attention to a range of issues related to the nation-state’s hyphen.4 These well-known and much-discussed events influenced and even determined the course of public opinion about the presence of minorities in Britain and France. Subsequent events including the 2001 Midlands riots and the 7/7 London bombings changed concepts of British citizenship in legal and social terms. In France, the 2004 law banning the wearing of headscarves and other “ostentatious” symbols of religion had its roots in the affaire des foulards. Later controversies around the burqa in 2011, the 2005 riots in urban areas by banlieue youth and Nicolas Sarkozy’s references to true French identity and history emerged from the affaire des foulards. The recruitment of French banlieusards by ISIL (Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant) and al-Qaeda, which has shocked both Britain and France, was rooted in the economic and cultural fault lines that appeared amidst these controversies. Religious belief and cultural observance have become an important nexus for public perceptions of what belonging to the nation means. The second part of my argument examines how claims based on religion challenge state-based citizenship (1) through the challenge to secularism and (2) as a call to group rights based on religion. In Britain and France, religious affiliation has become central to discussions about who belongs to the nation and who has the right to remain within the borders of the nation-state. The increased visibility of religion in debates and media, even as the number of people who declare themselves religious has declined, has aroused strong passions on both left and right. Arguments against group identities and group representation are based on the notion of cultural Otherness, which in turn is based on religious Otherness. For example, adults and children who form the second and third generations of minority groups have been born, reared, educated and served in jobs in Britain and France. To say that they don’t belong because they are Muslim or Sikh is to ignore the efficacy of state institutions in producing citizens. The emphasis on citizenship and culture is not a matter of quantitative polling or the itemizing of laws. The questions raised concern a qualitative and nuanced analysis focused on the following questions: 1. What are the historical roots of this perception of Otherness or lack of assimilation? 2. How is the modern globalized nation-state being redefined in the context

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of minority formation at a time when globalization and de-industrialization reduce the need for unskilled and semi-skilled labour, which formed the bulk of postwar immigration to both France and Britain? 3. Why is the hyphen in the nation-state the weakest link at this time of redefinition? While other immigrants have been absorbed over time, why are postwar postcolonial migrants and their children seen as unassimilable? The groups I deal with are, of course, mobile themselves and can access the flow of goods, ideas and mediascapes both within and outside Europe. One charge against non-European minorities, that they show (or have) insufficient national attachment or patriotism, is said to be compromised by these transnational affiliations. But as Faist has shown, transnational links are weaker over generations and often are more symbolic (through religion or language) than substantive (Faist, 2000). Paradoxically, a lack of acculturation makes the persistence of transnationalism and multiple loyalties easier. Faist stresses this: ‘Membership in nation-state polities is less often tied to formal citizenship but to rights arising from settlement and socialization’ (Faist, 2000, p. 22). This highlights the importance of cultural practices as an index of acceptance, and the importance of culture as a process of citizen-making. The third focus of my argument, which is detailed later in this introduction, is how the tensions between citizenship and integration, religion and secularism, national belonging and transnationalism, unfold. Specifically I examine the rhetoric of belonging as it develops in the interstices between the public and private spheres and becomes a source of conflict. Active citizenship versus integration A tension exists in many European states between the pressure to assimilate and fear of an increasing membership. This is due to social welfare-state systems where membership comes with clear advantages, and the increasing transnationalism of minorities facilitated by the ease of travel, media and communication. T. H. Marshall’s dictum that ‘citizenship requires … a direct sense of community membership based on loyalty to a civilization which is a common possession’ has given way to what Faist calls an ‘active multiculturalist’ citizenship, where what is called ‘claims-making’ on the state is much stronger. Under active multiculturalism, the state forgoes instituting a pressure for a singular national identity and allows groups to assert group or community identities (Modood, 2007). This defies the model of republican citizenship. It is even a step too far for adherents of Kymlicka’s theory of polyethnic group rights, upon which Modood’s own work is based (Kymlicka, 1995). This tension reveals the dual and conflicting role asked of the nation-state: as simultaneously the source of assimilatory pressure and the guarantor of ethnic rights based upon difference.

Introduction: migrants into minorities9 Scholars of citizenship argue that the role of the nation-state is declining amidst growing claims of human rights and universal rights (Soysal, 1996). But my research argues the contrary: the nation-state remains the arbiter of rights, duties and belonging even in a multi-ethnic state increasingly reliant on immigration (Schuster and Solomos, 2002). However, the state remains ambivalent on the issue of group rights versus culturally specific rights. The fear is that culturally specific rights might increase alienation and create disunity and lack of a common polity in favour of a transnational and therefore uncommitted citizenry. While some scholars, notably Yasemin Soysal and Saskia Sassen, favour a post-national globalized world that operates within the parameters of an international human rights regime, many still regard the nation-state as the primary guarantor of rights and liberties. Both international law and transnational rights embedded in dual citizenship remain too underdeveloped and access too limited. Evolving supranational bodies like the EU, though they allow non-EU citizens to vote in local elections, do not yet have a developed citizenship regime, either political or legal. That renders unrealistic any post-national multi-ethnic citizenship as a credible alternative to the nation-state. Migrants of the postwar era who entered France, with its republican ideals rooted in secularism, or Britain, where the history of citizenship is closely tied to monarchy, the Anglican Church, indigenous working-class movements and regional cultures, find these traditions at odds with their desire to preserve their homeland cultures. The left in both countries has traditionally seen immigrant labour as a threat and has been reluctant to make common cause with immigrants, let alone support their demands. Postcolonial relations between Maghrebis and France, and between South Asians and Britain have been strained through historical slights and misunderstandings exacerbated by political opportunism by both the left and the right. In contrast to supranational forms, the welfare nation-state remains symbiotically tied to national membership and claims-making, which also leads to a membership system based on inclusion and exclusion. Though this book does not explicitly deal with the status of the nation-state in a globalized world, its limits of powers and responsibilities and the claims on it comprise secondary themes. While both France and Britain have progressively circumscribed citizenship, specifically targeting postcolonial migrants, this has made it harder for non-European immigrants to become citizens. Britain took the lead in this narrowing trajectory beginning with its Commonwealth Immigrants Act of 1962, which repealed the right of settlement in Britain for British citizens from its former colonies. Only Commonwealth citizens who could prove they had a parent or grandparent born in Britain could still enter Britain. Clearly, this Act was aimed at citizens of colour. Hugh Gaitskell, the leader of the Opposition party, called it ‘cruel and brutal a­ nti‑colour ­legislation’. This was followed by Enoch Powell’s “rivers of blood” speech in 1968, which

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sealed the conflation of immigrants of colour and their lack of rights to citizenship. In France the Méhaignerie Law, which required children born of foreign parents to request citizenship instead of acquiring it through jus soli, was in effect from 1993 to 1998, and still affects changes in naturalization. The political rhetoric that supports such gate-keeping relies heavily on the perceived cultural difference and incompatibility between autochthone and ethnic citizens, or as French President François Mitterrand put it, France’s “seuil de tolérance” (threshold of tolerance). The term culture involves a set of complex variables, some in the public sphere of politics, others in the private sphere of home, personal choice and religion. Culture can also be used as a blanket term to signify the increasing use of securitization against minorities. It has often been used to re-invoke the dangers of immigration and visible difference. Traditionally, economic concerns have dominated discussions about migration, but since the mid-2000s securitization has become more prominent (Tirman, 2004; Kaya, 2009). Security fears have often portrayed European Muslims as fifth-column protojihadis. However, such analysis is seldom accompanied by an analysis of the systemic and institutional neglect of minorities at the economic, social and cultural levels. As Ayhan Kaya says, ‘Most of the response to these attacks has focused on immigration issues even though the perpetrators of the bombings were mostly products of the “society” they attacked. The categorization of those responsible as migrants seems to be a systematic attempt to externalize the structural failures produced by the social political structure. The security discourse conceals the fact that ethnic/religious/identity claims of migrants and their reluctance to integrate actually result from existing structural problems of poverty, unemployment, discrimination, xenophobia, heterophobia, nationalism, and racism’ (Kaya, 2009, p. 10). Kaya’s use of the word externalization often conflates national security with societal security, a reversion to ideas of an imagined national community and the spectre of unmanageable difference. Often, both the British and French states use cultural difference as an alibi to deny minority complaints of racism, institutional racism and scapegoating. To protect themselves from charges of targeting minorities, states often work through grass-roots community groups and leaders to facilitate surveillance and neutralization. However, this does not always succeed; in some scenarios, it delegitimizes the work of grass-roots organizations. For example, in Britain, the Labour government tried, after the 2005 London bombings, to prevent another extremist attack by rallying British Muslims under the scheme known as “Prevent”. This was meant as an appeal to all British citizens, but especially Muslims, to keep an eye out in the “community” for suspicious activity. While it had limited success, many Muslim groups complained of unfair profiling and stop-and-search seizures (Rehman, 2007). Muslim groups have long sought funds for setting up Islamic schools with a separate curriculum. The Government-supported Muslim Council (which has members affiliated with the Muslim Brotherhood and hard-

Introduction: migrants into minorities11 line Pakistani Islamists) was very active in this regard. A convenient system of quid pro quo was in place after 2001, whereby Muslim communities would supply the police with information in exchange for the funding of some cultural demands, in the name of community cohesion, to the tune of $116 million (Economist, 2009). This comfortable arrangement ended during the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 2006. The Muslim Council criticized British foreign policy in the Middle East and linked it to growing Muslim anger in Britain. The British Government responded by shifting favour and funding to alternative groups and think tanks like the Quilliam Foundation, which it called a “counter-terrorism” think tank, and the Sufi Muslim Council, which toed the Government line on terrorism (Bunglawala, 2009). In this context, cultural rights have become a trading tool, where groups use demands for culturally specific help to bargain for political power and legitimacy, and where the state, in turn, bargains for control and oversight. Methods: liberalism and race While liberal definitions of citizenship have always seen cultural autonomy as central to some form of cultural pluralism (as in Canada and the United States), France and Britain have had less success with this model, largely because of persistent economic and political marginalization of their migrants (Kymlicka, 1995). Additionally, the colonial histories between South Asians and Britain, and between Maghrebis and France, have helped perpetuate illiberal stereotypes institutionally and in popular discourse. Histories, racism, class differences and a lack of coherent systems for inclusion have caused state policies to swing schizophrenically between inclusion and exclusion. In the 1990s, with the spread of “new racism”, or cultural racism, the discourse of difference exacerbated the lack of acceptance by host societies. François Mitterrand’s famous phrase in December 1989 about France’s seuil de tolérance provided fire to those who, like Jean-Marie le Pen of the National Front, wanted the forced repatriation of existing migrants. Notably, the most Mitterrand offered was tolerance, not acceptance or even welcome. In Britain, some state intervention in the form of limited multiculturalist efforts in the 1980s and 1990s gave way after 9/11 to a point-based approach to citizenship that asks migrants to prove their suitability before they are granted citizenship. Even after formally receiving citizenship, naturalized citizens and refugees hold fewer rights and can be deported much more easily than other, fuller, citizens (Gibney, 2002). Since 1993, French laws on naturalization have made it harder for North Africans in particular to acquire citizenship. The rise of Islamophobia post-2001 has marginalized the working class population even more, owing to limited state support.5 Scholars like David Theo Goldberg advocate the co-articulation of the liberal and racial state as bound together by definition. Tracing the emergence of the

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modern liberal state from the seventeenth century, he argues that in the last four centuries, ‘racially conceived compromises regarding racist exclusions – ranging from constitutional endorsements of slavery to formalized segregation, colonial rule and its aftermath, affirmative action, immigration and crime policy – have been instrumental in sustaining a dominance of liberalism’ (Goldberg, 2002, p. 235). For my purposes, his claim that the racial exclusions of the contemporary liberal state are maintained not only through the management of immigration and assimilation, but nation-states’ configuration of belonging and homogeneity in racially conceived ways through laws, governmentality, inclusions, exclusions, definitions, policing and routinization, goes to the heart of my argument about the hyphen in nation-state. While the field of diaspora studies has made invaluable contributions to studying the settlement of migrant communities and the growing transnational networks that accompany the change from nation-centric to trans-nation-centric affiliations, the limitations of the term diaspora in the context of this study were soon apparent. Diaspora signifies a look over the shoulder, a lingering attachment to homes left behind. According to definitions by Safran and Tololyan, diasporas are always substantively or symbolically connected to the homeland (Safran, 1991; Tololyan, 1996). While settlement and integration continue apace, a diaspora’s primary identity is derived from the event or the place that produces the diaspora. However, while this has been largely true of classical (Jewish, African, Armenian), labour and imperial (African, English, Chinese) diasporas, it is less true of latetwentieth-century diasporas, which have been contemporaneous with developments in travel, communications and media. In addition, since the latter are mostly labour and colonial/postcolonial diasporas rather than the result of a single traumatic event, focus is more on the countries of settlement. Rather than concentrating on ethnic identity or national identification, it can be helpful to see these new diasporas as inhabiting what Nina Glick Schiller terms a transnational ‘social field’. Borrowing from Pierre Bourdieu and the Manchester school of anthropology, she uses the concept to call attention to social networks structured by power and identified not by given ethnic or national identities but in which ‘the field itself is created by the participants who are joined in a struggle for social position’ (Glick Schiller, 2005). This allows for a more openly constituted field and accommodates affiliations across class, ethnicity, religion and gender. In other words, if diaspora is giving way to something new, and I argue that the struggle for citizenship is creating new formations, then they reflexively change the value of diaspora formations as well. While I still use ethnic and religious categories to delimit the groups I study, it is important to recognize that these are not fixed categories. I have tried to chart some of these struggles and understand the historical roots of the struggle for full citizenship, defined as membership not just in the state but full membership in the nation.

Introduction: migrants into minorities13 My focus on citizenship and culture and the issues surrounding that relationship emerges from trying to understand the one (culture) in light of the demand for the other (citizenship). In fact, cultural rights are at the core of full citizenship. As Catherine Wihtol de Wenden puts it, ‘The aim is to express political claims (the status of foreigners, illegal residents, police discrimination) through popular culture, to include this culture in the components of French culture … and to express personal life experience in French history … The recognition of Islam as a religion in France (and not as an imported religion) … would also enable these cultural rights to be expressed’ (Wihtol de Wenden, 2007, p. 26). In addition to what is commonly understood as cultural citizenship, it is important to me to expand the analysis to those aspects of culture not easily portrayed in representational modes. Concepts of syncretism or hybridity, the decades-long debate about the place of religion in a democracy and the apparent failures of multiculturalism, are integral to the struggle over what Gayatri Spivak labels “re-presentation”. The main question becomes whose arguments will prevail in the struggle over full membership and whose definitions of citizenship will prevail. Public/private debates and citizenship The chief debates around the presence of non-Christian minorities in both countries are those around religion, culture, racism and class. They provoke a number of questions. What should be the place of religion in public life? Should it be relegated to the private sphere? Is assimilation even possible with such varied phenotypes and such stark class differences? What explains the economic marginalization of minorities over three generations? Is the state doing enough to dismantle the institutional barriers to access and acceptance by the majority or is it turning a blind eye while blaming minorities? Does the emergence of such minorities mean that France will have to rethink its republican separation between church and state and Britain its symbolic status as an Anglican nation? Or will minorities eventually follow the paradigm of earlier Spanish, Italian and Portuguese immigrants and blend into the larger population? This book approaches these complex questions through the lens of citizenship in its broadest sense: citizenship demands and the negotiation over those demands as found in the realms of culture, identity, religion and multicultural policy. I don’t address the questions around legal citizenship, which is an entirely different project, particularly around refugee flows and asylum. This project examines citizenship solely in terms of belonging: those who belong and those who don’t; that is, it is restricted to questions of integration, participation and claims-making by people who are already citizens. Though legal, minorities remain outsiders, who are reminded of their precarious situation during moments of national crisis. To take the French example, both Wihtol de

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Wenden and Alec Hargreaves point out the series of events tied to the questioning of the Maghrebis’ right to belong to the French state, despite the republican credo of non-racial universal citizenship (jus soli, as opposed to jus sanguinis): the Rushdie affair, the headscarves controversy, reform of the nationality code, the Gulf War, the Iraq War and the terrorist attacks of 1995 and 2001 (Wihtol de Wenden, 1998; Hargreaves, 2007). Moreover, during the November 2005 riots in urban France, the then Minister of the Interior, Nicolas Sarkozy, called them “racaille” (scum); the metaphor was one of contempt but also of non-belonging. As president, Sarkozy initiated a short-lived debate on national identity, seeking to distinguish between legal citizenship and national identification (Sharma, 2013). In these attempts to distinguish between French and non-French citizens, Sarkozy’s government focused on cultural and social citizenship rather than class or lack of access and education. Therefore, this project also focuses on claimsmaking and responses by the state by looking not at the state, nor just at the ideological nation, but at the space in between. In examining the components of exclusion, it is important to look at how debates between minorities and state organizations as well as media play out. Particularly when minorities are relatively powerless socially and economically, and the debates are visceral – beliefs about identity, about who belongs and who doesn’t, about what constitutes proper behaviour or claims of equality – debates can not only become heated, but can give rise to new voices and alliances. Tracing the lineaments of debates is a way to include different voices and histories through the agency of minority and mainstream individuals and organizations, instead of focusing only on state policies (see Silverstein, 2004). Merely by putting these disparate discourses together and in conversation with each other, one recognizes the rights of minorities to participate as citizens. Participation in civil society is a precondition to and synonymous with citizenship. However, participation does not always take place within the neat parameters of democratic rituals – elections, representative government, local and state councils or access to equitable resources. For example, among the first generation to arrive in France from the Maghreb, illiteracy was an obstacle in participation, as was suspicion and distrust of Algerians after the long war for its independence. In Britain, the lack of adequate housing in cities made political representation a problem. The endemic racism of the 1950s and 1960s when the British colour bar was still in place played its part in denying South Asians a voice as well. Two decades on, in the 1970s, workers from India and Pakistan used labour-based modes of participation, including workers’ strikes, race riots and gang wars. But the more crucial modes of participation by communities included the smaller, more local struggles over what children could wear to school, what food they should eat, or whether a temple or mosque could be built on the street. French workers’ unions did not welcome immigrant labour because immigrants were seen as wedge factors that would drive down wages.

Introduction: migrants into minorities15 They had to struggle to find a room on the factory floor where they could pray (Begag, 1984). These are the small ways in which cultural rights became the centre of emergent citizenship; a movement which would gather steam in the 1980s with the protests against the headscarves ban in France and against Rushdie in Britain. Are the struggles for citizenship about identity and culture or about equity? In the dominant culturalist reading, many of the struggles for acceptance are seen as debates over identity. But the identitarian reading is limited in its application to the material world. Starting with the critique of hybridity, books like Disorienting rhythms and Diaspora and hybridity have tried to move the discourse on diversity and culture beyond that of the simply identitarian (Hutnyk et al., 1996, 2005). The strictly materialist sociological studies have been valuable but limited in their own way since struggles for citizenship are not primarily material either, though they have important material causes and consequences (Castles and Davidson, 2000; Bleich, 2003; Peach and Gale, 2003). Though acceptance and rejection lie mostly in the ideological realm, they are often achieved through concrete initiatives, voices and events. This is the messy realm of culture and citizenship. Just as it occupies a place in between identity and politics, cultural citizenship also straddles a position between the public and the private spheres. In the republican tradition, citizenship is an identity that strengthens the polity (Bertossi, 2003). Or, as Joppke says, ‘citizenship is both a legal status and an identity, fusing the divergent legacies of territorial state-ness and republicanism’ (Bertossi, 2003, p. 33). Historically, the nation of citizens and the republican polity (state) have been remarkably congruent to the extent that the congruence is seen as a precondition to good citizenship. However, postwar immigration has challenged that assumption. In fact ‘the very recognition of ethno-cultural and religious diversity has been set in terms of a challenge to the congruence that exists in the Rousseauist tradition between membership, allegiance and equality rights’ (Bertossi, 2003, p. 33). Questions of cohesion, religion and the public/ private divide have replaced this unquestioned congruence; allocating rights and membership to newcomers is directly linked to fears of a loss of identity. This has been expressed variously as a fear of uncontrolled immigration, or Islamophobia, or a fear of unmanageable cultural difference. Bertossi puts it in terms of unity and plurality: ‘political identity yields ground to politics of cultural and religious identities versus national identity’ (ibid., p. 34). According to him, citizenship itself is at stake when ‘the lack of civil, social, or economical resources, the inequality of opportunity in education, employment or leisure have been publicized’ as areas where inequality is rife (ibid., p. 36). The state is no longer the final arbiter of belonging; belonging is ratified at multiple sites: family, school, neighbourhood, street and market. The instability of the hyphen that joins nation and state is therefore subject to constant and everyday

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ratification at multiple sites. Discourses of belonging are articulated formally and informally, often reinforcing each other. The state’s policing actions, including jailing and deportation, often mark certain populations as undesirable and a threat to law and order. At other times, the state sets parameters for discourses around belonging and articulates ideas that anchor them (Garner, 2007). The phrase “cultural securitization” coined by Huysmans is often invoked to explain how cultural belonging can be a reason to marginalize, ignore or physically exclude certain groups. When that happens, those particular groups enjoy fewer legal and human rights protections as well (Faist, 2002; Jackson and Parkes, 2008). In this way, the public, statist, symbolic actions and values reinforce and support cultural, ontological and private beliefs and fears that play out at different sites in order to produce harmony between nation and state, nation and culture, state and national identity. With the arrival of postwar postcolonial immigrants, this congruence is destabilized and the gap between nation and state has to be renegotiated. Chapters Since citizenship is a political and public enactment of a citizen’s place within the nation, its praxis in multiple spheres is usually a part of national tradition. Rogers Brubaker points out that the politics of belonging has both formal and informal aspects. Since many of the informal aspects are not expressly codified, only tacit understandings of belonging and non-belonging are visible (Brubaker, 2010). These everyday membership practices include multiple and overlapping categories, both public and private, both interior and exterior, both historical and contemporary. They are woven so tightly into (or are perhaps linked so inextricably to) ideas of polity and national culture that any difference within or questioning of these norms is seen as unpatriotic. That is why cultural demands, religion, gender and public expressions of difference elicit strong resistance from those who cling to an old vision of what national culture means. Habermas (2008) insists that a prerequisite of a vibrant democracy is a free and vibrant public sphere where views and complaints can be aired and negotiated. Yet, many cultural issues also involve private-sphere intangibles like family honour, the roles of men and women, relations between parents and children, traditional modes of prayer, community, and the secularism of the European public sphere. While existing divisions between public and private and between secular and religious are historically more consensual and dominant for majority communities, minority groups lack these distinctions. Minorities are also more likely to retreat into the private sphere, inviting accusations of non-assimilation. Historical, economic or class differences are often seen as cultural flaws or signs of incompatibility. The term culture arises in many debates about belonging and non-belonging, in both public and private spheres. In debates about race or culture, religion, or

Introduction: migrants into minorities17 the treatment of women, minorities are found wanting in cultural compatibility. One reaction to these debates is to wait them out: in another three generations, as experience in the United States has shown, these conflicts may end with the eventual assimilation of minorities (Rumbaut and Portes, 2001).6 But this is by no means certain. Even if likely, how does a wait-and-see approach help those experiencing this process or making policies to address it? Another reaction is to understand and address the causes of inequity. But decades of experience have shown this to be politically unpopular in the age of demagogy. A strong antiracist, pro-minority position is so unpopular that right-wing parties such as the British National Front, the French Front national, the Vlaams Blok in Belgium, the Pim Fortuyn List in the Netherlands and the Dansk Folkeparti (Danish People’s Party) have all succeeded in setting domestic agendas for ruling parties or coalitions despite their small numbers. A third solution may be to abandon nationalist rhetoric and more candidly embrace the realities of globalization, including economic, demographic and social futures that don’t include a return to the past of mono-ethnic full employment and closed borders. In any of the above solutions, minorities will not be granted inclusive citizenship without adequate organization among themselves, networking with other like-minded groups and clearly articulated demands. Since cultural difference is a main plank of anti-immigrant and xenophobic groups, cultural citizenship and inclusion inevitably becomes the battleground. The response, ultimately, can’t be to deny cultural difference itself but must incorporate cultural differences into national identity. In this context the first chapter of the book, ‘Challenges to national citizenship’, relates the history of citizenship in Britain and France and the nature of the challenge to the status quo. The nation-state in both Britain and France has sought out worker-migrants, but it was always in the context of what the state, not the workers, needed. In a postcolonial context, this has meant a continuation and repetition of colonialism’s tropes, with the colonial motherland or fatherland and its needs always coming first. The European nation-state’s use of migrants as labour surplus is derived from the post-imperial state as hegemon. This instrumentalist use of labour has been challenged first in workplaces and schools but more recently through the radicalization of youth who turn to extremism and terror acts in order to challenge the nation-state. Chapter 1 outlines some of these shifts in Britain and France. How do minorities become citizens? Chapter 2 looks at the conceptual categories states historically have used to manage the de facto multiculturalism arising from postwar migration. Two terms are central to the “new racism” of the 1980s: hybridity and community. Both terms signify self-enclosed groups coexisting in a separate-but-equal space apart from that of the nation. The chapter traces the rise and fall of “hybridity-speak” in the cultural, theoretical and policy spheres, arguing that it triggered a cultural relativism that produced

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Postcolonial minorities in Britain and France

racism and discrimination. The historical critique of hybridity from a materialist and a communitarian perspective concludes that hybridity rests on false notions of cultural homogenization and the equating of ethnicity and culture. Whatever its short-term value, in the long run hybridity emphasizes the ethnic, raced subject instead of the citizen-subject. In that sense it ignores concepts of justice and civil society in favour of cultural particularisms. The chapter concludes that the concept of hybridity has outlived its usefulness and must evolve into a more nuanced concept of citizenship. In the third chapter I develop a critique of multiculturalism. The chapter focuses on how anti-immigrant discourses have shifted away from stigmatizing race towards a critique of religion (mainly Islam). Religion is a public and private facet of culture, and this chapter examines how Muslims in Britain have historically organized to be heard. The satanic verses controversy and school reform were the first steps in being recognized by the state. This move led to public visibility and criticism about national belonging. While veiling has been an issue in France, support for the right of women to wear the veil does not necessarily signify a turn towards Islam. It can also signal a perception that French society is not cognizant of Maghrebi citizens’ rights. Decades of French policy which stressed common citizenship through assimilation, as opposed to the British model of multiculturalism, paradoxically resulted in a less radicalized group of citizens. Again, although the French and British positions are quite different, with the emphasis being largely on class in France, in both countries Islam functions in three distinct ways: as a retreat from mainstream pressures to assimilate, as a means for carving out a distinct generational identity, and as a vehicle for enacting a culturally specific identity opposed to mainstream and consumerist culture. The issue of group rights based upon religion is addressed in Chapters 3 and 4. Methodologically, this topic can be approached from several angles: Taylor’s definition of social citizenship, the rise of religiosity or the foregrounding of Islamic identity. Both chapters also examine how Britain and France have revised their earlier positions on multiculturalism (Britain) and assimilation (France) to each adopt a position much closer to the other’s, one that balances integration and multiculturalism. This is important, since historically and constitutionally, Britain and France initially had rejected each other’s position. Concordance has been clearest (or maybe greatest) in the area of education policy, especially the teaching of citizenship in schools. After the Crick report in 2001, Britain instituted citizenship classes as a compulsory school subject and introduced citizenship ceremonies, copying the United States. The French state has loosened its hold on education by permitting Muslim schools and by allowing a “French” Islam to become part of the state. While neither response is perfect, each is an improvement on previous neglect of these issues.

Introduction: migrants into minorities19 Chapter 5 addresses the important question of gender relations and women’s status within minority groups. This topic is necessary because women’s status within minority groups is often a synecdoche for the state of cultural progress or assimilation. However, this often accompanies a hyper-sexualisation of minority women that has deep roots in colonial history. I look at the paradoxical ways in which women are perceived both by majority and minority groups, and argue that the public–private divide operates here in the realms of sexuality and family, very much as religion and education operate in other spheres. The headscarf controversy draws attention to women’s voices and their agency on taking control of their representation. These two very different kinds of states and nations have produced remarkably similar situations regarding minorities. In both states, the emphasis has shifted from strict notions of how to manage diversity towards a more tempered inclusion. In both countries, Islam as a religious identity has raised fears and xenophobic attitudes which the state has exploited. On the other hand, minorities have actively entered into a dialogue with both states. Although republican and liberal democracies, France and Britain have both come to only qualified acceptance of the changing demographics of their societies; many things remain unaddressed in both countries. Economic disadvantage is a major reason why minorities remain outside the social mainstream. Housing patterns in France also explain why successive generations of Maghrebis continue to live literally at the margins of society. Ideologically speaking, the inability of the nation, as opposed to the state, to imagine itself as a multi-ethnic, multi-lingual and multicultural society is at the crux of minorities’ struggle for cultural citizenship. Notes 1 http://epp.eurostat.ec.europa.eu/statistics_explained/index.php/Migration_and_ migrant_population_statistics. 2 Some of the data on numbers of minorities are necessarily approximate because legally they are citizens and are not counted separately. While the ONS in Britain counts ethnicity and ethnic groups separately from “white”, the French census has always had a policy of race-blind categories, separating them on the basis of citizenship and place of birth rather than race or ethnicity. 3 http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/7991936.stm. In this incident all 12 Muslim men who were arrested were eventually released, prompting calls of racism and police high-handedness. 4 These can include seemingly diverse phenomena such as the resurgence of religious debate in a seemingly secularized society, the impact of US foreign policy after 9/11 on the treatment of minorities in Europe and, lastly, the historical legacies of Europe’s own religious wars and colonial history on modern state policies. 5 La Croix, the French Catholic newspaper, reported the results of a study by the CNCDH (La Commission nationale consultative des droits de l’homme) on 21

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March 2013 on French attitudes to race and immigration. According to them, only 22 per cent of the French had a positive view of Islam, compared with 29 per cent in 2012. Acts of violence against people of colour, Jews, Muslims and immigrants rose almost 23 per cent in one year. 6 Rumbaut and Portes cite the pre-1965 migrants to America, where ‘ethnic heritage … usually ceases to play any viable role in the life of the third generation’, and contrast them with the late-twentieth-century non-European migration, in which migrants are more defined by ethnic and national politics.

References Begag, A. (1984). L’Immigré et sa ville. Lyon: Presses universitaires de Lyon. Bertossi, C. (2003). Negotiating the boundaries of equality in Europe. The Good Society, 12(2), 33–39. Bleich, E. (2003). Race politics in Britain and France: Ideas and policymaking since the 1960s. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Bouvier, G. and Borrel, C. (2012). Les Descendants d’immigrés plus nombreux que les immigrés: Une position française originale en Europe. Paris: INSEE. Brubaker, R. (2010). Migration, membership, and the modern nation-state: Internal and external dimensions of the politics of belonging. Journal of Interdisciplinary History, 41(1), 61–78. Bunglawala, I. (2009). Calling time on Prevent. Guardian. 11 August 2009. Retrieved from www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/belief/2009/aug/11/prevent-islam-religionextremism. Castles, S. and Davidson, A. (2000). Citizenship and migration: Globalization and the politics of belonging. New York: Routledge. Chapman, J. (2005). Past and present: National identity and the British historical film. London: I. B. Tauris. Economist. (2009). How the government lost the plot. Economist. February 26 2009. Faist, T. (2000). Transnationalization in international migration: Implications for the study of citizenship and culture. Ethnic and Racial Studies, 23(2), 189–222. Faist, T. (2002). Extension du domaine de la lutte: International migration and security  before and after September 11, 2001. International Migration Review, 36(1), 7–14. Garner, S. (2007). The European Union and the racialization of immigration 1985– 2006. Race/Ethnicity: Multidisciplinary Global Contexts, 1(1), 61–87. Gibney, M. J. (2002). Security and the ethics of asylum after 11 September. Forced Migration Review, 13/14, 40–43. Gilroy, P. (1991). There ain’t no black in the Union Jack: The cultural politics of race and nation. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Glick Schiller, N. (2005). Transnational social fields and imperialism. Anthropological Theory, 5(4), 439–461. Goldberg, D. T. (2002). The racial state. Malden and Oxford: Blackwell. Habermas, J. (2008). Notes on post-secular society. New Perspectives Quarterly, 25(4), 17–29.

Introduction: migrants into minorities21 Hall, C. (2004). Of gender and empire: Reflections on the nineteenth century. In P. Levine (Ed.), Gender and Empire (pp. 46–76). Oxford: Oxford University Press. Hargreaves, A. G. (2007). Multi-ethnic France: Immigration, politics, culture and society (2nd edn). London and New York: Routledge. Hutnyk, J., Kalra, V. and Kaur R. (2005). Diaspora and hybridity. London: Sage. Hutnyk, J., Sharma, S. and Sharma, A. (Eds) (1996). Dis-orienting rhythms: The politics of Asian dance music. London: Zed Books. Jackson, P. I. and Parkes, R. (2008). The securitization of immigration policy, shifts in national immigrant integration models and the incarceration of immigrants in Germany, France and Britain 1970–2003. Humboldt Journal of Social Relations, 31(1/2), 39–82. Joppke, C. (1998). Challenge to the nation state: Immigration in Western Europe and the United States. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Kaya, A. (2009). Islam, migration and integration: The age of securitization. Basingstoke: Palgrave MacMillan. Kymlicka, W. (1995). Multicultural citizenship: A liberal theory of minority rights. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Lewis, V. A. and Kashyap, R. (2013). Are Muslims a distinctive minority? An empirical analysis of religiosity, social attitudes and Islam. Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion. 52(3), 617–626. Modood, T. (2007). Multiculturalism: A civic idea. Cambridge, UK, and Malden, MA: Polity Press. Ong, A. (1999). Flexible citizenship: The cultural logic of transnationalism. Durham: Duke University Press. ONS (2013). Identity. Government of Great Britain. Retrieved from www.ons.gov.uk/ ons/index.html. ONS (2014). Ethnicity and the labour market, 2011 census, England and Wales. Retrieved from: www.ons.gov.uk/ons/dcp171776_384463.pdf. Peach, C., and Gale, R. (2003). Muslims, Hindus, and Sikhs in the new religious landscape of England. Geographical Review, 93(4), 469–490. Rehman, J. (2007). Islam, “war on terror” and the future of Muslim minorities in the United Kingdom: Dilemmas of multiculturalism in the aftermath of the London bombings. Human Rights Quarterly, 29, 831–878. Rosaldo, R. (1994). Cultural citizenship and educational democracy. Cultural Anthropology, 9(3), 402–411. Rumbaut, R. G. and Portes, A. (Eds) (2001). Ethnicities: Children of immigrants in America. Berkeley, Los Angeles and London: University of California Press. Safran, W. (1991). Diasporas in modern societies: Myths of homeland and return. Diaspora: A Journal of Transnational Studies, 1(1), 83–99. Schuster, L. and Solomos, J. (2002). Rights and wrongs across European borders: Migrants, minorities and citizenship. Citizenship Studies, 6(1), 37–54. Sessions, J. E. (2011). By sword and plow: France and the conquest of Algeria. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press. Sharma, S. (2013). Le rôle de la mémoire et du trauma dans la création de citoyens-sujets minoritaires. In Collectif Write Back (Ed.), Postcolonial studies: Modes d’emploi (pp. 445–466). Lyons: Presses Universitaires de Lyon.

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Silverstein, P. A. (2004). Algeria in France: Transpolitics, race, nation. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Soysal, Y. N. (1996). Limits of citizenship. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Tirman, J. E. (2004). The maze of fear: Security and migration after 9/11. New York and London: The New Press. Tololyan, K. (1996). Rethinking diaspora(s): Stateless power in the transnational moment. Diaspora: A Journal of Transnational Studies, 5(1), 3–35. Wihtol de Wenden, C. (1998). How can one be Muslim? The French debate on allegiance, intrusion and transnationalism. International Review of Sociology, 8(2), 275– 288. Wihtol de Wenden, C. (2007). Immigration and cultural rights: Political recognition and cultural acceptance. Museum International, 59(1/2), 24–29.

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Challenges to national citizenship

It is clear from the experience of the United States and Britain that the possession of full, formal citizenship does not impede the development of multiply disadvantaged ethnocultural minorities. (Brubaker, 1998, p. 137)

An effect of the popularity of “multicultural” or postcolonial texts is the questioning of fixed and self-evident notions of nationality and citizenship. After decolonization, writers in newly independent countries like Kenya, India or Algeria made nationalism an important issue in their writing. This was at odds with the situation in Europe, where the postwar period saw a fatigue with nationalism. But if nationalism vanished from the agenda as a topic of debate, it reared its head time and again in the context of postwar labour immigration into Europe. It wasn’t until the 1980s, when questions about the insular nation-state were coupled with two important factors – the awareness of writing and film1 by immigrants who had been settling in northwest Europe first as labour, then as immigrants, and the slow transformation of Benelux and then France and Germany into what would be called the European Community (EC) – that the focus changed to a re-evaluation of the nature and importance of citizenship. In the last two decades, citizenship in its opaque, tautological, bureaucratic, absolute sense has given way to a more provisional and oppositional way of articulating both its necessity and its changing position. Beyond citizenship’s legal and punitive nature, and its disciplining effects felt in schools and prisons and at borders, citizenship for diaspora populations in Britain and France is equally about constructing identity, about rejecting given forms of assimilation in the social–cultural sphere and about performing a self-fashioned citizenship based in community, not nation. By wresting the discourse on citizenship away from governmental and right-wing ideologues (who deploy ethnicist, e­xclusionary

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rhetoric) to place it within the public realm of culture, diaspora communities actively shape the political, social and cultural spaces they inhabit. This redefinition of legal citizenship through the cultural praxis of citizenship is an entirely new phenomenon in the history of Europe, one that brings together political praxis and cultural expression, each strengthening the other. What is the link between national citizenship and identity? On the one hand, Will Kymlicka, Michael Walzer and Charles Taylor all argue that the national community is also a cultural community. Kymlicka contends that cultures allow people to make choices that express their identity (Kymlicka, 1995). Other theorists, like Linda Colley, foresee a modern citizenship that allows for multiple national identities, to coexist within the state; that is, she makes a distinction between identity and citizenship. This would allow for different identities, such as Scots, Welsh, Muslim, gay, to all live in Britain, and be British citizens (Colley, 1999). In the former argument, ‘the identities of men and women are constituted largely by their membership in cultural and national communities’ (Gibney, 2004, p. 25). Therefore, they are ‘fundamentally cultural beings’. It follows then that the entry of foreigners or people with a different set of cultural values and identity will threaten the stability of this cultural community. Gibney sees the right of national communities to protect their cultures, according to a partialist perspective, as being central to identity and social reproduction. In his reading of Walzer and Kymlicka, ‘The relationship between individual well-being and prospering of cultural groups characteristically leads partialists to argue that national communities have a moral right to protect their “integrity”; communities, in other words, have a right to reproduce their culture free from the interference of outsiders’ (Gibney, 2004, p. 25). Thus, the partialist argument that begins with the rights of the demos, ends with a conflation of demos and ethnos, where ethnos denotes a group or race of people who share a common culture. Colley, on the other hand, argues that citizens will have a political identity as citizens; however, true power will not be centralized in a state, but will devolve to local areas. Calling this the Millennium Contract of Citizen Rights, she argues that the future nation-state has to have a symbolism and public culture that is flexible and capacious enough to include migrants, regional identities, and alternative and overlapping identities. Britishness, she says, as opposed to Englishness, ‘is a synthetic and capacious concept with no necessary ethnic or cultural overtones’ (Colley, 1999). This clearly has implications for Western liberal democracies and the treatment of migrants and minorities. Who decides when to close borders and when to open up citizenship from beyond the nation-state? Whose interests are paramount? While liberal theorists of citizenship place culture at the heart of liberal democracy and citizenship, other political theorists frame the language of citizenship in terms of cultural rights. This makes culture the crux of the

Challenges to national citizenship25 argument between those who want to keep the national sphere “culturally pure” and those, like new minorities, who argue that liberal citizenship must include a broader definition of culture. Scholars of migration are among those who study citizenship not as it is, but as it should be. Matthew Gibney makes a distinction between two ethical perspectives on citizenship. The first, “partialism”, identifies the interests of the citizens as central to determining policies on migrants. Since the populace (demos) elects its representatives in a democracy, its interests take priority over any other moral perspective. This communitarianism perspective favours the interests of the national community over a larger ethical imperative (Gibney, 2004). The second perspective, “impartialism”, takes a more cosmopolitan view of membership and privileges moral imperatives and justice over narrow national interests (liberalism and utilitarianism). Though impartiality would seem the properly ethical and just perspective, partialism is in fact the most influential in realpolitik and in any discussion of culture and citizenship. Why does partialism have such a strong hold on notions of citizenship and its attendant belonging? According to Gibney, ‘if one accepts the partialist view of the state as a warm and intimate association, what separates citizens from foreigners is clearly a great deal more than legal status; they are separated also by the mass of shared understandings, practices, and common history which make the political community a site of special importance’ (Gibney, 2004, p. 27). The entrance and belonging of large numbers of people who do not share this ‘warm and intimate’ embrace of a common culture can disrupt and alter values that a community might hold in esteem. Outsiders may alter levels of public support for things like education or the arts which a national community may value highly. This could in turn incite hostile feelings and resentment against the newcomers and alter the stability of a nation-state. For partialists, the importance of national community and culture is central not only to political self-expression but also to identity and stability. Taking the partialist view of the nation-state as dominant, the privileging of cultural community and a common life is very close to the normative definition of citizenship. It also points to why, despite decades of settlement and acculturation, migrant minorities are still seen as outsiders and as belonging, if at all, on the margins of the nation-state. Their interests are marginal because their identities are seen as marginal and not properly belonging to the nation. They might belong to the state, speak the language, be born and brought up within national territory, but since their culture is different, and culture determines belonging, they do not belong. This conundrum, where minority citizens belong to the state but not to the nation, can lead to scapegoating, the creation of an underclass, and continuing tension between the law and lived reality. The Habermasian, communitarian view of citizenship is a philosophical ideal; in reality, no nationstate exists as a closed community, and citizenship functions through a kind of

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reality‑effect in which the purity and unity of a nation are disturbed by the presence of the so-called foreigner. Cultural citizenship is another term for what Gibney, Kymlicka and Taylor define as a composite communitarian perspective. Cultural citizenship is a contested idea/space within which different groups in the nation-state struggle for inclusion and normativity. Culture here is not defined as an epiphenomenon but as a materialist reality which includes state institutions like schools, employment and the military. It also includes the more traditional definitions of culture such as the arts, language, literature, music and film. Lastly, since cultural community is constructed as a shared space, values, ethics and ideology are also central to culture. Though socio-economic perspectives are important in determining the cause of persistent marginalization, economic factors alone cannot explain the marginalization of groups which have lived as migrants in a state for more than 50 years and three generations. While class has a significant, even determining, effect on the status of minorities, inclusion is not reducible to economic status. Rather, class in this case has much to do with culture. For example, a French worker in a Peugeot plant would perceive a Moroccan in the same job as having a different culture and as belonging to a different class. Even if they joined in a strike together and thus fought for a similar class interest, cultural difference would trump class unity in most cases. Similarly, race, itself a culturally constructed idea, would be considered more central to identity than class. Why have minorities in Britain and France found it hard to be accepted fully into the community of the nation? After more than half a century of immigration, the indigenous ethnic populations (autochthonous) of both Britain and France see their interests and issues as more representative and more deserving of the nation’s attention. If minorities want full acceptance and full citizenship, if they want to be members of the demos, then they have two main choices. One, they can accept that they will forever remain marginal to the cultural community that makes up the nation and consent to being an underclass. Or they can organize in a network of affiliations and organizations in order to force a change in the composition of a nation’s cultural community. A last option would be to persist as minorities which are hostile to the state, occupying an insider–outsider status. We see some of this in the so-called home-grown radicalism among young minorities.2 History of citizenship Contemporary citizenship is a struggle over the meaning of the term. The traditional legal and political meaning that presumes cultural homogeneity has given way towards a pluralist and activist form that plays out in the realm of culture and identities (see Colley, 1999). Cultural citizenship changes the emphasis from contractual and ethnocentric ideas of belonging to political, cultural and

Challenges to national citizenship27 transnational aspects.3 This incompletely defined space is concerned with identity issues but also, and more importantly, challenges older ethnocultural ideas of nation, patriotism and complete assimilation. Thus, the idea of citizenship as a fixed identity, or even as a contractual identity sealed by a piece of paper, is negated. Cultural citizenship’s primary argument attacks a basic premise of the nativists: that there is an essential, unchanging, pure native culture that needs protection from outsiders. It does so by expanding and giving voice to the idea that the meaning of being British or French is not an essential, but a contested and changing, space, always in the process of being renegotiated. Thus the very basis of the modern nation as it has been articulated by Benedict Anderson, among others, is up for debate. Though some histories of migration and settlement, such as Paul Gilroy’s, have dated the cultural anti-racism back to the 1970s, others have traced its origins to labour collectives and shop-floor workers’ organizations such as the Indian Workers Association (IWA) (Gilroy, 1991). Virinder Kalra points out that the mobilization of culture into anti-racist politics goes back to the 1960s when poetry and song were used to express cultural solidarity against racism in Southall (in Sharma et al., 1998). However, his account suggests that it was easy for white Britain, especially on the left, to marginalize this political–cultural organizing as being anti-state, and thus punishable, something no longer true. Instead, the somewhat fashionable resurgence of South Asian culture in Britain since the 1980s has made it axiomatic for politically correct leftists and politicians to acknowledge the presence and force of “multicultural” Britain, but it comes at a price. The resultant merchandizing and co-optation of the concept are hardly surprising (Hutnyk, 1999–2000). Citizenship is the battle for membership in a nation (as opposed to formal citizenship in the state) when immigrants become minorities, when the myth of return to the homeland is reluctantly abandoned, when a second and third generation of children settle and claim a country that was once seen as a temporary exile. Many have accused the discourse of a differentialist citizenship of disabling the universal and secular–legal definition of citizenship and the protection it provides individuals. Max Silverman, for example, holds that the weakening of the nation-state and the rise of civil (private, individual) rather than civic (communitarian, egalitarian) society in its place is an ambivalent blessing (Silverman, 1996). On the one hand, such a development encourages a pluralist culture, but on the other it leaves culture to the mercy of consumer power and laissez-faire capitalism. The most pessimistic, if not paranoid, reading of this change blames immigrants for fostering differentialist individuality at the expense of universal and secular citizenship. But as Silverman points out, ‘Citizenship was [always] merged with cultural conformity, the second seen as the condition of and the means to attain the first’ (italics added; Silverman, 1996, p. 147). Cultural citizenship re-politicizes the supposedly neutral space of citizenship by questioning the

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assumptions behind the universal citizen and, in the words of the French sociologist Sami Naïr, ‘opens up the public space to the clash of cultural particularisms’ (quoted in Silverman, 1996, p. 149). Nation-states have historically recognized that culture and language are central to the integration of minorities at the level of policy-making.4 Some states guide assimilation more strongly than others. In Sweden and the Netherlands, for example, ‘the government funds immigrant associations, facilitates learning one’s mother tongue, promotes equal opportunities in the labour market, and allows immigrants to vote in local elections’ (Sassen, 1999, p. 117). Through governmental policies, these countries institutionalize and emphasize the importance of cultural pluralism in their societies. This is not true in many other countries, especially France, where such a vision of integration with pluralism runs counter to the myth of a secular, universal citizen. While in Britain, as Cesarani points out, discourse on citizenship can easily be read as code for racism. ‘The current emphasis on the family as the training ground for citizenship and a building block of the nation has racial implications, too. Black family life has been systematically stigmatized and declared inadequate. The implication is that dysfunctional or incomplete Black families produce bad citizens – members of the “underclass”’ (Cesarani, 1996, p. 70). Hence, citizenship again becomes a divisive racial concept rather than an inclusive universal one. Thus, it is left to minorities themselves to seize the advantage in the battle for cultural and civic citizenship and, through it, define the modern nation as a place of multiplicity, pluralism and justice. France and Britain historically took very different approaches to the issue in the 1990s. France insisted on using the institutions of the nation-state – schools, the army – in order to make French citizens out of North African migrants. Britain was more open to a liberal, multicultural approach, especially under Tony Blair. After 2001, both took similar approaches to integrating minorities and immigrants. Britain turned to monitoring right-wing religious organizations and insisted on citizenship ceremonies and tests, while France began recognizing and controlling its Islamic mosques and organizations. People who argue that a political and contractual citizenship is preferable to “differentialist” citizenship ignore the continued pressure towards cultural assimilation that is a part of almost every history of modern citizenship. In France, many conservatives see the rise of culturalist or differentialist discourses as a step backwards from republican equality, arguing that only a secular universalist definition of citizenship protects human and political rights. While this argument has a degree of plausibility, the evidence that universal citizenship has proved unable and unwilling to accommodate the claims-making of multiracial Europe is overwhelming. Critics like Kymlicka and Brubaker strongly contend that instead of seeing culture as marginal to the process of citizenship, the linkage between culture and citizenship is a step towards greater integration.5

Challenges to national citizenship29 A brief overview of citizenship laws in France shows that while on one level legislation from 1789 to 1889 moved towards a “neutral” political definition of citizenship, the assumption always was that such citizenship would accompany cultural assimilation. On the contrary, in Britain, the link between citizenship and cultural uniformity (notwithstanding its minorities of Welsh, Irish and Scottish citizens) was not even questioned until immigration began from Eastern Europe, ex-colonies and the Commonwealth.6 Given the racial, religious and cultural differences between postwar immigrants and their hosts, assimilation in the conservative sense (i.e., as with many Polish, Spanish or Portuguese workers who arrived at the same time and were seen as fellow Christians, Europeans and, therefore, culturally assimilable) is problematic, if not impossible. Therefore, it is important to negotiate a new standard for what constitutes citizenship in a changed and changing society. A detour into a short history of citizenship laws in Britain and France proves that demands for a ‘multicultural citizenship’ (Kymlicka) are resisted, or seen as “stresses” on national life because they bring to the fore tensions about defining the constituents of a nation-state. The appearance of a more assimilable set of immigrants from Catholic Spain, Portugal and Italy in the 1940s and 1950s had meant that tensions had not surfaced over the questions of religious, racial and cultural homogeneity. With the earlier Eastern European migrants, questions arose about political loyalty. This proved to be an unreliable expectation in the second half of the twentieth century, as immigrants from an empire that had outlived its usefulness arrived in the labour-starved motherland and found themselves being blamed for being different, ghettoized and, in effect, bad citizens. The limited definition of citizenship and its inability to deal fairly with immigrants produced their demand for colour-blind justice. The slogan ‘We’re here because you were there’ drew connections between race, empire and nation that most people in Britain and France did not want to make. The legacy of colonization in the shape of a visible minority is finally forcing both Britain and France to rethink anachronistic, racially homogeneous citizenship laws. By challenging older assumptions about citizenship, minorities are challenging the national imaginary and breaking the silent but persistent link between nationality and race. Young Franco-Maghrebis have employed the dual strategy of engaging in local issues to bypass larger questions of nation, as well as looking to a bi-national (in the case of the Maghreb and France) or supranational (the EU) space for political and cultural action.7 The Runnymede Trust’s report (2000) on the ‘future of multi-ethnic Britain’ begins with a fact that few recognize as true: Britain is a multi-ethnic society. The report attacks the conservative shibboleth that multiculturalism is inegalitarian by foregrounding the problem, ‘Since citizens have differing needs, equal treatment requires full account to be taken of their differences. When equality ignores relevant differences and insists on uniformity of treatment, it leads to

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injustice and inequality; when differences ignore the demands of equality, they result in discrimination. Equality must be defined in a culturally sensitive way and applied in a discriminating but not discriminatory manner.’8 On the other hand, this plea for cultural equality is clearly not enough for minority scholars like Tariq Modood, who demands group rights based on religion instead of “community” rights based on race or place of origin (Modood et al., 2006). The question of British citizenship, as opposed to subjecthood to the Crown, began to be articulated late in the nineteenth century with the migration of European Jews into Britain. Earlier, the British relationship had been not to a nation-state, but to either the Crown or a feudal overlord, where citizenship was structured according to a Christian, confessional mode. Allegiance, rather than any objective measure of what made up a specifically “British” citizen, was important. The idea of what constitutes a “British” citizen wasn’t articulated until the first Jewish immigration into Britain from 1882 to 1905, which culminated in the 1905 Aliens Act, through which began the process of defining British citizenship. Not surprisingly, given the context, it was defined in terms of race. Bolsheviks followed Jews as the targets of a nationalist hysteria over immigration. But it wasn’t until after World War II that anti-immigration sentiment resulted in a weakening of naturalization laws and the abrogation of the jus soli. ‘The British-born children of non-British-born parents, even if the parents were naturalized, were barred from employment in the civil service, and from educational and housing entitlements’ (Cesarani, 1996, p. 62). Rapid decolonization after the war and the influx of citizens from white and non-white colonies soon defined the direction of successive Acts of Parliament on immigration towards a racialized view of Britishness. The 1948 British Nationality Act, which allowed both British citizens and citizens of Commonwealth countries to settle in Britain, was relatively liberal and adhered to the doctrine of civis Britannicus sum, whereby all British subjects could enter the ‘mother country’. But the arrival of people from the West Indies soon after was deemed problematic. Cesarani observes that around the same time (1947–51), 200,000 new East European immigrants were welcomed as an assimilable population, who could contribute to ‘Anglo-Saxon stock’. This attitude against racial mixing continued over the next 40 years, which saw the whittling down of primary immigration on the legal front and the rise of racist political rhetoric around “problems” and “unassimilability”. The 1958 Notting Hill riots and the recasting of antiimmigration feeling in the 1970s as an objective “law-and-order” issue further narrowed the space for acceptance of a multihued Britain.9 Within Britain, the fallout from increased immigration control and the obstacles placed in the way of family reunion reinforced the confusion around citizenship. This most clearly played out around the issue of admitting Asians fleeing Idi Amin’s rule in Uganda. The debate soon became about the purity of British culture and its incompatibility with any culture from non-white countries. It came to a head

Challenges to national citizenship31 in the Thatcher era over the issue of The satanic verses. The “Rushdie affair” is remarkable in retrospect for how it moved the white liberal intelligentsia to essentially the same position as the conservative nationalists. This was especially true after the Bradford demonstrations where copies of the novel were burned. Humanism, freedom of speech and author-centric arguments reinforced the view that religious fanatics (read Islamic immigrants) could not militate against the enlightened European view. The knee-jerk responses on both sides totally obscured the rights and wrongs of the book itself. But, then, it was never about the book.10 In France, the 1986 debate on immigration and citizenship launched the demand for a new citizenship. ‘The debate on the reform of the Nationality Code led primarily to the questioning of the association between nationality and citizenship, a central theme in the idea of “new” citizenship. The second generation demanded a notion of citizenship based on participation and residence rather than on nationality and descent’ (Wihtol de Wenden, 1994). Rogers Brubaker points out that French citizenship, as it arose in 1793 during the Revolution, was defined primarily in terms of an inclusive, universalist theme centred on a contractual relationship between the state and the citizen (Brubaker, 1998). It was a cosmopolitan citizenship that privileged the “Rights of Man” over the rights of citizens, one that did not articulate a distinction between Frenchman and foreigner. The only law that levied extra taxes and barred inheritance by foreigners, the droit d’aubaine, was repealed after the revolution. In succeeding years, during the Napoleonic era and the debate around the Civil Code through the 1880s, even though France engaged in some discussion about the degree of openness in civil society, it generally remained true to the idea of jus soli instead of ethnic lineage (jus sanguinis). ‘They did not ask: Who is French? but rather: Who shall enjoy political rights?’ (Brubaker, 1992, p. 87). According to Brubaker, during the drafting of the Civil Code, Napoleon emphasized the assimilative power of France, especially regarding the children of immigrants, who had ‘the French way of thinking, French habits, and the natural attachment that everyone has for the country in which he was born’ (ibid., p. 88). A similar trend in French political thinking reappeared in a slightly different form in the country’s relations with its colonial possessions. The Civil Code allowed the descendants of foreign-born parents to voluntarily claim citizenship at the age of majority. This aspect of the law was re-invoked in the 1980s when children of Algerian parents opposed automatic French citizenship.11 Even as French citizenship was relatively open and free of ethnocultural bias, it was also remarkably nation-centric. In the middle of the nineteenth century, nascent national movements in Greece, Belgium, Italy and Germany aroused interest in the connection between ethnicity and nationhood. France’s defeat in the Franco-Prussian War and the turn away from rationalism were two of the main reasons, according to Brubaker, leading to the nationalization of ethnic and racial categories. The

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primary ­theorists of race at this time were Gobineau, Renan and Hippolyte (ibid., p. 101). But it was the Dreyfus affair that most sharply brought the issue of race to the fore. However, both universal assimilationism and the recasting of nation in terms of ethnic and racial models coexisted into the twentieth century. The persistence of the assimilationist model depended largely on a national secular system of education and compulsory military service for all men. Through these two institutions, the nation-state managed to mould all French men, regardless of region, race or language, into national citizens rather than a loose collection of disparate ethnicities. During the Vichy regime and during the rise of the National Front in the 1980s, the other face of French citizenship arose: the exclusionist, ethnocultural one. This could be called the counter discourse of the assimilationist model. The history of this counter discourse is a history of anti-Semitism and colonialism. What stands out most clearly, however, is the constructed nature of the narrative of ethnic and cultural purity disseminated by organizations like the National Front and Le Pen. The transition from the predominantly assimilationist model of citizenship to a predominantly exclusionary one can be dated to the Algerian War of Independence and the return of the harkis (Algerians who fought on the side of the French against their own countrymen) and pieds-noirs (people of European origin living in Algeria during French rule) to France. But it can also be more fruitfully seen as a political program of the right that turned the multicultural insistence on “the right to difference” into an inability to assimilate. The right to difference became translated into an essential difference that could not be overcome and, as such, immigrants who were black or Islamic or carried some other mark of difference had to leave. Calls for repatriation were the extreme face of French nationalism in the 1980s. “New racism”, so-called because its focus isn’t race but culture, is actually not that new. Cultural relativism just provided a more acceptable guise within which to attack racial minorities in the post-Holocaust era. In the 1970s and 1980s, after the collapse of the postwar economy, Le Pen was given a marvellous opportunity in the burgeoning resistance to urban immigrants. The conjuncture of recession and unemployment allowed Le Pen to blame immigration for structural problems in the country’s economy. Since the 1980s, the French political right and left have fought over the rightful place of “immigrants” in France. Overall, French policy on immigration has moved steadily right, but this period has also seen the emergence of spokespeople and groups within French minority communities. The Marche des Beurs in 1983 and the rise of the anti-racist group SOS-Racisme, under its first president Harlem Désir, laid the basis for the appearance of grass-roots activists and politicians from among France’s minority communities (Malik, 1990). Under Nicolas Sarkozy’s leadership in the mid-2000s, France undertook a wide debate about national character, or what makes France distinctively French.

Challenges to national citizenship33 This debate, overwhelmingly, had to do with memory and national traditions. What makes France a nation, which parts of French history are worth remembering, and which are not to be dwelt upon were at the heart of this debate. Chapter 2 deals with this in more detail. Identity, religion and radicalism While culture was an important locus of struggle in the 1990s, post-2001 various forms of dis-identification took precedence in the struggle for full citizenship. Historically, minorities have been constrained by their legal status in the country or by political discourses that delegitimized their presence. National identity was associated with reference to histories that did not include them. Racial, religious and other differences among groups, aided and abetted by those in power, contributed further to a lack of coordinated organization. Debates over integration, institutional racism and loyalty to the nation-state took on an urgency after 11 September 2001, marked by paranoia and fear. After the 7 July 2005 London bombings, the question of what led four young men, three of them from Leeds, to become suicide bombers, killing 52 people and injuring more than 700, was uppermost in most people’s minds. Was it a hatred of British foreign policy, of British people or of extremist ideology? Again, in May 2013, when two men of Nigerian and Jamaican descent who had converted to Islam attacked Lee Rigby of the Royal Regiment of Fusiliers in Woolwich with a car and then with cleavers, killing him on the spot, questions about what could have prevented this killing arose but were never satisfactorily answered.12 Former Prime Minister Tony Blair blamed it on ‘problems with Islam’. The leader of the extremist Muslim group al-Muhajiroun blamed the British Government’s foreign policy instead of accepting any responsibility for the attack. Some right-wing groups attacked mosques in “revenge”. But the deeper issue of what led these youths to such extreme dis-identification from British national identity was never satisfactorily engaged. Wanting to use his death as a spectacular moment, Rigby’s killers waited 20 minutes with his body in order to declare to the responding authorities that they were ‘soldiers of Allah’ (Celso, 2014, pp. 101–102). The public spectacle of dis-identification with Britain was almost as important as the killing itself. Another incident took place in 2012, a French gunman named Mohamed Merah, from the housing estate of Les Izards in Toulouse, went on a shooting spree, killing a French soldier of Muslim descent, a rabbi, two other Jews and some schoolchildren. When caught, he jumped from his flat and killed himself. He justified his murderous rampage by blaming French foreign policy in Afghanistan and by proclaiming his identification with al-Qaeda. Links between Islamic minorities, jihadi ideology and terrorism are easily formed in the popular imagination. Despite many caveats, what causes Muslim

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youth to espouse terror is an important question. Sociological analyses are divided. In one study, two scholars polled British Muslims (almost 64 per cent nationally) and concluded that the two factors distinguishing Muslim from non-Muslim Britons were greater religiosity and social conservatism (Lewis and Kashyap, 2013). However, is that a cause of violence? Another study, by Chetan Bhatt, concluded that religiosity by itself is not enough to explain the appeal of terrorism to young men in particular. He points to the ‘corridors of violence’ or political pathways that lead South Asian youth to terrorism. He traces their paths from sympathies for causes like Kashmir and Palestine, which ideologically nurture their disaffection, to preachers and internet materials that provide them with the symbolic and rhetorical language to see these causes linked to British foreign policy and ultimately to operational skills that help them translate anger into action (Bhatt, 2013). What causes this political mobilization in the first place? Is it class politics or unemployment? Is it the lack of acceptance from majority populations, as is often thought? Bhatt argues that the distance between political anger and actual violence has disappeared as the ready availability of jihadi videos, militia camps, symbolism and terrorism as spectacle has made it relatively easy for people to carry out terrorist acts. And it is very clear to the perpetrators that they are enacting terror: violence against a symbolic civilian population (Bhatt, 2010). The heavy mediatization of terror acts is also part of their appeal. Monnot and Piettre see this form of violence as a desire for visibility, not for celebrity but for recognition as a Muslim and a citizen. They use the term recognizability as a fundamental desire which has historically been suppressed by the French insistence on laïcité (Monnot and Piettre, 2014, pp. 167–168). Recognizability is a conflation of recognition and visibility. According to Monnot and Piettre, the term foregrounds both the moral visibility of racism as well as the political status of Islam as an identity that is constantly suppressed through anti-veiling laws and the like. The desire by people like Adebowajo and Adebowale in Woolwich or Merah in Toulouse to be seen committing these acts points to their feeling invisible to majority society. The struggle over meanings of citizenship, even when routed through violence, is a clear challenge to the stability of national identities. The very presence of immigrants has always tested the assumed stability and permanence of defined and contained ideas of national citizenship. The first generation of postcolonial migrants, the “Windrush” generation from the Caribbean and its equivalent from South Asia and the Maghreb, fought their political battles on the shop floor, with immigration authorities, on the street and in courts. But for these immigrants, the “myth of return” to the homeland, nostalgia, problems of language, cultural dislocation and the economic precariousness of their position made homeland cultures a locus of solidarity instead of struggle. The second generation (if these absolute distinctions are permitted) saw themselves as part of

Challenges to national citizenship35 new, multi-ethnic societies and used culture to contest exclusionary versions of citizenship. Their linguistic and cultural facility within Europe and their sense of belonging, fraught as it is, have allowed them to challenge and change the terms of the debate whose exclusive, retrogressive definitions of national citizenship had left them out. This division between first and second generations is not an absolute marker of difference. It is used here only to mark a shift, or expansion, of those spaces where contestations over naming and definitions can take place. Children of immigrants who settled in the UK and France foreground issues of culture and citizenship much more overtly than their parents did. The French social scientist Catherine Wihtol de Wenden argues that the structure of the Maghrebi immigrant population has changed. ‘[One section] is older, and is increasingly threatened by unemployment in the car, steel and mining industries. The other segment is younger, and in spite of such difficulties as delinquency, unemployment, insufficient vocational training, failure at school, and drug use, is better disposed towards economic, social, cultural and even political self-organization … Some Maghrebians still belong to the first generation, while others are French citizens well-integrated into their social groups’ (Wihtol de Wenden, 2014, p. 152). Clearly, the ability to both function within and use culture is central to the move from “Maghrebi” to “French citizen” that takes place along generations. Like Linda Colley, Wihtol de Wenden makes a significant distinction between earlier forms of factory- or shop-floor-based political action and contemporary demands for “new citizenship” based on local political and cultural associations. ‘Consider the focus put on citizenship and civil rights. Some forms and definitions of a new citizenship appeared in urban suburbs among FrancoMaghrebians who liked to say that some of them were citizens by participation without necessarily being nationals’ (Wihtol de Wenden, 2014, p. 155). The emphasis on a collectivity based on ethnicity, religion and culture rather than labour highlights the new emphasis on culture as a tool of political activism, often confrontational, in which culture works not just expressively but in a declarative, polemical and agonistic way to define the minority population’s role and place in Britain and France.13 Since 2001, the emphasis in this struggle has been on religion, employment, culture and citizenship.14 The deployment of ethnicity and culture profoundly challenges the self-perception of national societies in Britain and France because what minorities are asking for is much more far-reaching than demands of earlier generations. Present generations are demanding equality with difference. This demand goes against the assumed stability of national identity and often gives rise to conflict as “recognizabilty” goes against the expectations of assimilation. It is fair to say that at present, citizenship issues in Britain and France, despite different historical beginnings, can be defined in two similar ways: first in terms of immigration and the presence of immigrants in ex-colonial countries

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which has challenged the assumption of shared understandings of citizenship; second, in the crisis of young minorities turning to different kinds of terror acts to draw attention and visibility to their existence and their demands for acceptance. Notes  1 Authors like Hanif Kureishi in Britain and Mehdi Charef in France are good examples, along with film-makers like Stephen Frears and Yamina Benguigui.  2 With the rise of ISIL or ISIS in Syria and Iraq, questions about this radicalization are increasingly being asked. See articles by Katherine Brown (2014) and Alan Cowell (2014).  3 The term cultural citizenship has been used by Toby Miller and Aihwa Ong in slightly different contexts. Miller uses it to suggest the multiple interpellations of the subject by mass culture in the interests of state and consumer governmentality, and Ong uses it to define how the United States treats or classifies its immigrants of colour according to class and racial divisions. My redeployment of the term is closer to Miller’s usage in suggesting that citizenship is something to be wrested and redefined from the state and conservative nationalists. Agency, in this definition, comes from below, as diasporic subjects and minority citizens use or fashion culture to assert their membership in a national community and to reject stereotypes of being black/Asian/Arab that are imposed from without. Thus, cultural citizenship is an activist struggle, not divorced from either pleasure or politics, one that finds its roots in multiple states, communities, languages, classes and colours. It also refuses to privilege one over the other as a precondition for assimilation or nostalgia.  4 I address the special way in which the word integration is used in debates on assimilation in France later, but here the term is used in its commonest sense, suggesting the efforts by governments and municipalities, schools and religious bodies, to adapt to minorities and encourage them to adapt to life there.  5 See Shafir (1998, pp. 167–220).  6 The exception to the link between citizenship debates and postwar immigration remains, most notably, in the case of Jewish immigration, first in 1753–54 from France, and then from 1882–1905. See Cesarani (1996, pp. 60–62).  7 Wihtol de Wenden reports that in 1989, 400 Franco-Maghrebis were candidates in the local elections, of which 200 were elected as municipal councillors (Wihtol de Wenden, 1994). Like Saskia Sassen and Yasemin Soysal, she sees the supranational impulse in their positioning themselves as “Europeans” rather than French, and sometimes as “Mediterranean”. Both these progressive formulations deny the politics of the nation-state as an arbiter of identity.  8 See the report at www.runnymedetrust.org.  9 See Gilroy (1991) for more on this subject. 10 See Social Text no. 29 (1991), a special issue on the Rushdie affair, for more on the fallout from affiliations made in haste. 11 The debate over being ascribed French citizenship was an issue particularly because Algeria had fought a long and arduous battle to become independent in 1962. A

Challenges to national citizenship37 related concern was the length of compulsory military service required by both France and Algeria, which played a part in the decision. 12 A report was released by the Intelligence and Security Committee of Parliament on 25 November 2014, which declared that the crime could not have been prevented. But in its recommendations, it does urge more surveillance of subjects who are judged “SoI” (subjects of interest) as these two suspects were. 13 I use the term minority rather than immigrant to suggest that erstwhile immigrant populations are now part of the countries involved. The term is also inclusive of all generations, rather than the awkward distinction between first and second generation in English and immigré and “jeunes issus d’immigration” in French. 14 See Taguieff (1991), which signalled a change in thinking about right-wing discourse. Balibar and Wallerstein (1993) is an important theoretical contribution to the field. A perspective of labour history and its analysis is provided in Castles and Cosack (1985).

References Balibar, E. and Wallerstein, I. (1993). Race, nation, class. New York: Verso. Bhatt, C. (2010). The “British Jihad” and the curves of religious violence. Ethnic and Racial Studies, 33(1): 39–59. Bhatt, C. (2013). The virtue of violence: The Salafi-jihadi political universe. Theory, Culture and Society, 31: 25–48. Brown, K. (2014). Analysis: Why are Western women joining Islamic State? BBC News. 6 October 2014. Retrieved from www.bbc.com/news/uk-29507410. Brubaker, R. (1992). Citizenship and nationhood in France and Germany. Cambridge and London: Harvard University Press. Brubaker, R. (1998). Immigration, citizenship, and the nation-state in France and Germany: A comparative historical analysis. In G. Shafir (Ed.), The citizenship debates: A reader (pp. 131–166). Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Castles, S. and Cosack, G. (1985). Immigrant workers and class structure in Western Europe. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Celso, A. (2014). Al-Qaeda’s post-9/11 devolution: The failed jihadist struggle against the near and far enemy. New York: Bloomsbury USA. Cesarani, D. (1996). The changing character of citizenship and nationality in Britain. In D. Cesarani and M. Fulbrook (Eds), Citizenship, nationality and migration in Europe (pp. 57–73). London and New York: Routledge. Colley, L. (1999). Britishness in the 21st century. Transcript of Millennium lecture at 10 Downing Street. Retrieved from www.number-10.gov.uk/output/Page3049.asp. Cowell, A. (2014). Britain arrests 6 in counterterrorism raids. New York Times. 14 October 2014. p. A10. Retrieved from http://nyti.ms/1rs5Fc2. Gibney, M. J. (2004). The ethics and politics of asylum: Liberal democracy and the response to refugees. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Gilroy, P. (1991). There ain’t no black in the Union Jack: The cultural politics of race and nation. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Hutnyk, J. (1999–2000). Hybridity saves: Authenticity and/or the critique of appropriation. Amerasia Journal, 25(3), 39–58.

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Intelligence and Security Committee of Parliament (2014). Report on the Intelligence relating to the murder of Fusilier Lee Rigby. Retrieved from http://isc.independent. gov.uk/committee-reports/special-reports. Joseph, M. (1999). Nomadic identities: The performance of citizenship. Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press. Kymlicka, W. (1995). Multicultural citizenship: A liberal theory of minority rights. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Lewis, V. A. and Kashyap, R. (2013). Are Muslims a distinctive minority? An empirical analysis of religiosity, social attitudes, and Islam. Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion, 52(3), 617–626. Malik, S. (1990). L’Histoire secrète de SOS-Racisme. Paris: Albin Michel. Modood, T., Triandafyllidou, A. and Zapata-Barrero, R. (2006). Multiculturalism, Muslims and citizenship: A European approach. London and New York: Routledge. Monnot, C. and Piettre, A. (2014). Being recognizable in order to overcome the crisis: The ambivalence of Islamic actors’ struggle for visibility in France and Switzerland. In G. Ganiel, H. Winkel and C. Monnot (Eds), Religion in times of crisis (pp. 153–171). Leiden and Boston: Brill Books. Sassen, S. (1999). Guests and aliens. New York: New Press. Shafir, G. (Ed.) (1998). The citizenship debates: A reader. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Sharma, S., Hutnyk, J. and Sharma, A. (Eds) (1998). Dis-orienting rhythms: The politics of the new Asian dance music. London: Zed Press. Silverman, M. (1996). The revenge of civil society: State, nation and society in France. In D. Cesarani and M. Fulbrook (Eds), Citizenship, nationality and migration in Europe (pp. 146–158). London and New York: Routledge. Taguieff, P. (1991). Le Force du préjugé. Paris: La Découverte. Wihtol de Wenden, C. (1994). Immigrants as political actors in France. West European Politics, 17(2), 91–110. Wihtol de Wenden, C. (2014). Second-generation immigrants: Citizenship and transnationalism. Araucaria, 16(31), 147–170.

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Postcolonial minorities and securitization

Introduction Public attitudes towards minorities, especially Muslim minorities, in Britain and France have changed rapidly since the events of 2001 and 2007. Groups that were defined as “immigrants” or by their country of origin – Pakistan, India, etc. – have been collapsed under a cultural–religious nomenclature of Islamic or Muslim, while no such categories have been created for Hindus or Christians. Hyphenated generational identities have lost their nuanced status. While the larger argument of this book explains the causes of this change, here I want to focus on why Islam and radicalization have been conflated not just in popular discourse but also in the media and political discourse. Legislation and police procedures in Britain since 7/7 have fostered this conflation between minority, Islam and violence, leading to further alienation and resentment among minority youth. In France too, the November 2005 banlieue riots and the Charlie Hebdo killings of 2015 have sharpened this trend. In this chapter, I argue that the conflation between violence, Islam and minorities is tied to a historical legacy rooted in colonial history and its debates about citizenship for colonial subjects. It is no coincidence that, in both Britain and France, the subjects of this scrutiny are postcolonial minorities. Historians of French and British colonialism have drawn the connections between debates about colonial Muslim subjects and their incompatibility with the kind of modern national citizenship that was available to British and French subjects (Clancy-Smith, 1998; Cesari, 2010; Sessions, 2011). In this chapter, I show the similarity of historical (colonial) and contemporary language and fears that exist about Islam and its perceived incompatibility with European society. Last, but not least, I contextualize Islamic terrorism of the present through comparing it to other groups that have fought nation-states in Europe in order to show how it fits within a European tradition of political struggle.

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Postcolonial minorities in Britain and France From hybridity to minority rights

Traditionally, the political incorporation of immigrants takes place in three stages. In the first stage they focus on homeland issues, in the second on politics of community, and in the third they demand participation in wider (national) society (Wihtol de Wenden, 1995). Insofar as the second- and third-stage activism can also include an insistence on ethno- or community-specific needs, this can give rise to resistance and resentment among the majority, as they perceive these actions as a refusal to assimilate. The 1980s saw a struggle for rights for minorities that led to some measure of acceptance about the presence of ethnic minorities in Europe, which became popular as “hybridity”. However, in the twenty-first century, the shrinking of the welfare state combined with the “war on terrorism” has effected a change in both official and popular attitudes towards minorities that threatens to eradicate the hard-won gains of the last three decades. Hybridity, in late-twentieth-century Europe, had worked well with the policies of “multiculturalism”, which acted as (safe) discourses about race. For example, in Britain, multiculturalism (as state policy)1 and hybridity (as identity) had become part of the state’s apparatus in “dealing with” its minorities. This also worked to foreclose more complex questions about modes of integration, institutional discrimination, racism and class. The French state rejected multiculturalism but stressed integration and assimilation under the rubric of intégration, which was quite ill-defined as a policy, but conformed to its historical policy of laïcité. Hybridity had another effect: it culturalized minority populations – which is to say, it reduced them to an essential set of cultural values. This can be seen most clearly in the easy trendiness of second-generation hybrid musical cultures (Begag, 1996; Hutnyk, 1999–2000) and the poppy radicalism of groups like Corner Shop in Britain or the later music of someone like Cheb Khaled, who contribute to an apolitical smorgasbord of styles that can be consumed and discarded, leaving behind a self-righteous glow of having done the right thing. Hybridity as cultural consumerism also allowed a view of multiculturalism that was non-conflictual and unproblematic. This remained true until events like the affaire des foulards or the Stephen Lawrence murder (1993) unveiled the discontents and tensions that lay beneath the careful “managing” of community relations, or until world events like 9/11 dismantled this safe management and gave free rein to existing tensions. Such events also brought to the surface issues within communities that were hidden by safe terms like “community”, or supranational parameters like “South Asian”, “North African” or “European”: issues like religion, class, and different norms around gender and sexuality. Bauman calls community the ‘long-lost, now rediscovered true home of humanity’, which also contains ‘the oppressiveness of parochialism, the genocidal propensity of collective narcissism, the

Postcolonial minorities and securitization41 tyranny of communal pressures, and the pugnacity and despotism of communal discipline’ (1997, p. 56). Under the guise of cosy, separate but equal coexistence, ethnicity and absolute relativism remained active. In France the rejection of multiculturalism and hyphenated identities in favour of “intégration” nevertheless coexisted with a tolerance of certain degrees of difference, but only insofar as the difference remained confined to the private sphere. Large areas of a citizen’s life were still defined by the state: laïcité and education; universal human rights were skewed towards existing cultural and state institutions, not emergent ones. The horror of hyphenated identities became one way of allowing only a limited difference. As a reaction to this model of diversity, French minorities’ insistence on hybrid identities, both French and Berber, or French and Arab, is predicated rather on the American model of multiculturalism, where the hyphen suggests the coexistence of both sets of identities. In a film like La Haine (1995), for example, the three friends in the banlieue refer repeatedly to American fashion and American films; American music forms the eloquent voice of their anger and their heroes are all from the American civil rights movement. The failures of American multiculturalism and its results, including the ghettoization of racial minorities, are read against the grain as an insistence on difference under the hegemonic discourse of French republicanism. Thus, contesting definitions of citizenship within the nation-state emerged, even as states in Europe tried to control the challenge that postcolonial immigration posed to national identities and belonging. Could one be a citizen of France or Britain while being a good Muslim, or while wearing the veil? Does citizenship mean adhering to the cultural norms or political laws of the nation? The generations that came of political age in the 1980s and 1990s have broken this silence by engaging the state in these conversations. By contrast, the post-2001 generations have seen this as a lost battle and have opted out instead of in, and often chosen to look beyond the boundaries of the nation-state. Shifts in state and social discourses While the discourse of hybridity was useful in resisting and rewriting nationalist xenophobia in the late 1970s and early 1980s, it has outlived its usefulness. In fact, its lack of utility has become harmful inasmuch as it precludes discussion and work around the terms of what should succeed it. One of the main criticisms of hybridity is its double nature: it is both radical and an alibi for “cultural” racism (Werbner, 1997, p. 2). On the one hand, hybridity challenges the takeit-for-granted nature of identity and culture and introduces a greater degree of self-reflexivity into it. On the other hand, its multiple fragmentations reduce it to a consumerist cornucopia and an intellectualized museum of habits, values and things (Werbner, 1997, p. 15). Another criticism it is that it repudiates modernity’s belief in universal justice and rights, opening society to relativism

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and structural racism. When everything becomes contingent on local knowledge and standards, where does respect for cultural particularities end and discrimination begin? The riots in the British Midlands in 2001 and the unrest in the French banlieues in November 2005 made it clear that that state policies were failing minorities by every benchmark, whether it was employment, schooling, housing or cultural integration. By itself, unrest was not new. France had seen protests by immigrant labour in the 1970s around housing, and in the 1980s the Marche des Beurs had highlighted demands by the second generation. Britain had seen labour unrest in the 1970s and neighbourhood territorial violence in cities in the 1980s. Even before the World Trade Center bombing in September 2001, religion in general – and Islam in particular – had emerged as an important issue for minorities. Britain had seen the mobilizing of Muslims across national lines in the wake of Salman Rushdie’s novel, The satanic verses, and Sikhs had mobilized as a way to call attention to their demands for Khalistan (the name given by Sikh nationalists for a proposed independent Sikh state). However, in the new millennium, new fault lines began to emerge that were qualitatively different. They involved the creation of new identities, political demands that seemingly threatened core tenets of the nation-state, and instead of being confined to a small group, seemed to threaten the identity of the majority population. Fundamentally, the nature of national culture was being questioned. Historically, one way of pathologizing the racial/ethnic other has been by highlighting religious differences. Tariq Modood claims this is especially true when the religion is seen as threatening institutional versions of hybridity (Modood, 2006). In many cases, religious rejection takes the place of less acceptable racialist discourses. He points out that similar anti-Islam sentiments exist in many countries of Europe (Denmark, Sweden, Germany, France and Britain), where anti-Islam discourses can substitute for less acceptable forms of race discrimination. As a cultural identity, religion still allows the expression of discomfort, incompatibility and rejection. This is more true now, after the threat of “terrorism” has been officially institutionalized, especially in the context of Islam, but even before September 2001 Islam was held culpable for discrimination against and repression of women and an intolerance of other religions. While countries like the Netherlands and Belgium have provided state resources for establishing Islam as one of the faiths in the country, other countries see Islam as being intrinsically opposed to assimilation or as incompatible with the cultural parameters of “national” character. Despite the formal and sometimes institutional presence of a multicultural state, religious hybridity, particularly in the case of Islam, gets elided. Discourses of hybridity often work better in the context of racial identity than with religious differences. This may be for two reasons: one, that a religious public identity, in this case Islamic, violates liberal democratic rules of the separation of church and state, public and private, which

Postcolonial minorities and securitization43 nevertheless rest on consensual ideas of majority religions in the nation. Second, as Pnina Werbner points out, that religious culture may be far more politicized (1997, p. 262) than is acceptable to the “lyrical” proponents of hybridity. It forces them to examine hybridity’s limits. The period between the Gulf War in 1991 and the 7/7 London bombings in 2005 saw an intensification of feelings of marginalization and the lack of a minority voice in Britain’s politics and policy. During the Gulf War, the level of rhetoric against Arabs escalated and led to a sense that Muslim voices were unheard in Britain. Not surprisingly, this period also saw the rise of a “Muslim” as opposed to a Pakistani or Bangladeshi identity. As a move from diaspora politics to a British Muslim politics, this was a notable shift. It could be seen most clearly in the radicalization of Islamic youth during the war, particularly in the case of the Bradford Council of Mosques, where the elders were almost forced by young, radical Muslims to call for a jihad against the Western Alliance, a move that fell through at the last moment (Modood and Werbner, 1997, p.  256). Subsequent cutbacks in Government initiatives in the areas of anti-racism, community inclusion and representation, and a lack of funding for minority and ethnic organizations, have only added to the marginalization of Muslim British youth.2 The events following the September 2001 attack on New York and the capture of Richard Reid, the “shoe bomber”, highlighted the fact that Islam and Islamic radicalism existed within those European countries that Americans had thought “safe”. Cities like Frankfurt, Marseilles, Bradford and Brixton became labelled as terrorist havens. What got lost in all the rhetoric was the very local nature of the causes that led to young people’s radicalism. More importantly, a significant aspect of the resultant securitization discourse was its neglect of the causes of radicalization. These causes had less to do with ideology and more to do with everyday life for minority youth, including disproportionately high unemployment, stop-and-frisk policing, media conflation of Muslims with violence and an increase in racial profiling. These world events and local histories, taken together with the ascendancy of conservative political parties in Western Europe beginning in the 1990s, supported a popular turn away from the liberal consensus on immigration towards an anti-immigrant and anti-multiculturalism rhetoric. Despite the fact that, demographically, Europe currently needs more, not less, immigration, in order to offset falling fertility rates and a growing population of retirees, most governments court popularity by enacting or espousing anti-immigration initiatives.3 While primary immigration ended in the 1970s in France and a bit later in Britain, both these countries have whittled away at other forms of immigration as well, including the migration of asylum seekers and skilled migrants, and migration from other parts of Europe. The net result of cutting off these avenues has been an increase in irregular migration. One example of this is the

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refugee camp at Calais, France, popularly called “The Jungle”, which hosts up to 4,000 refugees from Syria, Afghanistan and Sudan. The British Government under the Conservative David Cameron has spent over £12 million in order to fence the camp and guard it with armed police and sniffer dogs, instead of allowing the refugees to set foot on British soil in order to claim asylum. These refugees are forced to reach Britain illegally by jumping on trains and lorries crossing the English Channel. They are then reviled as “illegals” and economic migrants, and are accused of exploiting the welfare state. The irony is that between Britain and France, far more money is spent in keeping them confined than would be in allowing them to present their case for asylum. Since these actions are not practical, they appeal at a political and ideological level. Analogically, the fight against radicalization amidst their population is also undertaken at a political level instead of paying attention to its causes. Similar reactions against an officially tolerated multiculturalism have been put in place in numerous countries, especially after 2001, under the pretext of combating extremism. New centre-right governments whose platforms include rolling back immigration and benefits to immigrants have put in place laws that include the rejection of dual citizenship (the Netherlands), citizenship tests and ceremonies (the Netherlands and the UK), and the deportation of immigrants and their children as a result of a felony (the UK). These absolutist measures ignore Europe’s own need for immigration and its ageing population. While this anti-immigration/immigrant surge may not apply to most diasporic families and ethnic minorities living in Western Europe, since many have work permits and formal citizenship of the country in which they reside, it does silence demands for cultural and social rights by immigrants and it intimidates them from practising those rights openly. In that sense, it effectively undermines many of the gains they have made in sociocultural spheres up till now. Securitization With regard to Muslims, European states have had two distinct phases in dealing with their postcolonial populations. The early phase, from 1974 to 1989, was focused on pragmatic accommodation by making sure there were housing, burial sites, prayer spaces, etc. This phase began when the first large wave of immigration ended in the wake of the oil shock of 1973. However, following demands from the second and third generation of minorities for recognition of Muslim identities in the public sphere, the government attitude shifted to management of Muslims through ‘regulation, control and incorporation’ (Alam, 2011). Steps included legislation against visible symbols of religious identity; control over Muslim imams and personal law; requirements around language learning and comprehension of local culture; regulating steps to citizenship via tests, ceremonies, etc.; as well as bringing control over Islam into line with how various

Postcolonial minorities and securitization45 Christian sects were controlled. What was lost in this phase was an emphasis on education: educating the minorities about vernacular cultures, but also educating majority populations about Muslim culture and religion. Additionally, some of the causes of dissatisfaction and anger among minority youth were dismissed, especially in France, as gangsterism or antisocial behaviour. There was no acknowledgement of structural inequality, poverty or ghettoization in the wake of de-industrialization in Western countries. This remained true until as late as 2005, when Nicolas Sarkozy dismissed the rioting urban youth in French cities as “racaille”, essentially dismissing any causal factors for the riots except for criminality. The SSRC (Social Science Research Foundation), based in New York, in 2005 spoke out against this myopic view of social unrest. Jocelyne Cesari, writing for the SSRC, said: ‘It is not sufficient, however, to attribute these outbreaks of violence solely to factors of social and economic marginality. This marginality is exacerbated by a general context of urban degradation: a degradation, furthermore, which affects a very specific sector of the population. That is, the crisis of the banlieues primarily concerns first- and second-generation immigrants from the former colonies of the Maghreb’ (italics added; Cesari, 2005). Cesari points out that the categories of “Islam” and “Arab” that are used to define postcolonial minorities are not enough to explain the unrest. Instead, she points to the changing nature of French society as a whole that is being remade “horizontally”, with a centre and a periphery. Postcolonial minorities remain on the periphery, not just for a while but across multiple generations. This lack of social mobility and integration is one reason why Islamic identities are so attractive to minority youth. The second, and more important, point Cesari makes is that the 2005 riots are only the latest instances of a series of public events that call the legitimacy of state policies and the state’s sustained discrimination into question. Similarly, Stéphane Dufoix, in part of the same set of online essays, asks, ‘Do they [the 2005 riots] belong to the history of urban policy, of violence, of republicanism, of immigration policy, of post-colonialism, of discrimination, of the labor market, of politics, of media, of racism, of the police, of the French image in the world, and so on … All the dimensions aforementioned do constitute relevant lenses …’ (Dufoix, 2005). The combination of urban spatial marginalization, lack of social mobility and targeted policing seems to be a common factor in any analysis of social unrest in France. In Britain, the 2001 riots in the Midlands – an area where de-industrialization, especially in the textile and wool industry, has hit the hardest – were also analysed in similar terms. The Midlands were the heart of a large migration from Pakistan, Mirpur in particular.4 To the credit of the British Government, the report on the riots highlighted the need for better integration of communities from minority populations. Popularly called the Cantle report, it listed 67 recommendations, which included policy changes around housing, ­education, employment

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and community cohesion.5 However, its recommendations included long-term changes, some of which were implemented – such as those involving citizenship oaths and language learning – while others, like steps to increase community cohesion, were not. The Anglo-American “war against terrorism” pre-empted many of these changes because the dominant discourse shifted from community and minority groups to Islam in particular, and especially to Muslims as security threats. It is hard to underestimate the effect of the 2001 war against Afghanistan and Iraq, led by the United States and Britain. The establishment of the Guantanamo Bay detention camp in 2002 and the 2004 Abu Ghraib prison torture scandals burst into public view in the wake of the war. These two revelations seemed to reinforce Muslim perceptions that both these countries were determined to punish innocent Muslims for the “Twin Towers” bombings. This may seem an exaggeration, but the flimsy rationale on the American part for invading Iraq, the lack of support for the 2006 Israeli invasion of Gaza, and the incarceration of 780 prisoners of war in dereliction of the Geneva Convention seemed to bolster this thinking. In Abu Ghraib, pictures of American soldiers taking a sadistic delight in the humiliation and degradation of Iraqis were further proof, if any were needed, that this was a conscious policy encouraged by Western leaders. The British prime minister at that time, Tony Blair, famously called George W. Bush’s “poodle”, did not feel it necessary to stand up for minority British subjects who were swept up during the war and rendered to Guantanamo. The most infamous British detainees in Guantanamo were a group called the “Tipton Three”. These three men were repatriated to Britain in 2004 after being held for three years without charges. Subsequently, upon their return, no charges were filed against them. What this made clear was that these men had done nothing wrong and were detained without due process. In various interviews they gave, they alleged torture, beatings, prolonged isolation and threats of killing (Branigan and Dodd, 2004). Though there were worldwide protests at the allegations of torture and the conditions at Guantanamo, the effect on minorities in Britain and, to a lesser extent, in France, was to emphasize their marginal status in their countries of birth. Though there is no single cause of estrangement and radicalization among British minorities, the events of the “war on terror” and subsequent profiling by police and other authorities are two of the most important. France was significantly different from Britain in that French Muslims, mostly from North Africa, did not form a significant part of the young men fighting in Afghanistan. Though called Arabs, many of the Maghrebis in France are Berber (Amazight) or Arab, or a mix of the two. Identifying as Muslim is secondary to identifying as Arab or as a Maghrebi. There are many reasons for this. One is that the first generation of migrants from the Maghreb were politicized after the process of decolonization but not religious. Secondly, they aimed to return to the

Postcolonial minorities and securitization47 homeland eventually and so did not grow any religious institutions in France. Their children – the so-called second generation, born and brought up in France, attending French secular schools – did not grow up in a religious environment. The generation that organized the Beur movement in the 1980s worked very much within a French view of social movements and organizations, which was non-religious. However, as a third generation grew up in the banlieues and the Beur movement dissipated, organizationally and in order to find a language of protest, this generation turned towards Wahhabi and Salafist organizations that recruited members in the housing estates among disaffected young boys. As Cesari points out, it was the absence of alternatives that led them to radical Islam (2005). I would add that the motivations of this turn towards religion were decidedly non-religious. One of the biggest turning points within identity politics came in March 2004, when France passed its law banning religious symbols in public schools. Popularly called the law against veils or hijabs, it is technically known as Loi no 2004-228 du 15 mars 2004 encadrant, en application du principe de laïcité, le port de signes ou de tenues manifestant une appartenance religieuse dans les écoles, collèges et lycées publics. While, technically, this law applies to visible signs of all religions, the historical context of the law – that it came in the wake of an 18-year debate of the wearing of the headscarf or hijab – made it clear that the law was aimed at French Muslims. It singled them out as a population that stood against laïcité as defined in the 1905 law, and thus subject to policing by the state. For our purposes, it also imposed a single identity – Muslim – on a very heterogeneous population. Most school-age children, whom this law affected, were very much French, mostly the third generation of French Maghrebis. To define them first and foremost as Muslim works against integration by any standard. In 2010, a subsequent law was passed, the Loi interdisant la dissimulation du visage dans l’espace public. This law banned the burqa (full body covering) and the niqab (face veil) in public spaces. Again, only about 2,000 women in France practised this form of veiling but the heavy hand of the state made it attractive as a gesture of resistance. It also disproportionately singled out Muslims. Hand in hand with the political environment created by these two laws, France also witnessed the politicization of memory in order to strengthen a muscular, Eurocentric French identity. This was highlighted during the years when Nicolas Sarkozy was the premier. He made the politics of memory an important part of his government’s agenda. On coming to power, the new Sarkozy Government insisted on reviving the “glorious” history of France and its Resistance during World War II. Bracher recounts multiple instances of Nicolas Sarkozy’s efforts to rewrite the history of World War II and the role of ‘a rejuvenated discourse of unity and grandeur in the Resistance’ (Bracher, 2007, p. 54). In a related point, Hargreaves cites a February 2005 law, since rescinded, which insisted that schoolchildren learn the positive role of colonization and the

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positive roles played by French colonists and harkis (Hargreaves, 2007a). Thus, Sarkozy came to power against a backdrop of French debate about what kinds of histories should be remembered publicly and in schools, and what purpose they serve in strengthening the French nation. In this context, acts of memory and the presence of memorials become less about the past and overwhelmingly about the present. ‘Memorials and museums represent public statements about what the past has been, and how the present should acknowledge it; who should be remembered, who should be forgotten; which acts or events are foundational, which marginal; what gets respected, what neglected’ (Hodgkins, 2003, pp. 12–13). Intellectually, Sarkozy’s insistence on reviving a “strong” French identity owed a lot to historians both on the left and on the right who wanted to move away from Chirac’s policy of acknowledging the mistakes in French history in relation to colonialism and its minorities. Sarkozy started his presidency by commemorating 35 young Resistance fighters who were betrayed to the Nazis and killed in August 1944. He was accompanied by historian Max Gallo, who had published a defence of the Republic after the 2005 riots, rejecting demands that France should “repent” for slavery and colonialism. Soon afterwards, he published two books: Fier d’être français and L’Ame de la France: Une histoire de la nation des origines à nos jours (Bracher, 2007, p. 70). Both books, as the titles suggest, urged a move away from repentance and towards pride in the French nation. Pascal Bruckner, a philosopher, also joined in this trend, publishing his book La Tyrannie de la pénitence (2006) insisting that that France should escape its thrall to the ‘tyrannie de la pénitence’ (tyranny of guilt) and regain its place in the world. Therefore Sarkozy came to power supported by a groundswell of intellectual and popular support and a determination to move away from Jacques Chirac’s policies of accepting state responsibility for its history, unpalatable as it may be. Chirac had acknowledged state responsibility for the Vichy regime, and for the mass arrests of Jews in Vel’ d’Hiv in Paris in 1942. Most importantly, he had expressed regret at the May 1945 military attack on Algerian nationalists in Sétif, Algeria. This pattern of violent overreaction on the part of the French state was notoriously repeated in 1961 when French police in Paris attacked a pro-independence march by Algerian migrants. This ratonnade (attack against immigrants) has been a notorious historical reminder of French oppression in the minds of postcolonial Maghrebi migrants, and numerous instances of it are recounted in early “Beur” novels. The film uses colonial history to make this association between colonial subjects and postcolonial migrants more explicit. The French state, however, has not followed a consistent policy with regard to this history. Nicolas Sarkozy, in a reversal from Chirac, did not continue this tradition of enshrining memories that reflected badly on the state. To the contrary, he ran on a platform of restoring French strength and la rupture, which is to say

Postcolonial minorities and securitization49 a clean break from the policies of Mitterrand and Chirac (Bracher, 2007, p. 57). In fact he blamed the practice of “penitence”, along with the intellectual right, for the increasing communautarisme, or identity-based movements, in France. In these “memory wars” (ibid., p. 56) Sarkozy was to be a strongman, following the footsteps of de Gaulle, who held the nation together in the period following World War II when the conflict in Algeria threatened a civil war. Sarkozy’s initiatives also included a project of debate on “national identity” which sought to move away from a representational, multicultural France towards articulating a core idea of national identity around which everybody could rally. Sarkozy especially rejected the calls to honour and include colonial subjects who contributed to France during the two world wars and as postwar industrial labour. The controversy around the film Les Indigènes (2006), later released as Days of Glory in the United States, is especially instructive in this regard. This winner of five Best Actor awards at Cannes is a particularly unflinching look at the Algerian soldiers who fought in World War II and how they have been treated by France (Sharma, 2013). The film, partially financed by the Government of Morocco, was made by Rachid Bouchareb, a second-generation Frenchman of Maghrebi descent. It starred many actors, including Roschdy Zem, from a similar background. Controversially, the film tells the story of a group of North Africans who fought for the French under a raft of discriminatory conditions, and were then denied a pension in the wake of the Algerian War of Independence. It also connected their story to the story of French North African minorities, who, the film suggests, are similarly forgotten. Following the release of the film, the French Government belatedly restored the pensions of Maghrebi soldiers, though the pension was not indexed to inflation. France over the last two decades has seen violence – political, legal and ideological (pitting white “Français de souche” (indigenous French) on the one hand against Arabs on the other) – grow and strengthen through globalization and the restructuring of employment and labour. Public debates about the roles of minorities and their assigned roles, the pressure to integrate, and the hierarchy of assimilation have all made the question of history and memory more urgent. In both France and Algeria, films and popular culture have catalysed the debate, adding to the more academic and politico-legal spheres. And finally, since the Charlie Hebdo killings and, more recently, the attacks in Paris on 14 November 2015 in which 129 people were killed, there has been a linking of Maghrebi identities, the pressures of laïcité and the security apparatus in France. It is important, therefore, to examine the overlaps between the French treatment of Algerians in Algeria and its echoes in the present moment.

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While anglophone theory and criticism has engaged with the legacy of decolonization and with postcolonial theory and analysis for the last three decades, in France this field of inquiry has not gained a foothold either in academia or in popular culture. The implications and effects of this omission are quite serious, as shown in a seminal, multi-author work edited by historians Pascal Blanchard, Sandrine Lemaire, Nicolas Bancel and Dominic Thomas (Blanchard et al., 2014). Writing as recently as 2014, they categorically draw links between the amnesia of colonial history in French schools and universities, as well as in popular and political discourse, and the racist xenophobia targeting Muslim minorities in France today. The work looks at how colonial culture was constructed and disseminated and its memory repressed, and yet how the legacy of colonialism permeates French culture today, especially in the realm of race relations. While the work as a whole seeks to fill in the gaps between France’s national history and its colonial history, a connection that is not often made in France, it also draws attention to the lacunae in memory around the ways in which colonialism constructed difference. The latter has a very clear connection to how minorities, specifically Arab and African minorities, are represented today. To take but one example, Blanchard and colleagues question how the issue of racial difference during the two periods has not been investigated. During early colonialism, from 1830 to 1860, a clear racial hierarchy underlay the justification for colonial conquest. As they explain, the hierarchy was ordered by the degree to which groups were similar to Europeans. The Indo-Chinese were at the top of this scale, and the Kabyle, who were seen as more European looking, and sub-Saharan Africans were seen as at furthest remove. As Bancel and Blanchard show, this hierarchy persevered well into the twentieth century, when equality between the native and the Frenchman was never in play, though fraternity could be aspired to, if the native improved himself (Bancel and Blanchard, 2014, p. 173). Muslim Arabs were additionally seen as heirs to the Saracens, who had been enemies since the Crusades. This view was institutionally undergirded by laws that deprived Muslim Algerians of land and rights of inheritance, in order to favour French settlers. Algeria, specifically, was declared terra nullius (nobody’s land), meaning that its peoples were not seen as possessing any rights from laws or customs (Etienne, 2014, p. 456). Since Arabs were monotheistic and traders, they were not considered savages. But they were seen as ‘cruel’, treacherous and criminal (Bancel and Blanchard, 2014, p. 173). ‘Common themes of iconography from the nineteenth century through the interwar period were those stigmatizing religious “obscurantism,” the control exerted by religious officials over complex fraternal social organizations, the practice of sacrifice, and holy war … In iconography, this was translated into bodily expressions: a face hidden from view, shifty eyes, a stoop, etc.’ (ibid., p. 173). The authors point to the paradox

Postcolonial minorities and securitization51 that a colonial enterprise founded on universalist ideals operated upon notions of a racial and civilizational hierarchy. In Algeria, especially, Muslims were subject to a different legal and citizenship regime through the Code de l’indigénat. Under this law, all Algerian Muslims were excluded from citizenship and other political rights, while still being subject to forced labour, land expropriation and the compulsory growing of certain crops. Colons, or French settlers, enjoyed full rights as well as the right to summarily punish Algerians. Muslims were allowed citizenship, but only if they renounced their religion or, as Jennifer Sessions puts it, ‘if they renounced the personal status that allowed them to remain subject to Islamic law in civil affairs’ (Sessions, 2011, p. 321). So all Algerian Muslims had to choose between their religion and French citizenship, a quandary familiar to those Maghrebis subject to the 2004 laws against headscarves in public schools. Historically, for Muslim Algerians, this set up a system of differential and discriminatory civil law, where a minority of French settlers enjoyed disproportionate privilege at the expense of natives of that country. This led to a paradox: Arabs could not be French, but because they were not French, they could not access their rights, and because they did not have rights, they were not seen as advanced enough to enjoy rights. This was exacerbated in the case of Muslim women as their status within Algerian society was seen to be metonymically representative of the “civilization” of Arab society and underscored their unassimilable nature. Much of this was based on a 1840s study by Eugène Daumas. Called La Femme Arabe; the study claimed to ‘tear off the veil that still covers the morals, customs, beliefs’ of Arab society (quoted in ClancySmith, 1998, p. 164). Daumas used many of the tropes that still govern Arab women: that they were trained in “voluptuous behaviour”, that they were viewed as slaves to their husbands and that they symbolized the degradation of native life. Another writer, Hubertine Auclert, who documented colonial life in Algeria, took a slightly different stance, accusing the ruling French of colluding with Arab men to keep women subjugated (ibid., p. 171). It wasn’t until 1933, almost a century after Algeria’s conquest, that the French created a class of people called “évolué” who, though native, could be granted citizenship. Though colonial peoples were subject to a bio-political regime of difference, the lands and resources of their lands were not. Rather, these were seen as accruing naturally, and forcibly, to France. A century after the annexation of Algeria, the 1931 International Colonial Exposition in Paris marked the heyday of France as not just a colonial power but as an imperial one. Paul Reynaud, minister for the colonies, announced that the role of the Exposition, was to ‘make the French aware of their Empire’ (Blanchard et al., 2014, pp. 16–17). The Exposition was only the most visible face of a system where school and university textbooks taught of France’s “duty” to civilize, and support for colonial France was a part of good citizenship. This period was characterized by the naturalization of the

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nation as empire. The figure of the native in this period is also characterized by mistrust. Most colonial subjects were categorized into those that were “assimilable” or “desirable” and those that were not.6 The 1930s also saw the beginning of colonial migration into France, which continued well into the 1970s. Not surprisingly, these immigrants were routinely seen as undesirable, even as their lands and their labour were seen as an integral part of France. They were also subject to a social stratification based on the same racial hierarchy that defined the colonial enterprise. Blacks were seen as well suited for the army, music, dance and sports; the “yellows” as precision workers and laundry and restaurant labour; and “Arabs” as factory labour, unskilled labour and as delinquents (Blanchard and Deroo, 2014, p. 298). There was a clear contrast drawn in that period’s narratives between the positive extolling of the actions of French colonizers and settlers on the one hand and the “native” role in benefiting from, but never contributing to, French modernity. Blanchard studied 650 periodicals, weeklies and magazines, from this period to look at colonial discourse between 1925 and 1940. He quotes a colonial officer, Léon Lehurau, as saying, ‘Africa was saved by France, who delivered it from barbarism, from slavery, and from the violence and cruelty of the bloodthirsty. … France brought peace and justice to this vast country, along with the supreme lesson of civilized nations, the lesson of joyous, proud and freely accepted labor” (italics added; Blanchard, 2014, pp. 223–224). Unsurprising in the 1930s – the surprise lies in the fact that these kinds of claims were not repudiated after France’s loss of empire, but persisted in subtler forms through that time and three decades of postcolonial migration. Both the 1930s republican right, who saw the empire as necessary for France’s economic might, and the left, which served a xenophobic electorate, were complicit in the justification of an unequal colonial culture. François Coty, who wrote Sauvons nos colonies: Le Péril rouge en pays noir, and published Figaro, and Charles Maurras who worked in the organization Action française, but who were otherwise politically opposed, were agreed on the necessity and justification of empire. Other important thinkers of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries who accepted the French civilizing mission and the racial typology that undergirded it included August Comte, Ernest Renan, Jules Ferry and Victor Hugo.7 They also accepted the necessity of inequality between the French and those that they governed overseas. Maurras had this to say: ‘We are not bearers of liberty, we could not be: are not the benefits of a superior economy and moral code enough? Neither egalitarianism nor liberalism are valid in a colonial empire such as ours. … We are brothers, though we are not equal. We are brothers, though we are not exempt from the natural relationship of inferiority and superiority’ (quoted in Blanchard, 2014, p. 222). This cleavage between the ideals of the Republic and its economic needs could not have been clearer. Another silence has historically existed in France around the subject of Algeria and its struggle for independence. As Benjamin Stora has pointed out in his

Postcolonial minorities and securitization53 study of the Algerian War, there has been a deep silence in France and French histories around the war. First, in its nomenclature: it was never seen as a war. Instead it was designated simply as “events” or as the “Algerian tragedy”. Benjamin Stora says, ‘The memory of the Algerian war became encysted, as if within an invisible fortress, not in order to be “protected” but in order to be dissimulated, like the unbearable face of a Gorgon’ (Stora, 2001, p. 113). Members of the Organisation de l’armée secrète (OAS), an organization of European settlers in Algeria who opposed Algerian independence by acts of terrorism and fought against their own government, plunging the Fourth Republic into its final death spiral, were granted multiple amnesties over the years. Charles de Gaulle, who oversaw Algerian independence in 1962, was himself complicit in papering over the history of this period, agreeing to begin anew by suppressing any analysis of why France’s colonies from Indo-China to Morocco had rejected French rule so violently. France has never offered an explanation of colonialism beyond the civilizing mission, and entertained no explanatory narrative for the decolonization of Indo-China, Tunisia or Algeria which might cast any doubt upon its treatment of its subjects; French history and literature has retained as deep a silence around the loss of empire as it did around its injustices. In fact, as recently as this century, when Sarkozy led a campaign to reject a “politics of repentance” around French colonialism, with the support of philosophers like Pascal Bruckner, he followed in the footsteps of Maurras, who saw its benefits as far outweighing its drawbacks. One of the visible reminders of this colonial history is the presence of postcolonial immigrants and minorities in almost all the urban centres of France: Paris, Lyons, Marseilles, Lille and Toulouse. The other is the right-wing nationalist politics of groups like the Front nationale, whose rhetoric builds on the anger of former colonial soldiers and pieds-noirs. The repression of discussion and the absence of academic research on this issue has far-reaching effects. There has been, for one, no examination of how the ideologies that supported colonial conquest and empire-building and resisted withdrawal in the face of movements for independence still inhere in French society. Since they have not been named and identified, they cannot be expunged from national memory. There has been no memorializing or ‘memory-work’, in Susannah Radstone’s phrase, around this chapter of French history. A moment when that would have been appropriate was when the discussion of national identity and republican integration became a platform of the 1980s and 1990s. The echoes between assimilation and integration are very clear. The target of the integrationist rhetoric was the Muslim “Other”, who was seen as culturally intransigent. As Vincent Geisser points out, the French discourse of republican secularism and laïcité also is ‘strongly reminiscent of colonial fear and anxieties: the specter of sedition, the Balkanization of the social body, the rise of Muslim communitarianism’ (Geisser, 2014, p. 504). Conversely, the status of

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the Muslim minority subject is similar to that of the Muslim colonial subject, in being both too visible and invisible, stigmatized racially and culturally. French laws around identity and cultural assimilation, from the 2004 law against religious symbols in schools to the law banning the burqa, have all worked to control the threat posed to integration by the visible difference of the Other. At the same time, the events in 2015, the attacks on the offices of Charlie Hebdo and the attacks on restaurants in Paris in November 2015 have focused attention on the radicalization of youth from French banlieues. Unlike in 2005, when Sarkozy dismissed them as criminals and racaille, in the wake of the November 2015 bombings attention is properly focusing on the reasons for the young minorities’ attraction towards the destructive ideologies of ISIS and like groups. It can be argued that while the immediate answer might lie in causes like discrimination and unemployment, part of their marginalization from French society, a more complex answer will include their status as postcolonial minorities. In the latter role, they are heirs to French neglect of colonial history, actions and hierarchies that were never repudiated or addressed because they were never acknowledged. Jean Robert’s study of the colonial imaginary from his analysis of “Arab jokes” is instructive in this regard (see Henry, 2006). Let me first address the role that unemployment and poverty play in civil disturbances. According to research carried out by Dominique Vidal, based upon reports by the Renseignements généraux or RG (General Information Services, an intelligence wing of the French national police, ultimately answering to the Ministry of the Interior), in the period following the 2005 riots, there was no indication that Islamist groups or any other organized group played a role in the disturbances. Rather, according to the RG’s report, sharing ‘a lack of work based investment in urban spaces’, youth from banlieues had ‘strong identity-based feelings that did not stem from their ethnic or geographic origins but instead from their social conditions and feelings of exclusion’ (Vidal, 2014, p. 519). The RG went on to say that ‘youth from sensitive neighborhoods feel they are punished for their poverty, the color of their skin, and their family names’ (ibid., p. 519). Translated from official language, this indicates a system of discrimination that leads to frustration and anger. Vidal goes on to cite data from another report, this time by the National Watch Group on Urban Regeneration Zones (ZUS), which bases its data on 752 such zones across France, that unemployment and school failure rates are twice the national average in such areas, fiscal revenue at the fortieth percentile, and that youth from North African and African families were particularly affected by these statistics. A young man with a name like JeanPierre had six times the chance of being called for a job interview than someone called Mohammed. This points to a statistically compelling case for institutional discrimination, based on a combination of race, religion and geographical origins (Vidal, 2014, p. 522). Vidal quotes the CNCDH (Commission nationale consultative des droits de l’homme) report from 2004, giving the statistics that 33

Postcolonial minorities and securitization55 per cent of French citizens call themselves racist, and the victims of racism were in the order: North Africans and Muslims (42%), ‘foreigners and immigrants’ (26%), Africans and blacks (17%), French (12%), Jews (6%), and ‘persons with a different skin color’ (6%). So, immediate issues that need to be addressed are urban renewal and social diversity. In the long run, issues of history and memory are equally important because they are at the root of the postcolonial forms of discrimination suffered by young men of African and North African origins. When Paris was attacked in November 2015, many people sought answers for how young Muslim men, in particular, become radicalized. In addition to deprived neighbourhoods, French prisons are one of the most common places where radicalization of young Muslim men happens, often through other inmates who play upon their anger and distrust. This raises another issue: that of high rates of incarceration and harsh sentencing for men of Maghrebi origin. The reasons for this are not hard to find. Poverty, joblessness and anger make for a potent combination. A deeper reason is the combination of historically inherited cultural attitudes towards colonial populations and the racism against the improbably named “second- or third-generation immigrants”. The connection between the two is spelt out by Abdelmalek Sayad as being analogical: immigration is today’s colonialism (quoted in Bouamama and Tevanian, 2014, p. 528).8 The point Bouamama and Tevanian make is that the links between colonialism and racism are deep-rooted, historical as well as contemporary. Because memories of colonialism, its drawbacks and mistakes, are not acknowledged or discussed, French society repeats those in the ways in which its minorities are treated. After 2005, the report by the RG warned that if the issues of ghettoization and urban spaces were not addressed, they would lead to ‘a new explosion of generalized violence’ (Vidal, 2014, p. 519). That, unfortunately, was exactly what happened in 2015. In the next section, I look at terrorist incidents in Britain and France, and argue that the decades of neglect and discrimination have clearly played a part in the radicalization of young minority men and women. However, their actions are not rooted in diaspora politics, nostalgia or any form of postcolonial politics. Their actions are grounded in their experience of growing up as postcolonial minorities in countries which target them on the basis of cultural difference and marginalize them on the basis of race and religion. Islamic fundamentalism is a symptom, not the cause of their actions. European terrorism, European minorities My attempt in this section is to show how, in both France and Britain, a Muslim – as opposed to a South Asian or Maghrebi – identity arose in the years after 2001. It was also an embattled identity, one that saw itself as arrayed against the state’s foreign policy, its domestic surveillance and policing, and as being

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disenfranchised from the national polity. All these effects made postcolonial minority groups ripe for radicalization. Though Islam is portrayed as being inherently a violent religion, a study carried out by sociologists on whether Islam is a predictor of conservatism has yielded some interesting data. Though Muslims are as a group more likely to be religious and socially conservative, multivariate analysis shows that this is due to socio-economic disadvantage (Lewis and Kashyap, 2013).9 They are more likely to attend weekly services, and disapprove of homosexuality, divorce and abortion as well as same-sex unions. However, once these data are adjusted for education and economic status, Islam is no longer is a predictor for social conservatism, and seems more in line with general British attitudes. So it is not Islam that inherently makes them more likely to be conservative, it is their lower socio-economic status. Given that most British Muslims, like French Muslims, come from working-class and poor backgrounds, how fair is it to blame Islam for their attitudes? Since the London bombings in 2007, there has been a significant amount of scholarship on the causes of and responses to radicalization and terror. The causes are many. They include a post-2001 hyper-securitization and the derogation of human rights, and Western governments’ surveillance of Muslim subjects based on orientalist stereotypes (Edmunds, 2011). Others have blamed a return to “civilizing missions” based on dehumanizing a section of the population (Guardiola-Rivera, 2009). A number of studies by French scholar Jocelyne Cesari have used data in order to point to low socio-economic status, segregation and low skills as causes for discrimination, which in turn leads to less integration into the mainstream (Cesari, 2013, p. 3). Farhad Khosrokhavar’s work is a useful corrective because he locates the latest incidents in the context of European terror movements from other periods, including the leftist movements of the 1970s (Khosrokhavar, 2010, p. 229). His historical approach also highlights the varied nature of the causes: from colonialism to immigration, from the lack of integration to the role of mosques and radical preachers, as well as the actions of counter-terrorism groups of foreign governments such as the Groupe d’intervention spécial in Algeria. Transnational jihadi movements such as ISIS or Daesh, their earlier counterparts such as the Tablighi Jamaat and al-Muhajiroun, and, of course, al-Qaeda have also all used the mosques and their networks of preachers and imams to recruit young men and women from Muslim communities. 10 France also has a number of nonArab Muslim converts who have left to join ISIS and other movements abroad. One of the planners of the November 2015 attacks in Paris was one of these (ibid., p. 240). Islam, rather than a cause, is seen by Khosrokhavar as being used instrumentally by terrorists. ‘[Islam] is much less the reproduction of tradition than a regressive and oppressive form of modern action based on new technologies and a religious ideology … [that] is directly related to the modern world’ (ibid, p. 240). Transnational and global movements allow jihadis to reject the

Postcolonial minorities and securitization57 European nations in which they have grown up as well as the countries to which their parents belong. It is not surprising that in Britain Bangladeshi youth, who are at the bottom of socio-economic rankings, are the most radicalized (Weaver, 2015). Since the mid-1990s, the stigmatization of Islamic identities has been inextricably linked with securitization; that is, Islamic identities are seen as fundamentally opposed to the interests of the nation-state and the imperative is to control and manage them. Any discussion of “radical Islam” in France eventually comes to the case of Khaled Kelkal. During the summer of 1995, he was the subject of a manhunt and accused of multiple crimes, including murder, setting bombs on the French railway between Paris and Lyon, and shooting at a group of four gendarmes. He was eventually shot to death while on the run near Lyon. Analysis of Kelkal provides a textbook case of Khosrokhavar’s thesis that militant or radical Islam in France has almost nothing to do with faith and everything to do with deprivation and exclusion. Kelkal was born in Algeria to a father who worked in Lyon. Under the wave of family reunification in the 1970s, his mother joined her husband and Kelkal grew up in a Lyon banlieue called Vaulx-en-Velin. The French know this suburb as the site of huge protests against substandard housing in 1990.11 Kelkal’s life was typical of boys living in the neglected suburbs of rapidly deindustrializing cities. His brother was sentenced to prison for nine years and Khaled too was arrested and warned many times for stealing cars and robbery. Finally, in 1990 he was sentenced to four years in prison and while there came under the influence of a member of the Groupe islamique armé (GIA), which was involved in the conflict between the Algerian Government and the Front islamique du salut (FIS).12 Under GIA tutelage, Kelkal travelled to Algeria, received some training and returned to France. Between 11 July and late August 1995, he killed an imam of a moderate mosque, shot at four gendarmes and was suspected of setting off a bomb on the Paris metro. A nationwide manhunt for him eventually ended with his death. Apart from his training by the GIA, Kelkal could have been any young boy in any banlieue in France. Failed by an indifferent educational system and denied opportunity by society, he turned towards violence and became a symbol for the demonization of “Muslim” youth and their threat to French society. Transnational Islamic movements in France have not taken root in the same way as in Britain. Much of the Islamization feared in France is home-grown and the result of factors that could be addressed by the state, including creating an equitable education system, proper housing, and a more integrated system of access to jobs and social mobility. While social mobility has been easier for Muslim migrants in Britain than in France, they are also less mobile compared to other minority groups. A downside of the less statist British system is that transnational Islamist mosques and preachers have been more effective and influential there than in France. This fringe of radical preachers and

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mosques has led to Government suspicion and crackdowns on Muslims in general. A well-known example is that of the Finsbury Park Mosque and its preacher, Abu Hamza al-Masri. The Finsbury Park Mosque was established in the 1990s, to accommodate up to 2,000 worshippers. It was the largest new mosque in London, built to serve the growing Muslim population of South Asians, Egyptians and Moroccans. Soon the mosque became associated with the fiery, radical sermons of al-Masri, who would often preach on the street outside the mosque as a spectacle. Later, post-2001, the “shoe bomber” Richard Reid, and Zaccharias Moussaoui, a French citizen who was to be the so-called twentieth bomber in the World Trade Center attacks, were both discovered to be linked to the mosque and to al-Masri. In early 2003, 100 British agents entered the mosque on charges related to a possible ricin attack, and al-Masri was arrested on terrorism charges soon after. The mosque was later handed over to the Muslim Association of Britain, a charity that has sometimes been linked to both the Muslim Brotherhood and Hamas, which took over operations and installed a new board and imams. It was revealed later that two British Muslims being detained at Guantanamo Bay were also under al-Masri’s tutelage, as were three Chechen fighters. The controversy over the Finsbury Park Mosque left two central issues in its wake. One, what explains radical Islam’s attraction for a minority of British Muslims? While unemployment and discrimination are partially to blame, are there other reasons, such as British foreign policies, especially its closeness to American wars in the Middle East? Secondly, what can be done to reduce the impact of radical Islam in Britain? The course the Blair Government was following, increased stop-and-search and detainment laws – such as the 2001 Anti-terrorism, Crime and Security Act – were, rightly, not very popular. Is there a need to rethink British multiculturalism and emphasize integrationist policies instead of the ideal of simple diversity? Or, in the case of France, is there a need to address issues of economic discrimination? Can European countries encourage the formation of an Islam that would be acceptable to Muslims and non-Muslims alike? The EU’s CHALLENGE project, which looked at elements of insecurity and citizen liberties, comprising 60 scholars from 23 universities, issued its mid-term report in 2009.13 The authors of this report point to some significant themes in social control and liberties, which included radicalization, new surveillance technologies, practices of exception and derogation regarding human rights, and the broad targeting of certain groups as the “enemy” (Didier Bigo et al., 2009, pp. 283–308). They particularly place doubt on the claims justifying the new security apparatus and forms of surveillance and question their efficacy. Ultimately, they agree with many other scholars when they ask whether the term radicalization is overused. Like Cesari and Khosrokhavar, they also think that radicalization is linked to broader social issues like marginalization, multi-generational

Postcolonial minorities and securitization59 segregation and unemployment (ibid., p. 286). By focusing on the symptom and not the cause, governments risk perpetuating the real causes of radicalization. There thus seems to be significant degree of consensus among scholars with different approaches on causes and reasons for radicalization. But what do they make of state responses? One trend seems to be the literal and figurative “distancing” of the enemy through the media, technologies of killing and the reducing of them to a Manichean binary by rejecting the role of social conflict. This, in addition to group profiling, cessation of citizenship and the use of deportation, seems to be less about combating violence than about creating the illusion of safety. In the name of providing security, human rights are regularly ignored, and mass surveillance is a given in everyday life. The rule of exception has become routine. Muslim minorities tend to suffer disproportionately under this atmosphere of fear and exclusion, and anti-terrorism policy tends to exclude them even further. The International Centre for the Study of Radicalisation (ICSR) at King’s College, London, has published numerous studies showing that any extremist group draws its membership from people suffering a crisis of identity and belonging (Maher, 2015). Looking at British radicals such as Anjem Choudary and others, Maher concludes that it is civil society that needs to focus on longterm inclusion rather than submit to the fears of persecution. The ICSR has studied and talked to over 700 fighters from the UK who have joined ISIS, and concludes that, instead of denying them a return to Britain if they choose to leave ISIS, Britain would be much better rehabilitating them and helping them build bridges to their societies (Weaver, 2015). Though France has a high number of young men who have left to join ISIS, the overall percentage of minorities who practice a fundamentalist Islam is very low. The first generation of immigrants were notably not very religious, and rates of young people joining radical groups or espousing Salafist views have been small and relatively recent. After the Charlie Hebdo attacks in January 2015, numerous interviews carried out by journalists focused attention on the “chronic ills” of minorities rather than on growing radicalization. In fact, fears expressed by minorities were that the attacks would be a pretext to demonize them and ‘intensify an already explosive social and economic situation’ (Ellick and Alderman, 2015). The paradox of an assimilative society that marginalized its youth was clearly seen. ‘Youth here said they felt as if they were living in a separate country, detached from the social and economic benefits of the state and abandoned by a system that preached unity and solidarity with France’s republican and secular values’ (Ellick and Alderman, 2015). The French Prime Minister, Manuel Valls, broke with the security consensus when he blamed French ‘territorial, social, ethnic apartheid’ and a divided society for creating ‘two Frances’ (De la Baume, 2015). While one cannot deny that radicalization in the name of Islam is on the rise among minority youth, how much of it is owing to the lack of other avenues for

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organizing and having a voice, and the desire to have an impact? And, conversely, how much of it can be blamed on Islam itself? It is true that a second generation of radical outfits like ISIS have used technology to build networks of believers and sympathizers among young Muslims in Europe, particularly in Britain, France and Belgium. ISIS has invested heavily in presenting a technology- and media-savvy front to attract recruits.14 Commentators in the British media agree that ISIS is very attractive to young men and women. ‘ISIS is much younger and global. It’s an internationalist organization. It thinks of itself as progressive. If you are scrambling for your identity, ISIS is the bright flame to follow’ (Bennhold, 2015). It is also true that Saudi Arabia, in particular, has been complicit in backing Salafist and Wahhabi groups that spread a fundamentalist view of Islam among the deprived neighbourhoods in major cities like Birmingham and Leicester in Britain, and Paris and Lille in France. This has led many men and women, some as young as 15, to travel to Syria to join groups like ISIS. Parents and states seem unable to stop them, or to create a strategy for reintegrating them back into society when they return. This is especially true in the case of girls or young women who leave voluntarily to marry fighters, or aid them as teachers, nurses or doctors (Brown, 2014). We saw this most recently after the Paris attacks in November 2015, when the parents of Mohamed Abdeslam, said that they had tried to dissuade him from leaving for Syria but had been unsuccessful. Both Britain and France have robust anti-terrorism ministries and units, which are vigilant about these threats. Yet they have not been, and will not be, able to guard against terror tactics practised by their own citizens if the sources of their citizens’ anger against the state are not addressed. France, for example, passed its Anti-terrorism Act in 2006, and since then the 2012 law that specifies penalties for inciting terror over the internet. It also makes it clear that French law should not punish people for a particular ideology, only for actions resulting from that ideology, a point that was learnt the hard way by France in the Algerian War (Rault, 2010). But whether this distinction holds after the 2015 attacks is hard to tell. In 2014 France tried to pass a law banning anyone from leaving France who the authorities suspect of participating in terrorist activities abroad or upon their return. This has been seen as infringing on the right to free movement, especially since the information this can be based on may be secret. A major fear resulting from the strengthening of security laws like this one is that they overwhelmingly single out Muslims. They also upend the rules of habeas corpus and put suspicion above proof. Abdellali Hajjat, a French scholar, notes that such trends also set up a dichotomy between “good” and “bad” Muslims, thus singling them out over and above any actions individuals might commit (Hajjat, 2010). Such laws construct Muslims as a “problem”, just as immigration was seen as a “problem” in the 1960s. Hajjat points out that this happened as the war in Algeria was going on, a fact that was not lost

Postcolonial minorities and securitization61 on Algerians. Thus he brings up the fact that colonial and postcolonial flows of labour were controlled through creating a category of the problematic Muslim (Hajjat and Mohammed, 2013). Other scholars, like Didier Fassin, have also called attention to the historical and postcolonial aspects of the focus on Muslim youth as problems. Fassin, like Hajjat, points out that social, educational and economic disadvantage provide a more direct causal link to radicalization than any Islamist ideology. Thus, they are wary of the ‘instrumental use of insecurity and [of] immigration laws’ (Fassin, 2013, p. xv). Instead, Fassin suggests, ‘the officers patrolling the disadvantaged neighborhoods are actually enforcing a social order characterized by swelling economic inequality and expanding racial discrimination’ (ibid.). Therefore, while Islam and religion have been targeted as a cause of terror and insecurity both in Britain and France, the majority of young minorities are also heirs to decades of colonial and postcolonial history that has formed public perception of them as a “problem” demographic. Conclusion Across the decade since the riots in urban France in 2005, and the Charlie Hebdo shootings in 2015, there has been a renewed interest in understanding the recurrence of violence and the reactions of different groups in France. Under Nicolas Sarkozy, this examination of urban violence took on a new salience since he used the derogatory term racaille to define the rioters. To those who saw the riots as a result of decades of spatial political and economic marginalization, this became an opportunity to define alternatives to the narrative criminal banlieusards. Though citizens in name, their access to citizenship is curtailed and hemmed about in many ways; postcolonial bodies do not enjoy equality either legally under the securitization of religion and race nor socio-economically where, as Fassin says, a Maghrebi last name is enough to get you thrown off the interview list. Though France has a reputation of a universal jus soli, in practice full citizenship is practiced ethno-nationally, and not legally. In their quest for acceptance, what minority bodies are found to be missing is a universalism that is defined according to a set of particular, white, male bourgeois bodies – what Mayanthi Fernando calls particular bodies that have proclaimed themselves to be universal (Fernando, 2014). Under securitization, they must also practise an ambivalent relationship with their own group or community, proclaiming disaffiliation with Islamic extremism, even as they are identified with it. As Fernando puts it, minorities must ‘constantly disavow, even as they are constantly reduced to, their communal belonging’ (Fernando, 2014, p. 214). John Bowen, in a widely discussed essay in the Boston Review (Bowen, 2015) published in the wake of the Charlie Hebdo killings, makes the point that for years North African migrants and their children have been confined to b­ anlieues at the

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edges of cities and denied equal status that would enable them to live and work amongst the “normal” French. François Maspero’s urban diary, Roissy Express: A journey through the Paris suburbs (Maspero, 1994), chronicles the world that banlieusards inhabit. His contention is that the structures of work, segregated housing in isolated estates and inadequate public transportation combine to keep banlieusards separate and isolated from the rest of France. Their schools track even the brightest into the same dead-end jobs as their parents, so that there is no social mobility across second and third generations. Additionally, laws like the 2004 ban on visible symbols of religion (targeting Muslim headscarves) formalized a series of measures that made the lives of those in the banlieues even more difficult. Though it brought them visibility, it was not a visibility that was helpful in any way. Rather, it stigmatized an already disaffected and hopeless population. Thus to the often-asked question: why didn’t more Arabs join the “Je suis Charlie” rally? Bowen’s answer is that most saw the rally as a way to mask the real misery in the banlieues (Bowen, 2015). Its participants, mostly white French and urban, were people who used “civic-bourgeois universalism” (Balibar, 2012, p. 207) to define a kind of normality. At least, they established a set of norms that defined good citizenship. In this they were helped through institutional modes of what Foucault called governmentality: a system of rights and wrongs undergirded by the psychological–criminological apparatus (Balibar, 2012). These institutions – police, media, psychology – all combine to define the opposite of normal in such a way that even the victims buy into those definitions. Foucault calls this judging before the crime, “pre-judgment” – that is, an individual can be defined as criminal just because he or she can be thought capable of harbouring criminal instincts of thoughts about certain actions (ibid., p. 211). Thus criminality becomes intrinsic to Arab youths in a banlieue, just as it was to Arabs in French Algeria because they were Arabs. And the reason they are capable of it is not just religious or racial or biological or cultural, since these categories can never be defined separately from each other. ‘A cultural element was always involved … in the alleged biological classification of races, inasmuch as it was indiscernible from a representation of hierarchies, relationships of inferiority and superiority … based on the antithesis of barbarity and civilization’ (ibid., p. 216). The continuity between colonial and postcolonial France lies in these histories of categorization, policing and violence. They have a history of class, cultural and sexual discrimination. The voyeuristic fascination with les Mauresques, as the orientalist French called North African women, continues today with the forced unveiling of women wearing headscarves and niqabs in public spaces (Alloula, 1986). Male sexuality is similarly contained through policing and stop-and-frisk laws under the guise of security: very similar to colonial Algeria. Stephen Kipfer makes an excellent point in juxtaposing two speech acts by Nicolas Sarkozy: one in which he faults the ‘African man’ for not having yet ‘left the state of nature

Postcolonial minorities and securitization63 and entered the curse of history’ (Kipfer, 2011, p. 1155). The other when he proposed to reinvent cities by cleaning up the scum (racaille) in 2005. The two remarks are linked by a history of colonial thought, Hegelian in its hierarchical ordering of civilization. Notes  1 Yasmin Ali (1992) points out the roots of multicultural policy in Britain in the context of the first Race Relations Act in 1965, when Roy Jenkins was Home Secretary.  2 An exception to this, as Modood points out, is the umbrella organization called the Standing Consultative Forum, which includes federations of different religions and nationalities (Modood and Werbner, 1997, p. 254).  3 See the Economist (2002) for statistics to support this point.  4 See the work of Pnina Werbner, who has done extensive work on this community.  5 The Cantle report can be found at: http://resources.cohesioninstitute.org.uk/ Publications/Documents/Document/Default.aspx.  6 In this context, see George Mauco’s work of the period, particularly his 1932 publication, Les Etrangers en France (quoted in Blanchard et al., 2014, p. 21).  7 See Etienne (2014) for an extended treatment of this theme.  8 They quote Sayad thus: ‘Beyond the series of analogies that one can find in these two phenomena – historical analogies (immigration is often the daughter of direct or indirect colonization) and structural analogies (in today’s order of relationships of domination, immigration takes the place that colonization once occupied) – ­immigration has, in a certain sense, been built as a system, much like one used to say that “colonization was a system” (to borrow Sartre’s expression).’  9 The authors pull their data from three surveys: the Faith Matters survey, census data from 2011 and the British Social Attitudes survey from 2009. 10 See Kevin Sullivan’s article in The Washington Post on one such preacher, Mizanur Rahman (Sullivan, 2015). 11 There is a vast literature on the link between the treatment of immigrants in France and the shoddy housing conditions in which they were, and are, forced to live. See Hargreaves (2007b) and Metcalf (1996). 12 The FIS was banned by the Algerian Army and Government, despite winning the national elections. The French Government used the ban to get rid of people deemed to be “militants” linked to the FIS. The collusion between an unelected government in Algeria and the former colonizer, France, was clearly part of the impetus for many youth in the French banlieues to turn towards radical politics. 13 You can see this report and others at www.libertysecurity.org. 14 See the article in the British Telegraph by Rob Crilly, describing ISIS’s social media outreach (Crilly, 2015).

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Alam, A. (2011). Liberal states and Muslim minorities. Proceedings of symposium Minorities and Pluralism, May 2011. Retrieved from www.india-seminar. com/2011/621/621_anwar_alam.htm. Ali, Y. (1992). Muslim women and the politics of ethnicity and culture in northern England. In G. Sahgal and N. Yuval-Davis (Eds), Refusing holy orders: Women and fundamentalism in Britain (pp. 101–123). London: Virago Press. Alloula, M. (1986). The colonial harem. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Balibar, E. (2012). Civic universalism and its internal exclusions: The issue of anthropological difference. Boundary 2, 39(1), 207–229. Bancel, N. and Blanchard, P. (2014). The invention of the native (1918–1940). In P. Blanchard, S. Lemaire, N. Bancel and D. Thomas (Eds), Colonial culture in France since the Revolution (pp. 171–179). Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Bauman, Z. (1997). The making and unmaking of strangers. In P. Werbner and T. Modood (Eds), Debating cultural hybridity: Multi-cultural identities and the politics of anti-racism (pp. 46–57). London: Zed Books. Begag, A. (1996). Les Chiens aussi. Paris: Points-Virgule. Bennhold, K. (2015). Britain is losing against ISIS recruitment tactics. New York Times. 29 July 2015. Retrieved from www.nytimes.com/2015/07/29/world/europe/britainis-losing-against-isis-recruitment-tactics.html?_r=0. Bigo, D., Carrera, S., Guild, E. and Walker, R. B. J. (2009). The changing landscape of European liberty and security: The mid-term report of the CHALLENGE project. International Social Science Journal, 59, 283–308. Blanchard, P. (2014). National unity: The right and left “meet” around the colonial ­exposition. In P. Blanchard, S. Lemaire, N. Bancel and D. Thomas (Eds), Colonial culture in France since the Revolution (pp. 217–231). Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Blanchard, P. and Deroo, E. (2014). Paris, a colonial capital. In P. Blanchard, S. Lemaire, N. Bancel and D. Thomas (Eds), Colonial culture in France since the Revolution (pp. 296–306). Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Blanchard, P., Lemaire, S., Bancel, N. and Thomas, D. (Eds) (2014). Colonial culture in France since the Revolution. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Bouamama, S. and Tevanian, P. (2014). Can we speak of a postcolonial racism? (1961– 2006). In P. Blanchard, S. Lemaire, N. Bancel and D. Thomas (Eds), Colonial culture in France since the Revolution (pp. 527–535). Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Bowen, J. (2015). France after Charlie Hebdo. Boston Review. 3 March 2015. Retrieved from http://bostonreview.net/forum/john-bowen-france-after-charlie-hebdo. Bracher, N. (2007). Bruckner and the politics of memory: Repentance and resistance in contemporary France. South Central Review, 24(2), 54–70. Branigan, T. and Dodd, V. (2004). Afghanistan to Guantanamo Bay: The story of three British detainees. Guardian. 4 August 2004. Retrieved from www.theguardian.com/ world/2004/aug/04/afghanistan.usa. Brown, K. (2014). Analysis: Why are Western women joining Islamic State? BBC News. 6 October 2014. Retrieved from www.bbc.com/news/uk-29507410.

Postcolonial minorities and securitization65 Cesari, J. (2005). Ethnicity, Islam and les banlieues: Confusing the issues. Social Science Research Council. Retrieved from http://riotsfrance.ssrc.org/Cesari/. Cesari, J. (Ed.) (2010). Muslims in the West after 9/11: Religion, politics and law. London and New York: Routledge. Cesari, J. (2013). Why the West fears Islam: An exploration of Muslims in liberal democracies. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Clancy-Smith, J. (1998). Islam, gender and identities in the making of French Algeria, 1830–1962. In J. Clancy-Smith and F. Gouda (Eds), Domesticating the Empire: Race gender and family life in French and Dutch colonialism, (pp. 154–175). Charlottesville and London: University Presses of Virginia. Crilly, R. (2015). FBI chief: Isil’s social media strategy makes it bigger threat to US than al-Qaeda. Telegraph. 23 July 2015. Retrieved from: www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/islamic-state/11758558/FBI-chief-Isils-social-media-strategy-makes-it-biggerthreat-to-US-than-al-Qaeda.html. De la Baume, M. (2015). French premier says “apartheid” is leaving minorities on the fringe. New York Times. 20 January 2015. Retrieved from http://www.nytimes. com/2015/01/21/world/europe/paris-attacks-suspects.html. Dufoix, S. (2005). More than riots: A question of spheres. Social Science Research Council. Retrieved from http://riotsfrance.ssrc.org/Dufoux/. Economist (2002). Half a billion Americans? Economist. 22 August 2002. Retrieved from www.economist.com/node/1291056. Edmunds, J. (2011). The limits of postnational citizenship: European Muslims, human rights and the hijab. Ethnic and Racial Studies, 35(7), 1181–1199. Ellick, A. B. and Alderman, L. (2015). Crisis in France is seen as a sign of chronic ills. New York Times. 15 January 2015. Retrieved from www.nytimes.com/2015/01/15/ world/europe/crisis-in-france-is-seen-as-sign-of-chronic-ills.html. Etienne, B. (2014). The Age of Contempt, or the legitimization of France’s civilizing mission. In P. Blanchard, S. Lemaire, N. Bancel and D. Thomas (Eds), Colonial culture in France since the Revolution (pp. 455–461). Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Fassin, D. (2013). Enforcing order: An ethnography of urban policing. Malden: Polity Press. Fernando, M. L. (2014). The Republic unsettled: Muslim French and the contradictions of secularism. Durhum and London: Duke University Press. Geisser, V. (2014). Republican integration: Reflections on a postcolonial issue (1961– 2006). In P. Blanchard, S. Lemaire, N. Bancel and D. Thomas (Eds), Colonial culture in France since the Revolution. (pp. 497–509). Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Guardiola-Rivera, O. (2009). Being against the world: Rebellion and constitution. London: Birkbeck Law Press. Hajjat, A. (2010). “Bons” et “mauvais” musulmans: L’Etat français face aux candidats “islamistes” à la nationalité. Cultures et Conflits 79/80(autumn/winter), 139–159. Hajjat, A. and Mohammed, M. (2013). Islamophobie: Comment les élites françaises fabriquent le “problème musulman”. Paris: La Découverte. Hargreaves, A. G. (2007a). Multi-ethnic France: Immigration, politics, culture and society (2nd edn). London and New York: Routledge. Hargreaves, A. G. (2007b). Indigènes: A sign of the times. Research in African Literatures, 38(4), 204–216.

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Henry, J.-R. (2006). France–Algérie: Une histoire à suivre. In M. Arkoum (Ed.), Histoire de l’Islam et des musulmans en France (pp. 903–921). Paris: Albin Michel. Hodgkins, K. and Radstone, S. (2003). Contested pasts: The politics of memory. London: Routledge. Hutnyk, J. (1999–2000). Hybridity saves: Authenticity and/or the critique of appropriation. Amerasia Journal, 25(3), 39–58. Khosrokhavar, F. (2010). Islamic radicalism in Europe. In J. Cesari (Ed.), Muslims in the West after 9/11: Religion, politics and law (pp. 229–244). London and New York: Routledge. Kipfer, S. (2011). Decolonization in the heart of empire: Some Fanonian echoes in France. Antipode, 43(4), 1155–1180. Lewis, V. A. and Kashyap, R. (2013). Are Muslims a distinctive minority? An empirical analysis of religiosity, social attitudes, and Islam. Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion, 52(3), 617–626. Maher, S. (2015). ICSR insight – the roots of radicalisation? It’s identity, stupid. ICSR. Retrieved from http://icsr.info/2015/06/icsr-insight-roots-radicalisation-identitystupid/. Maspero, F. (1994). Roissy Express: A journey through the Paris suburbs, trans. P. Jones. London: Verso. Metcalf, B. D. (Ed.) (1996). Making Muslim space in North America and Europe. California: University of California Press. Modood, T., Triandafyllidou, A. and Zapata-Barrero, R. (2006). Multiculturalism, Muslims and citizenship: A European approach. London and New York, Routledge. Modood, T. and Werbner, P. (1997). The politics of multiculturalism in the new Europe: Racism, identity, and community. London and New York: Zed Books. Rault, C. (2010). The French approach to counterterrorism. CTC Sentinel. 13 January 2010. Retrieved from www.ctc.usma.edu/posts/the-french-approach-to-counter terrorism. Sessions, J. E. (2011). By sword and plow: France and the conquest of Algeria. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press. Sharma, S. (2013). Le rôle de la mémoire et du trauma dans la création de citoyens-sujets minoritaires. In Collectif Write Back (Ed.), Postcolonial studies: Modes d’emploi (pp. 445–466). Lyon: Presses Universitaires de Lyon. Stora, B. (2001). Algeria: A short history. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Sullivan, K. (2015). Police call him an ISIS recruiter. He says he’s just an outspoken preacher. Washington Post. 23 November 2015. Retrieved from www.washingtonpost. com/world/national-security/police-call-him-an-isis-recruiter-he-says-hes-just-anoutspoken-preacher/2015/11/23/924d8f6e-8a15-11e5-9a07-453018f9a0ec_story. html. Vidal, D. (2014). From colonial history to the banlieues (1961–2006). In P. Blanchard, S. Lemaire, N. Bancel and D. Thomas (Eds), Colonial culture in France since the Revolution (pp. 518–526). Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Weaver, M. A. (2015). Her Majesty’s jihadists. New York Times. 19 April 2015. Retrieved from www.nytimes.com/2015/04/19/magazine/her-majestys-jihadists.html. Werbner, P. (1997). Introduction: The dialectics of cultural hybridity. In P. Werbner and

Postcolonial minorities and securitization67 T. Modood (Eds), Debating cultural hybridity: Multi-cultural identities and the politics of anti-racism (pp. 1–28). London: Zed Books. Wihtol de Wenden, C. and Badie, B. (1994). Le défi migratoire: Questions de relations internationales. Paris: Presses de la Fondation nationale des sciences politiques.

3

Race by any other name: Islam and the contestation of citizenship

And now what will become of us without Barbarians? Those people were some sort of a solution.

(Cavafy, 1967)

In an increasingly politically and economically unified and internationalist Europe, how does a new European culture define itself? The process of selfdefinition, creating zones of exclusion within Europe, may be one way, especially if those zones are located within ethnicities and religions. Islam has historically occupied the liminal zones of a “secular” but historically Christian Europe, which has defined itself in terms of its borders in the east and the south. The term Europe only replaced Christendom under William of Orange (reigned 1689– 1702), when republicanism set the stage for the beginning of colonial trade (Balibar, 2004). Historically, Islamic and colonial “others” have long defined the borders of “Europe”. In the late twentieth century, decolonization and its effects brought these borders back within Europe. At the same time, decolonization saw the construction of what Balibar calls a ‘fictive ethnicity’, or the conflation of the terms ethnos (people as an imagined community) and demos (people as a collective subject of representation). Demos began to be read exclusively as ethnos, the identity invoked in contradistinction to the foreignness of immigrants. This post facto tribalism leads to national identity defined in terms of exclusion: ‘the divide between “majorities” and “minorities” and, more profoundly still, between populations considered native and those considered foreign, heterogeneous, who are racially or culturally stigmatized’ (Balibar, 2004, p. 76). In the last half of the twentieth century, in Britain and France, Islam has served as a category which combines religious and ethnic otherness. Fictive ethnicity has found a convenient opponent in the fictive otherness Islam represents. Islam has become useful

Islam and the contestation of citizenship69 shorthand for conflicting policies and exclusionary rhetoric, challenging the impulse to inclusion and assimilation in these countries. While Islam is the religion most practised by Britain’s and France’s largest migrant communities, precise numbers are not easy to come by, largely because census figures are collected according to country of birth and do not include religion. This makes numbers misleading, particularly among the second and third generations of Muslims. According to the numbers provided by the UK census bureau, in 2011 the number of Muslims in Britain was approximately 2.7 million, or 4.8 per cent of the population, making them the largest minority in Britain.1 In France, statistics are complicated by the fact that many migrants, especially the harkis from the Maghreb, have French citizenship and are counted not as immigrants but as “Français musulmans”. Children of first-generation immigrants are counted as French citizens. Lastly, France does not collect census data by religion. Searching the INSEE database for “population étrangère” produces a total count of 3.2 million foreigners. In 2012, INSEE estimated France is home to 5.7 million immigrants (defined as people born overseas), making up 8.7 per cent of the total population. The “descendants d’immigrés”, as they are called in INSEE statistics, number 6.8 million, or 11 per cent of the population. So, in total, minorities make up about 19 per cent of France’s total population.2 Given these numbers and that Muslims have been citizens and residents of both these countries for more than 50 years in some cases, it becomes doubly important for Europe to grapple with aspects of nationality and difference that these new citizens of Europe express. No discussion of Islam in Europe can avoid reference to 11 September 2001 and the undefined, unending “war on terrorism”. Whatever the necessity and rationale for this war, a result has been to further define Muslims and Arabs in Europe as not only marginal but also threatening. Leaders like Italy’s former Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi have taken it upon themselves to describe the us-versus-them dichotomy as one between savagery and civilization. The Iraq war and its fallout, especially the tragic bombings of 2004 in Madrid and 2005 in London, exacerbated the trend towards a policy of “containment” and policing, expressed most clearly in the bill the French Parliament passed in 2004 banning the wearing of the hijab by students of state lycées. The wording and scope of the law, with its history of struggles over the wearing of headscarves stretching as far back as 1986, is sufficiently vague to permit school authorities to target only Muslim students and to ignore the wearing of overt religious symbols like crucifixes and yarmulkes by other students. It is important to recognize that Islam coexists with many other religions in both Britain and France. More significantly, Islam as a community identity marker has a specific historical emergence that did not begin with early migration. From the 1950s to the 1970s, identity markers were national or racial, but not religious. For a brief period, the term “black” acquired a political valence that went beyond

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national origins, religion or ethnicity (Gilroy, 1991). Since then France has variously called its minorities Beurs, Maghrebis, immigrés de la seconde génération and Musulmans, while in Britain the term black has been succeeded by Asian, Bangladeshi, Indian, Pakistani, African-Caribbean and now Muslim, Hindu, Sikh, etc. Not only do the labels become narrower and more “community” oriented over time, but they also ignore subgroups and their contested relationships with these larger designations. Some people may be more or less orthodox, or subscribe to different schools within their religion.3 The contemporary Islamophobia in both countries and the discussion about “Eurabia”4 and terrorism rest on multiple ­fallacies regarding religion and ethnic minorities in Europe. In both countries, a Muslim identity only emerged once primary migration was curtailed, in Britain by the Immigration Act of 1966 and in France by the 1970s oil shock and recession. In their wake, family reunification increased dramatically, and with families came the need for schools, mosques and other cultural institutions. Their establishment also produced a backlash against immigrants (Vertovec and Peach, 1997). Many of the cultural demands that have in retrospect been subsumed under a religious marker were initially created because of family settlement: for halal food and for access to local resources and places of worship. As Gilles Kepel points out, one must recognize that this new identity as “Muslim” is a result of selection and choice, not a throwback to some “traditional” identity. In his view, both individual and community-oriented Islamic identities are reconstituted, not atavistic (Kepel, 1997, p. 49). Or, as another scholar notes, ‘The assertion of Islam … as France’s second religion is really an alternative means of political mobilization’ (Leveau, 1997, p. 148). In other words, it is a modern phenomenon. Jonathan Birt emphasizes that Islam is not a univocal phenomenon. Any generalization about “Islam” tout court risks ignoring Islam’s historical development into different schools and tendencies, and fails to recognize what makes Islam distinct in Europe (Birt, 2005). As used here, “Muslim” does not designate just practising Muslims or people with Islamic beliefs and practices, but also those who are designated or interpellated as such. Three caveats should be noted before proceeding further. First, a generational distinction may be drawn. Some Islamic practices are not orthodox; they are embedded within an ethnocultural praxis – most common with first-generation immigrants and the older generation. In this case, the role of community, nation of origin and rites of passage (burial, marriage, circumcision, language) are important (Cesari and McLoughlin, 2005). For the older generation, Islam is firmly rooted within the national and ethnic (biradari) systems. Among the younger generation of European Muslims, a more individualized religion, ‘indistinguishable from the observance of Islamic laws’, is more popular (Cesari and McLoughlin, 2005, p. 5). Cesari and McLoughlin call this orthopraxis, or the literal observance or religious prescriptions in everyday

Islam and the contestation of citizenship71 life. Within orthopraxis, religion becomes a way to establish one’s identity and counter mainstream society’s labels. The younger generations tend to think of Islam as a transnational ummah (whole Muslim community) rather than an ethnic form of cultural practice. At least two very distinct versions of Islam exist among South Asian Muslims in Britain: traditional, syncretic practice, and new orthodox forms of practice that have no regional roots. Second, distinctive Islamic schools of thought compete for primacy among European Muslim minorities. A complete taxonomy isn’t possible here, but a broad overview is helpful. Among Bradford’s early migrants, four types of Islamic thought were prevalent as reflected in the mosques. The major divide was between the Barelvi and Deobandi forms of Islam. Barelvis tended to be Sufi, culturally syncretic and relied on pirs or charismatic leaders to define their faith. Most of the subcontinental forms of Islam among the working class and less literate populations were Barelvi. The Deobandi school also hailed from Uttar Pradesh in India and originated in Islamic reformist tendencies under British colonialism. Deobandis urged a return to the original texts and practices of Islam, urged introspection and austerity, and targeted individual redemption rather than that of a community. This form was popular among Gujaratis and petit bourgeois south Indians as well as Pathans. When Deobandi Islam started, it was seen as pioneering and innovative, not conservative, but it later became allied with the more conservative Tablighi Jamaat, which gained ascendancy among Western Muslims and became defined as fundamentalist (King, 1997). Lastly, a smattering of mosques identified themselves as Shi’a and Ahmadiyya. By contrast, in France, mosques were historically associated more with countries of origin than with tendencies within Islam. For example, the Paris Mosque was inaugurated in 1926 by the Sultan of Morocco. Until about 1982 it was mostly controlled by Algerians (Front de libération nationale, FLN) with close links to the Algerian Government, and mostly ignored by the Turks. After 1982 power over French mosques shifted to Moroccans, again closely connected to the Moroccan Government. Unlike formal, state-controlled mosques, smaller more informal religious organizations never provided an opportunity for Maghrebis to organize. Because a French law banning associations by foreigners remained on the books until 1981, no religious or religio-cultural associations were allowed. Post-1981, many Islamic associations sprang up in the banlieues, the most popular being Foi et pratique (Faith and Practice), an offshoot of Tablighi Jamaat or Jamaat-i-Tablighi. Foi et pratique, in contrast to the British situation, did not invest in mosques or other institutions but relied mainly on visiting preachers who spoke at small prayer halls and gathered a fairly large group of young migrants around them (Nielsen, 2005). No organization oversaw this itinerant population of preachers and imams for most of this period. Overall, there are fewer “practising” Muslims in France than in Britain. Rémy Leveau cites a 1989 poll by Gallup, Le Monde and others that found that 73 per

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cent of the Muslim respondents aged 18 to 30 of both sexes who were born in France were open to a relationship with a non-Muslim. More than 70 per cent said they saw no problem with interfaith marriages. And 93 per cent of all those surveyed said it was possible to be integrated and still practise Islam in private (Leveau, 1997). Religious coexistence is clearly a less important issue among young French Muslims than political integration. Alec Hargreaves argues that in fact most Beur youth support French leaders rather than symbols of Palestinian resistance like Arafat.5 Therefore, it seems fair to agree with Leveau’s conclusion, that ‘The assertion of Islam, in recent years, as France’s second religion is really an alternative means of political mobilization, produced by a social group’s lacking local references or refusing those which are produced for it. … [Islam] constitutes a tradition re-invented for the situation in France’ (Leveau, 1997). It is both a transitional identity that resists complete assimilation and a ‘demand for integration’ (ibid., p. 148). In other words, an Islamic identity in contemporary France can be read as a demand for political and social equality by French citizens. In light of the previous three caveats, it becomes clearer how the struggle of Islamic peoples in Britain and France has played out around multiculturalism. To what extent will the state accommodate multiple groups and their demands for educational opportunities or for dress codes targeted to their (sometimes different) cultures? Or, if communities demand a different standard of separation between church and state apparatuses, how will a local council react? Will Muslims in largely secular countries accept Islam as a religion within the private sphere, one that does not challenge the “secular” nature of the state, or will they insist on Islam as not just a religion but a way of life, one whose observances blur the public/private distinction? It might be tempting to read Islam as one religion among many in an increasingly multi-religious state, one that in the long term will lose its edge of radical difference. But because Islam has been burdened with many hidden assumptions about cultural difference, including the incompatibility of East and West and, ultimately, the project of the European Enlightenment, it takes on a significance far beyond that of just another religion. The question becomes, is it possible for Islam to find a home in Europe and remain part of the Islamic ummah? If Europe is indeed a supranational entity trying to police its internal and external borders, will it see a transnational ummah as a threat? The issue of new religious identities is crucial, particularly in European countries that define themselves as zones of exclusion. This chapter argues that in both Britain and France, religion has replaced race in official and popular discourse as the (demonized) element that defines minorities and their place in society. Since the Rushdie affair in Britain and the affaire des foulards in France, most attitudes towards Islam, the religion practised by the largest number of immigrants in both countries, have been based on ignorance and containment. They have ranged from managing difference through a

Islam and the contestation of citizenship73 combination of rhetorical and administrative methods in housing, education or immigration law, to trying to legislate “assimilation” in education or women’s rights in order to neutralize what is perceived as its radical nature. Foregrounding Islam in this way as a politically and socially acceptable subject of criticism has also made it an attractive target of attack for cultural conservatives and a rallying point for young people within immigrant and minority communities. More importantly, this chapter examines how since 1989 religion has effectively functioned as a “reply” to state and institutional racism, to social marginalization and to a lack of economic opportunity. For those who embrace an Islamic identity, religion functions in three ways: as a space of retreat from mainstream pressures to assimilate, as a means of carving out a distinct generational identity, and as a vehicle for enacting a culturally specific identity opposed to mainstream popular (often consumerist) culture. Multiple Islams and the institutionalization of national Islams As noted in the preceding section, the term Islam can assume different significance not just across countries of settlement and origin, but also across generations, classes and ethnicities. Many Muslims are not religiously observant. In fact, in a 1995 survey of Algerians in France, 65 per cent said they had no religion (quoted in Vertovec and Peach, 1997, p. 9). To persist in identifying them all as Muslim (as opposed to Maghrebis, or even French) shows a certain illogical fearmongering. Avtar Brah argues that even the term “minority” is misleading because it ignores the multi-axial nature of immigrant communities. Minorities among themselves have varying interrelations of power and influence along ethnic, religious, origin and region-based lines, even race and caste (Brah, 1996). According to Brah, minority roles are often performative in their enacting of power relations. Within his framework, I argue that affirmation of a particular version of religion is often a response to disempowerment (social, economic, generational). Whether one chooses to veil or not (hijab), to be secular or to emphasize race, class or religion as one’s primary identity, the choices made signal a particular relationship to mainstream society. This performative relationship can be rejectionist, separatist, antagonistic or assimilative, but it speaks to cultural identities within the nation-state, French or British. Islam was seen by the majority either as a “traditional”, as opposed to a “modern”, habitus, or as a “problem”: a source of practices like forced marriages or honour killings. Only since the late 1980s have the French and British governments tried to recognize and institutionalize it as a national religion. This serves the dual purpose of controlling and containing Islam within legal and public discourse, while also “westernizing” it, an avowed aim of the governments of both countries. By westernizing Islam, they hope to also moderate it. The assumptions on which this long-term plan are predicated betray an extremely

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Eurocentric, binary, almost Hegelian, attitude towards the non-European world. The root causes of anger and radicalization – poverty, unemployment and racism – have been ignored or neglected in favour of a management model that seeks a “moderate” version of the religion. The results have been uneven, as the account below will show. Despite the many attempts to find institutional and representative grounds from which a counter discourse about Islam and Muslims may emerge, a lack of dialogue and comprehension between majority and minority persists, most consistently among Muslims in Britain and France. However, the creation of Islamic councils and other “representative” bodies has succeeded in its aim of drawing Muslims into representative and institutional politics and blunting some of the grass-roots anger and spontaneous protest of the early 1990s. Some critics, like Cesari, argue that this mainstreaming of Islam is a way to avoid addressing the core issues of discontent, which are poverty and unemployment (Cesari and McLoughlin, 2005). In Britain, the interlocutor between the Muslim “community” (the assumption is that Islam is a unitary identity) and the Government is the Muslim Council of Britain (MCB). The MCB was set up as an umbrella organization in 1997 as the successor to two other organizations, the National Interim Committee for Muslim Unity (NICMU) and the United Kingdom Action Committee on Islamic Affairs (UKACIA). Though founded to unify South Asian Muslims, it has had a hard time laying down a consistent line about Islam. The founding head of the MCB, Sir Iqbal Sacranie, created a controversy when he took a hard line on Salman Rushdie in the wake of Ayatollah Khomeini’s fatwa by declaring that ‘Death, perhaps, is a bit too easy for him’ (quoted in Murtagh, 1989). Some years later, Sacranie refused to attend Holocaust Memorial Day celebrations because they did not also commemorate Palestinian deaths in the Middle East. Both positions were unpopular in Britain. He also has publicly disapproved of homosexuality. Secretary General of the MCB from 2006 to 2010, Dr Muhammad Bari took a more conciliatory stance and called himself a “community leader” rather than a religious one. Rather than clamouring for any punishment against Rushdie, he said only that Rushdie ‘caused a huge amount of distress and discordance with his book, it should have been pulped’ (Sylvester and Thompson, 2007). The British Government has taken care to allow only the more moderate voices in this umbrella organization to be heard, and has left it to the MCB to police its more outspoken members.6 This has obvious strategic implications since it allows some controversial topics to play out within a community while keeping the Government clear of charges of discrimination. However, since the London bombings in 2005, and the “war on terror”, a host of other organizations have emerged to challenge the MCB’s position as the sole spokesman for British Muslims. The British Muslim Forum and British Muslims for Secular Democracy have both endorsed the need for more grass-

Islam and the contestation of citizenship75 roots measures to combat extremism and the economic deprivation that seems to feed it. The British Government is increasingly bypassing the MCB in favour of contacts with other organizations that are in touch with younger Muslims. The Government has established the Mosques and Imams National Advisory Board (MINAB) to train and produce British imams (see Birt, 2008) in an attempt to manage religion, and affect future generations of Islam in the UK. The national governments of Algeria and Morocco have historically played a larger role in managing Islam in France than the French Government. This changed with the creation of a Government-sponsored Islamic umbrella organization very similar to the British organizations. Post 9/11, the Conseil français du culte Musulman (CFCM) was set up in 2002–3 at the urging of the then Interior Minister, Nicolas Sarkozy. Cesari identifies in the motivation a persistent discursive slippage between the practice of Islam, “fundamentalism” and terrorism (Cesari and McLoughlin, 2005). Sarkozy championed the candidacy of Algerian candidate Dalil Boubakeur as its head or rector. At the time, Boubakeur headed the Paris Grand Mosque and was a very powerful personality. He was elected to lead the CFCM for two terms, but alienated the French public by refusing to deride anti-Semitism. In February 2008, he called for a 20-year suspension of the 1905 French law of laïcité so that French mosques could catch up with churches in terms of infrastructure and resources. While his statement was prompted by the very real problem of funding new mosques, it seemed to strike at the heart of French secularism. Sarkozy sat out the next CFCM election and did not support Boubakeur, who pre-emptively bowed out of the race7. Other opposing factions in the CFCM, some more radical than the Grand Mosque coalition to which Boubakeur belonged, profited from his absence. The result was a win for Mohammed Moussaoui, a moderate Moroccan (not an Algerian like Boubakeur) who was supported by the Government in Rabat, as Boubakeur had been supported by Algiers.8 Boubakeur’s loss underscored that in order to be supported by the state, mosque clergy in France must appeal to moderates. This can deter them from truly representing the issues of their parishes. Boubakeur was a middle-class, westernized doctor who had no support in the banlieues and did not represent or support their views. He relied entirely on Government support for a job that mistakenly defined him as a representative of all Muslims in France. The history of the creation of French Muslim organizations dates back to the early labour migrations when the mostly male migrants practised their religion with difficulty and in private. Only in the late 1980s did factories and industries allow “prayer rooms” to be set aside for workers. Events of the last 20 years have caused Islam to be raised as a public issue. In 1989, when the affaire des foulards was still quite recent, another incident took place in Charvieu-Chavagneux in Isère, where a prayer room was destroyed by a bulldozer, injuring several people including a child. This was widely believed to be a deliberate act of prejudice

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and prompted some Maghrebis to see Islam as a political, not just as a private, ­identity. The outbreak of the first Gulf War in 1991 raised political issues about Islam among the Maghrebi population. By 1992, the French Government had decided that a single organization should be the interlocutor between France’s Muslim population and the state; efforts began to find or build the right organization. This process launched the founding of the CFCM. Ideally, the French state wanted an actor less directly influenced by outside powers, including Algeria. The task of finding such a grass-roots organization or figurehead that was both prominent and representative was challenging.9 Another complication was a growing schism between the more upwardly mobile, religious, but better integrated Beurs and the majority of banlieusards, who remained economically marginalized and regarded Islam as their primary political identity. This division reflects a schism among immigrants from Muslim countries in France. The majority of first-generation working-class migrants were not very religious or observant. It is the French-born second generation that has often adopted Islam as an identity and for the voicing of political views or claimsmaking. The turn to Islam is over determined because the French definition of intégration has no place for either racial or religious political identities. Racial identity conflicts with French republicanism and resistance to Anglo-Saxon multiculturalism. Freed from the private sphere, religious identity begins to collide with the principle of laïcité, a bedrock of French law since 1905. Often, group identities have to be mobilized around issues of parity or exceptionalness. French law and political tradition leave very few options for minorities (Koopmans et al., 2005).10 Therefore, issues such as marginalization, unemployment or police harassment, which might be articulated as civil issues in other circumstances, are instead disguised as identity issues. Confusingly, the battle for citizenship of a nation-state becomes a competition for the definition of Islam and Muslims – who defines them and how; what options are available to dissenting voices within the community; how does this newly defined religion accommodate the needs of younger generations, women and its own minorities? All become points of contention but also points of insertion into the nation-state. As Koopmans et al. observe, demands for parity or exceptional treatment from the state are determined more by how the nationstate treats minority politics than by any inherent quality of the religious group itself. Parity demands are made to win treatment equal to that of other groups, while exceptional demands are made to gain recognition for the special needs of a particular group. In general, parity demands are “acculturative” and more likely to be met, while exceptional demands are “dissociative” and more likely to cause controversy (Koopmans et al., 2005). Demands by Muslims for funding for single-religion schools in a country where religious schools already exist for Catholics and Jews (as in France) are more likely to be met than demands for a different dress code for Muslim girls (as in Birmingham).

Islam and the contestation of citizenship77 To conclude, if cultural citizenship is to include religious rights, as I argue it does, that development also produces its own share of conflict. Inarguably, in both Britain and France citizenship as expressed around religious identity, has, in the last three decades, produced these moments of conflict. In addition to the two instances above, other examples include the fight over control of education in Birmingham and the Swann Report on multicultural education of 1985 (Brah, 1996),11 the November 2005 riots in France, and the post-2001 demonization of Muslims. These controversies have also had another, unintended, effect: a clear reminder that Muslims are irreversibly a part of British and French society. This reminder is helped by the fact that Muslims have had to organize in order to practise what sociologists call “claims-making”. What is less often pointed out is the fact that claims-making is always done at home, within the nation. Despite the fact that Islam’s history in Europe goes back to medieval times, popular discourse has stubbornly painted Muslims not just as late-twentieth-century newcomers, but has tolerated them, in William Barbieri’s phrase, with a sense of ‘aggrieved hospitality’ (Barbieri, 1999).12 Since 2001, this has changed. Although Muslims may have complex relationships to a historical religion, Islam, they have been depicted as homogeneous. Nevertheless, their struggles emphasize the steady nature of Muslim participation in civil society. In that context, the specific centres of controversy around “Islamic” demands – an inclusive education, the limits of free speech, dress codes in school, the tension between national identity and transnational affiliation – are analogous to ethnic demands and all form core elements of a debate over the nature and limits of modern citizenship in Europe. Religion and the modern nation-state in Europe While the modern nation-state has often tried to stress the separation between church and state, it has also tended to ignore religion as a factor in politics, perhaps because a de facto assumption of religious homogeneity undergirds French and British society. That renders resurrection of the dying spectre of a European secularism in the face of immigration as more than a little disingenuous. In Britain the monarch is also the head of the Anglican Church, and in France, where Catholicism is the majority religion, until 50 years ago, the only religious alternative to Christianity with rights recognized under French law was Judaism. Section 25 of the 1944 Education Act and the 1988 law against blasphemy in Britain have historically protected only one religion, Christianity. Until quite recently, in courts of law, oaths were sworn on the Bible, not on any other holy book (Joly, 1995). In France, the Vichy regime’s persecution of Jews and the postwar repudiation of Vichy’s policies ensured that France accepted Judaism as part of French history and culture. But Judaism remains an exception. Certainly, this has never been the case with Islam in either country, even though Islam was the major religion in colonial North Africa and was one of

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the two major religions in British India. Historically, French Algeria was never identified as a colony, but as a department of France. Thus, during the colonial period, Algerian Muslims were, in fact, French, and their religion was, officially, a French religion. Nevertheless, this has not meant greater acceptance for Islam in France. Contemporary postwar and postcolonial minorities in Britain and France pose, in terms of race and religion, the first serious challenge to the seeming homogeneity in these societies (Nairn, 1977; Hall et al., 1978; Gilroy, 1993). The reasons for this disjunction are both historical and political. Modern states, according to Bhikhu Parekh, former chairman of the Commission on the Future of Multi-Ethnic Britain, are territory based, and qualitatively different from traditional societies, which were based on notions of social belonging (demos) that were multidimensional. Modern citizenship replaces that social belonging with the notion of elective loyalty to the state, coupled with an acceptance of territorial and legal state authority. This is more democratic because it expands the notion of legal citizenship, though at the risk of making the state less able to accommodate multiple loyalties and affiliations and cultural multiplicity. The ‘ideological state apparatuses’, in Louis Althusser’s phrase, and the state’s legal and coercive organs all help knit this modern version of formal citizenship back into national belonging, as they have succeeded in doing for the last 200 years. Parekh (2002) thinks this change in citizenship is why the nation-state finds challenges in the form of multiple affiliations so threatening: The State and the citizen represent two interdependent polarities of the political relationship, each defined in formal and abstract terms. Since the two are directly related, the modern State is suspicious of and feels threatened by well-organized ethnic, religious, national, and other communities lest they should mediate its relations with its citizens and set up rival foci of loyalty. Unlike pre-modern polities, the modern State does not generally grant these communities legal recognition and political status, invest them with rights, or allow its citizens’ loyalty to them to be on par with their loyalty to itself. (ibid., p. 41)

Parekh’s distinction between pre-modern and modern states highlights the need for contemporary nation-states to find ways to accommodate the transnational affiliations that have historically been a part of social, religious and trade ties. While early cultural nationalists such as Hegel and Rousseau saw the nationstate not just as a civic association but as an entity imbued with a shared unitary culture, this impulse led, in Parekh’s view, to a homogenizing impulse, fatal to a real multiculturalism. ‘The modern State makes good sense in a society that is culturally homogeneous … However, in multi-ethnic, multinational, and multicultural societies – whose constituent communities hold different ideas about the nature, powers, and goals of the state, have different histories and needs and who cannot therefore be treated in an identical manner – the modern State can easily

Islam and the contestation of citizenship79 become an instrument of injustice and oppression’ (ibid., p. 45). Parekh brings a historical perspective to the crisis of the modern European nation-state, to argue that its historical development along culturally nationalist lines has left it unable to deal humanely with constituents who have multiple locations and loyalties. Will this crisis in the modern nation-state continue? Short of a radical change in policy, it seems unlikely that a wait-and-see approach will result in eventual assimilation of all minorities. The long-term view of this crisis may be to wait for a gradual process of assimilation to take place across multiple generations, when minorities lose touch with alternative and competing calls on their loyalty. But given the competition for state resources such as pensions, jobs, and educational and medical aid, this outcome seems unlikely. There are many reasons for this. One, the demographic trends in Europe, which include an ageing native population and a growing ethnic population, spell the need for a younger labour force even as demagogic anti-immigrant feelings increase. Second, the globalization of trade and finance means that national governments can no longer guarantee jobs and social benefits such as pensions, medical care and subsidized education. This in turn enhances resentment against “foreigners”, including resident minorities. Third, in the decade post-2001, security concerns can easily become an alibi for economic fears and racism. Thus, it is likely that feelings against all forms of Otherness, especially Islam, will be exacerbated in the next decade. One response by minorities might be to strengthen the methods used to demand specific rights and articulate an effective counter-discourse. The ability to seize the initiative in answering majority assumptions is an important way to fight for equal citizenship.13 But it is unclear whether the existing counterdiscourse really originates from a religious perspective. Some commentators argued after the 2005 riots in France that the young rioters were not “Muslims” or radicals as much as they were unemployed and disaffected. Alec Hargreaves (2005) points out that the rioters were in fact using very traditional French methods of protest to announce their needs to the Government.14 With a nod towards the French Revolution and the 1968 riots, their methods can be seen as a traditionally French response to inequality, not a manifestation of Islam. The French model of integration has been highly successful. Its failures have been in social and economic policy. While respectful towards the Muslim heritage of their immigrant parents or grandparents, second- and third-generation minority ethnic youths fundamentally share the same aspirations as their majority ethnic peers but are being denied equal opportunities to participate in French society. It is this exclusion which has generated the resentment and anger seen at work in the banlieues. (Freeman, 1995)

Both Hargreaves and Olivier Roy strongly cautioned against reading the 2005 riots as an Islamic protest. Nevertheless, headlines in the United States and Britain both proclaimed this was a protest by “Arab Muslims”, which was t­echnically

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true but completely irrelevant to the protests. Some tabloid newspapers went further, such as the Daily Mail in the UK, which called it a ‘French intifada, an uprising by French Muslims against the state’ (quoted in Burke, 2005). Within immigrant and minority communities in the UK and France, the constituency of Islam, especially radical Islam, is both fringe and transnational, not national. This means that while a radical Islamic constituency inarguably exists, radical Islam signifies less about homeland cultures or parental culture and is more tied to an emergent political identity. One of the main underlying problems in French banlieues is unemployment, rather than Islam. ‘These ritualized attacks on automobiles, symbols of the social mobility denied to inhabitants of the banlieues, and on police forces seen as representatives of an exclusionary social order are symptoms of deep-seated problems which have been festering for decades, above all poverty, unemployment and widespread ethnic discrimination’ (Hargreaves, 2005). Most of the organizing around Islam has been about the right to have a say in decisions that affect national migrant populations in general and Muslims in particular. Even transnational Islamic movements such as the Tablighi Jamaat and the Hizb ut-Tahrir (UK), while originating in South Asia and Egypt, owe their success among youth in Europe to their appeal to a specifically European way of living (I will elaborate on this later). The goal of equal citizenship within a modern nation-state does not merely require the right to practise religion freely within the private sphere, but necessitates religious freedom and rights in those areas where the public and private spheres intersect: education, culture, marriage, family reunification and, controversially, the right to control children’s clothing and education within the “secular” spaces of schools. This proposition is not easily accepted by the state because it often contradicts fundamental ideals enshrined in the state’s political institutions. In the debate over whether minorities can have equal social and cultural rights, minorities themselves have often been criticized as being insufficiently national, or their demands or concerns have not been addressed for fear of encouraging difference (the wrong sort of difference, instead of the safe and easily managed degree of difference). Strikingly, throughout this dialogue over national identity, the language has increasingly conflated nation with a larger “European” or “Western” identity, most parodically exemplified by Silvio Berlusconi’s boast of a superior civilization (A. P., 2001). Historically, of course, the boundaries between European and Islamic cultures have undergone major shifts in space.15 Spain and the Balkans are the two most obvious examples of the intermingling of the two. The more worrying question is whether immigrants and minorities from Muslim countries are becoming the foil against which the new European identity is being defined. If so, is there an effective counter-discourse within these communities that will offer alternative self-definitions? Instead of seeing Islam as a problem to be managed and neutralized, perhaps European states should realistically assess the growth of radical Islam, to the

Islam and the contestation of citizenship81 extent that it exists, as an outgrowth of years of social, political and economic neglect by local and national governments. After the economic crises of the 1970s and the resultant tightening of immigration controls in both the UK and France, young Muslim men have seen their chances of education, employment and integration into mainstream society plummet. While the 1980s saw the introduction of some initiatives both by immigrant groups and by local councils to address economic and political marginalization (the Marche des Beurs and Rock Against Racism, for example), these have largely ignored the problems of ghettoization and urban planning, disproportionately high unemployment, lack of social integration across three generations, and inadequate educational and other social services. But young French and British citizens are not willing to tolerate what they see as deliberate marginalization, and they often turn to religion as one way of claiming an identity in Europe. If religion has become the new race, then Islamophobia is the new racism. Islamophobia feeds from the same trough as the new cultural racism, a rightwing hijacking of the traditional multiculturalism and anti-racism which became popular in the 1970s. The term cultural racism was first coined by Pierre-André Taguieff in the 1980s. Taguieff (2001) traces the evolution of racism from the biological to the culturalist, and defines it as the ‘absolutization of specific heritages or of differential heredities’. He goes on to say, ‘Today radical cultural pluralism is at the basis of the most acceptable modes of racism’ (ibid., p. 6). He sees this new racism as not just a way to maintain the old racism but also as discrimination under the guise of pluralism. While emphasizing the particularities of Islam or of Muslims, both proponents and opponents of a sealed, static Islamic identity, in Taguieff’s terms, can be part of this turn towards a differentialist racism. In plain words, both Islamophobia and Islamophilia can be a part of the same problem: a distraction from an emphasis on inequality, unequal access to opportunity, and racism. What is essentially a class and race divide can become a culture-specific case that cannot be addressed nationally because of the absolute otherness of each (segregated and foreign) culture. Islamophobia as a latter-day form of racism is particularly striking when read against the background of a rise in a new “European” identity, and what is excluded from definitions of “European-ness”. Balibar calls this move towards the privileging of a European identity ‘an apartheid being formed at the same time as European citizenship itself’. He traces the roots of this exclusionary move back through colonialism and earlier, making it clear that the battle over the new European identity will be fought on old grounds, dressed up as religion or culture instead of race (Balibar, 2004, p. 9). Notwithstanding Taguieff’s warning about the culturalist turn, culturalism is undeniably two-sided. Since the 1980s, political and public discourse about minorities in Europe has used the idea of culture to define, help or attack the issues of discrimination. But minorities have also used culture as a way to

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o­ rganize a political identity. The language of culture has also gained prominence owing to a series of historical events centred on the question of Islamic customs and sensitivities. In the cases in Britain and France that follow, I want to show how a discourse centred on Islam took the place of a more generic anti-racist political discourse, and examine some of the implications of this shift, both negative and positive. One of the positive implications involves the rise of Muslim minorities as a political group, not just a cultural one. Cultural citizenship here took the form of staking a claim in the nation-state and claiming rights within it. ‘Conceptually, citizenship has evolved from a conception of rights attached to persons to a discussion of rules of inclusion, relational processes and rights attached to groups’ (Berezin and Schain, 2003, p. 12). The next section will present key moments when citizenship shifted from being a legal, epistemological (citizenship as category) fact to a contestation with the state about rights to inclusion. Britain: schools, books and fatwas Britain’s Muslims have fought for specific cultural rights since the 1970s. One of the main loci of this struggle has been the emergence of mosques as social organizations. Mosques have traditionally served as mediators between individuals and families of migrants and other organizations in the non-immigrant society. They have never been only religious organizations or places to pray. They have also been a gathering place to discuss concerns over jobs, housing or education; to conduct networking and social care business; and to provide information. Since many of the early migrants came as factory labour and lacked English language skills, mosques also worked as legal and social-service information centres. When primary immigration slowed after the 1968 Commonwealth Immigrants Act and the 1971 Immigration Act, most subsequent immigration was the result of family reunification. In that context, the focus of immigrant needs shifted from jobs and legal advice to education and social services, where the roles of mosques became central to their settlement. Mosques were helpful to first-generation parents because they served as mediating organizations, provided translation services, and disseminated new laws and regulations from the schools. Often families were afraid to negotiate with schools directly and mosques served to translate and distribute materials from the schools to parents and to carry parents’ concerns to the schools. For example, in 1986, when the Birmingham Local Educational Authority (LEA) published the report Guidelines on meeting the religious and cultural needs of Muslim pupils, mosques had copies translated and distributed widely to inform parents about the guidelines. Mosques helped parents properly formulate their grievances into demands, and mediated between them and school authorities. They were centres of political organization as well – as in Bradford, where they helped set up a

Islam and the contestation of citizenship83 Muslim Liaison Committee in 1983 to negotiate with the schools. Later, in 1988, when the 1944 Education Act was superseded by the 1988 Act which did away with LEAs, mosques liaised with other cities to set up an umbrella organization to oppose passage of the bill. Schools, too, have served as the seedbeds of political thought and the organizational foundation of an agonistic model of citizenship in the UK. Danièle Joly, in her book on Britain’s Muslims, shows how both mosques and schools have played a mutually reinforcing role in the rise of Muslims politically and socially, as they broke away from early identification with country of origin, biradari and region (Joly, 1995). According to Joly, the two organizations worked so well together partly because the British educational structure granted LEAs the flexibility to incorporate local needs into school curricula and rules, mandated under the UK Education Act of 1944. These local demands were mediated through mosques but implemented in schools. Joly’s examples are mainly from Bradford and Birmingham, two Midlands cities where large numbers of people from Pakistan came to work in the wool and textile mills. These were also the two cities where the earliest struggles around education for Muslim students took place. An example of an issue that brought together parents of schoolchildren early in the 1970s is food and dietary restrictions. Muslim parents asked that their children be provided halal food, or at least vegetarian food, in the school lunches. Some schools in Bradford allowed halal food twice a week and provided vegetarian options on other days. A second issue that arose early in the 1970s concerned dress codes for girls. Most schools mandated short skirts as the girls’ uniform, whereas Muslim parents felt that religious and cultural norms obligated girls after puberty to wear a more modest dress. After negotiation with the LEAs, pupils in many schools were allowed to wear tracksuits or the salwar-kamiz, as long as it matched school colours (Joly, 1995). A third issue was around religious instruction. Here LEAs were very active in helping provide Muslim, Sikh and Hindu religious instruction to pupils. In Birmingham, the Standing Advisory Council for Religious Education was set up to fashion and implement a multireligious syllabus. It became a model for incorporating multifaith elements into a traditional British syllabus.16 Mosques, though, acted as both social-care organizations and religious centres. They also provided the structure of early political organization around specifically Muslim concerns. They can be called the earliest organizations in Britain that focused on cultural citizenship. When the Rushdie affair began with the publication of The satanic verses in 1988, mosques in Bradford were in the forefront of organizing rallies and articulating the sense of aggrievement that Rushdie’s novel had provoked among Muslims. The satanic verses was published on 26 September 1988. The first country to object to the book was, ironically, India. Two members of parliament (MPs),

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Syed Shahabuddin and Khurshed Alam Khan, appealed to Indian Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi that the book be banned. Because a general election was imminent, in which the vote of Indian Muslims was invaluable, Gandhi banned the book on 5 October 1988.17 Most commentators saw this as a piece of political opportunism. However, soon after, Faiyazuddin Ahmad, public relations director of the Islamic Foundation in Leicester, heard of the ban, and mounted a campaign to have the book banned in Britain as well. He sent photocopied passages to all the Islamic organizations in Britain and lobbied the 57 Organisation of Islamic Cooperation (OIC) countries to press for a ban. The Union of Muslim Organisations (UMO) in London convened an emergency meeting on the topic. At that meeting was Sher Azam, head of the Bradford Council of Mosques, who would later lead protests against Rushdie. The head of the UMO lobbied then Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher to have the book banned under British blasphemy laws. However, the attorney general told him the law only applied to the Anglican Church (this seventeenth-century law has since been repealed.)18 With legal and political avenues closed at this point, a number of Muslim organizations arranged direct protests. One of the earliest protests was held in December in Bolton, and Azam organized another on 14 January in Bradford. In Bradford, more than 1,000 people joined to protest Rushdie’s novel, and copies of it were set ablaze. This was the first time that Muslims came to Britain’s notice as a political group, not simply as immigrants or workers. Reactions in the press to the book-burning were overwhelmingly negative. The national newspaper the Independent carried an article headlined ‘The dangers of a Muslim campaign’ that exhorted Muslims not to ‘impose their values either on their fellow Britons of other faiths or on the majority who acknowledge no faith at all’, and added, ‘Is their campaign not doubly counterproductive, first, in giving the book so much publicity, and second, in reminding Britons of the intolerant face which Islam has all too often shown abroad?’ (quoted in Appignanesi and Maitland, 1992, p. 56). The controversy over the novel is compelling in how it brought together many developments in political organization, identity politics and definitions of Islam in Britain. First, Muslims in Britain were seen as part of a transnational body of people, what Muslims themselves would call an ummah. Second, a national/local controversy was elided (by the Independent, as well as by other commentators, including the author Fay Weldon) with “intolerant” Islam worldwide, the reference being notably to Iran. Lastly, a religious/cultural community was elevated to the status of a national minority. Much of this became apparent only in retrospect. However, at this point one could have argued that tempers were running high after the atavistic act of book-burning, and things could have died out in time. That was not to be. Soon, the controversy escalated from being a British affair to a global one. In a broadcast on Radio Tehran on Valentine’s Day, 1989, Ayatollah Khomeini of Iran called for Rushdie to be executed and exhorted

Islam and the contestation of citizenship85 ‘all zealous Muslims to execute them [enemies of Islam] quickly, wherever they find them, so that no one will dare to insult the Islamic sanctions’ (quoted in Appignanesi and Maitland, 1992, p. 68). This fatwa, or ordinance, was followed by other announcements that ratified the Iranian view that there was a British and Zionist conspiracy to challenge Islam, in which Rushdie was acting for the British intelligence agency as ‘a hireling of Indian origin’ to insult Islam. The only solution was to “neutralize” the problem by banishing ‘this ugly, cursed and evil person’ (Appignanesi and Maitland, 1992, p. 73). The fatwa changed the landscape of a quarrel over a book ban almost entirely; at stake were the lives of Rushdie, his publishers, owners of shops that stocked his books and his translators. What was initially a two-month British controversy that had helped organize British Muslims became a bifurcated affair. One level concerned the much more serious issue of protecting the life of Rushdie and those associated with the book’s production. This threat would continue amongst controversy for nine more years. At another level was the continuing organization on the part of Muslims in Britain in which the Rushdie affair, as it came to be known, catalysed the national organization and political prominence of British Muslims as well as the opprobrium of British cultural elites.19 The long Rushdie affair lasted nine years. In the process, two things happened: one positive and one negative. The negative first: the emergence of a Muslim community as a political actor in Britain was accompanied by rhetoric depicting Muslims as backward, uncivilized, fanatical and hostile to liberal democracy. The positive was the emergence of a coherent organization of Muslim voices, likely to grow larger and more diverse as well as more entrenched as a British community. Though Rushdie was to live in hiding for almost this entire period, a period he later described as demeaning, the rise of a Muslim community as an active participant in British national society has continued long beyond that.20 Rushdie saw Muslims who sympathized with the censorship of his book and the Iranian fatwa as fanatics and as people who had turned on him, who was chronicling their histories. He quoted Bob Dylan: ‘They can do any damn thing because they have God on their side’ (Rushdie, 2002, p. 217). He ended up overstating his case by insisting that mullahs and fundamentalists were setting the terms of the debate. ‘The truth is that there is a great struggle in progress for the soul of the Muslim world, and … the fundamentalists grow in power and ruthlessness’ (ibid., p. 238). But Rushdie also detested the British Government’s ambivalence about protecting his free speech rights and protecting him, since it was supposed to be ‘his fault’ (ibid., p. 233). Rushdie and the Muslim groups that opposed him, and whom he despised, were similar in one respect: both were asking to be heard as British voices and for their rights to be understood as British rights. In an essay against a particularly vituperative column in the tabloid Daily Mail, Rushdie said, ‘I have the same right as any other citizen – to say what it is about this society and its leadership that I dislike. I will give up that right only (to coin

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a phrase) over my dead body. The real arrogance lies in assuming, as the Daily Mail and its columnists assume, that their view of this country, “their Britain”, is the only legitimate one’ (ibid., p. 247). In effect, Rushdie and his protestors were asking for the same thing: legitimization of their voices and claims. People on the left dismissed the protestors as intolerant and uncivilized, and people on the right wished that Rushdie would behave himself and pipe down. Both were harking back to an imaginary time when absolute consensus ruled the British public sphere. The battle for cultural citizenship had begun. The Rushdie affair was only the beginning of a long battle for a multicultural Britain, with culture, not race, the primary battleground. Minority groups’ former unity as labourers or migrants or blacks or Asians fragmented along religious lines – Sikh, Muslim and Hindu. In the 1990s minority groups seemed to be winning the battle for a more inclusive school system and society. The rise of the second generation of British Muslim youth, children who were born and had grown up in Britain but who questioned their place in it, was a natural outgrowth of identity politics. The shadow of the Rushdie affair lingered long after the immediate controversy died out. It produced an awareness of a discrete Muslim identity, what it meant to be Muslim in a multi-ethnic Britain, and how religion and ethnicity supported each other. In 1996, the political organization that became prominent over the Rushdie affair was deployed to lobby for an amendment to the recent Race Relations (Remedies) Act of 1994. Muslim councillors (numbering nearly 160) and heads of local educational authorities succeeded in adding protection for religious, not just racial, minorities to the Act (Werbner, 2000, p. 315). While this was a huge advancement towards the establishment of the political and cultural rights of Muslims, the events of 11 September 2001 in the United States and 7 July 2005 in London led to a rollback of some of these gains. Both events provoked questions anew about Islam and Britishness, with some on the right debating Muslims’ ability to coexist, some questioning whether British multiculturalism had led to a lack of integration and others insisting that violence wasn’t a natural part of Islam. Two organizations in the 1990s, one independent and one governmental, were central to the public debate that accompanied this change. The Runnymede Trust, a research and public policy agency established in 1968 and supported by voluntary donations, was dedicated to promote a successful multi-ethnic Britain – a Britain where ‘all citizens and communities feel valued, enjoy equal opportunities, lead fulfilling lives, and share a common sense of belonging’.21 As part of this mandate, in 1989 the Trust published a report by Iqbal Wahhab titled Muslims in Britain: Profile of a community, an effort to introduce the rest of Britain to its largest minority and to counter stereotypes. More presciently, working together with the Commission on British Muslims and Islamophobia in 1996, it released a report called Islamophobia: A challenge for us all.22 The report, based on interviews and public meetings, made two important points. First it

Islam and the contestation of citizenship87 emphasized the diversity of Islam, its internal dialogue and differences. Second, it highlighted forms of anti-Muslim prejudice and explained its implications for society as a whole. For the purpose of my argument, the report contained two significant insights: it pointed to the consequences of social exclusion and vulnerability among religious minorities and, more important still, it made the correlation between religious and racial violence and prejudice. ‘Racial violence is all of a piece therefore with anti-Muslim prejudice. The key recommendation is that this must be explicitly recognized in whatever new legislation may be introduced. A legal term such as “religious and racial violence” is required. The term “racial violence” is no longer adequate on its own. This must also be recognized by race equality councils, housing authorities, police forces, and inter-agency monitoring groups’ (Wahhab, 1989). This widely disseminated report is remarkable for its anticipation of the ways in which prejudice can take the form of “facts” about a religion or community. As a whole, it did double duty: it provided information and it warned about the dangers of defining an entire population. The second organization that was set up in 1967 in the wake of the Race Relations Act of 1968 eventually came to be known as the Commission for Racial Equality (CRE). Since 2007, the CRE has been incorporated into the larger Equality and Human Rights Commission, or EHRC. The CRE was the leading research organization on race in the UK, which examined how racial prejudices were articulated and what could be done to counter them. The organization’s Fact Files database tracks baseline demographic, educational and employment data, which is available on their website and in archives. Its most important reports are Employment and ethnicity, Citizenship and belonging: What is Britishness? and Race Relations Act, 2006, which ‘describes the feelings, attitudes and opinions of people living in Britain today in relation to culture, identity and race relations’.23 The CRE also examined civic participation by different communities and multiculturalism in schools. While its publications provided valuable data and legal advice, compared to the Runnymede Trust the CRE’s findings were couched in moderate terms and conclusions were left for the reader. The CRE did not publish any report specifically addressing Muslim concerns but instead included minorities of all kinds in examining different kinds of discrimination. Still, many of the topics addressed – employment, discrimination, civic participation – attempted to pre-empt the surprise protests and mobilization like those surrounding Rushdie’s novel. Part of the CRE’s utility for the British Government remains to build consensus around diversity and anti-discrimination in the public at large. By 11 September 2001, Muslims in Britain had gained both visibility and a voice in national debates, though at a price. That price was hyper-visibility. By 2000, schools in Britain included multifaith curricula, the number of mosques had increased, a new generation of British Muslim imams capable of addressing the issues around being Muslims and British were becoming the norm, and the

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MCB had established itself as a voice for mainstream Muslims, although many Muslims still felt ignored.24 Nevertheless, discrimination persisted and Muslims remained the “enemy within”. The latter charge was especially prominent after the London bombings of July 2005. At the Muslim Youth Forum in 2005, an annual event organized by the Guardian, Swiss scholar Tariq Ramadan called for British Muslims to become “critical citizens” in order to help their communities. ‘A true citizenship is a critical citizenship,’ said Ramadan (quoted in Barkham et al., 2005). In a column for the Guardian, he compared citizenship in France, which he said was still rife with inequality, to Britain, where he said Muslims had more rights. One of the lingering questions among scholars is: are the grievances of Muslims in France qua Muslims or because of their class and unemployment? France: cars, veils and jobs The literary precursor to the November 2005 riots in France was a slim, partly autobiographical book by Mehdi Charef published in 1983. Le Thé au harem de Archi Ahmed (1983) was translated and published in English in 1989. Majid, its protagonist, experiences the hard concrete of the French banlieue as a metaphor for his experience in France. ‘The children grow up as part of the cement and the concrete. They grow up and they begin to take on the characteristics of concrete: they’re dry and cold and hard, to all appearances indestructible – but they’ve got hidden cracks’ (Charef, 1989, pp. 50–51). To counter this feeling of la dérive (the drift), Majid and his friends indulge in sprees of pointless violence directed at property in the banlieue. They, in turn, are hunted by the police, in round-ups (rodéos) that end in predictable tragedy for the book’s protagonists. Charef’s early Beur novel, however, does point out the “in-between” status of children like Majid, who are neither French nor Algerian. It makes a strong connection between social and economic exclusion and urban violence. The 1995 fiction film La Haine, presented in a documentary style by director Mathieu Kassovitz, makes a similar point by following a day in the lives of Saïd, Vincent and Hubert, three young residents of a dilapidated housing project outside Paris. Saïd is of Algerian descent, Hubert is older and his family is from West Africa, and Vinz is Jewish. They share the banlieue’s poverty of hope and opportunity. During one of their petty vandalism escapades, a friend is shot by the police. The film takes place over one entire day, cinéma-vérité style, while they pretend to “do” something. Mostly the day depicts crushing boredom, what has been identified as the experience of la dérive, and certain jokes and slogans like a leitmotif. For example, the friends pass a billboard with an image of a globe that reads ‘le monde est à vous’ (the world is yours). Shots of this billboard cut back and forth between Hubert’s disbelieving face and the false promise of the slogan. Another joke in the film involves a man falling from a 50-story building while uttering ‘jusqu’ici tout va bien’ (so far, so good). The joke is on the false optimism of the

Islam and the contestation of citizenship89 man plunging to his death. In both these instances the scepticism of society’s promises is rooted in the reality of the banlieues. Since the 1983 Marche des Beurs and the formation of SOS-Racisme, Beurs, or immigrés de la seconde génération, have been catalysts for a rethinking of what being French means. In turns defensive and xenophobic, French public discourse since 1983 has moved from rejecting multiculturalism to accepting the need for integration. In the process, some consensus has emerged about two things: one, what used to be seen as a problem of immigration is in reality a socio-economic problem of marginalization. Second, alternatives to complete assimilation in the form of discrimination positif, integration and an acceptance of “Français musulmans” have been thrown into the mix. As in Britain, certain milestones demarcate 1983 from the post-2001 world. I will argue that although many similarities exist between the British and the French experiences – ­including early labour immigration, colonial histories, and schools as the setting for early struggles concerning culture and equal acceptance – the two histories differ in ideas of statism; state ideologies; the value attached to laïcité, or secularism; lack of social mobility among the early French migrants; and less religiosity among French Muslim minorities. Issues raised by Islam in France have been less about religion and more about equality. The distinctness of the debate around this Islam concern features of the French State (laïcité) and the distinct demographic (secular, working class) profile of its migrants. In contrast, the struggle for citizenship by Muslims in the UK has not been as much about political representation. One could argue, as Tariq Ramadan does, that British Muslims are more advantaged than French Muslims in this regard, or one could recognize that the French secular state has no quarrels with Muslim representation as citizens, only as Muslims. The struggle for citizenship is still about equal legal rights, equal access to opportunity, and equality in education and employment. Since 1983, the fight for full French citizenship has been waged around three issues: laïcité, defined as a prohibition against the wearing of headscarves; the stigmatization of minorities as Islamic and violent when the core issues are economic and social vulnerability; and use of the language of security and “war against terror” to counter a domestic underclass. When all minorities are seen as Muslim and therefore potentially threatening, then the Republic is not accepting of cultural diversity. The call for integration and diversity can be also read as a covert appeal for assimilation. Islam’s presence in western societies … prompts a re-evaluation of the principle of cultural equality, and a redefinition of the very concepts of tolerance and pluralism … What is currently understood as multiculturalism, then, is a partial assimilation to the dominant public culture, together with the preservation of individual cultures in the private sphere … Islam’s integration into European societies leaves this model open to question, sparking debate on what constitutes ‘public culture’. (Cesari and McLoughlin, 2005, p. 49)

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It would be fair to say that issues identified as “Muslim” are actually problems that most Maghrebis face. Calling them “Muslim issues” paints social issues as religious ones and frames them as problems inherent to minority communities, not the result of state treatment of minority populations. A rejection of the “daily plebiscite” The French republican ideal of citizenship is often cited in the debate over the extent of laïcité in the French state. Should the laïcité inherent in French public institutions and, above all, in its schools extend to a ban on hijabs? Or does that infringe on the human rights and religious freedoms of the pupils?25 The 2004 law, in the wake of the recommendations of the Stasi Commission on laïcité, outlawed all ostentatious symbols of religion in state schools in the interests of preserving the Republic’s laïque nature. (What precisely constitutes a conspicuous or ostentatious religious symbol was left to local school and judicial authorities to decide.) Three questions arise. Is the state’s laïque nature the real issue or, as some minorities insist, is French society discriminating against its postcolonial minorities under the guise of upholding the state’s laïque character? Does banning the hijab in school conflict with religious duty or only prevent (gendered) cultural compliance? Finally, in winning the right to wear the hijab, what did French Maghrebis gain and lose? Jeremy Jennings argues that the French version of republicanism, following Ernest Renan, regards citizenship as a daily plebiscite. In Renan’s conception, neither race nor ethnicity is a characteristic of a political community. Jennings quotes Dominique Schnapper’s version of this doctrine: ‘National identity is not a biological fact but a political fact: one is French through the practice of a language, through the learning of a culture, through the wish to participate in an economic and political life’ (Jennings, 2000, p. 577). Thus, citizenship is universal, not particularistic. But being universal does not make it pluralistic. Between the two poles of universalism and pluralism, French Muslims who insist on wearing the hijab are seen as deliberately isolating themselves from the social and political community in a gesture of aloofness. The pressure towards universal citizenship can be felt as assimilatory, something to be resisted. Jennings sketches the development in French political thought from republicanism to the 1905 law on laïcité, especially stressing the role laïcité played in the internal colonization of the Breton, the Corsican and the Occitan populations early in the history of the Republic. The process of turning individuals into citizens culminates in two institutions: the school and the army. State schools were enjoined to provide laïque ‘moral and civic instruction’ to produce ‘good citizens’ who would loyally defend the Republic (Jennings, 2000, p. 578). To be a citizen is to be French and to inhabit a certain culture and language, as the two (citizenship and Frenchness) have by now become closely intermingled with the dying out of provincial iden-

Islam and the contestation of citizenship91 tities. In traditional French thinking, citizenship is coeval with being culturally French. However, with the need to import labour since the 1940s, this ‘Republican acculturisation’ (Jennings) has become less successful. While immigrants from Spain, Italy and Poland have been assimilated over time, partly because their Catholicism made acculturation easier, immigrants from North Africa have been unable to find similar acceptance. ‘How … might the Republic respond to an immigrant minority, facing social and economic exclusion, which identifies strongly and publicly with a religious faith?’ (Jennings, 2000, p. 581). In 1988, a Rapport de la Commission de la nationalité exhibited one response when it insisted that laïcité was non-negotiable. ‘The integration of an Islamic element into the French national community implies an acceptance by Muslims in France of the rules and the law of a republican and, above all, secular (laïc) State. For Islam this represents a real upheaval. The French state … cannot renege on this demand’ (Jennings, 2000, p. 582). Thus, what is at stake in the debate over the hijab, or “ostentatious symbols of religion”, is the nature of the republican state itself, or so the defenders of laïcité would have us believe. In practice, some symbols of religion such as personal crucifix jewellery or Jewish kippas historically have been tolerated. But the Creil expulsions by the (Antillean) headmaster, Chenière, touched off a debate involving not only the republican nature of the state but an accompanying debate about women’s freedom of choice versus patriarchy, forcing socialists and feminists to take positions opposing minority rights. Feminist scholars saw the hijab as an oppressive symbol of patriarchy that prevented free choice by young girls. Sophie Duchesne distinguishes between two forms of citizenship: (1) citoyen par héritage (Frenchness as an ideal, citizenship tied to a history and culture) and (2) citoyen par scrupule (Frenchness as a universalist ideal). Most Français de souche (ethnic French) are threatened, according to Duchesne, by both the spatial concentrations of immigrants in banlieues and by their “refusal” to assimilate. Veils were seen as ‘the Munich of the republican school’ (in the sense that the hijab would be the first of many other demands, including exclusion from sports and biology classes, etc.) as well as a symbol of male dominance, whereas the ideal school should be a site of emancipation (Duchesne, 1997). Respected scholar Michèle Tribalat denies that local authorities should recognize the Koran’s injunctions regarding modesty. She argues that wearing the hijab is ‘acquiescing in a conception of feminine modesty … that is supposed to protect the men from their own concupiscence’ (quoted in Fetzer and Soper, 2005, p. 83). Supporters of the hijab argue that banning it would be infringe on personal liberty, and expelling students would deny female students an education and the ability to think for themselves. Some adopted what Fetzer and Soper call a ‘soft laïcist’ position, with appeals to pluralism, human rights and religious freedom. But in the array of positions that evolved from 1984 to 2004, it became clear that the affaire des foulards was

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ultimately much more than a debate over a few female pupils who wanted to wear a hijab. Its significance lay instead in the threat perceived from an Islamic identity that refused to remain invisible – as the first generation of immigrants had done in public memories of France’s long colonial war with Algeria, where women in hijab had often acted on behalf of the Algerian Front de libération nationale (FLN) – in plain old racism and, finally, in France’s commitment to a integrationist policy. This policy was both (1) proudly distinguished from the Anglo-Saxon model of multiculturalism with its racial tensions and (2) rooted in assimilatory policies. Ultimately, the veil or hijab controversy, much like the Rushdie affair in Britain, became a mobilizing and coming-of-age event for second- and third-generation French immigrants. The refusal of students in headscarves to capitulate to local authorities and remove the hijab meant that they had no support from state-run authorities. Supporters had to organize themselves through mosques or through other spatially based organizations in order to fight mainstream opinion. The process, though influenced by other factors, has resulted in an organized form of state Islam two decades on, a grass-roots network of groups that can mobilize around an array of issues and a politicized younger generation of Muslims who are aware of their roles as French citizens. The end result has been an enhanced sense of citizenship. By the end of the 1990s, according to Frégosi, there were as many as 2,000 Islamic associations in France and almost as many led by Beurs, which were organized around civic and political rights (quoted in Samers, 2003, p. 355). Even within the group identified as Maghrebis, or second- and thirdgeneration “immigrés”, no single organization or body represents them, either religious or non-religious. Despite a surcease in the controversy surrounding the hijab, its impact on political consciousness was long-lasting. But the affaire des foulards, though central to understanding the development of religion as a tool of politics and identity, is not the only lens through which to view Islam in France. Class and the perpetuation of racism under the guise of culture are even more important in understanding French Islam. Racism’s double: radicalism The assumption that we know what “Islamic” means is familiar and misleading. While the “securitization” of the term after the American World Trade Center bombings made it a frequent appellation, there are numerous ways to be “Islamic”, or even a Muslim. Some of the major divisions in institutionalized Islam have been examined earlier, but faith is also a personal praxis. Each individual has a unique relationship to faith: personal but also historical, familial, traditional, national and institutional. Thus, the false consensus of “Islamic” can often be more an accusation than a description. Many French scholars of the new Islamism argue that Islamism in France is less about religion and more

Islam and the contestation of citizenship93 the result of social exclusion (Khosrokhavar, 1997; Ramadan, 2004; Cesari and McLoughlin, 2005). A popular term to describe second- and third-generation Maghrebis is les jeunes exclus, which defines them as outsiders, as forced into a marginalized position vis-à-vis society. Although “Français de souche” accuse young Muslims of raising the spectre of communautarisme or néo-communautarisme and thereby damaging the laïque consensus, it is worth recalling what Khosrokhavar said about the reasons for this fear: ‘le jeune comme un épouvantail est un produit de la peur fantasmatique de la société vis-à-vis de cette religion’ (Khosrokhavar, 1997, p. 215). That is to say, racism produces its double, radicalism. Khosrokhavar insists that a genuinely democratic nation has to accept a variety of ways of expressing citizenship. And when one way (jobs, acceptance, access) is closed, the expression of religious identity offers a mode of expression to youth who are denied legitimacy in most other venues. More radically, he believes French society has no choice but to change its views on strict laïcité if it wants to stop the cycle of radicalism and make Islam as neutral a French religion as Christianity. ‘La citoyenneté de demain ne saurait reproduire telle quelle celle d’aujourd’hui. Elle se déclinera sur plusieurs registres, sera multiple, et on ne saurait lui dénier de légitimité sous prétexte qu’elle contrevient aux lois intangibles de la République’ (Khosrokhavar, 1997, p. 18) (The citizenship of tomorrow will not be the same as it is today. It will develop along different registers, be multiply constructed, and will not be denied legitimacy under the pretext that it doesn’t follow the invisible laws of the Republic). Within Khosrokhavar’s multiple registers, two identities are most important and, as he says, must develop along with each other: ‘se conjuguant et cherchant à se légitimer mutuellement: Musulmans et Français’ (ibid., p. 19). He is very clear that without social exclusion and poverty, the turn towards a declaratory, egoist Muslim identity would be less attractive, and integration would take place over time. But as long as the stigma around Islam exists, it will continue to draw youth who find no other way to respond to the social and economic exclusion they confront. Why that stigma exists is much murkier. Nabil Echchaibi tells a complex story in his analysis of Beur FM, a radio station that grew out of the Marche des Beurs in 1983. He explains how Beurs became alienated from their roots. According to Echchaibi (2007), the French state co-opted Beurs as symbols of their religion and race while denying them a voice, leading to the perception that they had sold out to power. Echchaibi claims that the French state systematically identified Beurs, immigrants and their children as Islamic, even when Islam was not their primary identity. He and other scholars like Hargreaves (2005) and Begag (2007) argue that economic opportunity, not acculturation, is at issue. But in a classic game of blaming the victim, the French Government has always sought to blame Islamic minorities for a lack of acculturation. Even in the case of the 2005 banlieue riots, high-profile commentators like Alain Finkielkraut accused the rioters of using citizenship for “utilitarian” reasons

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while retaining loyalty only to their religion. ‘The problem is that most of these youths are blacks or Arabs, with a Muslim identity’ (Echchaibi, 2007, p. 304). Along with Henri-Bernard Lévy, Finkielkraut rejected sociological explanations and insisted that the real problem was Islamicization. In response to demands for cultural acceptance, banlieusards are accused of being the thin end of the wedge of a creeping Anglo-Saxon multiculturalism or métissage. This is easily understood code for anti-republicanism. President Chirac labelled the riots an identity crisis (Echchaibi, 2007, p. 306), even as Dounia Bouzar, a Governmentappointed expert to the CFCM, refuted this reading and insisted that ‘the question is not to find out what Islam says or doesn’t say, but to understand why this youth, born in France and socialized in the Republican school, wishes to find out what Islam says about this or that’ (quoted in Echchaibi, 2007, p. 303). Echchaibi sees an urgent need to de-Islamicize the debate in order to avoid scapegoating the minority community and to look instead to a re-evaluation of strict republicanism. However, he concedes that is an uphill task because of the perception that any discussion of diversity or acceptance of other cultures is considered foreign to French republicanism. France and its minorities have far to go when they can’t even get the French state to accept the idea of cultural diversity and economic equality. British Islam is tied less closely to class and more involved with transnational identity politics. Identity politics has a long history, dating back to the colonial British policies of divide and rule. Unlike France, Britain does not have the colonial legacy of a long, drawn-out, violent war for freedom, as in Algeria. In fact, during Britain’s colonization of India, Muslims were seen as more martial and less arrogant than the caste-ridden Hindus. When it came to Britain’s earliest immigrants, Muslims were not seen as a threat or as especially exotic. More importantly, immigrants were not predominantly defined by religion (as explained above). Religious identities only came to the fore as a common labour and/or anti-racist front gave way to community-based demands following the onset of family reunification and struggles concerning schools. The discourse on minorities, as Ceri Peach says, was “colour” in the 1950s; “race” in the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s; “ethnicity” in the 1990s; and is “religion” at present (cited in Abbas, 2007, p. 288). While many French sociologists claim that Muslims in the British context have more religious freedom and have made greater strides towards a state-led social and legal discourse around diversity and multiculturalism, British authors like Abbas and Modood disagree. They feel that Muslims have always had to struggle against some version of Islamophobia. After the second Gulf War and the London bombings of 7 July 2007, there has been a strong public debate in Britain about multiculturalism. While some of it is clearly anti-Muslim, other voices have questioned the value of a separate but equal approach, saying it leaves communities insufficiently integrated.26 Scholars like Abbas don’t think multiculturalism has failed, but that a disproportion-

Islam and the contestation of citizenship95 ate bias against Muslims in jobs, housing and education has served to isolate Muslims males (Abbas, 2007, p. 289). Not only have the cities of the Midlands, home to the majority of South Asian Muslims, suffered from de-industrialization and unemployment, they have also experienced ‘direct discrimination and racial hostility’ (ibid., p. 289). This does not, however, explain why Muslim South Asians have been disproportionately more affected than others.27 Britain is a less statist regime politically than France and has a less rigid sense of its national identity culturally. Due partly to globalization and its attendant economic insecurity and partly to globalization’s rapid population shifts, Britain has had to deal with many new immigrant populations as well as older minority groups. The demand for Muslim integration sidesteps the question of the sometimes hostile attitudes of the majority. British Muslims have been increasingly and disproportionately the targets of surveillance, stop-and-search encounters, arrests and excessive policing. Following the London bombings and the attempts to blow up transatlantic airliners in 2006, they became a tempting demographic for security crackdowns, which in turn pushed them towards radical political positions. The conflation of Islam with terrorism has led to further stigmatization of Islam and Muslims. A European Islam? A heartening outcome of the overwhelming attention that has been paid to the question of Islam in Europe, for reasons of history as well as ideology, has been the rise of European Islamic scholars and intellectuals. This is part of the growth in cultural citizenship where European Muslims no longer look back towards their parents’ homelands to understand and analyse their situation, but to themselves as part of European nation-states. One of these intellectuals, and perhaps the most controversial, is the Swiss-born Tariq Ramadan, mentioned above. He is the grandson of the Egyptian Hassan al-Banna, founder of the Muslim Brotherhood, and the son of Said Ramadan, who was exiled from Egypt by Gamal Abdel Nasser. He has emerged as one of the most important commentators on a European Islam. His ideas about a European Islam offer an alternative to religious radicalization in countries like Britain, France and the Netherlands. Tariq Ramadan was born in Geneva, and after teaching at various universities in Europe, currently teaches at St Antony’s College, Oxford. He is a member of the EU and the British task forces on religion. Although mistrusted by various Islamophobes, Ramadan has consistently advocated an integrationist position of a European and moderate Islam, where Islamic thought is adapted to contemporary European sensitivities. He remains controversial, not least because of his family, but much of his work is addressed to young Muslims in an effort to reconcile Islamic theology with life in secular European democracies. If the challenge facing Muslims in Europe is how to reconcile Islamic tradition with

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life in a secular country, then Ramadan’s work provides a number of ideas about how that may happen. Two of his books, Western Muslims and the future of Islam (2004) and Muslims in France: The way towards coexistence (1999), suggest ways in which young Muslims can find active citizenship within Europe while staying true to Islamic scripture. Ramadan’s dual insistence on Europeanness and Islamic texts has puzzled lay readers and made him controversial. It is nonetheless important to recognize how he tries to juggle different worlds, by bringing Islamic texts and concepts to bear on worldly issues of identity and social responsibility. Ramadan makes three conceptual interventions in the debate on a European Islamic identity. The first concerns the idea of “fiqh”. Fiqh refers to ideas in Islamic jurisprudence but also refers to an Arabic term meaning “deep understanding” or “full comprehension”. Ramadan performs a reading of Islamic fiqh to arrive at what Muslims should do when they are in a new environment, which is abroad or, in traditional terms, when they are “in exile”. Traditionally, Islamic fiqh divides the world into two: the Dar-al Islam (abode of Islam) and Dar-al harb (abode of war). This reflects the worldview of early Islam, when Mohammed had to fight to establish its religion (Ramadan, 2004). However, Islamic fiqh also gives us a third term, Dar-al Dawa (abode of safety), which signifies peace but not a Dar-al Islam. That is to say, it is not a place where Muslims need to be afraid or antagonistic but a place where they can live as Muslims and pursue their religion. In his view, liberal democracies such as Europe’s have legal and social laws which do not persecute followers of Islam. There are problems with his concept of Dar-al Dawa, predominantly discrimination and representation. But according to Ramadan, ‘If the abode where Muslims live provides them with security – as we must honestly recognize is the case in the West – this must be taken into account … Indeed, wherever a Muslim who declares, “I bear witness that there is no god but God and Muhammed is his messenger” [the shahada] lives in security and can fulfil his fundamental religious obligations, he is at home’ (ibid., pp. 72–73) In other words, he translates the word dar as referring not to a specific area but to the entire world, what he calls the “open world”. If Muslims are at home (dar can also be translated as home) in this larger world, then it follows that they are at home in Europe as well. The second concept that Ramadan stresses is the idea of responsibility. In the shahada, the phrase used to declare oneself a Muslim, which reads ‘I bear witness that there is no God but Allah and Muhammed is his Messenger’, the central idea is one of testimony or bearing witness. Ramadan argues that testimony and bearing witness are therefore the first duties of a conscientious Muslim. Testimony, in his reading, means living in full social and moral engagement with society, not isolated and in fear of it. ‘They must give their society a testimony based on faith, spirituality, values, a sense of where boundaries lie, and a permanent human and social engagement’ (ibid., p. 73). In this sense, being a good Muslim involves being involved in the larger society, standing up for what

Islam and the contestation of citizenship97 is right and against injustice. It does not, as the Tablighi Jamaat argues, suggest a purely interiorized existence. Ramadan argues for a practical application, in society, of traditional ritual, and for Islamic concepts that can be interpreted historically, that evolve, and that need to be interpreted in context. Ramadan’s third concept, which he takes from Islamic thought, is the apparent contradiction between loyalty to the ummah (Muslim community or fellowship) and to larger society which may be both Muslim and non-Muslim. In Ramadan’s reading of this tension between the ummah and larger society, and where a Muslim’s loyalty should lie, he stresses the concept of justice in all edicts of the Koran. In other words, loyalty has to be tempered with the concept of justice, in all situations. ‘If the sense of belonging to the ummah is inherent in the Islamic faith and part of the essence of tawhid [oneness of God and his justice] … this attachment is based on a true understanding of the mission of the Muslim community as a whole … to bear witness to their faith in the presence of God before the whole of humankind by standing on the side of justice and human dignity in all circumstances, in relation to Muslims and non-Muslims alike’ (italics added; ibid., p. 91). Ramadan’s argument is very close to arguing for the innate dignity of each individual. Read carefully, it is possible to see that he is making an argument for extending the concept of ummah to whichever society one may be living in. All three reconceptualizations of Islamic thought represent the direction of Ramadan’s exegetical and sociological writing. Ramadan is also significant for what he represents: a European attempt to reconcile the apparently irreconcilable – Islam in European societies. He takes on the difficult job of defining an Islamic citizenship within the secular environment of contemporary Europe. He rejects the notion that citizenship cannot be inspired by faith. On the other hand, he also rejects that a faith-based community is equivalent to communitarianism – something that often comes up in the French context. More critically, he seems to insist that religion, and its praxis, is a collective effort and thus social. Anybody who wants to practise religion has to contend with society. He says, ‘At the heart of the message of Islam, there is no part of Muslim ritual, from prayer to the pilgrimage to Mecca, that does not emphasize – even prioritize – the collective dimension. To practice one’s religion is to participate in the social endeavour, so there can be no religious consciousness without a social ethic’ (ibid., p. 149). Social justice is, however, not sacrificed in the pursuit of religion. It is important to notice that Ramadan does not discourage Muslims from fighting for justice or for rights, but simultaneously expands the concept of community and responsibility. European Muslims cannot be opposed to the society around them, but must instead engage with it if they are to live responsibly and bear witness (shahada). Ramadan doesn’t shrink from the challenges of society. To the contrary, he lays out eight rights for which all Muslims should organize and fight, which include the rights to a sustainable life, family, housing, education,

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work, justice and solidarity. In laying out these rights he combines a reading of the Koran with the goals of social justice, and links both. In particular, he encourages an ethic of citizenship that looks outwards, not a sense of victimhood that retires defensively to self-pity (ibid., p. 165). In the years since 1989, the year of the veil controversy at Creil and that over The satanic verses, Muslims in France and Britain have made great progress in getting organized, in starting associations, umbrella organizations and publications that counter negative stereotypes and also give them an organizational structure that allows them a voice in governance, legal matters and media representation. Tariq Ramadan represents only one facet of this development, and is sometimes too controversial for what he aims to do – offer Muslims the hope that they, too, have a right to be European. He hopes, through the practice of a responsible cultural citizenship, that Islam will become one of many religions in Europe, and one that is not seen as antithetical to Europe. To conclude, while citizenship is certainly one way for Muslims to find a place for themselves in Europe, majority communities and the mostly white governments in Europe have to do their part in recognizing that a dialogue is necessary, that questions of employment and housing, education, and legal rights have to be dealt with equitably before Muslims in Europe feel at home. Trying to force-feed secularism and integration is ideological policing, not a resolution for isolated communities besieged by both the state and the media. In this context, first principles have to be abandoned for a more pragmatic recognition that since Muslim and non-Muslim minorities are European minorities, European nation-states must find ways to include them in the nation. Britain seems to have made larger legal and structural strides in this endeavour than France, though France is more candid about acknowledging the role of socio-economic factors in perpetuating minority anger. Islam also will have to be interpreted contextually, as Ramadan argues, to evolve a European Islam responsive to the needs of European Muslims. I started this chapter by talking about how the discourse on Islam is strikingly similar to that on race and difference in the 1980s. Both stress irreconcilable differences between majority and minority populations: one on the basis of some inherent biological quality, the other by assuming absolute cultural difference. The differentialist position is logically untenable, but when states and state organs use it for “security” or “law and order” it can also be profoundly undemocratic and inhumane. From the minority perspective, the biggest issues are acceptance and coexistence. But a third factor is at play: the process of defining a specifically European Islam, adapted to living in a new culture and society. Instead of portraying Islam and Muslims as foreign and strange, perhaps it is time to recognize how closely they are a part of European identity itself.

Islam and the contestation of citizenship99 Notes  1 More detailed statistics can be found at www.statistics.gov.uk/cci/nugget.asp?id=954.  2 These data can be accessed at www.insee.fr/fr/ffc/docs_ffc/FPORSOC15j_ FTLo2pop.pdf.  3 In this context see King (1997).  4 The term is a pejorative one, first popularized by Israeli journalist Bat Ye’or in her 2005 book, Eurabia: The Euro-Arab axis, and later popularized to mean Muslim immigrants in Europe by right-wingers like Daniel Pipes, Ayaan Hirsi Ali and Oriana Fallaci.  5 Alec G. Hargreaves, public lecture at DePaul University, Chicago, February 2008.  6 See www.mcb.org.uk for more details on its membership structure.  7 According to the International Herald Tribune of 3 May 2008, ‘Chems-eddine Hafiz, a senior Grand Mosque official, made it clear that ceding CFCM leadership was unacceptable. “We can’t be in the CFCM without having the presidency”, he told journalists’ (Reuters, 2008).  8 Heneghan (2007) points out that while the Grand Mosque coalition’s roots were mainly in older, urban mosques with a majority of Algerians, the Rally for French Muslims (RMF) had stronger links to the banlieues and rural areas with immigrant populations. Both groups retained links with governments in their countries of origin.  9 As in Britain, the Tablighi Jamaat was most active in organizing on the grass-roots level, but it was seen as being moderate enough (Samers, 2003, p. 358). 10 I owe the distinction between “parity” and “exceptional” demands to the excellent book Contested citizenship (Koopmans et al., 2005). 11 Brah points out, quite rightly, that the Swann report of 1985 was one of the earliest Tory-led investigations into the effects of racism on British minority children in school. It also stated quite clearly that ‘Britain is a multi-racial and multi-cultural society, and all pupils must be enabled to understand what this means’ (Brah, 1996, p. 131). Thus, the need to acknowledge the impact of diversity in British schools has been recognized for a long time. The debate seems not to have progressed beyond that. 12 For a historical overview of Islamic history in Europe, see Watt (1972). 13 While Parekh’s argument and mine about the role and value of defining a multiaccentual citizenship applies not only to Muslims but to all religious, ethnic and racial minorities, this chapter takes Islam as its subject. That is not only because it is the largest minority religion in terms of people identifying a connection to it, whether they are practising Muslims or not, but because it has served as an important lightning rod in popular discourse as being in conflict with “Western” values, which remain undefined, only identified in their opposition to Islam. The argument could be made that in many ways Islam metonymically stands in for older Other religions and identities in arguments about the central place of Europe and European culture. In that sense, this chapter’s argument could be extended to talk about other forms of identity as well. 14 ‘These ritualized attacks on automobiles, symbols of the social mobility denied to inhabitants of the banlieues, and on police forces seen as representatives of an

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e­ xclusionary social order are symptoms of deep-seated problems which have been festering for decades, above all, poverty, unemployment and widespread ethnic discrimination. These problems have been staring French politicians in the face for the past twenty years. Their failure to successfully address them has bred the despair, resentment and anger among residents of the banlieues which fueled this year’s disturbances’ (Hargreaves, 2005). 15 A good account of these shifts can be found in Clancy-Smith (2010). 16 As Joly points out (1995, p. 17), a multifaith syllabus spurred its own backlash as Muslim parents protested against an ecumenical syllabus because it exposed their children to other faiths that they feared could encourage a critical attitude towards their own faith. 17 Much of the timeline of the protests against The satanic verses is from Appignanesi and Maitland (1992). 18 See www.opsi.gov.uk/si/si2007/uksi_20072490_en_1 for more details on the Racial and Religious Hatred Act of 2006, which replaced the old British blasphemy law. 19 For more on this see Sharma (2001). 20 From a collection of essays and op-ed pieces Rushdie wrote across the span of the fatwa. 21 See www.runnymedetrust.org/about.html. 22 The report was distributed to think tanks, Government offices, employers, and Muslim and non-Muslim organizations and universities. The Trust updated its report in 1999 and 2004 to provide current information and directives to all concerned. A summary of the reports is available at the website. 23 See www.equalityhumanrights.com/about-us/our-work/key-projects/race-britain. 24 See the 2004–5 series on ‘Islam, race and British identity’ in the Guardian newspaper (Guardian, 2004–5). 25 In response to the 2004 law passed by France, Human Rights Watch declared it an ‘unwarranted infringement on the right to religious practice’ (http://hrw.org/ english/docs/2004/02/26/france7666.htm; accessed 31 October 2008). However, other Muslim scholars like Tariq Ramadan deny it is an obligation under Islamic law. 26 See Watt and Glover’s (2008) article in the Guardian for an example of this discussion, where “identity” is used as an alibi for socio-economic ills of British society. 27 Abbas says that while one in seven of Birmingham’s population is Muslim, the Muslim male unemployment rate is three times that of the city. This leads them to stagnate in inner city areas away from employment opportunities that may be more easily found in the suburbs. He thinks this cycle of unemployment and social stagnation contributes to frustration among Muslims (Abbas, 2007, p. 289).

References Abbas, T. (2007). Muslim minorities in Britain: Integration, multiculturalism and radicalism in the post-7/7 period. Journal of Intercultural Studies, 28(3), 287–300. A. P. (2005). Storm over Berlusconi ‘inferior Muslims’ remarks. Independent. 27 September 2001. Retrieved from www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/stormover-berlusconi-inferior-muslims-remarks-9271641.html.

Islam and the contestation of citizenship101 Appignanesi, L. and Maitland, S. (Eds) (1992). The Rushdie file. Syracuse: Syracuse University Press. Balibar, E. (2004). We, the people of Europe? Reflections on transnational citizenship, trans. J. Swenson. Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press. Barbieri, W. (1999). Group rights and Muslim diaspora. Human Rights Quarterly, 21(4), 907–926. Barkham, P., Curtis, P. and Harker, J. (2005). Islamic voice of reason speaks out, but the anger remains. Guardian. 21 November 2005. Retrieved from www.guardian.co.uk/ uk/2005/nov/21/july7.immigrationpolicy. Begag, A. (2007). Ethnicity and equality: France in the balance, trans. A. G. Hargreaves. Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press. Berezin, M. and Schain, M. (Eds) (2003). Europe without borders: remapping territory, citizenship and identity in a transnational age. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Birt, J. (2005). Locating the British imam: The Deobandi ‘ulama between contested authority and public policy post-9/11’. In J. Cesari and S. McLoughlin (Eds), European Muslims and the Secular State (pp. 183–196). Aldershot: Ashgate. Birt, Y. (2008). British Muslims and the Muslim Council of Britain: The next decade. openDemocracy. 7 May 2008. Retrieved from www.opendemocracy.net. Brah, A. (1996). Cartographies of diaspora: Contesting identities. London: Routledge. Burke, J. (2005). France and the Muslim myth. Guardian. 13 November 2005. Retrieved from www.guardian.co.uk/world/2005/nov/13/france.comment. Cavafy, C.P. (1967). Waiting for the barbarians. In The essential Cavafy, trans. E. Keeley and P. Sherrard. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Cesari, J. and McLoughlin, S. (Eds) (2005). European Muslims and the secular state. Aldershot: Ashgate Publishing. Charef, M. (1990). Tea in the harem, trans. E. Emery. London: Serpent’s Tail. Clancy-Smith, J. (2010). Mediterraneans: North Africa and Europe in an age of migration, c. 1800–1900. Berkeley: University of California Press. Duchesne, S. (1997). Citoyenneté à la française. Paris: Presses de Sciences Po. Echchaibi, N. (2007). Republican betrayal: Beur FM and the suburban riots in France. Journal of Intercultural Studies, 28(3), 301–316. Fetzer, J. S. and Soper, J. C. (2005). Muslims and the state in Britain, France, and Germany. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Freeman, G. P. (1995). Modes of immigration politics in liberal democratic states. International Migration Review, 29(4), 881–902. Gilroy, P. (1991). There ain’t no black in the Union Jack: The cultural politics of race and nation. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Gilroy, P. (1993). The black Atlantic: Black modernity and double consciousness. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Guardian (2004–5). Islam, race and British identity (series). Available at www.theguardian.com/uk/series/islam-race-british-identity-series. Hall, S., Critcher, C., Jefferson, T., et al. (1978). Policing the crisis: Mugging, the state, and law and order. London: Macmillan. Hargreaves, A. (2005). An emperor with no clothes. Social Science Research Council. Retrieved from http://riotsfrance.ssrc.org/Hargreaves/.

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Heneghan, T. (2007). Why we don’t call them “Muslim riots” in Paris suburbs. Reuters. 29 November 2007. Retrieved from http://blogs.reuters.com/faithworld/2007/11/29/ why-we-dont-call-them-muslim-riots-in-paris-suburbs/. Jennings, J. (2000). Citizenship, republicanism and multiculturalism in contemporary France. British Journal of Political Science, 30(4), 575–598. Joly, D. (1995). Britannia’s crescent: Making a place for Muslims in British society. Aldershot: Avebury. Kepel, G. (1997). Islamic groups in Europe: Between community affirmation and social crisi. In S. Vertovec and C. Peach (Eds), Islam in Europe: The politics of religion and community (pp. 48–58). London: Palgrave Macmillan. Khosrokhavar, F. (1997). L’Islam des jeunes. Paris: Flammarion. King, J. (1997). Tablighi Jamaat and the Deobandi mosques in Britain. In S. Vertovec and C. Peach (Eds), Islam in Europe: The politics of religion and community (pp. 129–146). London: Palgrave Macmillan. Koopmans, R., Statham, P., Giugni, M. and Passy, F. (2005). Contested citizenship: Immigration and cultural diversity in Europe. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Leveau, R. (1997). The political culture of Beurs. In S. Vertovec and C. Peach (Eds), Islam  in Europe: The politics of religion and community (pp. 147–155). London: Palgrave Macmillan. Murtagh, P. (1989). Rushdie in hiding after Ayatollah’s death threat. Guardian. 18 February 1989. Retrieved from www.guardian.co.uk/books/1989/feb/18/fiction.salmanrushdie. Nairn, T. (1977). The break-up of Britain: Crisis, and neo-nationalism. London: New Left Books. Nielsen, J. S. (2005). Muslims in Western Europe. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Parekh, B. (2002). Reconstituting the modern state. In J. Anderson (Ed.), Transnational democracy: Political spaces and border crossings (pp. 39–55). London: Routledge. Ramadan, T. (1999). Muslims in France: The way towards co-existence. Leicester: The Islamic Foundation. Ramadan, T. (2004). Western Muslims and the future of Islam. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Reuters (2008). Row casts doubt over France Muslim Council vote. Al Arabiya News. 3 May 2008. Retrieved from www.alarabiya.net/articles/2008/05/03/49317.html. Rushdie, S. (2002). Step across this line. New York: Random House. Samers, M. E. (2003). Diaspora unbound: Muslim identity and the erratic regulation of Islam in France. International Journal of Population Geography, 9(4), 351–364. Sharma, S. (2001). Salman Rushdie: The ambivalence of migrancy. Twentieth Century Literature, 47(4), 596–618. Sylvester, R. and Thompson, A. (2007). Dr. Bari: Government stoking Muslim tension. Telegraph. 10 November 2007. Retrieved from www.telegraph.co.uk/news/ uknews/1568881/Dr-Bari-Government-stoking-Muslim-tension.html. Taguieff, P.-A. (2001). The force of prejudice: On racism and its doubles, trans. and ed. H. Melehy. Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press.

Islam and the contestation of citizenship103 Vertovec, S. and Peach C. (Eds) (1997). Islam in Europe: The politics of religion and community. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Wahhab, I. (1989). Muslims in Britain: Profile of a community. London: Runnymede Trust. Watt, N. and Glover, J. (2008). Multicultural ideal ‘terrible’ for UK – Tories. Guardian. 27 September 2008. Retrieved from www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2008/sep/27/polls. conservatives1. Watt, W. M. (1972). The influence of Islam on medieval Europe. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Werbner, P. (2000). Divided loyalties, empowered citizenship? Muslims in Britain. Citizenship Studies, (4)3, 307–324.

4

The nation-state’s wobbly hyphen: the backlash against multiculturalism

We are sleep-walking our way into segregation. (Trevor Phillips, Chairman, Commission for Racial Equality, 2005) The assertion, re-imagining and negotiation of difference is central to group formation and evolution and thus to multiculturalism. (Modood, 2007)

The nation-state holds within it a deep schizophrenia. Tensions between the private space of the national, which is deeply ideological, and the public space of the state, which is impartial, can result in tensions that are hard to resolve, let alone acknowledge. Like the nation-state, national culture is a space neither wholly private nor public but one in which public and private spheres intersect in ways that can be hard to legislate. These public/private cultural spheres include religion, codes of dress, education and schooling, women’s rights, laws governing marriage and divorce, housing, and forms of institutional negative and positive discrimination. Since postwar immigration into Britain and France became recognized as permanent in the late 1970s, both countries have adopted some form of multiculturalist policies that address minority cultures, positively or negatively. These policies have tried to legislate those aspects of “culture” that span this divide between private and public worlds: housing, dress, women’s rights, ways of bringing up children, tolerance for different ways of living. This process has often been criticized or seen as “pandering” to minorities, lacking sufficient assimilative power and diluting native national culture. It has also set up an us-versus-them mentality where minorities are regarded as recalcitrant and unwilling to accept dominant national culture. The idea of nation has consistently proved a stumbling block to state efforts at multiculturalism. Kulturnation has fought staatsnation, nationalist romanticism has struggled against modern secularism, and jus soli against jus sanguinis.

The backlash against multiculturalism105 Zygmunt Bauman calls it the ambivalence at the heart of modernity, while Jürgen Habermas and Dominique Schnapper hold out hope for a citizenship of praxis, where nationalism will keep its most progressive qualities while maintaining equal access to the democratic public sphere (Bauman, 1991; Habermas, 1992; Schnapper, 2002). Lately there has been a demand to discard or radically revise state multiculturalism as traditionally practised and to recognize, not just tolerate, new religious identities. This has upset the status quo accommodation of ethnic identities and changed the traditional political left/right divisions in European politics. What is being challenged here, through culture, is the historical identity of the nation itself. Nation versus state In Britain, multiculturalism has been officially accepted since the 1970s as a way to “deal” with the immigration “problem”. In France, although the term multiculturalism has never been used and the concept is still debated, policies around anti-discrimination have led to a de facto form of multiculturalism (lately known as “positive discrimination”) in practice, despite an insistence on integration. The British embrace of multiculturalism reached its apogee under Tony Blair’s Government, when Blair pronounced that a ‘New Britain’ had arrived and symbolically replaced the Georgian cross of British Airways with a plethora of abstract “multicultural” icons. Even as the new era of multiculturalism coexisted with egregious cases of institutional racism like the 1993 Stephen Lawrence murder, policy discourse remained in favour of diversity, unlike in France. Dissent from the multicultural orthodoxy, as with Ray Honeyford’s article in the Salisbury Review in Bradford in 1984 (reprinted as Honeyford, 2006), was seen as racist, and dismissed.1 The unquestioning attitude remained in place until 2001, when the summer riots in the Midlands set off a backlash. Both the 2001 riots and the London bombings in 2005 signalled an about-turn on the issue of multiculturalism. Like a deposed monarch, multiculturalism was suddenly held responsible for a host of social ills: isolation, segregation, and a lack of citizenship and national identification. The situation in France was different. The November 2005 urban riots demonstrated that, far from being integrated, national minorities had become an angry underclass, largely because of a severe lack of economic integration (Wihtol de Wenden, 2007). The perception of excessive multiculturalism in Britain, and not enough “positive discrimination” in France, focused attention on the link between multiculturalism, acculturation and citizenship. More importantly, these shifts made it clear that the assumption of an “individualist”, case-by-case acculturation would entail a confrontation with the concept of group identities, whether of gender, religion or race. Issues of belonging and multiculturalism have also raised the issue of citizenship and its links to culture and religion.

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Groupthink in both countries has hastily blamed the lack of common citizenship on excessive multiculturalism. Trevor Phillips, chairman of the Commission for Racial Equality (CRE), famously called it ‘sleepwalking into segregation’. The Government-sponsored Cantle report on the English Midlands riots of 2001 similarly cited lack of community cohesion as a major cause for disaffection among British minorities. While much rests on the definition of multiculturalism or diversity, both code words for integrating minorities, I argue that the source of this response lies in a pious tokenist or piecemeal multiculturalism, rather than excess. Secondly, multiculturalism cannot be implemented only as a social policy. The nation has to include minorities in its symbolic and historical imaginary. Unless multiculturalism is integrated at every level with symbolic signifiers and myths of nationhood on the one hand, and included in every policy concerning education, employment, religion and education on the other, a common sense of citizenship and belonging will never emerge in European countries. The temptation has always been to read the lack of minority acculturation as strictly an educational or an economic or a racialist issue. But it is all those plus a lack of identification with the nation-state. This means that the narrative of nationhood has to be changed to include minorities, whether postcolonial or those who suffered under colonialist regimes of discrimination and marginalization. The battle must take place on the grounds of parity, not ideology. The state has not only failed in acknowledging and including minorities, but the national imaginary, in its reading of history and identity, has insisted on seeing all minorities as newcomers and immigrants, who have no place in the nation. National identities, as in the Netherlands, insist on a distinction between “allochthonous” and “autochthonous” identities, “ausländeren” and “volksdeutsch” in Germany, or “Français de souche” and “Beurs” in France; other countries like Italy use racial categories. France continues to call its second- and third-generation minorities “immigrés”, thus coding race and belonging through (divisive) language. Even though this language may arise out of a well-meaning intent to direct social welfare programs to immigrants, it ends up reinforcing the targeted populations’ place outside the nation. This is true especially on the right, where economic resentment of migrants and minorities as undeserved welfare scroungers has been reinforced by the sense of their permanent outsider status in a “thick”, cultural sense (signifying multiple strands of culture) (Koopmans et al., 2005, p. 14). Habermas distinguishes between two definitions of citizenship that are at issue in debates over the nature of multiculturalism: the nationalist and the republican. Germany and France are good examples of this schism. In the nationalist or volkisch definition, the communitarian nation (defined successively as “pagan people”, then “politically organized people” and finally “people united by common history and descent”) is the source of state sovereignty and power – i.e., it defines the ‘political identity of the citizen within a democratic

The backlash against multiculturalism107 polity’ (Habermas, 1992). The republican definition, most famously recognized in Ernst Renan’s 1871 phrase, ‘the existence of the nation is … a daily plebiscite’, focuses on a nation of citizens. The two definitions – the national myth of belonging and the republican myth of citizenship – are at odds with one another. A nation of people is very different from a nation of citizens. The republican, post-national model of citizenship cannot explain the role of patriotism nor the feeling of belonging to a community or group identity. Habermas says that ‘the Nation of citizens does not derive its identity from some common ethnic and cultural properties but from the praxis of citizens who actively exercise their civil rights’ (Habermas, 1992, p. 1; original italics). However, in the modern nation-sate praxis has to be sanctioned by the state and its laws, and by the state’s definition of who constitutes a legitimate citizen. One can agree with Habermas that the alternative, separatist, communitarian nationalism is both chauvinistic and unethical, and has no role in public life. Yet, as Habermas himself concedes that identity is crucial to citizenship, ‘Citizenship is an answer to the questions “Who am I?” and “What should I do?” when posed in the public sphere’ (ibid., p. 16). These identitarian aspects of citizenship are what national myths and narratives answer. The mythology of nation has an important emotional role in the nation-state, through national traditions and symbolism, but it must be tied to an inclusive, plural definition of citizenship to also be ethical and inclusive. In this chapter I will look at some of the debates surrounding multiculturalism, including its uses and drawbacks, to assess the effectiveness of an expanded multiculturalism in redefining national identity. This redefinition is crucial if we are to move away from the pragmatic and instrumental view of immigration that marked the guest-worker era. It acknowledges the history of imperial and postcolonial links between sending and receiving countries. The politicking around anti-immigration and anti-immigrant policies will not end until the definition of the nation-state is changed from a falsely homogeneous to an existing pluralist and diverse one. Here, if nowhere else, European countries should look to North American models. While it may have been true in the 1950s that European countries were not “traditional” countries of immigration like Canada and the US, this distinction no longer is true. Most of Western Europe has been a destination of mass immigration for at least the last half century and, if demographic trends hold, will continue to be. Nearly ten per cent of both France and Britain’s total populations have roots in postwar immigration. Nations cannot look over their shoulder at an imaginary past of racial and religious unity predating postwar immigration, since this history is short and not definitive. It was not till the end of the nineteenth century that states like Germany and Italy even came into being. The United Kingdom itself owes much of its regional unity to its imperial adventures overseas from the seventeenth century on.2 If nationstates like France and Britain expect well-acculturated minorities, people who

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take citizenship and dialogue seriously, they must in turn extend acceptance and opportunity at all levels, including the symbolic, the cultural, the religious and the racial. This includes many difficult tasks. National histories will have to be rewritten to include the silent presence of racial and religious Others and their still-evolving cultures in the body of the nation-state. National holidays will have to include festivals like Eid, Muharram, Diwali and Baisakhi. Fundamentally, national identity will have to be rearticulated to include pluralism and diversity. In Renan’s terms, both the staatsnation and kulturnation will have to include the new minorities (Asari et al., 2008). As Tariq Modood puts it, multiculturalism is ‘the story a country tells about itself to itself, the discourses, symbols and images in which national identity resides and through which people acquire and renew their sense of national belonging … [it has] to be revisited and recast through public debate in order to reflect the current and future, and not just the past, ethnic composition of the country’ (Modood, 2007). These narratives, myths and stories need to reflect not just ethnic composition, but colonial histories, ethnic histories and cultures as well – because, without the two, there can be no true citizenship. Despite their different national relationships to an official multiculturalism, both France and Britain have traversed a similar route to repudiate gains in the area of equality. The next section will consider the different cases made against multiculturalism in these two countries. Sleepwalking towards multiculturalism Objections against multiculturalism in Europe share certain features. One common rhetorical strand is that multiculturalism has “gone too far”, that governments have pandered and appeased minorities for electoral gain, removing the pressure for minorities to assimilate. Like many overstatements, there is some truth in how British multiculturalism has resulted in segregating ethnic minority populations over two generations. The effects of segregation – poverty, lack of educational attainment, unemployment, marginalization and lack of engagement with the national public sphere – have kept minorities from engaging with other groups and the larger public sphere. But what conservatives object to when they talk about rampant multiculturalism has more to do with what Koopmans calls assertive or claims-making discourses in which minority groups ask the state for exceptional rights based on special religious or ethnic needs (Koopmans et al., 2005, p. 159). For example, Muslim minorities may ask for girls-only schools or halal meat on school lunch menus. While both Britain and France are liberal democracies open to parity demands for equal rights, they are less open to group demands, and particularly group demands that go against dominant values of secularism or dominant cultural mores.

The backlash against multiculturalism109 A second, oft-heard objection to multiculturalism is that minorities ought to assimilate to the dominant culture, not vice versa. This argument sounds reasonable, but does not withstand practical examination. First, how do groups assimilate in the face of institutional, social, economic and housing barriers to assimilation? Second, if dominant groups have group rights, why can’t newer groups? Next, is complete assimilation even possible when phenotypical markers of difference engender discrimination? What kind of assimilation is possible when most postwar migrant groups are unskilled labour and postcolonial and suffer from both economic and status marginalization? Theoretically, there are additional arguments. For example, is dominant culture homogeneous and clearly defined? Does “culture” include religion or just language and clothing? Does the pressure to assimilate infringe the individual’s right to dress, speak, marry or worship as he or she chooses? The conservative demand to “just assimilate” raises too many problems to be a viable option. Hence the emphasis on multiculturalism. But even multiculturalism is not straightforward. How is multiculturalism defined in Britain and France? Is it pluralist, hegemonic, segregationist or assimilationist? Ethnic or civic? Is it voluntary? Open or assimilative? Different countries have experimented with various forms of multiculturalism across history. Not surprisingly, present forms of multiculturalism have their historical roots in the heyday of nationalism under imperialism. The history of imperialism has had a huge impact on British national identity. Asari and colleagues point out (Asari et al., 2008, p. 9) that the British nation owes much of its unity after the English Civil War to the harnessing of regional and provincial identities, such as the Scots and the Welsh, to a larger imperial project. This was achieved by keeping the symbolic resources of Scottishness and Welshness while emphasizing British political boundaries and sharing the imperial nation’s riches. ‘The common mission of empire was in large part what enabled this, because whatever else Empire might be, it is multicultural … Its legitimating ideology is one that fundamentally rejects the ethno-nationalist principle that cultural homogeneity is the primary basis of political legitimacy’ (Asari et al., 2008, p. 11). In a multiculturalism based on imperial histories, what is the place of post-imperial subjects? In Britain, no coherent national identity replaced the imperial one: all subsequent national identities were articulated in terms of the loss of the grand imperial one. As late as 1981, Margaret Thatcher cited the loss of empire as a reason for the Falklands War, to ‘prove that Britannia still ruled the waves’. Asari claims that a stripped down, de facto English identity replaced the imperial British (inclusive) one. Her quotation of John Major’s definition of a national identity is remarkable for its atavistic images: ‘long shadows on county grounds, warm beer, invincible green suburbs, dog lovers and pool fillers and … old maids cycling to Holy Communion through the morning mist’ (Asari et al., 2008, p. 11). Dated and nostalgic, Major’s definition points to the absence of any common

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“civic mythology” that can unify a multicultural Britain. ‘The result has been the implementation of policies of multiculturalism divorced from any notion of national unity’ (ibid., p. 13). Britain was not alone in this. Traditionally, France too saw its colonies as part of the nation-state itself. They were simply the territoires outre-mer and the dominions outre-mer. All Algerians had automatic French citizenship, just as Indians and East Africans (patrials) had British citizenship. After decolonization, while Britain continued its links with its former colonies through the creation of a cultural/economic British Commonwealth, the bitter Algerian War soured France on maintaining extended postcolonial ties. France, even more so than Britain, has failed to formulate for itself a coherent post-imperial national identity. Instead, it has continued the colonial practices of ethnic divide and rule towards its migrants, just as in the 1950s employers followed the old colonial geographical routes to bring labourers into France in order to keep down costs (Balibar, 2004; Silverstein, 2004). In France, attitudes towards postcolonial minorities are rendered quite complex, partly because of the state’s republican character, which in theory extends citizenship to all nationals based on the philosophy of jus soli or naturalization, and partly because of the nature of Algerian decolonization, which was long-drawnout, brutally fought and just as brutally suppressed. The effects of imperial rule extend to present-day French politics, not just in the shape of the National Front, but in the very definition of a Gaullist nation.3 It is no coincidence that the cultural racism of the 1990s which included Le Pen’s anti-Arab rhetoric and also Mitterrand’s regressive phrase “seuil de tolérance” referred explicitly to an ethnic and cultural conception of Frenchness. Legally and politically, the 1990s saw a rollback of the principles of jus soli that characterized French nationality laws. The Pasqua legislation of 1994–96 stripped children of immigrants born in France of the right to automatic citizenship. They now had to apply for citizenship themselves before the age of 21 or be deported. The deportations were public and were accompanied by significant force to present a public relations image of a France that belonged to the French. This was seen most clearly in the controversy around les sans-papiers of Saint Bernard parish, where unarmed people, including women and children, were forcibly removed in armoured vans by the police.4 The rhetoric surrounding the sans-papiers explicitly used the language of the right concerning citizenship and national protection, and demonstrated that the state granted no rights of appeal, humanitarian law or protection to non-citizens.5 Through its response, the state conflated nationality and citizenship, explicitly rejecting non-citizenship-based humanitarian and religious appeals. The rights of denizens or people who had a legal status of less than full citizenship, or whose legal status had expired, were seen to have no claim to protection or consideration by the state. The long-term effect of these policies has been not only to render immigrant labour more vulnerable, but to weaken labour rights in general.

The backlash against multiculturalism111 In addition to labour rights, this trend affects human rights more widely, resulting in a loss of protection against state violence. Etienne Balibar draws attention to how the combined lack of social rights and the emphasis on culture can function as a double exclusion. He notes the use of the phrase préférence nationale by extreme right-wing parties in France to designate an ahistorical belonging to which minorities can never aspire (Balibar, 2004, p. 37). Through the use of pro-national rhetoric and the national force it engenders, such an ideology deprives people of fundamental social rights and leaves them vulnerable to expulsion in the interests of arbitrarily established “thresholds of tolerance” or “capacities of reception and integration”, which are coded ways of designating race and nationality.(Balibar, 2004). This implicitly conflates race, nationality and citizenship, ascribing these qualities to foreigners or people who are seen as foreign, having less rights than others who look or are designated “French”.6 The myth of the republican state – that citizenship is equally accessible to all, regardless of race or country of origin – is hollowed out and made meaningless in favour of a national myth of belonging. Thus, jus soli inches towards the German model of jus sanguinis, based in no small part upon the notion of culture. In theory, the republican model of citizenship promises equal rights for all, but in practice French nationality is identified with a process of assimilation to the dominant culture. As in Britain, the roots of this discriminatory access to citizenship and social rights lie in France’s colonial history. Immigrants from North Africa are not only erstwhile colonial subjects, but this notion of continuing ex-colonial subjecthood is extended to subsequent generations who must follow a system of what Balibar calls ‘colonial tutelage’ (Balibar, 2004, p. 38). They are seen to be “indigènes”, underdeveloped and incapable of modernity either because of illiteracy, religion or language; they must grow into citizenship. This model continues the French colonial ideology of la mission civilisatrice, and assumes that the end point of such tutelage is French culture, unadulterated by the many cultures that inhabit modern France. It is cultural chauvinism, but it goes a long way towards explaining the resistance to any comprehensive model of multiculturalism. However much the “rights of man” may undergird the French constitution, colonial history has left France with what Balibar calls a ‘pragmatic anthropology’ in which the immigrant is not a citizen, but a “subject”, and traditional French culture ‘tends to see itself as the metropole, minimizing its differentiations and internal conflicts in order to represent its unity by opposition’ (Balibar, 2004, p. 40). In this context the de facto citizenship rights that have been fought for by movements in the 1980s and 1990s (the Marche des Beurs, the Sonacotra struggles, the rise and fall of SOS-Racisme) have not effected a questioning of metropolitan culture or its links to imperial histories. Indeed, as Balibar points out, the universalist nature of republican citizenship has its basis in colonization. ‘This historical correlation is translated into the very formulation

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of u ­ niversalism: first in religious language, as a mission of evangelisation, then in secular terms through the discourse of Enlightenment … This represents an extensive (or assimilationist) universalism whose relation to an imperialist politics (in the double sense of economic-political imperialism and cultural imperialism) … cannot be denied’ (ibid., p. 57). Economically, linguistically, culturally and spatially, French minorities have been pushed to the margins of mainstream national life, functioning mainly as surplus labour, or as imperial “subjects”, and treated with both physical and symbolic violence. In addition to ideology, the state’s lack of a cogent multiculturalist policy underlies the denial of the long-term implications of immigration by politicians and the public alike. Throughout the 1960s and 1970s, the recruitment and settlement of labour was not coordinated by the Government but by private employers, who provided housing in hostels to the mostly single male immigrant workers. Only following the oil crisis of 1973 and a subsequent drop in primary immigration (and a rise in family reunification) did the Government begin to build temporary shantytowns (bidonvilles) or high-rise foyers for immigrant workers. These were temporary structures, often without running water or adequate sanitation. After a series of strikes by immigrants protesting living conditions and rents in the foyers pour travailleurs migrants (FTMs) like Sonacotra (1974–80) in Seine-Saint-Denis, the French Government designated betterbuilt ZUPs (zones urbain prioritaires) to provide housing in urban banlieues. However, these banlieues were liminally positioned at the far reaches of cities, strategically away from city centres, transportation and employment (Maspero, 1994). Predictably, they became spaces of political activism, urban decay and harsh policing. In the 1990s the banlieusards, disappointed by the state, turned to religion and transnational identities (Kabyle, Arab or Muslim) to counter social and economic neglect (Begag, 1986, 2007; Hargreaves, 2007). In 1981 French President François Mitterrand came to power promising that immigrants would have a “droit à la différence” and went on to create policies aimed at “la France au pluriel” (plural or multiculturalist France). He specifically targeted banlieues for new after-school programs to teach and educate young children; set up rehabilitation programs for dilapidated housing estates to avoid unrest like that which had happened in Sonacotra, Les Minguettes and Vénissieux; organized weekends in the country for children led by former inhabitants of the banlieues; and established Educational Priority Zones (ZEPs). Most important politically, he relaxed rules on immigrant deportations and lifted a 1938 law banning immigrant organizations. The Fond d’action sociale (FAS), which was created to fund initiatives for immigrants, became the seedbed for many leaders of in the Beur movement of the 1980s (Silverstein, 2004). However, under pressure from Jean-Marie Le Pen’s right-wing National Front, these initiatives were soon undermined by increased anti-Arab demagoguery and public fears that immigrants were exceeding France’s “seuil de tolérance” (threshold of tolerance).

The backlash against multiculturalism113 The 1980–2010 period has decisively shown that economics, not culture, is at the heart of the separation and isolation of French minorities. A brief history of organizing by minority youth will show how structural problems undergird the lack of integration. The Marche des Beurs kick-started the Beur movement in the 1980s and led to the political birth of the “second generation”, a label that has gradually fallen out of use. Co-sponsored by the organizations Mouvement contre le racisme et pour l’amitié entre les peuples (MRAP) and SOS-Racisme, the march started in Marseilles with about 35 people and ended in Paris with about 60,000. It put the children of France’s immigrants, who called themselves “Beurs” (an inversion, or verlan, of the French word, “arabes”), on the map. Alex Silverstein observes that this word inversion was also a signal that the political passivity of the older generation would be replaced with a more activist and aggressive pursuit of rights. The Beurs served notice to the French public that the “McDonald’s–couscous–steak frites” hybrid generation had arrived. Culturally, the Beur movement saw a veritable explosion of music groups, theatre groups, radio stations, magazines and, above all, publishing.7 The republican state seemed to welcome the activist Beurs into its fold, as it mentored young leaders and funded many Beur efforts. It seemed that the Habermasian version of new French citizens, able and willing to renegotiate the terms of their inclusion in the state, had arrived. Ironically, that proved to be the Beurs’ undoing. As political actors they were accused of becoming the “Beurgeoisie”, and selling out their grass-roots constituencies for the perks associated with joining France’s elites. Alec Hargreaves notes the parallels between these postcolonial intermédiaires sociaux hailed by successive Governments since the mid-1980s, and their colonial parallels in the “intermédiaires culturelles” in Algeria, whose roles as translators of different interests in society were crucial to ruling far-flung territories. In the new millennium in France, these intermediaries were clearly marked as agents of the French state, with no clear role and no clear power. They were in-between people with no constituency, thus discredited on all fronts. Hargreaves identifies these postcolonial elites as “shock-absorbers”, quoting Rémy Leveau that they are ‘de nouveaux caïds placés à la têtes soumises’ (the new elites heading submission) (Hargreaves, 1998).8 Soon any emergent leadership from the banlieues came to be regarded as politically suspect. The Beur movement died out under infighting and accusations of becoming “Beurs de service” (house Beurs). Two additional pressures, one from the Algerian Government to follow its line in religious and cultural matters, and the other from local municipalities that were glad to fund cultural activities but not political ones, helped sap the Beur movement of its vitality (Silverstein, 2004). Beurs found the younger generation unwilling to follow their example, rejecting what they saw as “intégration de pognon” (“big bucks integration”, in the words of novelist Farid Boudjellal, quoted in Silverstein). This example of the Beur movement shows how, unlike in Britain, acculturation was not central to the issue of French minorities’ integration.

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By the 1990s, the social and political optimism that had briefly arisen with the Beur movement had subsided into a much gloomier and more insular picture. The Beurs were succeeded by a génération de banlieues, a group that added young Algerians fleeing the civil war in Algeria to the mix in the banlieues. Silverstein sees in this new generation as the dystopian counterparts of their utopian predecessors, substituting a culture of hate and rioting for organization and marches. They created a an inward-looking culture of neighbourhood gangs, rodéos and daily violence. Mathieu Kassovitz’s film La Haine (1995) portrays the anger and sense of abandonment that minority youth in the cités felt. At this time a transnational filiation with Islamic and Algerian groups also began, owing partly to people fleeing Algeria and partly to the spread of satellite television that brought channels from their homelands to a young generation. The cultural in-­betweenness of the Beurs was replaced by an explicit turn away from French society and toward an imagined community, not of the parents’ homeland, but of an abstract community of religion and shared values. This form of closed religious identities can be seen as a rejection of the engagement of the Beurs. By turning to religion, young banlieusards stressed ‘faith and values, the quest for a universal community going beyond cultures and nations, the importance of local congregations as a basis for socialization and alienation from a society seen as materialist and vain’ (Roy, 2004). It was also a departure from the French public sphere into closed, communitarian and, above all, local, cité-based groups. Calling themselves “rabeus”, the inverse (verlan) of Beurs, this generation rooted themselves in local, marginalized spaces. They also organized into regional associations like those based on Berber or Kabyle culture, Algeria- or Moroccobased groups, and along mosque-based lines. Often, the Islamic groups were ranged against Berber groups and vice versa. Organizations like the ACB (Berber Culture Association) and Berber Cultural Movement became strong political platforms for minority youth (Silverstein, 2004). However, the multicultural demands of the Beurs were not entirely dead. Movements for Berber culture, for the teaching of the Berber language – Tamazight – in schools and the establishment of organizations opposed to the imposition of laïcité in schools all kept young minority populations in the media eye. The Beur generation, while shedding the label, had by now become part of French literature and broadcasting, foregrounding the voices and interests of the cités and banlieues and negotiating competing identities. One example is Azouz Begag, originally a Beur writer, born to an uneducated worker from Algeria, who became a professor at the National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS), a novelist and a minister for equal opportunities during Nicolas Sarkozy’s tenure as Minister of the Interior (2002–4, 2005–7). In the wake of the 2005 riots, Begag resigned his post in protest against Sarkozy’s labelling of the rioters as “racaille”. He wrote a book denouncing the institutional racism of French politics in Un mouton dans la baignoire (a sheep in the bath; whose title refers to

The backlash against multiculturalism115 the stereotype of Muslims sacrificing sheep indoors). Another example is Nacer Kettane, who trained as a doctor, then founded Radio Beur as a small pirate station transmitting news of movements and marches by Beurs across France. The success of Radio Beur led him to develop a web of regional commercial radio stations known as Beur FM. This entrepreneurial expansion was seen as a movement away from its grass-roots mission, but it can be argued that regional radio stations serving the needs of minorities across France offer an important contribution by broadcasting debates and voices across the spectrum. By providing commercial airtime to minority businesses and majority firms trying to reach new customers, these stations also position French minorities within a French consumer demographic.9 The early 1990s saw some very strong organizing around the affaire des foulards which has been covered in previous chapters. It is important to note, though, that unlike in Britain, French authorities have had a very Janus-faced attitude towards minority acculturation. On the one hand, they have largely neglected the issue and appropriated the cultural racism of Le Pen’s National Front to win electoral votes on the right. Anti-immigrant legislation like the Pasqua law and the work of the Stasi Commission on schools and laïcité have been popular with Le Pen’s traditional supporters.10 On the other hand, they have repeatedly rejected the “Anglo-Saxon” multiculturalism of Britain, ostensibly because it would lead to segregation and “communitarianisme”. So, through marginalization and pressure, the onus to assimilate has been put solely on the minorities despite the threefold odds placed against them of segregated housing, high unemployment and cultural prejudice. The result, not surprisingly, has been tremendous frustration on both sides, and a worsening of living conditions for French minorities. Britain’s path to multiculturalism, unlike France’s, was supported by the state and had stronger institutional roots in community struggles over parity rights in education. Even before the struggles in schools in the 1970s, many first-­generation immigrants had fought labour battles for better pay and working conditions under the rubric of black unity. But by the 1980s this unity had fractured, first into Asian and African-Caribbean groups, and then into national and religious groups. Both policy and popular perceptions distinguished between ethnicities, but increasingly through the late 1990s and the early twenty-first century, the language of difference became one of group identities and religious, not ethnic, difference. This was particularly true of Islam, which was seen as a more “visible” religion, one which, in Koopmans’s terms, was making exceptional demands and seeking a larger degree of separation from other social groups. Chapter 3 lays out some of the British debates around Islam. My purpose here is to briefly consider two reports that were central in explicitly linking religious group rights, community segregation (mostly religious, sometimes ethnic) and citizenship. The first, the Crick report by the Advisory Group on Citizenship

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chaired by Sir Bernard Crick, was commissioned in 1997 and published in 1998 to provide input into a review of the national curriculum of British schools. The second is popularly called the Cantle report (2001), or Community cohesion: A report of the Independent Review Team – that team having been chaired by Ted Cantle. It was commissioned in the wake of the summer 2001 Midlands riots by young second-generation men, mostly South Asian Muslim youth, in the northern cities of Bradford, Oldham and Burnley. Citizenship was centre stage in both reports. The Crick report’s findings led the Government to introduce “citizenship studies” as a subject in British secondary schools in 2002. Published and implemented under Labour minister David Blunkett, the Secretary of State for Education and Employment from 1997 to 2001 and Home Secretary from 2001 to 2004, the report emphasized the need to educate students as active and critically engaged citizens in a diverse society. Envisaged by the Crick report as a subject to actively engage students and lead them towards practical learning within their local communities, it instead became yet another subject in the already existing “civics” curriculum. Based largely on book learning, the students’ own community involvement and engagement has remained negligible (Miles, 2006). Partly, this is owing to overstretched school bodies and patchy implementation by local education authorities (LEAs). But critics have pointed out that the Crick report famously did not address the questions of race and multiculturalism as they relate to citizenship (Miles, 2006). The Parekh Report, authored by the Commission on Multi-Ethnic Britain (2000) chaired by Lord Bhikhu Parekh, addressed this lack by focusing particularly on multiculturalism’s link with race and “racisms”.11 However, critics on the left, such as Arun Kundnani, have accused Parekh of burying his critique of British racism in academic language and focusing too much on culture and not enough on the deep-rooted institutional and direct racism in Britain (Kundnani, 2002). The British Government, predictably enough, could use the Crick report to pay lip service to citizenship education without tackling any of the underlying issues it raised. By 2004, this movement towards emphasizing citizenship for immigrants had culminated in the introduction of formal citizenship ceremonies based on the US model, but had not addressed the root causes of insufficient integration. In the wake of these reports, citizenship became the state’s answer to addressing the ill effects of multiculturalism. It came to be seen as a transmissible virtue or a set of values that can be taught in the classroom and passed on to the community in local town halls. Of course, as Dina Kiwan points out, citizenship is not a feeling or a status, but a practice. It involves daily engagement with the structures of the state and the nation as well as shared allegiance to the political principles of the state. However, the Crick report relies heavily on the notion of “shared values”, without questioning what those values are or how they might travel across classes and ethnicities. Then, again, can formal education really instil those values? The curriculum also relies on citizens as “individuals”, and doesn’t

The backlash against multiculturalism117 deal with groups or collectivities of any kind. More egregiously, the curriculum of citizenship studies includes no engagement with history or with the history of the British Empire, sidesteps the issues of ethnicity by using the term “diversity” as a catch-all word for difference, and ignores anti-racism (Kiwan, 2008). The framers of the new citizenship studies might have more effectively implemented a “participatory” kind of multiculturalism in which students examined power relations, access to resources and institutional channels of discrimination. The Cantle report on the rioting, predominantly by young Muslim men, in northern England in 2001, also took a culturalist approach to a structural problem. Entitled Community cohesion, the report echoed the Crick report’s focus on the need for citizenship and community cohesion. But what is community cohesion? Reading the report, written by a team of ten researchers (including six South Asian “community leaders”) and three advisors under Cantle as the chairperson, it blames the riots on segregation but blames the “communities” themselves for (self) segregation. The word communities connotes non-white ethnic communities, not white ones. The burden of cohesion or segregation falls exclusively on the racialized populations. This is a classic ahistorical, blame-thevictim approach. Overly reliant on a culturalist reading of South Asian communities in Midland mill towns, the report does not discuss the unemployment, white flight and crumbling infrastructure of the inner cities, or the racist policing that precipitated the riots. Instead, it points to drawbacks within Asian culture as a cause. In the 1980s, this same culture had been hailed as a strength among South Asians, leading to strong family ties and higher educational attainment. The effect of singling out South Asians in both cases was also to break up any minority unity by distinguishing Asians from African-Caribbeans. The attempt to divide minorities into discrete ethnic and religious groups still continues, with Muslims being singled out and compared unfavourably to Hindus and Sikhs. Historically, the Midlands was home to a majority of settlers from Pakistan and, later, Bangladesh. The de-industrialization of the Midlands, coupled with white relocation to the suburbs, left this population isolated and unemployed in much larger numbers than minorities in Britain’s southeast. However, the history of minority migration and settlement is ignored in the report, and urban blight is mentioned only in passing. The report says, ‘Area based regeneration initiatives clearly have a role to play, but in many cases they again reinforced the separation of communities … The development of cross-cultural contact and the promotion of community cohesion, was not valued as an end in itself’ (Community Cohesion Review Team, 2001). The strategy urged by the report was a ‘new citizenship’ based on ‘myth-busting’ and increased ‘cross-cultural contact’ (p. 11). How that would address multigenerational poverty or acculturation was not clear. A. Sivanandan and Arun Kundnani, both then researchers at the Institute of Race Relations (IRR), have been critical of this culturalist turn away from

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anti-racism to “cultural protectionism” (Sivanandan, 2000; Kundnani, 2001). They both see the emphasis on culture as a way to defuse the anti-racist movement that existed among “black” communities in the 1980s. The Macpherson report was published in 1999 in the wake of the murder of Stephen Lawrence, a young black boy murdered in 1993 by six white teenagers while walking home. The subsequent inquiry was blocked at every turn by the police force, outrage against which led to the creation of the enquiry commission in 1998, headed by Sir William Macpherson. The Macpherson report was unequivocal in finding that the police force was institutionally racist. It recommended more officers from ethnic minorities be hired and the setting up of a standing race relations unit, and compulsory race relations training at all levels in order to address the issue (italics added).12 Apart from that, ‘the fight against racism was transformed into a fight for culture, the fight against a system into a fight for the individual. Smash and grab ethnic politics came to replace ethnic self-reliance and inward looking preoccupations with the self became elevated to a politics of identity’ (Sivanandan, 2000). One could argue that Sivanandan’s and Kundnani’s notion of earlier “self-reliance” was utopian, but they were absolutely correct in observing that the culturalist turn in British multicultural policy did no favours to communities battered by unemployment and discrimination. Instead, the culturalist focus tended to pathologize them and seek solutions that put the onus of change on ethnic communities instead of on society at large. The causes of the 2001 riots are instructive in pointing to the historical and economic odds against minorities that led directly to the riots. Oldham, Burnley and Bradford are historical mining and mill towns, the mainstay of the colonial economy in the nineteenth century. They imported cotton from the plantations of the US South, the Caribbean and India, spun it into cloth and sold it back to the colonies at a profit. The 1950s brought much-needed labour from Pakistan and Bangladesh to supplement the postwar requirements of these textile mills, especially to staff night shifts at the machines which traditional white workers did not want. As the mills declined in the 1970s, employment shifted to lower-paying local service economies, and long-term unemployment in areas like Oldham, Burnley, Accrington, Blackburn, Bradford and Leeds reached as high as 50 per cent (Kundnani, 2001). Cities crumbled and communities became segregated and riven by declining education standards as well. The situation facing second- and third-generation workers was a depressing one. In Erik Bleich’s terms, they saw a combination of ‘access racism’ in education, housing, employment and services and of ‘physical racism’ on the street (Bleich, 2003). Kundnani adds institutional racism to the mix, since police, education and urban authorities failed to address the problems over many decades. Insofar as any community leadership existed, it was self-serving and co-opted, with no visible improvements for the people the leaders represented. In this respect, the situation was very similar to that of the banlieues in France.

The backlash against multiculturalism119 A new class of “ethnic representatives” entered the town halls from the mid-1980s onwards, who would be the surrogate voice for their own ethnically-defined fiefdoms. They entered into a pact with the authorities; they were to cover up and gloss over black community resistance in return for free rein in preserving their own patriarchy. It was a colonial arrangement which prevented community leaders from making radical criticisms, for fear that funding for their pet projects would be jeopardized. The authorities hoped that if they threw some money at the bigwig blacks, they would stop complaining. And the community leaders proved them right. (Kundnani, 2001, p. 420)

In this way, Government policy on “ethnic communities” and the interests of the leadership in poor and depressed communities both conspired to create the anger and frustration that rocked the Midlands in 2001. However, instead of blaming segregation and institutional racism, the Cantle report on the riots blamed multiculturalism and, especially, Islam. The solutions included “forced integration”, restrictions on immigration (quite overlooking that the rioters were British) and new citizenship studies in the curriculum. It is in this context that we have to read Trevor Phillips’ statement about failed multiculturalism, his assertion that ‘we are sleep-walking … into segregation’.13 Phillips headed the CRE, now known as the Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC), an academic and advisory body whose pronouncements carry much weight in policy circles. It also enjoys the right to instigate criminal proceedings against anyone accused of racial discrimination (Bleich, 2003). In effect, it is an unacknowledged arm of the state. For Phillips to issue a public statement against multiculturalism is momentous. It allows open season on more than 30 years of anti-racist legislation in Britain, starting with the 1965 Race Relations Act. Phillips drew a straight line from multiculturalism to segregation. In later speeches, he nuanced the position, placing more weight on class divisions and on the need for integrated schools and higher education. But the damage was done. Soon Harriet Harman, Minister of State at the Department of Constitutional Affairs, agreed that Britain was heading towards a New Orleans type of segregation. Phillips later gave a speech at Manchester, essentially repeating his warning: ‘The fact is that we are a society which – almost without noticing it – is becoming more divided by race and religion’ (Phillips, November 27, 2007). Phillips’ speeches, from 2005 to 2007 have continued this theme, leading Britain to question the value of multiculturalism or, at the very least, its efficacy as a policy. David Blunkett, in 2001, went further, asking Asians to integrate and adopt British ‘norms of acceptability,’ and to marry within the Asian population settled in Britain instead of overseas. The subsequent white paper on community cohesion suggested American-style citizenship tests and pledges. Thus, though the concept of community perseveres and is not seen as threatening, fear of ethnic communities’ difference remains strong. (Werbner, 2005)

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When talking about British multiculturalism’s trajectory, we are still talking about a very different beast than the French variant. Bleich calls it the difference between the British “race relations” model and the French “anti-racism” model (Bleich, 2003). In Britain, multiculturalism travelled under the broad policy of race relations, through institutions like schools, places of worship, the CRE, minority hiring initiatives; all addressed marginalization and sought integration, although they did not erase the former or affect the latter completely. In France, by contrast, there has been a marked reluctance to even address the need for multiculturalist policies, and racism is seen as a crime only against an individual. These differences can be seen across a variety of practices and policies. The most important difference between the two countries is that while Britain has over the years collected and tracked data about housing, employment and education according to race, ethnicity and also religion (EHRC has played a large role in this), France has refused to collect any demographic data according to race, origin or religion since 1976. Following its republican model of citizenship, the primary divide is between citizens and non-citizens. So any policy targeting a racially disadvantaged group or community would have a hard time locating its desired group (Hargreaves, 2007). The second difference involves the structure of governmentality in both countries. The British Government allows local, council and non-governmental bodies considerable leeway in defining, administering and implementing programs aimed at ethnic minorities. This is in addition to Government initiatives in healthcare, education and housing. France, by contrast, acts as a dirigiste state, with the Government initiating and implementing most community activities. The housing market is also much more tightly controlled in France. The French Government has steadily refused to follow the “Anglo-Saxon” multiculturalist model, which would identify and address ethnic groups in trouble. Groups have always found it hard to organize by themselves, largely because until 1986, any organizations by foreigners were banned. The French state defines minorities as a problem, but most ameliorative measures are a half-hearted combination of anti-immigrant feeling, demagoguery and secularity. Lastly, Bleich points out that the French law against anti-Semitism, banning the denial of the Holocaust, also has had the effect of foreclosing any questioning of official history: ‘it has also created an “official” interpretation of history, dissent from which can result in fines or imprisonment – a highly controversial step in an open democracy’ (Bleich, 2003, p. 12). As a result, there is practically no public questioning of governmental discourse about race, discrimination or French history with its postcolonial populations. This prevents any systemic questioning of the nexus between state policies, colonial history and racism. Therefore, any discussion of multiculturalism as an isolating and radicalizing policy in both countries must acknowledge the considerable differences between France and Britain. In Britain there is a more active “communitarian”

The backlash against multiculturalism121 pursuit of multiculturalism and the approach is more “separate but equal”, while in France multiculturalism has not been followed as a policy and segregation in housing, education and employment continues to be fact of life for most minorities.14 While one country actively promoted multiculturalism, the other promoted integration. Yet a backlash against multiculturalism in both countries has been articulated in very similar terms. Also, in both countries, civil and political unrest – the 2001 Midlands riots in Britain, the July 2005 bombings on the London underground and the urban 2005 riots in France – have added to the reaction against multiculturalism. Is the debate about multiculturalism another way to resist accepting cultural differences within the nation-state? Is it xenophobia or racism? Or is it a debate which seeks to mend a system that has become too culturalist and ethnic-based, ignoring the need for new kinds of common citizenship? These questions revolve around three debates on status quo multiculturalism: first, that it breeds segregation based on different cultures that don’t want to assimilate; second, that it addresses only the public sphere when a new multiculturalism also needs to address the private; and last, that traditional multiculturalism follows the Rawlsian line in addressing the individual subject while ignoring the idea of group identities. Culture, diversity and difference One charge against the kind of diversity that multiculturalism institutionalizes is that it leads not to pluralism, but to difference, separation and, eventually, segregation. Popular media terms like “Eurabia” and “ethnic ghettoes”, or more academic ones like the “cultural-diversity sceptical turn”, all suggest that minority populations have become too different, hence ungovernable. This in turn stems from a multiculturalism that is ‘aggressive, separatist and intolerant’ and rooted in ‘tribalism’; that is to say, the antithesis of the modern (Sartori, quoted in Grillo, 2007, p. 986). The backlash against this ‘excess of alterity’ has led some commentators to say that the very concept of multiculturalism is too “fuzzy” and needs to be clarified. Ralph Grillo defines this as a difference between strong and weak forms of multiculturalism. Weak multiculturalism recognizes cultural difference in the private sphere but acknowledges acculturation in the public spheres of employment, housing, education, health and welfare. Strong multiculturalism is characterized by institutional recognition of difference in both spheres, with special provisions for language, schooling, healthcare, welfare and political representation organized around ethnic/religious lines (Grillo, 2007). Paradoxically, states such as Britain are perceived as possessing a system of strong multiculturalism when they have actually instituted a weak multiculturalist system. While concepts like diversity and difference are “fuzzy”, the assumed meanings of “national” culture and cohesion are equally unclear. Not just migrants but native

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ethnicities are also withdrawing into gated or fortified areas, and antagonizing each other. This separation could have unforeseen consequences; Grillo observes that the ‘demonization of Islam may itself motivate a repli communautaire [communitarian withdrawal]’ (Grillo, 2007). This move to “cry wolf” at cultural alterity started with differentialist racism in the 1980s, gained new adherents with the attacks in Europe following 2001, and is premised on naturalizing cultural difference. In other words, differentialist racism asserts that individuals inhabit particular cultures forever. This view rests on what Michel Wieviorka calls an evolutionist (as opposed to modern and secular) view of history, where culture is traditional and unchanging and, over time, will be swept away by modernity. This assumes a number of things about (minority) culture. First, that it remains unchanging, going through a process of reproduction (automatic), rather than production (choice and change). Second, that history is evolutionary and teleological. Given the right conditions, ethnic cultures will discard group identities and emerge into the liberal sunlight. Third, there is a blurring of tradition, religion and lack of freedom which assumes that staying within communities or joining majority society is a matter of free choice. Outside contexts and attitudes have no bearing on the matter. To sum up, religious or ethnic minorities voluntarily stay within the confines of tradition; when they evolve, they abandon old customs and choose to disappear into the melting pot of a neutral national culture. Majority cultures (their citizenship not being subject to proof since they are part of national culture), have three choices: assimilationism, tolerance or acceptance (Wieviorka, 2004). In the first instance, they can insist that minorities assimilate and that their specificities disappear into the melting pot. In the second instance, minority difference will be tolerated as long as it doesn’t challenge national norms or generate conflict. In the third and last instance, they can accept that minorities have cultural rights and recognize them as part of a national identity. This last recognition contains a deep epistemological shift: an acceptance that European societies are now multi-ethnic. This recognition of multi-ethnicity as a part of modernity has not happened yet. Modernity is still identified as a unitary national achievement that predates immigration. It has become a cliché to assert that cultures are complex, fluid and multiply situated; identities are always shifting; and no group is homogeneous. Both Werbner and Ayse Caglar also note that cultures are not static, they change as they are reproduced in different contexts. Therefore, insofar as they respond to contemporary contexts (for example, lavish weddings to impress less affluent neighbours), cultural habits translate differently across time and place (Caglar, 1997; Werbner, 2005). Then why are ethnic groups accused of being too traditional or having an “excess” of culture? Putting aside prejudice temporarily, visibility is one obvious answer. A different culture is always visible in a way that familiar (majority) culture is not. It is also true that first-generation immigrants tend to cling to

The backlash against multiculturalism123 rituals and customs in a foreign country. In many cases, these tend to disappear over subsequent generations. The first generation’s visibility magnifies the perception that cultural traditions conflict with majority norms, a perception heightened by earlier forms of multiculturalism organized around symbols of difference such as clothing, food and festivals. However, existing contemporary examples of alterity are seen as unacceptable, especially issues around gender like honour killings or forced marriages or forbidding female education after puberty. Among South Asians in Britain, the issue of arranged marriages has been much publicized. In the name of recognizing cultural difference, should European society accept these practices, letting groups monitor themselves? Or should they be condemned and banned? The then Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr Rowan Williams, raised a storm of protest in 2008 when he called for aspects of Islamic shariah law to be incorporated into or coexist with the British legal system. This was seen as an excess of multiculturalism. Yet, both Anglicans and Jews in Britain have their own ecclesiastical courts, although the Jewish courts reserve their imprimatur for consensual or arbitration cases (Sciolino, 2008). In the case of Dr Williams’ call, there was a schism within Muslim public opinion in response. Women’s groups objected to this suggestion on the grounds that under shariah, women’s rights are often infringed. Other groups saw this call as too accommodationist. In such a case, the state has a difficult task balancing cultural rights with existing national laws. Many scholars who seek to introduce multiculturalism in the wake of immigration champion group-based rights. They argue that traditional “liberal” multiculturalism is based on universal individual rights which implicitly valorize traditional post-Enlightenment values and implicitly marginalize group- and community-based identities. Modood and Kastoryano suggest that most countries of Western Europe have instituted many different versions of secularism through historically specific compromises with national religions and churches. For example, France’s secularism evolved from a desire to lessen the influence of the Catholic Church, and so civil symbols replaced religious ones in all state offices. On the other hand, British secularism was less radical since there was no absolute schism between state and church. Thus, the monarchy and Parliament still have trappings of the Anglican Church and its officials. Modood and Kastoryano’s larger point is that secularism and its public/private separation have their roots in native “folk” cultures and are not universal. ‘No regime stands outside culture, ethnicity or nationality and changes in these will need to be reflected in political arrangements of the regime’ (Modood and Kastoryano, 2006). Secondly, if states allocate all difference and particularity to the private sphere, groups such as women and minorities effectively won’t get heard (Werbner, 2005). Most states devise compromise solutions where some group identities such as those based on gender are accepted in the public sphere, and others are not. Modood and Kastoryano argue that the range of acceptable groups should be enlarged to include religious identities.

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But when group practices conflict with state laws, should states back down? Should they remain neutral and “outside” religious or ethnic identities (Rawls, 1971)? Official secularism is indeed the republican credo but, as Will Kymlicka says, states are never neutral. Implicitly or otherwise, states tend to accord with the values of the dominant group. For example, Christmas is a national holiday but is not recognized as a religious one; it is seen as a religion-neutral holiday. Neutrality, in this case, may be to preserve the status quo of a historically dominant group. Secondly, do states have a duty to help or ameliorate the position of historically disadvantaged groups? There, too, neutrality is not an option. Some form of affirmative action or positive discrimination has long been practised by both France and Britain (Kymlicka, 1995). While Kymlicka’s observation applies mostly to ethnocultural groups, scholars such as Modood want to extend state neutrality to ethno-religious groups as well. Modood observes that some non-ethnic forms of group identities already exist and are accepted, such as regional (the Welsh language and culture), gendered (the women’s wing of the Labour party) and class identities (trade unions). So why should ethno-religious group identities be considered excessive? He also seems to suggest, though this is not clear, that multiculturalism needs to change over time as group profiles and needs change: ‘specific policies and multicultural institutional arrangements have to be customised to meet diverse … ­vulnerabilities, needs, priorities’ (Modood, 2007). Thus he suggests that the American-style use of hyphenated identities leads to integration because they effect political mobilization as well as participation in the national public sphere. Though this would be anathema to French policy makers (Wieviorka names communitarianism as a deviation or perversion of multiculturalism), Modood sees it as crucial in making distinctions between tolerance and recognition of new populations. Brian Barry, by contrast, reads the presence of diverse ethnicities and religions as all the more reason to maintain a secular and less multicultural state in the face of difference (Barry, 2001). ‘Difference as such is not the source of conflict. What causes conflict among adherents of different religious faiths is their leading to incompatible demands’ (ibid., p. 24). By keeping religion separate from the state, the state can aspire to fairness and even-handedness, if not complete equality. A related question often asked of group multicultural proponents is about difference from difference. In other words, how do group rights protect minorities within religions (Ahmadiyyas within Islam, Dalits in Hinduism, atheists born as Christians within Christianity), and other populations that may feel coerced into obeying group rules? Can they be protected from religion if it is institutionalized in educational, legal and political ways? What about community pressures?15 Is collapsing liberalism’s principles a way to become more or less even-handed? While one can agree with the critique of liberal multiculturalism, other questions about its replacement with group rights remain.

The backlash against multiculturalism125 Public versus private Part of the debate over the institutionalization of difference under multiculturalism rests on the distinction that liberalism makes between the public sphere and the private realm. This touches very specifically on citizenship because the public sphere is where citizenship is practised. However, by bringing the notion of culture out of the private realm to the political and public one, that separation becomes unstable and questionable. Historically, the argument against multiculturalism has rested on this divide. In other words, minorities are supposed to assimilate politically, socially and educationally, while culture and religion are only to be practised in the private sphere. Thus the public sphere remains secular, neutral and equal. This is the argument that Habermas makes in his essay (Habermas, 1992). His elaboration of new kinds of citizenship calls for a clearly demarcated public sphere of dialogue and argument, which he sees as an integral part of citizenship. On the other hand, people whose identities are primarily defined through religion or sexuality may see this demarcation as a denial of their rights to free expression. Modood defines this private/public divide as ‘an arbitrary, if historically grounded, bias against one kind of minority’ (Modood, 2008a). Disagreement about what constitutes the proper realm for culture and religion has been one of the main arguments dividing the pro- and anti-multiculturalists. (This debate, though topical, is not new. In nineteenth century France, a similar debate was conducted about the extent to which Jewish Sanhedrin could be part of a post-revolutionary France. It was suggested that because Jewish law was written for a theocratic state, it would not allow Jews to participate as citizens within a secular one. ‘The conflict between the law of the state and Jewish law was therefore seen as inevitable, and one that could not be tolerated’ (Berkovitz, 1989, p. 47).) Liberal multiculturalism has few answers for spheres of life that straddle the divide between public and private. This is a particularly complex issue when the demand for parity and exceptional rights conflicts with traditional and legal divisions between public and private. Modood’s proposal for group rights as a parity right makes sense in the areas of religious schools or political and cultural associations, especially in expanding British blasphemy laws to protect religions other than Christianity. Habermas calls this a protest against the ‘selective application of established constitutional principles’ (Habermas, 2008). But other areas are less clear-cut. For example, can civil servants such as teachers or doctors wear problematic clothing (a hijab or a niqab, a face covering) while at work or school?16 Is there a conflict with their duty to their pupils or patients? Can they choose not to work with people who don’t accept their choice of clothing? In the area of marriage laws (again, both a personal choice and a legal status), do all British citizens accept British laws that may or may not be based on Christian law? If a religion has its own laws with regard to marriage, which set of laws

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applies?17 What about people who are not religious, but are culturally Muslim? What about divorce? The state in Britain has applied its uniform civil code to these cases, but what happens in cases where group rights conflict with the civil code? Can each community have its own personal code, as happens in some other countries, and was applied to Algerians in France? And what particular group rights should be created? All rights, even cultural and group rights, are delimited by two parameters: a state’s constitution and its laws. However, when a set of group rights conflicts with laws governing the separation of church and state, should exceptions be created for group rights? Should they be created for all groups or only the largest minorities, namely Muslims? Which group rights have the unanimous support of all their members? The particulars of group rights that are being demanded, especially in Britain, are unclear. Even Tariq Modood, who has written extensively on the need for group rights, is hazy on what particular group rights are being asked for, beyond blasphemy laws and special educational institutions. These are all areas where the line between public and private, cultural and religious, rights is unclear and debatable. Towards the end of this chapter I address this debate more fully. But first, the most frequent objection to granting group rights to religious groups is the fear that women’s rights will be rolled back. This debate has most clearly played out in France over the headscarves affair. Feminism and multiculturalism: hard choices Questions around group rights take on a special salience when cultural rights and women’s rights conflict. While it is true that many cases around Muslim women have been unfairly sensationalized, it is equally true that horrific cases of honour killings, forcible kidnappings and homeland marriages are often justified in the name of tradition, religion or culture. These cases are not unique to Muslims, they apply to the Asian community at large. Any such law would apply to South Asians from multiple religious groups, since all groups contain families that have emigrated from conservative, rural and less educated areas. It is not enough to accuse feminism, as Modood does, of becoming a ‘missionary ideology’ wanting to impose ‘western supremacy’ on non-Westerners (Modood, 2008a). Even if that were true, such dismissals do not address the valid concerns about the treatment of South Asian women under the rubric of “tradition”. A fair response would both agree and disagree with Modood. Some feminist scholars try to balance the demands of culture and gender. Some, like Gita Sahgal and Nira Yuva-Davis, acknowledge that the term fundamentalism has a particular political salience for nativists and xenophobes, but the burden of culture and tradition in groups also falls disproportionately on women and girls. For example, they point out that most Muslim schools in Britain have been established as girls-only institutions (Sahgal and Yuval-Davis, 1992, p. 8). Why

The backlash against multiculturalism127 is religion- and culture-specific education geared only to girls? One reason could be that the traditional and religious acculturation of girls is seen as a priority that results in separating them from wider society. In other words, it serves as a mode of control and often is not voluntary. Another argument is that while religion has replaced race as an important identity marker, many opportunities for alliances and support are lost in the quest for a purely religious political identity. Using the example of the Southall Black Sisters (SBS) and Women Against Fundamentalism (WAF), Sahgal and Yuval-Davis show how an exclusively religious basis for collective identity can hamper women’s quest for equal opportunities, safety and refuge from violence, and reproductive rights (Sahgal and Yuval-Davis, 1992). While they agree with Modood’s critique of secularism and on the need for an alternative ways to think about multiculturalism, they do not see religious group rights as a just replacement for secularism. Other critics on the left prefer to focus on the economic factors behind the “traditional” cultural issues. These critics do not find a contradiction between multiculturalism and women’s rights. Instead, they consider the preoccupation with abuse of women part of a xenophobic agenda (Dustin and Phillips, 2008, p. 420). While not denying that women’s rights need to be protected, they think the inordinate focus on women promotes a cultural racism against minorities. Dustin and Phillips point out that Britain already has many laws on the books to deal with FGM (female genital mutilation), forced marriages and honour killings. They argue that better implementation of existing laws along with greater women’s activism and stronger support networks to implement those laws are the answer (Dustin and Phillips, 2008). An excessive focus on religion ignores economic and social factors that affect the practice of particular customs and traditions. For example, the emphasis on women staying home and not working may be tied to the lack of adequate employment available for men in the community. Notions of honour or shame are invoked as a reason, but the real issue may be high unemployment within a particular community. This debate over religious rights and women’s rights has had a longer and more complex history in France. From 1983, when the headscarves debate started, to 2004, when the new law on secular attire in schools was passed, feminists and right-wing xenophobes have become strange allies. The 1905 law on secularism prohibited clergy and religious instruction in schools and banned the distribution of written propaganda and displays of religious iconography and insignia. Historically, its aim was explicitly to grant freedom of religion, not freedom from religion. However, this demanded a strict divide between the public and private spheres, with religion being relegated to the private. Some critics falsely equate secularism and atheism, but historically atheism was never an option in heavily Catholic France. Passage of the 1905 law culminated the Revolution’s efforts to democratize the public sphere and protect

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it from the power of religious institutions. Over time, in France, this has led to a privileging of the state’s administration of public and private aspects of an individual’s life: births, marriages, deaths, divorces and education are all heavily administered by the state. This is regarded as preferable to the intrusion of religion into civil society. The issue of veiling divided French feminists down the line because it forced them to take sides on a law which was perceived as a guarantor of freedom for women. Both the veiling issue in France and the debate around the Somali-born Dutch politician Ayaan Hirsi Ali in the Netherlands have confronted feminism in Europe with a difficult choice of alliances and affiliations.18 In France, the choice was portrayed as one between secularism and Islamic fundamentalism, between women’s rights and solidarity with ethnic minorities. Not surprisingly, it was a difficult and divisive choice. The 2004 law passed by the French Government, banning the wearing of religious insignia in schools, is an example of universalizing French racism and a guarantor against proselytization in schools. Bronwyn Winter points out that even as Human Rights Watch attacked the law as ‘violating religious freedom’, the majority of feminists and the French left supported it (Winter, 2006). She sees support for the law as the majority view, while only a minority of French feminists, including Christine Delphy, sided with ‘Islamists and anti-Semites’ in opposition (p. 281). The most dramatic split was between a Maghrebi-origin feminist group, Ni putes, ni soumises (NPNS),19 which opposed the law, and the largest feminist umbrella association in France, the Collectif national des droits des femmes (CNDF), which included Maghrebi and anti-racist groups, and supported it. A major reason underlying some French feminists’ support of the 2004 law can be viewed through historical context. Although proponents of the hijab define it as a symbol of religious freedom, many commentators point out that the veil is not native to either Turkish or Maghrebi cultures, and fewer than 630 out of a total of 250,000 Muslim students in France wore the veil in 2004. As a political symbol, on the other hand, it is an insignia of proselytization which contravenes the French secularist tradition (Winter, 2006). ‘It denotes allegiance to conservative religious values and, increasingly, Islamism’ (p. 295). Educators opposed to it see it as part of a dismantling of the secularist system; they call it a ‘Trojan horse’ for other forms of ‘special treatment’ (Kechat, 2001, quoted in Fetzer and Soper, 2005). Feminism and ethnic solidarity seem to be ranged against each other in this controversy, which suggests how complicated the process of defining the place of public and private citizenship has become. Winter details how French feminists split amongst themselves in the wake of the 2004 law. The main groups arrayed against each other were the older CNDF and the new group, NPNS, led by Fadela Amara and arising from the banlieues. Although CNDF was older and had a history of battling fundamentalism and racism (among other issues affect-

The backlash against multiculturalism129 ing women), NPNS had a narrower mandate. It came to public attention in 2003, and defined itself as being exclusively ‘for equality and against the ghetto’. It thus stressed its difference from CNDF and marked out its territory as the urban banlieues. At first, NPNS attracted strong support from Maghrebi women because, as its name suggests, it voiced their problems in particular – choices constrained by culture, family and racism. It lost favour with Maghrebi women later. In its current form, it has lost political credibility by being seen as the darling of political parties that oppose change. It gets extensive funding from both socialist and right-wing politicians who recognize supporting an ethnic women’s group as an easy way to appear pro-minority but remain anti-immigrant. Winter claims that NPNS is losing support among its core constituency. According to her, the core choices are between cultural relativism and ethnocentrism. ‘Why … should we rush to embrace the extreme Right when it is dressed up in an ethnic cloak?’ she asks (Winter, 2006, p. 295). One problem with the final version of the 2004 bill was that, although it was based on the Stasi Commission report (The Commission to Reflect on the Application of the Principle of Secularism in the Republic), it omitted many of the recommendations that would have made it a more balanced bill. Bernard Stasi’s recommendations included the establishment of national holidays marking Eid and Yom Kippur; a secular institute of Islamic studies; Kurdish, Arabic and Berber instruction in schools; and categorical opposition to any conventions recognizing polygamy. Most importantly, the recommendations would outlaw the application of Algerian, Moroccan and Tunisian personal laws to immigrant couples, protecting them under French secular law. The Commission also recommended the addition of sections on the history of slavery, colonization and immigration to the history curriculum of state schools. None of these progressive suggestions made it into the 2004 law, which instead focused on the banning of religious insignia and relieved the state of any responsibility for making secularism work for minorities. This in turn affected the law’s reception by the broad left, which criticized the Government passing the law, but supported the law itself. Given the version that was eventually passed, the bill’s polarizing nature is not surprising. However, is it fair to see cultural relativism and universalism as the only available choices? Or does wearing a veil accommodate (or represent) a spectrum of identities? Are headscarf proponents essentially inimical to emancipatory movements like feminism or so-called progressive ones like secularism? One way to understand the resistance to the 2004 law may be to examine French secularism’s historical ties with colonial history. Secularism was used in surprising ways to manage difference within French colonies. Both Bronwyn Winter and Ruth Mas have pointed out the origins and use of secularism in French colonial history as a tool for managing difference in Algeria and other North African territories. Secularism was part of a

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policy of “divide and rule” that essentially created a buffer against Arabs and in favour of Berber or Kabyle populations (Mas, 2006). Berbers were considered more secular and Arabs overly religious and thus backward. Mas argues that the modern Muslim “secular” subject in France resides in these fractures of memory around French laïcité, which was mobilized and negated at different times in history. For example, the 1905 law was abrogated after World War I and applied only partially after World War II, especially in Alsace Lorraine where religious identity was equated with resistance to the Germans. The French Government utilized the law differently in different historical contexts. In the law’s application to Muslims, the Muslim subject is seen as not only outside the three major religions of France, but he or she is framed mostly in terms of law and (dis)order issues. This appears both historically in colonial Algeria (where French Muslims were not allowed to gather, organize or publicly debate) and in the contemporary context of urban unrest. The discourse of laïcité has long been bound up with the application of the mission civilisatrice dedicated to bringing French colonial subjects up to par, so to speak, with the (disembodied) ideals of French laïcité. Any discussion of secularism has to identify and discuss the imbrication of state secularism with colonial history. France’s treatment of its minorities is linked to colonial history. This was in evidence as French politicians debated a law in 2005 to institute “colonialisme positif” teaching. This rather insensitive initiative was partly aimed at indemnifying ‘the civil and military victims of events tied to the processes of independence in the former departments and territories’ (Mas, 2006). In other words, it was an attempt to institutionalize a glorious version of colonial history and placate a vision of the Algerian War of Independence as a “public order operation”. The fact that such an initiative can take place in contemporary times is proof that France has not yet come to terms with its shameful colonial past. In another example, the Code de l’indigénat, in force until 1946 and which deprived Algerians of any political rights, was seen by the National Front as a laudable effort to civilize Algerians. Mas quotes a National Front deputy as saying ‘We must write history and teach it so that children know that France was not colonialist, it was colonizing. And it transmitted all the Republican values to the elites that rule over these people today’ (Mas, 2006). Therefore, the cruelty and inhumanity of colonialism are seen as necessary to bring French ideals to the colonized. This historical amnesia is easily transformed into the securitization of national minorities. ‘After September 11, the collective amnesia regarding the negative aspects of colonial laicité is increasingly articulated in relation to the war against “terrorism”. Islam is discursively set up as obstructing the realization of the eternal and metaphysical true nature of laicite, whose lost and hidden authenticity is regenerated through the recollection of colonialism as positive’ (Mas, 2006, p. 592). The link to colonial laws and history is not just a reference to the

The backlash against multiculturalism131 past. Both to the National Front and to many members of the French Maghrebi population it is both a living memory, a part of their past, and a history whose narrative remains contested. The fight over the definitive version of the narrative remains at stake in the secularist debate, as in many others. This same arrogance and historical blindness is evident in the debates around Islam and French laïcité. Though laïcité has a long anti-clerical past in France, it is not intrinsically opposed to Islam, or vice versa. A dialogue with Islam would allow some compromise position to emerge, but not if laïcité in its pure and burnished form remains the ahistorical Holy Grail of French political discourse. However, the French Government does not seem to have followed the path of dialogue. One example can be seen in how the Government has gone about organizing Islam as a French religion (see preceding chapter). In 2003, when Sarkozy as Minister of the Interior organized the CFCM (le Conseil français de culte Musulman), he insisted upon linking the initiative to the French war against terror and forced all members to sign a document recalling the principles of laïcité, a move many considered infantilizing and patronizing. This colonialist approach continues to appear in the make-up of the CFCM and other Government-sponsored Muslim bodies, who are supposed to play the good Muslim to the bad Muslims in the banlieues: an extension of the way in which colonial elites were trained and treated. Why take such an arrogant and patronizing approach to Muslims? One answer may lie within the class composition of Muslims in Europe. Not only are the majority of them postcolonial (with the exception of Turks and Iranians), but they make up the lowest proletarian class of French labour: often illiterate, unskilled and imperfectly comprehending the French language, their children undereducated and suffering four times the unemployment rate of the French population (Wiles, 2007). Larbi Kechat calls their struggles over veiling ‘class war by another name’ (Kechat, 2001). Michael Walzer also observes that the particular combination of economic handicaps, political powerlessness and racial stigma makes attitudes towards minorities less tolerant (Walzer, 1997). Returning to the issue of gender, the “rescue and empower” rhetoric that secularists seem to apply towards Muslim women is reminiscent of a feudal, universalizing instinct. In an attempt to go beyond the binary of this debate, Rosi Braidotti advocates a postsecular turn in feminism. By postsecularism she means thinking about religion without seeing it as the antithesis of secularism. Instead, she sees many similarities between religion and laïcité, specifically their support of an ethical society. She argues that since all emancipatory movements share religious roots, including so-called secular ones like feminism and Marxism, to set up a false opposition between secularism and religion is condescending and misleading. The move towards postsecularism undoes the neat divisions between public (secular) and private (religious) citizen and subject, which undergird many of the debates about multicultural citizenship and culture.

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A strategy to avoid this bind may be to define the private also as public and political. Braidotti offers another way of looking at the hijab controversy by defining it as a moment of “auto-poesis”, or self-styling, a form of feminine political agency. In a postsecular formation, she says it is possible that ‘political subjectivity can be conveyed through and supported by religious piety, and may even involve significant amounts of spirituality’ (Braidotti, 2008). Both these theses challenge traditional first- and second-wave feminists (both existentialist, like de Beauvoir, and socialist, like Barrett, Davis, Delphy and Rowbotham), whom she calls ‘civic, not theistic’. Braidotti argues that, by contrast, much postcolonial and race-based feminist thinking is in fact grounded in spiritualist and religious piety. Her specific examples include writers on African-American issues like Audre Lourde and Adrienne Rich; theorists like Luce Irigaray and bell hooks; and postcolonial writers like Paul Gilroy and the ecology warrior, Vandana Shiva. This is the postsecular turn in feminist theory, which she thinks will open a pathway for a dialogue between feminism and activists in favour of religious identities. The postsecular approach allows feminists to find common ground with other movements that draw political strength from religious or spiritual movements, not by denying their history but by looking beyond the Euro-American mainstream. The “postsecular turn”, a phrase coined by Habermas, also brings up the split between public and private that governs the historically secular “British” or “French” form of citizenship, which bears rethinking. Don’t forget that women were also once barred from full citizenship for not belonging to the “public” sphere. By redefining the threshold of the public, women successfully fought not only for citizenship but also for public and private issues of reproductive rights, domestic labour, the right to work and equal pay for equal work; all issues having to do women’s private rights within the public sphere. Similarly, now that the barrier to equal citizenship is being raised against minorities on the ground that their religion and religious concerns should not enter and affect the public sphere, a similar reworking of the split between public and private is in order. Feminism and other emancipatory movements like socialism and Marxism, which have historically reacted in protectionist and often xenophobic ways toward immigrants and minorities, should be the first to launch a conversation about the value of group rights in a pluralist, if not a multiculturalist, society. Many pluralist societies outside Europe (Turkey, India, Indonesia, South Africa, Canada) have long had historical paradigms for granting different sets of group rights and of tolerating multiple religions and practices. The Ottoman Empire had the dhimmi system which, though not perfect in its application of higher tax rates against non-Muslims, did give minorities specific rights and freedoms. India, too, has a dizzyingly diverse society across religions, races and histories, and it also allows different personal codes to apply to different groups

The backlash against multiculturalism133 under law. In fact, monotheistic and homogeneous societies are a historical aberration. They are tribes, not states. The construction of a unitary culture, language and religion is hard for European countries to uphold in the absence of external empires and falling birth rates. This approach is also untenable and self-defeating because it produces an angry and polarized citizen body. However, group rights are not a simple solution. If such rights are granted, they should be accompanied by safeguards that protect weaker sub-minorities that may be vulnerable to the actions of self-appointed community spokespeople who claim to “speak for” an entire religious group. Individual versus group rights So far, I have discussed the backlash against multiculturalism in terms of excessive diversity and women’s rights. Here I want to take up the issue of group rights. The argument against multiculturalism is that traditional “Anglo-Saxon” (liberal) multiculturalism only deals with the individual and does not address new minorities’ need for group rights and recognition as a means to assert citizenship. Most recently, the groups in question have been defined not racially but according to religion. This is not only an external definition, but also, and more importantly, a self-definition that marks what sociologists call the “postsecular age” in Europe (see Bracke, 2008; Habermas, 2008). The most important proponent of group rights in Britain has been Tariq Modood. Modood has analysed, critiqued and suggested changes to British multiculturalism, particularly regarding Muslims, who make up a significant majority of Britain’s minorities. He rejects Kymlicka’s argument that religious and ethnic groups should be treated differently under multiculturalism, instead making the case for ethno-religious groups. Modood also rejects multiculturalism as it is now constituted on an individualist basis. He defines four elements that are essential for a multicultural policy: race, ethnicity, cultural heritage and religious community. While these categories overlap, they are all modes of differentiation. For Modood, the concept of difference is the starting point of any just multiculturalism. Multiculturalism has to address not the individual but the collective. ‘A collectivity is targeted, [so a] collective response is needed’ (Modood, 2007). The collectivity includes not just race or phenotype but community structure, cultural heritage and religious tradition. Thus, a group could be defined not just by religion but by any of these categories which designate difference. ‘The assertion, re-imagining and negotiation of difference is central to group formation and evolution and thus to multiculturalism’ (Modood, 2007, p. 41). The aim of such a reformulated multiculturalism, according to him, is not the eventual erasure of difference but its transformation into something that can win (or gain) civic respect. Since group identities are stigmatized, he sees identity discourses and the remaking of group public identities as central to this transformation.

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Ultimately, Modood would like to see Britain put in place a model of communitarian pluralism which would facilitate the process of claims-making through political mobilization and policy outcomes. Not surprisingly, group rights and communitarianism are very controversial; they contradict the history of secularism and evoke the religious wars that marked Europe’s history in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. A fear of social fragmentation is often cited as a reason for resisting group-based claimsmaking, along with Islamophobia (both historical and contemporary), postcolonial arrogance, and race and class prejudice. These fears cannot be dismissed easily. Prejudice is rooted in history and self-identity and, unfortunately, people cannot be insulted out of their beliefs. The only recourse is constant debate in the language of law and rights discourses, and the application of constitutional and other laws to cover minorities fairly. The fear of separatism and social fragmentation is at the root of the French and British resistance to the formula that Modood suggests: ‘communitarian pluralism plus claims-making’. The French see this as an extension of AngloSaxon-style multiculturalism. Within Britain, a milder term such as “diversity” (toothless to some) is seen as more acceptable than “difference”. But according to many communitarians, difference is central to defining identity, and having a clearly defined identity is central to equal, participatory citizenship. Conversely, there are many reasons for the “backlash” against multiculturalism, some conjunctural and others historical. However, a fear of excessive alterity and the governability of difference is certainly part of it. Critics like Ralph Grillo suggest a toning down of difference; others, like Jan Nederveen Pieterse and Michel Wieviorka, see how the engineering of false binaries and of symbolic and real violence leads to transnational conflicts and domestic radicalization. What is an optimum response to this fear? Is the solution heavier governance, more consensus or less difference? Tariq Modood’s solution is based on (1) an appreciation of difference; (2) equality and respect for group-based identities, including religious ones; (3) a reworking of the meaning of secularism (‘less French’, as he says); and (4) programs to address inequalities in the socio-economic, educational and labour spheres (Modood, 2007, pp. 61–62). So far, so good. His preferred method of achieving this aim is an examination of key social areas, institution by institution, to renegotiate a more egalitarian access and status for ethno-religious groups. Modood’s insistence on recognition plus respect is problematic for many scholars. Not everyone thinks both are possible, or even desirable. Some think that respect cannot be legislated or governed, nor that it’s the state’s role to implement “respect”. Habermas, in his essay on postsecularism, disagrees with Modood that respect is necessary. ‘Tolerance means that believers of one faith, of a different faith and non-believers must mutually concede to one another the right to those convictions, practices and ways of living that they themselves reject’ (Habermas,

The backlash against multiculturalism135 2008, p. 23). Habermas doesn’t consider appreciation or rejection as important as recognition. He is very critical of group rights, as defined by what he describes as ‘those ultra-minded multiculturalists who advocate the introduction of collective cultural rights. Such protection for entire cultural groups would in fact curtail the rights of their individual members to choose a way of life of their own’ (ibid., p. 25). An argument for religious group rights in order to address the inadequacy of a secular legal system has been premised on universal human rights. As Yasemin Soysal points out, many countries are encountering challenges to existing citizenship models through appeals to a universal model of human rights (Soysal, 2000). With regard to the freedom of religion, the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR), Article 9, states: 1. Everyone has the right to freedom of thought, conscience and religion; this right includes freedom to change his religion or belief and freedom, either alone or in community with others and in public or private, to manifest his religion or belief, in worship, teaching, practice and observance. 2. Freedom to manifest one’s religion or beliefs shall be subject only to such limitations as are prescribed by law and are necessary in a democratic society in the interests of public safety, for the protection of public order, health or morals, or for the protection of the rights and freedoms of others.20 The language in Article 9 part one gives individuals the freedom to practise religion ‘in public or private’, supporting the claims of those lobbying for recognition of group-based identities. But part two of Article 9 builds limitations into the rights of religious expression, including the limitation of state law. Therefore, group rights do not necessarily translate into a separation from the secular body politic and the legal arena. Yet again, the phrase ‘as … are necessary’ leaves much to the state’s discretion. That can be problematic. The language of ‘public safety’, ‘public order’ and ‘rights and freedoms of others’ lobs the ball back into the court of the nation-state and its security apparatus. Some states may see this as a necessary way to safeguard public security; others may use it to gain short-term political capital and reassure the more xenophobic among their populations. While states like Germany and the Netherlands have historically used a corporatist model to include Islam as one of many religions sanctioned by the state, other states like Britain and France have routinely invoked secularism to deny representation or rights based on religion. As of now, no state has a clear universalist legal basis for claiming group rights as human rights. The second claim, that group rights infringe on state secularism, requires serious examination. If we are to understand secularism as a separation in state policy between church and state, and its intent as preventing religious bias, then in theory it’s a good thing. But what is secularism and how did states arrive at

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their versions of secularism? And is the old version of secularism tenable in the face of demands for recognition and respect, not just tolerance, of a new religion, Islam? Historically, British secularism has never had a complete schism from the Anglican Church. Since the English Civil War, as Parliament asserted more control in running the country, first through the House of Lords and then by the Commons, the power of the monarchy shrank, as did that of the Anglican Church. In the nineteenth century, many of the restrictions on Catholics and Jews were lifted, and a de facto multiculturalism reigned in England. This was certainly not true of the overseas British Empire, however. Overseas, the Anglican Church proselytized and ran schools, missions and other projects with the full backing of the East India Company and then the British Government. In eastern and southern Africa, the Church functioned as an arm of the military and civil missions as well. This involvement has been the target of many criticisms of the Church. But the Church has never been fully severed from the state, and it has been part of it for more than half a millennium. The parity demand  for institutional representation is a fair one, as is that for religious schools. The Church is experiencing declining attendance and funds, and is riven by controversies over the appointment of female and gay clergy. Anglican bishops from postcolonial countries in Asia and Africa are close to breaking with the Anglican Church by wresting control and taking it in a more traditional and controversial direction. All these struggles represent an attempt, however unwilling, by the Church to modernize and keep in step with a population that is becoming more open. On the other hand, as the previous chapter points out, Britain still epitomizes a terrain of struggle between transnational, conservative trends in Islam (as well as Hinduism and Sikhism) and more progressive tendencies. French secularism has a much more dramatic history. Traditionally considered one of the important seats of Catholicism, France has been called “the eldest daughter of the Church”). Avignon in southern France was the seat of the papacy in the fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries, until the Western schism drove it back to Rome. The French Catholic Church continued to be powerful, especially in its persecution of Protestants and Jews. Its participation in the medieval Inquisition; the Wars of Religion 1562–98, including the St Bartholomew’s Day Massacre in 1572 when more than 3,000 Protestants were killed in Paris and 30,000 across France; and in the repeal of the Edict of Nantes which had outlawed the targeting of non-Catholics, all attest to the Catholic Church’s long and bloody history. The French Revolution and the successive republics focused on wresting power from the church and abrogating it to the state, which culminated in the law of 1905. Catholicism remains the majority religion; six out of eleven public holidays are Catholic holidays (the other five are non-religious) and, although the majority of French are non-practising, they

The backlash against multiculturalism137 still identify themselves as Catholic. As Winter explains, ‘The history of French secularism is the history of religious pluralism and religious freedom as much as it is the history of freedom from religion’ (Winter, 2006, p. 287). Any amendment of the 1905 law to dilute secularism in France not only goes against French republican traditions, but raises the spectre of religious wars and strife. This notion of freedom of religion and from religion is seen as a form of protection, not just a separation of church and state. The affaire des foulards, which resulted in the 2004 law banning ostentatious symbols of religion in state-run schools, raised the possibility of blurring those lines. Critics say the law bans students from manifesting their religion, in this case Islam, while crucifixes and yarmulkes are still permitted. They argue that the headscarf is just the tip of the iceberg (the Trojan horse argument) and that Muslim parents will use religion to keep their children away from certain subjects or from studying with male teachers; in effect, restricting their education. Supporters of the law, like Winter, claim that it establishes an equal law for all French communities. They also claim that the hijab has nothing to do with religion but is a political symbol. Both are partially right. The 2004 law does not take the next step, which is to acknowledge the place of religion in society and allow groups some flexibility in choosing schools for their children. Specifically, this option is open to Catholic and Jewish children, but not Muslims. One possible solution might be to establish more religious schools which get partial state funding, as in Britain. France had six Islamic schools in 2013. Most were open to boys and girls, and taught the standard French state curriculum along with classes in Arabic, Turkish and religion. In the years since the Lycée Averroès opened in Lille in 2003, academic results have been good, and it topped academic rankings in 2015. But Muslims have remained divided on whether this trend was positive, citing a lack of acculturation for children who are going to live in mainstream French society (Blignaut, 2003). Thus, even within Islamic groups, opinions are divided. But does the 2004 law discriminate against the majority of Muslim students who go to public schools? In Britain, religious schools are growing both in number and in the amount of state funding provided. By some counts, England itself (as opposed to Britain) has nearly 7,000 Christian or church-based denominational schools, 36 Jewish, 7 Muslim and 2 Sikh.21 Almost 90 per cent of these schools’ funding comes from the state. Their curriculum is fairly consistent with the state curriculum but people have nevertheless objected to “faith-based schools” (generally meaning non-church religious schools). Objections centre on the schools’ restrictive admission policies and their putative effect on social integration (Wintour, 2001; Dugan, 2009; Garner, 2009). Neither objection is based on any harm to secular school pupils. However, British teachers’ unions (including the National Union of Teachers) have called for an end to faith schools, claiming that they are discriminatory and undermine the social need for “mixing”.22

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As in France, critics of religious schools foresee difficulty only when the religion in question concerns new minorities, mostly non-Christian ones. In ­principle, faith-based schools have existed in Western societies for many centuries, so this fear is based very specifically on race and religion, bolstering the complaints of group-rights advocates who feel that their culture is not accepted as part of the mainstream. On the other hand, fears of fragmentation are based on the 1980s experiment with official multiculturalism, which, combined with a lack of economic opportunities, led to increased isolation. Again, as in the controversy over veiling in France, critics on the left in Britain have chosen to oppose religious schools, placing them in the odd position of supporting those on the right and opposing their own traditional supporters. While Britain has no legal or constitutional requirement as France does for a laïque state-funded education, secular schools should probably make some accommodation to a group’s specific cultural needs, whether for separate prayer or dietary requirements. But that would, in essence, destroy the basis for “secular” schools as a neutral space and would replicate internal separation. The alternative would be to ask all groups to give up cultural or religious demands in school. This would be akin to the position the French Government took with the 15 March 2004 law. Either way, Britain faces a hard choice between withdrawing state funding for all faith schools or allowing them to flourish, which would encourage a stronger group identity, not assimilation. We see that whether a state has a strong laïque culture or a de facto individualist culture, there is little support for faith-based, non-Christian schools in either case. The objections to this breaching of a de facto secularism, however casually it has been asserted, are framed both on the left and the right as a fear of increasing divisiveness. Whether racist or realist, it is interesting that these objections occurred at a time when the standards of state schools are falling and comprehensive state education as a whole is seen as mismanaged and incapable of producing workers adequately equipped for the new knowledge economy. However, proponents of group identity make no promises to deliver a better education. Limiting the debate to either group rights or secularism in the context of education is a mistake, in my opinion, because primary education, if handled badly, can ruin the chances of multiple generations to come. A major objection to the demand for religious group rights is that religion itself is retrograde and not modern, thus to meet the demand would be to roll back modernity. The assumption that the secular is modern while the traditional is cultural and ethnic often lies behind the arguments over multiculturalism. This equating of modernity with Europe galls many. But it is fruitful to regard the larger debate between secularism and religion as similarly ahistorical, whereby the “West”, a large amorphous mass west of the Volga and north of the Mediterranean, is seen as having “arrived” at modernity while the rest of the world lags behind. Any demand for recognition of cultural rights and fuller

The backlash against multiculturalism139 citizenship is therefore viewed as a refusal to join modernity. Similar attempts to equate all religions, or to insist on a more pluralist society, are rightly seen as a defence against assimilation, and are reduced to “tradition”. But the idea of group rights evokes more substantial problems, including a reinstatement of the notion that religions and cultures are self-enclosed, overdetermining identities. Wouldn’t such a claim for the primacy of religion lead to cultural absolutism and bias? Many of the debates around identity-based groups engender only a chauvinistic gesture politics. An example of this is the “pig soup” movement in France that began in 2003 when a group called Identity Bloc opened public soup kitchens serving only pork-related food as a way of asserting “Christian culture” and excluding non-Christians. Supporters have survived legal challenges and have led marches chanting, ‘We are all pig eaters’ (Friedman, 2009). This dietary racism, led by Odile Bonnivard and supported by Le Pen’s Front national, may be a publicity stunt but it signifies belonging in the nation as opposed to belonging in the state. The ritual chant, ‘Aider les nôtres avant les autres’ (help our own before others) that Friedman identifies as their slogan, (Friedman, 2009, p. 16) is a clear attempt to draw lines of cultural exclusion based on tradition (dietary laws of the other) and openness and secularity (no dietary laws). Nativist racism becomes recast as a metaphor for modernity and inclusion (Smith, 2006). The solution that Modood and like-minded scholars propose – communal autonomy that does not question the religious nature of the state but only expands it to include Islam and other religions – is only the flip side of the “separate but equal” politics that the pig soup example portrays. Modood’s stance has drawn much criticism. As Ranu Samantrai points out, ‘Modood’s model of pluralism forestalls conflict and dissent at the level of the national by rewarding their suppression at the level of the local’ (Samantrai, 2000). Modood’s model presents further problems in its simplistic notion of Islamic peoples in Britain as unified, monolithic and having a consensual, self-evident leadership. According to Samantrai, their leadership, and its funding and recognition, are the only issues facing the state. While Modood’s reasons for proposing this model sound good, he claims that implementing Charles Taylor’s concept of equal dignity and equal respect requires a citizenship enacted through ‘civic debate and action initiated through our voluntary associations, community associations, trade unions, newspapers, media, churches, temples, mosques, etc.’ (Modood, 2008b). This ignores dissent and multiple forms of Islam as well as the legitimacy of the leadership’s authority. In fact, Modood’s argument begins by identifying two obstacles in the formation of a multiculturalist coalition, one of which is ‘the uses of feminism … as a missionary ideology’ (Modood, 2008b). He anticipates that questions of power and agency will be raised in response to his suggestions and that family and gender issues will form the heart of any critique.

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Questions of power in Modood’s critique remain unanswered. The models for his multiculturalist coalition founder over what constitutes group leadership and how such a leadership exercises its power. In fact, the very notions of “community” and “groups” are seen as problematic by theorists like Rogers Brubaker, precisely because they assume a non-existent unity. ‘Recognition of the centrality of organizations … of the often equivocal character of the leaders’ claims to speak and act in the name of ethnic groups … can remind us not to mistake groupist rhetoric for real groupness’ (Brubaker, 2006). What Brubaker calls “organizations”, I am calling the problem of leadership. Who organizes, speaks for and speaks about a group? What is the nature of the relationship between a “group” and the state? If Modood is arguing for a Turkish-style millat system or a colonial-style electorate that the British employed in India, he is ignoring the historical results that those divisions produced. ‘When he suggests that a new pluralism look to models of accommodation achieved under colonialism … a power-sharing arrangement in which dominant players agree to limit their zones of authority in exchange for recognition and survival … the nation becomes the empire writ small, complete with protonational communities within, movement between enclosed communities strictly regulated, and dissenters delivered into the hands of local power brokers’ (Samantrai, 2000, p. 112). Seen in these terms, an alternative theory of multiculturalism becomes nothing less than a power play that replicates colonial structures without regard for the community’s future. Modood makes the disturbing claim that moral certainties having ‘to do with the family, community, religious or quasi-religious ethics’ would be within the purview of these local institutions and would be backed by the state (quoted in Samantrai, 2000, p.  113). In arguing against the cultural exclusion of the nation, Modood is asking for the power of the state to be delegated to community groups. Such slippages between cultural inclusion and what Samantrai calls ‘state sponsored technologies of ethnicity’ are extremely problematic. Conclusion The backlash against multiculturalism marks an important historical point in the evolution of European immigrants into minorities. The earlier forms of multiculturalism, which rested on a static, enclosed view of culture, have ended. In their place are the usual calls for assimilation, but historically such responses, despite the hysteria of terrorism, have passed their sell-by date. A more participatory form of social policy, different from the separate-but-equal tokenist approach, must develop. The controversies around group rights versus integration are one place to start a discussion, although it seems to me that integration is always a given when one takes a multigenerational approach. The three modes of national integration – public education, popular culture and employment –

The backlash against multiculturalism141 all effect increasing modes of integration across generations. However, structural barriers to integration also perpetuate and exacerbate themselves across generations. This is where the French and British cases occupy similar ground. Though in France structural barriers of employment and education are very high, and in Britain culture and identity rights-based movements are seen as a problem, the debates have proceeded along similar lines. In both cases, the majority constructs minorities as a problem, refusing to see how national discourses of belonging and exclusion are, in effect, creating the problem itself. Until the nation and the state work in unison to revise the ideological and structural barriers to belonging, creating more multiculturalism, a multiculturalism that is more evenly distributed, minorities will remain excluded at the barricades, a reproach to the nation-state. As Tariq Ramadan said in a TV debate with Ayaan Hirsi Ali, ‘I’m tired of people telling me I am a Muslim and I have to integrate. I’m sorry, but it’s done. It is done. You have to look at your own society in a different way.’23 Notes  1 See Halstead (1988) for a thoughtful assessment of the controversy around Ray Honeyford. While it is true that some of Honeyford’s claims about self-segregation were quite inflammatory, his main point, that multicultural piety produces bad educational attainment and insufficient acculturation, has been borne out since the mid-1980s.  2 For a good historical account, see Asari et al. (2008).  3 Gaullism traditionally stands for a strong role for the state in economic affairs (dirigisme) and international affairs (a nuclear France), and for a strongly conservative approach in matters dealing with immigration and French overseas possessions. Both Jacques Chirac and Nicolas Sarkozy followed Gaullist principles with regard to minorities.  4 A good account of the events around the sans-papiers incidents can be found in Harris (1996).  5 For more on this, see Rosello (2008, pp. 15, 137).  6 Balibar (2004, p. 36) designates these as including ‘racial profiling in police identity checks, modalities of detention that resemble concentration camps, and expulsion from territory’.  7 See the chapter ‘The generation of generations’ in Silverstein (2004) for more details on the Beurs.  8 Hargreaves uses the example of the group France-Plus, led by a young economic lecturer, Arezki Dahmani, who was not a Beur, but took on the task of creating a coherent electoral bloc out of the Maghrebis in the estates. However, not being from the banlieues himself, he was also vulnerable to shifting political winds and funding, and soon found himself unsuccessful as well as derided.  9 See their website, www.beurfm.net, for the variety of formats (debates, music, religious and Kabyle programming). Beur FM also positions itself as a broadcaster for

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listeners across the Maghreb, not a specific country. They have a lively internet radio which streams live 24 hours a day. 10 See Taguieff (2001) for a discussion of cultural racism. 11 See www.runnymedetrust.org/projects/past-projects/meb/report.html for background on the Commission and its report. 12 See the BBC file on the Stephen Lawrence murder and Sir William Macpherson’s report at http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/static/special_report/1999/02/99/stephen_lawrence /report/default.htm#Summary. 13 Ceri Peach in fact disputes the simple factuality of this assertion based on his study of residential patterns in the UK. In comparing Britain to the US, Peach says that only 22 per cent of British minorities live in areas where they make up more than 50 per cent of the population, where in the US the average African American lives in a neighbourhood that is 78 per cent black. Over time, the index of segregation has actually decreased in all British cities except Leicester, where it has increased (Peach, 2005). 14 For an analysis of spatial and urban segregation in literature, see Sharma (2004). Also see Silverstein (2004) for his chapter, ‘Spatializing practices’. 15 Barry (2001, p. 27) specifically questions Islamic doctrine, in which the Koran is read as a “literal word of God”. He says this sets up a conflict with liberal doctrine that has been tested even in liberal democratic states like Turkey, and would be likely to lead to conflict in Europe. 16 See the case of Shabina Begum versus Denbigh High over the right to wear a jilbab (a full-length outer garment, traditionally covering the head and hands), in 2004 (quoted in Dustin and Phillips, 2008). 17 This debate about shariah courts in Britain concerns whether they serve a social good. See Elaine Sciolino (2008) and MacEoin et al. (2009). 18 Ayaan Hirsi Ali sought asylum in the Netherlands owing to a fear of forced marriage, but later joined with filmmaker Theo van Gogh to make a film, Submission, attacking Islam’s treatment of women. She was later found to have fabricated the grounds on which she sought asylum. The question of whether she fairly critiqued Islam, or used it as a cynical ploy to further her career in an already Islamophobic society, continues to vex feminists. See van den Veer (2006). 19 Their deliberately provocative name means “neither whores, nor submissive”, in keeping with their mission of independence from majority and community norms. 20 See www.echr.coe.int/Documents/Convention_ENG.pdf. 21 See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parochial_school. 22 The motion, which was debated at the union’s annual conference in Cardiff, states: ‘Religious groups, of whatever faith, should have no place in the control and management of schools.’ It declares that ‘all children should have the opportunity and the right to meet and work with children from a variety of backgrounds and faiths within their day-to-day education’ (Garner, 2009). 23 See www.youtube.com/watch?v=FVKssm5E2no.

The backlash against multiculturalism143 References Asari, E.-M., Halikiopoulu D. and Mock, S. (2008). British national identity and the dilemmas of multiculturalism. Nationalism and Ethnic Politics, 14(1), 1–28. Balibar, E. (2004). We, the people of Europe? Reflections on transnational citizenship, trans. J. Swenson. Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press. Barry, B. (2001). Culture and equality. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Bauman, Z. (1991). Modernity and ambivalence. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Begag, A. (1986). Le Gone du Chaâba. Paris: Seuil. Begag, A. (2007). Ethnicity and equality: France in the balance, trans. A. G. Hargreaves. Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press. Berkovitz, J. R. (1989). The shaping of Jewish identity in nineteenth century France. Detroit: Wayne State University Press. Bleich, E. (2003). Race politics in Britain and France: Ideas and policymaking since the 1960s. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Blignaut, C. (2003) France’s first Muslim school raises hopes – and concern. Christian Science Monitor. 15 October 2003. Retrieved from www.csmonitor.com/2003/1015/ p07s01-woeu.html?related. Bracke, S. (2008). Conjugating the modern/religious, conceptualizing female religious agency: Contours of a “post-secular” conjuncture. Theory, Culture & Society, 25(6), 51–67. Braidotti, R. (2008). In spite of the times: The postsecular turn in feminism. Theory Culture & Society, 25(6), 1–24. Brubaker, R. (2006). Ethnicity without groups (reprint of 2004 edn). Cambridge and London: Harvard University Press. Caglar, A. S. (1997). Hyphenated identities and the limits of “culture”. In T. Modood and P. J. Werbner (Eds), The politics of multiculturalism in the new Europe: Racism, identity and community (pp. 169–185). London and New York: Zed Books. Commission on Multi-Ethnic Britain (2000). The future of multi-ethnic Britain: The Parekh report. London: Profile Books. Community Cohesion Review Team (2001). Community cohesion: A report of the independent review team. London: Home Office. Dugan, E. (2009). Inside Britain’s first Hindu state-funded faith school. Independent. 21  June 2009. Retrieved from www.independent.co.uk/news/education/educationnews/inside-britains-first-hindu-statefunded-faith-school-1711566.html. Dustin, M. and Phillips, A. (2008). Whose agenda is it?: Abuses of women and abuses of “culture” in Britain. Ethnicities, 8(3), 405–424. Fetzer, J. S. and Soper, J. C. (2005). Muslims and the State in Britain, France and Germany. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press. Friedman, S. S. (2009). The ‘new migration’: Clashes, connections, and diasporic women’s writing. Contemporary Women’s Writing, 3(1), 6–27. Garner, R. (2009). Teachers’ union calls for an end to faith schools. Independent. 5 April 2009. Retrieved from www.independent.co.uk/news/education/education-news/ teachers-union-calls-for-an-end-to-faith-schools-1662932.html. Grillo, R. (2007). An excess of alterity? Debating difference in a multicultural society. Ethnic and Racial Studies, 30(6), 979–998.

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Habermas, J. (1992). Citizenship and national identity: Some reflections on the future of Europe. Praxis-International, 12(1), 1–19. Habermas, J. (2008). Notes on post-secular society. New Perspectives Quarterly, 25(4), 17–29. Halstead, M. (1988). Education, justice and cultural diversity: An examination of the Honeyford affair, 1984–85. London: Falmer Press. Hargreaves, A. G. (1998). The beurgeoisie: Mediation or mirage? Journal of European Studies, 28(1/2), 89. Hargreaves, A. G. (2007). Multi-ethnic France: Immigration, politics, culture and society (2nd edn). London and New York: Routledge. Harris, A. (1996). Undocumented in France fight against inhuman laws. People’s Tribune. Vol. 23 no. 4, March 1996. Retrieved from www.hartford-hwp.com/archives/61/113. html. Honeyford, R. (2006). Education and race – an alternative view (reprint of 1984 article in the Salisbury Review). Telegraph. 27 August 2006. Retrieved from www.telegraph. co.uk/culture/3654888/Education-and-Race-an-Alternative-View.html. Kechat, L. (2001). Itinéraire: Larbi Kechat. Revue Projet, 2(266), 6–13. Retrieved from www.cairn.info/revue-projet-2001-2-page-6.htm. Kiwan, D. (2008). Citizenship education in England at the cross-roads? Four models of citizenship and their implications for ethnic and religious diversity. Oxford Review of Education, 34(1), 39–58. Koopmans, R., Statham, P., Giugni, M. and Passy, F. (2005). Contested citizenship: Immigration and cultural diversity in Europe. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Kundnani, A. (2001). From Oldham to Bradford: The violence of the violated. Institute of Race Relations. Retrieved from www.irr.org.uk/news/from-oldham-to-bradfordthe-violence-of-the-violated/. Kundnani, A. (2002). The death of multiculturalism. Institute of Race Relations. Retrieved from www.irr.org.uk/news/the-death-of-multiculturalism/. Kymlicka, W. (1995). Multicultural citizenship: A liberal theory of minority rights. Oxford: Clarendon Press. MacEoin, D., Addison, N. and Green, D. G. (Ed) (2009). Sharia law or ‘one law for all’? London: Civitas. Mas, R. (2006). Compelling the Muslim subject: Memory as post-colonial violence and the public performativity of ‘secular and cultural Islam’. Muslim World, 96(4), 585–616. Maspero, F. (1994). Roissy express: A journey through the Paris suburbs, trans. P. Jones. London: Verso. Miles, S. (2006). Citizenship education: An examination of the relationship between the Crick Report and policy implementation in the UK. In A. Ross (Ed.), Citizenship education: Europe and the world (pp. 713–720). London: CiCe. Modood, T. (2007). Multiculturalism: A civic idea. Cambridge, UK, and Malden, MA: Polity Press. Modood, T. (2008a). Is multiculturalism dead? Public Policy Research, 15(2), 84–88. Modood, T. (2008b). A basis for and two obstacles in the way of a multiculturalist coalition. British Journal of Sociology, 59(1), 47–49.

The backlash against multiculturalism145 Modood, T. and Kastoryano, R. (2006). Secularism and Muslims in Europe. In T. Modood, A. Triandafyllidou and R. Zapate-Barrero (Eds), Multiculturalism, Muslims and citizenship: A European approach (pp. 162–178). London and New York: Routledge. Peach, C. (2005). Britain has enclaves, not ghettoes. Guardian. 28 September 2005. Retrieved from www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2005/sep/28/race.world/print. Rawls, J. (1971). A theory of justice. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Rosello, M. (2008). Representing illegal immigrants in France: From clandestins to l’affaire des sans-papiers de Saint-Bernard. Journal of European Studies, 28(109/110), 137–151. Roy, O. (2004). Globalized Islam: The search for a new ummah. New York: Columbia University Press. Sahgal, G. and Yuval-Davis, N. (Eds) (1992). Refusing holy orders: Women and fundamentalism in Britain. London: Virago Press. Samantrai, R. (2000). Continuity or rupture? An argument for secular Britain. Social Text, 18(3), 105. Schnapper, D. (2002). Citizenship and national identity in Europe. Nations and Nationalism, 8(1), 1–14. Sciolino, E. (2008). Britain grapples with role for Islamic justice. New York Times. 19 November 2008. Retrieved 20 November 2008 from www.nytimes.com/2008/11/19/ world/europe/19shariah.html. Sharma, S. (2004). Urbanism and citizenship in the work of Azouz Begag and Hanif Kureishi. In A. G. Hargreaves (Ed.), Minorités postcoloniales anglophones et francophones: Etudes culturelles comparées (pp. 15–30). Paris: L’Harmattan. Silverstein, P. A. (2004). Algeria in France: Transpolitics, race and nation. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Sivanandan, A. (2000). Macpherson and after. Institute of Race Relations. Retrieved from www.irr.org.uk/news/macpherson-and-after/. Smith, C. S. (2006). In France, a meal of intolerance. New York Times. 27 February 2006. Retrieved from www.nytimes.com/2006/02/27/world/europe/27iht-journal. html. Soysal, Y. N. (2000). Citizenship and identity: Living in diasporas in postwar Europe. Ethnic and Racial Studies, 23(1), 1–15. Taguieff, P.-A. (2001). The force of prejudice: On racism and its doubles, trans. and ed. H. Melehy. Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press. van den Veer, P. (2006). Pim Fortuyn, Theo van Gogh, and the politics of tolerance in the Netherlands. Public Culture, 18(1), 111–124. Walzer, M. (1997). On toleration. New Haven and London: Yale University Press. Werbner, P. (2005). The translocation of culture: “Community cohesion” and the force of multiculturalism in history. Sociological Review, 53(4), 745–768. Wieviorka, M. (2004). The making of differences. International Sociology, 19(3), 281–297. Wihtol de Wenden, C. (2007). Immigration and cultural rights: Political recognition and cultural acceptance. Museum International, 59(1/2), 24–29. Wiles, E. (2007). Headscarves, human rights, and harmonious multicultural society: Implications of the French ban for interpretations of equality. Law & Society Review, 41(3), 699–735.

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Winter, B. (2006). Secularism aboard the Titanic: Feminists and the debate over the hijab in France. Feminist Studies, 32(2), 279–298. Wintour, P. (2001). Religious schools must integrate in the community. Guardian. 14 November 2001. Retrieved from www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2001/nov/14/ uk.schools.

5

Bearers of tradition or oppressed minority?:1 women as citizens

The condition of women is one of the most remarkable circumstances in the manner of nations. Among rude people the women are generally degraded; among civilized people they are exalted. (James Mill, quoted in Forbes, 2003)

The central issues around full citizenship – secularism/laïcité, public/private, race and class – inevitably use gender as a dominant signifier of difference. The term “gender” is commonly used to denote women, as opposed to both sexes, just as the term “minority youth” usually denotes young men, not women.2 Both categories operate as coded language that indicates, but does not name, specific demographic categories while investing them with the symbolic weight of entire ethno-religious or racial groups. This group status is the basis for determining whether complex communities are fit to join the modern nation. These judgements create and reinforce a strong us-versus-them perception which inhibits integration (Korteweg and Yurdakul, 2009). But how does the signifier “gender” function within the debate about citizenship? What are the stakes in the debate over women’s rights in the European nation-state? Critics like Walby argue that in the case of women, civil rights lag behind political rights, and in the case of men, civil rights are granted much sooner than the political (Walby, 1994). Concerning minority women, the discussion of “gender” usually signifies an imbalance, whether a lack or an excess. The concept of lack is complex and multidimensional. Originating in Lacanian psychoanalysis, it can indicate a lack of liberty, a lack of equality or a lack of the ability to integrate. Any discussion of gender also invokes its opposite, excess, where excess can denote an excess of tradition, patriarchy, oppression, culture and familial roles. Most importantly, almost all the memes that a discussion of gender uses are connected to female sexuality and attempts to control how and where it can be invoked. Thus,

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­ inority women are always displaced from the centre or norm; decentred and m pathologized, they are judged against the norms set by a majority, usually that of white, middle-class women. These sets of significations occur within minority groups, who see the policing of gender roles as central to maintaining strong identities, as well as among majority groups, who consider gendered roles and viewpoints an obstacle to integration. From both majority and minority perspectives, these discussions centre upon women, while actually erasing women from the debate. Instead, they function only to emphasize difference, or ‘capture the cultural distance (or proximity) between the French [or British] and their postcolonial others’ (Raissiguier, 2010). This chapter will examine the historical and political issues that influence the debates on women’s citizenship. Citizenship is both historically gendered and also, in its liberal democratic forms, linked with the end of gender-based discrimination (Kilic, 2008) .When cultural nationalism chooses gendered subjects as a justification to discriminate against certain groups, questions around power, voice and access to the public sphere assume increasing importance. The chapter focuses on national discourses that are tagged as cultural but in fact revolve around female sexuality and control, through subjects such as veiling, marriage and divorce. Feminists are often split over how these so-called evaluative judgements about Others’ cultures are linked to definitions of modernity and to colonial histories. Especially relevant here is the work of Aihwa Ong, who sees feminist approaches to non-Western women as treating them as ‘women in development’, which is to say women who have not yet achieved modernity (Ong, 1998). While the debates are often poised on the crux of modernity and tradition, the category of “modern” is assumed to be coeval with “Western” and left unexamined. Common distinctions between liberal/conservative and left/ right politics break down in discussions about gender and sexuality and are often replaced by unexamined postcolonial attitudes. As Aihwa Ong says, ‘Although a common past may be claimed by feminists, Third World women are often represented as mired in it, ever arriving at modernity when Western feminists are already adrift in postmodernism’ (quoted in Schick, 1990, p. 370). This can be seen most clearly in how the veiling debate in France has divided French feminists, with leftists the strongest supporters of state-mandated laws against the hijab (see Chapter 3).3 In all these debates, modernity denotes or concerns tradition and culture on the one hand (public sphere) and sexuality on the other (private sphere). Though public laws and social norms in most Western European countries recognize women as bearers of rights, within the domestic or private sphere women’s rights are overshadowed by the rights of male citizens to keep the private sphere off limits to the state and its agencies. Human rights violations like forced marriages, honour killings and limitations on movement are seldom considered the provenance of the state. Maintaining the public/private dichotomy

Women as citizens149 can often jeopardize women’s rights (Okin, 1998). Often, a reductive culturalism can be at play, attributing differences to cultural traditions, thereby implying that modern women are more equal with men than others (Winter, 2006). However, in other cases, the state can seem to be overly intrusive and normative, forcing all women citizens to conform to predetermined norms of education, dress, child-rearing, etc. The boundaries between public and private, majority/ minority, and individual and group identities can be hard to define. This division over minority women’s issues appears even among women scholars. Historian Joan W. Scott frames the debate in her book, The politics of the veil (2007), where she presents the disagreement as a paradigm between two pairs of women. One pair comprises French feminists Janine Mossuz-Lavau and Chahdortt Djavann. Their somewhat different positions regard the 2004 law banning the foulard as a symbol of male oppression that women are often forced to wear and as a public gesture of their submission to patriarchal conventions. The other pair comprises two Muslim feminists, Dounia Bouzar and Saïda Kada, who, conversely, define veiling as an individual, private choice and reject open sexuality as an index of liberation (Scott, 2007). Within feminism itself, then, the veil is constructed as an issue that encompasses both sides of the public/ private divide, and divides Western and Muslim feminists.4 Race and nationality complicate this position, with white French feminists having mostly supported the banning of the foulard in 2004, while claiming that their position nonetheless supports women’s rights. To what extent can white French feminists speak for women who are racial and religious minorities? The subject of women’s citizenship or a gendered citizenship raises two important questions. One concerns representation (vertreten): who represents women, who speaks for them, who sets the terms for their voices to be heard? The second issue, as Spivak points out, is one of representation (darstellen): the politics of changing signification and meaning in the process of claiming to speak for, or on behalf of, someone (Spivak, 1994). In the latter context, the question changes to: how are minority women positioned even within the space of pro-women or feminist critique? How do religious immigrants and minority women position themselves as citizens? This is the starting point of the debate on gender issues, particularly private/public issues such as veiling and its relationship to modernity and women’s rights, which will be further discussed later. Within liberal democracies, citizenship has evolved over a period of many centuries to define a gender-neutral individual rather than a group or a “nomos” (the principles governing human conduct, especially as defined by culture or custom). In the contemporary debate around gendered citizenship, it is bound up with other contentious issues, such as backlash against contemporary multiculturalism, fear of group identities and the fear of overt religiosity. Antipathy towards racialized minorities is exacerbated by the effects of persistent class inequality amidst an atmosphere of exclusion against the background of industrial and

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urban decline.5 Combined, these issues help maintain a hostility to lived modes of otherness. A variety of political models share this negative attitude to alternate group identities. As Shachar points out, ‘Liberal, civic-republican, and ethnocultural models of membership all share in common a basic mistrust of “identity groups” as a relevant component of citizenship theory’ (Shachar, 2000). When identity groups have organized to establish group-based rights, which can vary from the right to religious facilities or single-sex schools, women’s rights within the larger category of group rights arguably have been the lynchpin in those debates. Discussion of women’s citizenship and viewpoints on gender inequality can trigger issues as diverse as the protection of national culture, modernity, patriarchy, equality and secularism. In that context, it is surprising that scholarly sources on this subject are such a small part of the growing scholarship on ethnic minorities. While gendered citizenship in general is increasingly central in citizenship debates, most scholars of women’s citizenship actually pay little heed to minority women (Pateman, 1992; Lister, 2003). On the other hand, scholars who do focus on minority-group rights have very little to say about how women’s needs will be addressed within more autonomous groups (Wihtol de Wenden, 1999; Siim, 2000; Raymond and Modood, 2007). Race and gender are both seen as important, but are seldom discussed together. These schisms reflect a clear imbalance in favour of the normative male majority identity in the field of ethnic and racial studies in this area (Killian, 2003; Yuval-Davis, 2007; Raissiguier, 2010). A major reason for this imbalance is that women are interpellated as minorities in many complex and overlapping ways. The majority often sees them as model minorities, constructed as “good workers” – i.e., more submissive than men, particularly young men. As doubly oppressed minorities, they are seen to need protection from iniquitous forms of patriarchal tradition. As passive victims, they appear to need rescuing through secular liberalism. In all these cases, they are positioned in opposition to men from their own groups. Depending on the argument, women are placed within the binaries of either hero or victim. In both roles, women have a disproportionately close relationship with cultural identity. Both within and outside their ethnic or religious group, they are perceived as carriers of culture, transmitters of traditional values, symbols of male honour and integral to policing group boundaries against majority cultures. This is especially true in the context of traditional pressures for endogamy and the control of female sexuality as principles justifying the use of surveillance and control. Displacement and diaspora processes heighten these policing tendencies when group identity and its perpetuation seem to be threatened. Only Nira Yuval-Davis and Pnina Werbner’s work has addressed this complex intersectionality of women subjects within minority groups and how this leads to their over- and under-representation in debates around immigration and integration (Yuval-Davis and Werbner, 1999).

Women as citizens151 Women are central in maintaining group identities, but why is their position within groups so central to the subject of citizenship? I argue that their prominent role in citizenship debates revolves around an unspoken but dominant correlation between modernity and citizenship. The commonplace assumption is that immigrants and minorities are not as modern as native (autochthonous) French or British, or that minorities have to meet some unspoken standard of modernity in order to be part of the nation. This lack of modernity is a burden of culture that they perpetually inhabit, unlike dominant groups who are not defined as cultural beings to the same extent. While cultural modernity is seen as a precondition of national belonging, the precise form of cultural modernity is both ill defined and implicit. In most cases, it is all but indistinguishable from assimilation (Scott, 2007). Modernity, or its lack, within immigrant/minority culture is judged most often on the basis of the status its women enjoy. In this way, women are crucial to that space where the right to be different gives way to difference as stigma. Full citizenship for minorities is denied on the premise that doing so will harm women’s citizenship. This argument is flawed not only by its tautological nature but because it focuses only on one part of the group that is socially, economically, legally and historically a whole. The somewhat tautological argument was bolstered by immigrant rights discourse in the 1980s and 1990s that privileged cultural difference and group rights. In the 1980s, diverse movements such as the Sonacotra movement in France, which demanded family housing for immigrants, and the effort to admit Asian students to Birmingham schools, insisted on being recognized both as citizens and as being culturally different. This position soon proved counterproductive as anti-immigrant parties like the right-wing Front national and the BNP (British National Party) seized on the issue of cultural differences to argue that minorities did not belong within the nation-state (Taguieff, 2001). Minorities had privileged their differences in order to challenge older ideas of nationhood and to realize the promise of multiculturalism. This argument rebounded to their disadvantage when the notion of difference became a justification for excluding minorities. Since then, the issue of cultural difference, especially when focused on women’s complicated relationships within their ethnic, racial or religious groups, has been a focal point of debates involving immigration and new minorities. Colonialism, modernity, gender However, the link I emphasize between modernity, citizenship, female sexuality and cultural difference has an even older history, rooted in the colonial period. It has been argued that, broadly speaking, women’s roles as touchstones of a group’s readiness for incorporation within the larger public sphere owes much of its power to Western women’s long and difficult struggle to gain full citizenship (Bock and James, 1992; Siim, 2000). But when these same attitudes

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towards female sexuality and political participation are associated with postcolonial minorities, they recall older, colonial relationships of political and intellectual domination, including Eurocentrism and orientalism (Ahmed, 2008). The complex interrelationship between older histories of colonialism, recent histories of migration and settlement, and persistent class inequalities continues to be filtered through the persistent binaries of modernity and tradition. The argument goes something like this. Citizenship is seen as a symbol of modernity; minorities do not treat women as equals; ergo, they are not modern and they are not ready to be counted as equal citizens of the nation. Versions of this argument can be heard in debates about women’s rights to wear a veil as well as controversies over female genital mutilation (FGM), endogamy and exogamy, honour killings, and arranged marriages. While violence against women exists across societies, its specific manifestations within minority groups are judged as more heinous. Examples of violence against majority women or incidents linked to patriarchy and sexism are not read in terms of a narrative of modernity or as an indictment against the entire group, but with minorities, the tendency is to fall back into what Mahmood Mamdani calls “culture talk” (Mamdani, 2004). So why is a lack of modernity so integral to the reading of practices around postcolonial minority women? And what sorts of double standards does it engender with regard to postcolonial minorities? One important reason lies in the long shadow that colonial histories cast over the present. Under colonial rule, the justification of land grab and its attendant violence was often made through the ideology of “la mission civilisatrice” or the “white man’s burden”. This involved defining pre-colonial practices as decadent and ahistorical in order to construct colonial power as the harbinger of modernity.6 In India’s case, these practices were seen as embodying ‘India’s otherness and served to authorize colonial rule as a project of reform’ (Prakash, 1997). As a result, the British justified their presence by the ‘the establishment of the railways, modern industry and education, law and legislation, [which] came to function as technologies of colonial modernity projected to deliver India from its backwardness’ (Prakash, 1997; Major, 2011). Similarly, in the case of women’s rights, the British abolition of the practice of sattee or suttee was seen as an example of colonial action against backwardness (Major, 2011). Colonial rulers defined their authority as stemming not from the ability to extract value by force but from their ability to establish modern and better ideas and institutions in the colonies. Promoting India or Algeria, for example, as a colony and establishing the colonist’s right to occupy the land meant proving the unsuitability of Algerians or Indians to occupy their own land. This unsuitability was very often phrased as their (excessive) adherence to tradition, religion and their treatment of women, all seen specifically as unmodern traits (Scott, 2007). James Mill published his History of British India in 1817, which philosophically argued strongly that the treatment of women in any society was an indicator of its modernity. He

Women as citizens153 said, ‘Among rude people, the women are generally degraded; among civilized people they are exalted’ (quoted in Forbes, 2003). Hindus, according to Mills, treated their women with ‘extreme degradation’, hence they were candidates for English civilization. This logic of colonial enlightenment and its equivalence with the colonial modern functioned in similar ways in both British India and French Algeria.7 Historians of French colonial policy in Algeria have documented how women’s equality and their place in the public sphere were contested both by the colonists and by the FLN, especially around the issue of modernity. Marnia Lazreg makes the point that French laws for Algeria between 1830 and 1962 explicitly tried to replace Islamic laws and traditional practices with secular French laws in order to facilitate assimilation (Lazreg, 1990). However, assimilation was never the true aim. Muslim Algerians were segregated while non-Muslims were held up as preferable groups. Lazreg points out that women loomed large in the colonial imagination precisely because they provided a justification for French rule. ‘The French invaded Algeria with a preconceived notion of the country that privileged religion and women’s oppression. Women were thus appropriated by the French first in the fictitious mode and then in the colonial mode. Either way, they were merely a ploy for damning or mythologizing a culture deemed inferior by the colonizers’ (ibid., p. 760). This focus on women’s oppression could sometimes take grotesque and violent forms, as seen below, particularly during times of political struggle against colonialism. It can be argued that both modes of appropriation linger in the French postcolonial imagination as a self-evident “truth” about Muslim women. The most egregious example of violence against Muslim women is an incident that took place on 13 May 1958 during the Algerian revolution. A coup by pro-Gaullist army generals against the civilian governor of Algeria was capped by an exhibition of women’s “liberation” on the steps of the governor’s palace in Algiers, to demonstrate the benefits of the continued French presence in Algeria. As part of this jingoistic exercise, a group of French women (presumed to be army wives) ritualistically and publicly carried out the (forced) unveiling of a group of Algerian women. This action was “spectacular” at many levels. As a spectacle, it had pedagogic value, teaching its audience not just about French power and the ability to do good but also demonstrating power as good. It addressed itself differently to Algerians than to its audience in metropolitan France. To Algerians, it was a punitive spectacle. In France, it helped rally support behind the continued colonization of Algeria. But within this spectacle on the steps of the governor’s palace, Algerian women played a central role as both exemplars of and metonyms for Algerian subjectivity. Women metonymically stood in for Algeria, while their forcible unveiling by French women symbolized their sexuality as well as their subjection to French power.8 Unveiling them was also an attempt to shame Algerian

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men while asserting the benefits of French modernity. ‘Once more Algerian women were viewed as keepers of the key to breaking down resistance to colonial domination’ (Lazreg, 1990, p. 767). This public ceremony emphasized that colonization was ‘a force emancipating women’ (Ellis, 2010). The language of emancipation and the language of force both used the bodies of Algerian women to influence Algerian men and the metropolitan French public. Algerian women were used but were not the subjects of this elaborately coded spectacle. They had no agency in their own representation. While the ostensible subject of women’s freedom in 1958 and of the affaire des foulards is postcolonial minority women, the conversation is instead clearly about the French nation and the definition of French culture. A similar confluence of ideology, politics and veiling appears in French laws passed in the postcolonial period of 2004 that punitively outlawed wearing the veil in public spaces. Women in France who wear the full-face veil in the street, in schools, on trains or in airports face a 150 € fine and must attend a mandatory “citizenship” class. The assumption underlying this punishment is that citizenship and the veil are incompatible and that citizenship can be forcibly granted to women (Chrisafis, 2011). If one agrees with Lazreg, Ellis and de Groot that women’s status and veiling in particular are indices of power, desire, exoticization and self-definition in the colonial period, then a parallel can be seen in contemporary France where national identity is interrogated through minority women, especially over the question of the foulard. The simultaneous exoticization and eroticization of the veil has an old and complex history dating to the eighteenth century; it is a textbook example of the problem of representation, or darstellen in Spivak’s terms. Malek Alloula’s analysis of colonial postcards from 1900 to 1930 in his book The colonial harem (1986) reveals the contradictory and horrifying nexus of desire, power and representation in French Algeria. Alloula points to the increasing erotic fixation on the veiled female figure, whether outside or indoors. Sometimes this figure is photographed literally behind the bars of windows and doors, where she is seen as imprisoned but available to the colonial viewer’s gaze. In other photographs, she is seen reclining in the harem posed as an odalisque, semi-nude and offering herself to the male gaze in a relaxed attitude of intimacy, finally appearing in a topless ensemble that reveals her breasts in various artless ways. Alloula uses the photographs to observe that they capture nothing natural about the women or their habitus. Rather, the subjects are posed in a studio setting to display a sexualized and ideological representation of Algerian women who, without the staging, would be unavailable to the French gaze (Alloula, 1986). Since these postcards were produced for the French market, they act as ideological constructs that support a particular reading of the Other, which offers up difference as well as sexual availability. Both are symbolized by the veil or its removal. Except, of course, that the photographs are constructed rather than representing a natural

Women as citizens155 image: ‘the typology of the orientalist photographers confirmed a world view, producing rather than reflecting a reality’ (Schick, 1990; original italics). Most photographs were staged by commercial photographers in the studio, but with the suggestion of verisimilitude. As Alloula points out, this seeming verisimilitude reveals more about the desire of the viewer than any form of objective knowledge about Algerian women (Alloula, 1986). As an example, he shows how every detail is exaggerated to provide credibility of the photographs’ “ethnographic alibi” – i.e., the photographer’s claim to truth and his knowledge of the Other. In addition to the ethnographic ruse, Alloula points to the ‘unsaid (colonial ideology) and the repressed (phantasm)’ that undergird the popularity of these postcards (ibid., p. 28). In his collection of postcards, the progressive stripping and nudity of the models reveals the desire to see Algerian women as both traditional and sexualized figures who solicit the gaze of the colonial French male. Alloula suggests that in this double, contradictory, role they appear to solicit and justify the French civilizing mission. All the tropes in the postcards – the harem, the odalisque, the imprisoned women – gratify the viewers’ gaze and affirm the need for their presence. In short, women act as the alibi for French rule in Algeria. This double movement of the colonial female subject who appears as a passive victim while simultaneously seeming to actively solicit the colonial gaze negates and diminishes the agency of the colonized male’s desire and renders him unmanly. At the same time, this ethnographic mask ignores social relations and customs to privilege the colonial framework of understanding and defining gender relations. Not only does the veil become a symbol of Algeria’s struggle against France for independence, but, as Frantz Fanon has documented in A Dying Colonialism (Fanon, 1965), it gives rise to violence targeted specifically against women, including rape, blindfolding and stripping women as a prelude to torture, and firing on women targets by the OAS (Scott, 2007). Upon being forced out of Algeria, France continued its fascination with the veil. Historian Scott says, ‘For the French, it continued to stand for the backwardness of Algeria, but it was also a sign of the frustration, even the humiliation, of France. It was the piece of cloth that represented the antithesis of the tricolore, and the failure of the civilizing mission’ (ibid., p. 66). Like the French, the British, during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, enacted a number of laws to “protect” women in India from patriarchal customs and traditions. Though similar to French concerns about veiling in Algeria, the British attitude was, at first, to seek local religious and scriptural authority to support their actions (Mani, 1987). Their concerns ranged from controlling prostitution, banning sati (suttee) and raising the age of consent (all topics related to female sexuality). The case of sati, or widow self-immolation, is the best-known example from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The assumption behind curbing sati was that Indian men, under the yoke of tradition and

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religion, were incapable of or unwilling to protect women or were complicit in institutionalized cruelty and torture. Prompted by the increasing presence of Christian evangelists in India, Lord William Bentinck passed a bill banning sati in 1829. Supported by modern reformists within India such as Rammohun Roy, the bill emerged from existing colonial discourses around women’s salvation and bringing modernity to the colonies (Mani, 1987; Haggis, 2000). Just as the unveiling of Algerian women spoke to the politics of colonial rule in the French metropolis, the attempt to modernize women’s roles in India had a close relationship with redefining women’s citizenship within Britain (Ghosh, 2004). In both cases the redefinition of the Other was linked to self-definition at home, particularly the struggle to win rights for women in France and Britain. In Britain, the nineteenth century was notable for its shift in women’s employment from the domestic sphere to the professional, wage-earning sphere. This was particularly controversial in the period after the Crimean War (1853–56) and Florence Nightingale’s work with wounded soldiers (Figes, 2010). Women in Victorian Britain were renegotiating their roles as potential voters, workers and citizens even as they began to dominate missionary work in India. The two spheres had an important and clear effect on each other.9 ‘Women’s involvement in the foreign missionary movement was almost entirely galvanized around issues having to do with the social and spiritual emancipation of Indian women from the middle of the nineteenth century. … By the end of the nineteenth century, women missionaries outnumbered men in the “foreign field”, as the efforts to “uplift” colonised women threatened to become the most extensive department of mission work’ (Haggis, 2000, p. 109). Indian women, in particular, were perceived to need an education in gender roles as well as Christianity. In Victorian times, their education was placed firmly within the institutions of marriage and family. Missionaries offered to teach women domestic skills, and basic reading and writing. Missionaries’ mandates also involved “outreach” (proselytizing) to Muslim women in purdah (what used to be called “zenana work”) with the eventual aim of converting them to Christianity. Algerian and Indian women were seen as contravening French and British norms of femininity by adhering too closely to their societies’ social and religious precepts. Algerian women’s use of the veil and Indian women’s adherence to religious ritual were read as symptoms of their backwardness and a just cause for uplift by missionaries. Relatedly, these initiatives were popular with both sexes at home who supported this moral justification of colonialism. Despite the differences between French and British forms of colonialism, in this situation they both viewed women very similarly. Much more than a moral “mission civilisatrice” was the British idea of making colonial subjects closer to the “norm”, which in this case was male, middle class and imperial. This ‘rule of colonial difference’, in Partha Chatterjee’s phrase, was applied to both women and colonial subjects of both sexes. In other words, the redefinition of feminine and masculine roles was mutually constitutive and

Women as citizens157 involved a complex dialogue between the colonies and the metropole. While women were actively proselytizing new feminine roles abroad, at home they were simultaneously combating the relegation of female subjects to an inferior position of intelligence and strength. But the relationship between imperial women at home and British women abroad was neither consistent not coherent. On the contrary, the very women who took up the cause of equality through missionary work abroad, in defiance of normative wifely roles at home, in turn regarded their colonial counterparts as unequal. There was no conception of equality between races or sexes across the colonial divide. This was as true of British as of French women. Joanna de Groot’s history of French orientalism shows how the differences between men and women or between races were classified as (1) essential or natural, (2) unequal, and (3) sexualized and feminized (de Groot, 2000). De Groot quotes the nineteenth-century French statesman Alphonse de Lamartine who characterized people of the Ottoman Empire as unimportant because they were ‘nations without territory, patrie, rights, laws or security … waiting anxiously for the shelter’ of European occupation (de Groot, 2000, p. 44). Lamartine was not exceptional in his views. John Stuart Mill and Rudyard Kipling both understood Indians as being childlike and in need of British paternalism. This parent–child relationship between colonizer and colonized was deemed necessary for the development of these childlike people and involved using authority and force “for their own good”. ‘The use of a parental concept of authority combined a sense of care and involvement with … power and control’ (de Groot, 2000, p. 44). In gendered terms, the wielding of power and authority was a clear male prerogative. Both culture and nature or biology demanded female subordination to the (imperial) male of the dominant class, whether through servitude or marriage. The feminizing of colonial males and the orientalizing of women went hand in hand with the greater narrative of development and modernization. It is important to understand the roots of debates around citizenship in the contemporary context as lying as far back as the seventeenth century. Colonial attitudes and beliefs were based on intellectual, literary and philosophical work that often preceded and accompanied colonialism. Historical colonialism followed ideological and intellectual groundwork laid through the representation of the “East” through art, travelogues both real and fictional, literature, and first-person accounts. From these complex, overlapping and multifunctional discourses, certain tropes about subject peoples, whether in Algeria or India, gained popularity and a truth status that rendered the East unequal, yet transparent, to the European mind. ‘Expanding European incursion abroad and the advent of fictionalised travelogues and ethnography rendered the literary trope ever more popular, as an increasingly ambiguous frontier between fiction and fact lent an air of vraisemblance or plausibility, to even the most outlandish constructions’ (Ellis, 2010, p. 30; italics original). These constructions imbued both women

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and “Orientals” with mystery, lack of reason, excess emotion and need for direction. Such characterizations were found in travel literature (Lady Mary Wortley Monatgu, de Lamartine) of the time, fiction and poetry (Victor Hugo, Lord Byron, Gérard de Nerval, Rudyard Kipling), as well as in art (Eugène Delacroix) and in proto-anthropology (Richard Burton).10 The domination, control and improvement of these weaker Others was not just morally necessary, it was also imbued with sexual and erotic meanings. Images around the tropes of veiling, seraglios, harems, luxury and sensuousness, and exoticism steadily proliferated in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. De Groot details many examples of this erotic Otherness in art and literature, and concludes that ‘The blending of conquest and enjoyment, of power and pleasure, of desire and domination, became part both of the lived experience of travel, conquest and authority and the imaginative world of writing and painting’ (de Groot, 2000, p. 54). More pointedly for my focus, these ideas of gender and power in turn subverted laws around citizenship and participation. By naturalizing cultural differences, these tropes supported received ideas about the importance of modernity: who has it, why they deserve it and how civilization is a given for some cultures and not others. Ideas of modernity and backwardness produced through this complex interplay of difference, subordination and sexuality were the dominant justification for imperialism. Since modernity, or its lack in the East, was such a strong argument for colonial rule in both India and the Maghreb, particularly in the realm of culture, it is important to examine how modernity has been defined and used. Since Hegel, modernity has been seen as a linear developmental process, unequally distributed between the West and the rest. The concept is both ubiquitous and abstract. Despite lacking clarity, however, modernity has been a claims-making concept and a justification for Europe’s right to rule: ‘something to which the colonised should aspire but could never quite deserve’ (Cooper, 2005). But how is modernity judged and evaluated, and by whom? Is modernity a set of practices, a historical epoch or a process with a defined end in view? And if there are alternative modernities, don’t they function simply as alternatives to some normative version of modernity, which is Europe’s? Frederick Cooper provides a good critique of these overlapping and sometimes contradictory deployments of modernity, specifically of colonial modernity. He argues that modernity, though intrinsic to capitalism and its relations of production, including colonial relations, is not a causal factor in colonial disciplinary measures. Rather, modernity as epoch, governmentality and process is internally contradictory, and does not flow intentionally from any one source (Cooper, 2005, pp. 113–152). This redefinition of modernity by Cooper is important because the purpose of building an argument about modernity is not to assign blame but to show how familiar and ubiquitous issues and tropes fashion our understanding of Europe’s Others.

Women as citizens159 Other scholars disagree about intentionality and see marginalization as the objective of these discourses. Dipesh Chakrabarty, in Provincializing Europe, while not claiming any clear purposefulness, identifies a coherent centre to political modernity flowing from Enlightenment thought and links it to ‘citizenship, the state, civil society, public sphere … distinctions between public and private’ (Chakrabarty, 2000, p. 4). In his opinion, that centre originates in ‘an ­unavoidable – and in a sense indispensable – universal and secular vision of the human’ (Chakrabarty, 2000). Within the context of minorities in Europe, one can read this turn to the secular and liberal individualist view of the human as doubly significant. One, it originates in colonial times, and two, it is closely tied to the state’s assertion of control over women’s rights, deciding whether women are safer within their groups or should be liberated to live and practise their rights as individuals. Framed in this way, the contemporary parallels to colonial rule are fairly obvious. What Cooper calls “rights talk” versus “community talk” also makes clear that in conceptualizing gender, colonial discourse assigned place and status not just to women but to a complex web of identities and statuses across the colony and at home. In denying modernity to racial and gendered subjects, both men and women, European colonizers were arrogating to themselves a normative position which justified their presence and authority in lands they held by force. These positions were articulated across the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in British colonies and from the mid-nineteenth to the early twentieth centuries in French Algeria. These norms acted as integral parts of colonial governance, forming the basis of laws and policies about how different populations lived together (segregation), married or cohabited (miscegenation), and worked (labour rights and compensation) (Stoler, 2002). Added together, these norms that were later called “indices of development” seemed to justify the taking away of power from indigenous populations in political, familial and economic spheres, and concentrating it in the hands of their European overlords. The colonial gaze at first used only two indices to assess native “inferiority”: political institutions and levels of technology. However, from 1850 on, the question of women increasingly preoccupied the colonial bureaucracy as a means for judging the suitability of Algerian men and women for receiving political and judicial rights (Clancy-Smith, 1998). Proto-ethnographers such as Edouard Duchesne in De la prostitution dans la ville d’Alger depuis la conquête (1853) ascribed early puberty and veiling as the primary reasons for prostitution and homosexuality among Algerians. While prostitution was an obvious reflection of Victorian hysteria about venereal disease, it also reflected an unspoken anxiety about miscegenation and, relatedly, race. ‘Given the privileges and power that whiteness carried in the colonial world, questions of racial mixing and sexual control were crucial to the maintenance of imperial authority’ (Hall, 2004). Using women’s sexuality and treatment as an index of development was

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c­ onsidered a valid line of reasoning. General Eugène Daumas, a mid-nineteenthcentury general and later French senator who established himself as an “expert” in Arab culture, wrote an essay, La femme arabe, which claimed that ‘the condition of women allows us to evaluate the social state of a people’ (Clancy-Smith, 1998, p. 163), thus defining women a synecdoche for an entire land. Daumas’ analysis seeks to address anxieties about race and sexuality by blaming Algerians and their sexual mores. This ascribes blame where none exists and culturalizes a material way of life. Attributing sexual excess to men and women was a common rhetorical manoeuvre to establish inferiority and a lack of human status (Levine, 2004). Similarly, the late-nineteenth-century French feminist Hubertine Auclert attacked both colonialism and Islam for rendering Algerian girls ‘little victims of Muslim debauchery’ (Clancy-Smith, 1998, p. 170). The slippage from Algerian to Muslim to women as victims is seamless and builds upon common-sense assumptions about Algeria, drawing correlations between women’s status, morality and civilizational generalities. It should be clear from the above that in judging the nature and place of women, the French also defined Algerian masculinity. The discourse on gender in Algeria implicated Algerian men as both licentious and repressive. Together, men and women exemplified a debased and diseased population which posed a danger to itself and to the French in Algeria. Women were cast in the roles of passive victims while men were depicted as both excessively sexual and repressive. These successive screens of alterity uncovered and constructed not a taxonomy of Algerian men or women but a colonial male identity. This became the unspoken norm against which all other identities and characteristics would be judged and found wanting. ‘The Arab woman, as represented either visually or discursively, functioned as an inverted image or negative trope for confirming the European settlers’ distinct cultural identity, while denying the political existence of the other’ (Clancy-Smith, 1998). The logic of this complicated and interrelated web of definitions, judgements and hierarchies ultimately upheld an imperial political economy that privileged the colonizing power (through colonial male identity) and justified its right to occupy and extract maximum value from its possessions. Gendered forms of culturalism were integral to a set of mutually constructed representations of national and extra-national identities, and remain so today. The gendered and sexualized immigrant becomes a way to test the limits of diversity in contemporary France. Gender is central to the entire hierarchical order of colonial power because it gives power a responsible cast and defines ‘quality, skill and usefulness’ (Levine, 2004). Its importance lies in defining social relations across an entire spectrum: between colonial males and colonized men and women, but also among colonial men and women at home and abroad. Linguistic or semiotic analogies can be useful here because much of this process was embedded in narrative and imagery. The status of women was at the heart of the narrative of empire and relations

Women as citizens161 between France and Algeria, Britain and India. Within this narrative, Arab and Indian women acted as a synecdoche for their societies and their fitness for selfrule. The role of synecdoche is crucial for contemporary societies as well. Quoting Bourdieu, Vertovec points out that ‘the explicit question – Should wearing the “Islamic” voile (headscarf) be accepted at school? – hides the implicit question – Should immigrants of North African origin be accepted in France?’ (Vertovec, 2011). Symbols like the headscarf stand in for a set of cultural attributes that are interpreted differently in France and Britain. The French state ascribes an antiFrench religiosity to the headscarf. In Britain, the headscarf is not regarded as an insult to the British state but instead denotes a lack of secular modernity and the threat of (dangerous) Islam. In this metonymic relationship of headscarf to minority, judgements about the treatment and place of women have become an assessment of the progress of the entire ethno-religious group and its fit within the nation-state. Culturalism is based on a conception of cultures as bounded and static, but as themselves polysemic; i.e., they can suggest a whole range of often contradictory meanings from illegality to religious fundamentalism. This mode of reading gendered Others has not changed significantly from colonial times. ‘The behaviour, the demeanour, and the position of women thus became a fulcrum by which the British measured and judged those they colonised. Women became an index and a measure less of themselves than of men and of societies’ (Levine, 2004, p. 7). While using synecdoche and metonymy was useful, what was at stake was far more important than narrative style or value judgements. These judgements became the foundations for policies and political actions that shaped colonial interests; what Stoler calls ‘foundations to the material terms in which colonial projects were carried out’ (2002, p. 14). By passing laws against veiling or sati or child marriage, not only were colonial officials arrogating to themselves the right to intervene in private/religious/personal realms, but they were doing so in a way that influenced laws on suffrage, labour, legal personhood and livelihood. Just as the institution of the census in India fixed formerly mutable caste and group identities, so views formed about gender and the treatment of women have had long-lasting historical effects (Dirks, 1992). This can be seen most clearly in the discourses on minority women as being oppressed, unfree, subject to the most heinous forms of patriarchy and lacking liberal subjectivity. In none of these contemporary discourses are the links to colonial discourses about modernity and gender explicitly invoked. Yet, despite what Stoler calls this “colonial aphasia”, imperial discourses have a long shelf life and uncannily echo many contemporary positions on “Muslim” or South Asian women around dress, marriage and divorce, and intimate life. This aphasia absolves contemporary discourses from the taint of colonialism but it also forecloses links to a longer historical perspective. As Stoler puts it, ‘By bracketing the history of colonial racism, the popularity of the National Front’s extreme Right racism in the 1990s

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could be dismissed as aberrant in France’s social history rather than as part and parcel of the extensive and explicit colonial debates over citizenship rights and metissage’ (Stoler, 2002). This is especially true of the 2004 law against public veiling that insists that the veil contravenes the secular state, which is modern, secular, legal and therefore the norm to which customs like the veil have to assimilate. As Scott puts it, ‘The civilizing process, once the justification for colonialism, was now to be applied to immigrants; former colonial subjects were to be integrated as French nationals’ (Scott, 2007, p. 81). The French horror of communalism was seen as limited to groups which had “culture”; racialized minorities were both the products as well as the producers of group and cultural identities which contravened national identities. Scott asks, ‘A girl in a headscarf was a member of a “community” but a girl in a miniskirt was expressing her individuality – was this an objective distinction, or one which rested on normative standards in the guise of neutrality’? (Scott, 2007). Gender in the contemporary context: creating a state of exception In the contemporary context, the question of gender and citizenship can be approached in three ways. Philosophically, do current approaches to citizenship account for the ways in which gender metonymically stands in for “culture” in the debate on multiculturalism? And to what extent does the attention to culture pathologize minorities? Second, do debates over the hijab in France and forced marriages in Britain build on existing discriminatory structures or do they reflect a real confusion about gender, citizenship, and religion or group? Finally, we have to ask the political question: who speaks for the women in minority communities? Do feminist scholars have that right or do intra-group members and leaders (men mostly) speak for them? What groups have emerged in both countries that purport to speak to the issues of women? The hyper-focus on issues of veiling and its link to religion have intersected with all three of these areas (gender/culture, pathologies of minority subjectivity and representation) as the veiling debate was politicized under Nicolas Sarkozy’s nine-year tenure as Minister of the Interior and President of France (2002–4, 2005–7, 2007–12). Though the affaire des foulards had been an issue in France since 1986, it was only after 2007 that rhetoric on the “failure of multiculturalism” appeared in Germany, the Netherlands, France and Britain, where it has been accorded an importance well beyond minority affairs or “immigration”. This perceived failure was elevated to the level of a debate on national identity, the boundary between belonging and not belonging in a nation, and the coexistence of the public and the private spheres. Both the political posturing on a national level and the reactive culturalism of minority spokespeople conferred on it a heavy symbolic burden. In rejecting this symbolic status, it makes sense to

Women as citizens163 study the philosophical, sociological and political questions surrounding gender and minority identity, especially in their intersectionality. The advantages of an intersectional analysis follows the manner in which many British scholars have used the term “intersectionality” – i.e., to examine the multiple and shifting ways in which women occupy identities based on race, ethnicity, religion and gender, to create a layered and complex sense of citizenship. Similarly, a female minority subject is also classed, ethnicized and raced in ways that build on each other. Nira Yuval-Davis uses the concept of intersectionality to study identity. In The situated politics of belonging, she and her coauthors explain that the politics of belonging are always situated intersectionally (Yuval-Davis et al., 2006, p. 7). Location (space) and history (time), along with class, race, technology and politics, affect what they call “projects of belonging”. Yuval-Davis makes an important distinction between belonging and citizenship. While the latter is open to all, belonging is more closely aligned with the function of the nation, being defined in terms of nation and the maintenance of boundaries. It has less to do with legal and political spheres than with emotional and subjective ones (Yuval-Davis, 2007). In most cases, discrimination or marginalization does not occur in readily identifiable forms that are exclusively legal or political. It can also occur amidst a complex mixture of public and private. For example, under stop-and-search rules, which race or ethnicity is singled out most often? How does that relate to public discourses around criminality? Or to housing conditions that lead to poor education outcomes? Belonging or identity always happens within a complex social environment and is never mono-faceted. While the state guarantees rights to all citizens, in practice national discourse constructs an ideal citizen–subject who deserves these rights. Those who don’t fit that prototype are seen as undeserving or parasitical citizens. Different subjects have different access to rights, speech and agency; their experiences of inclusion and exclusion can be very different. Flora Anthias, in the same book, sees complex positionalities as a process occurring at the intersection of structure (social position and social effects) and agency (social positioning, meaning and practice) (Yuval-Davis et al., 2006, p. 27). She uses the term positionality to mean lived practices, subjectivities, and organizational and representational conditions. In her definition of positionality, the focus on minority women as a synecdoche for the complications of multiculturalism can open the debate to the effects of agency, which are important in this context. If we can see women’s role as not just ascribed to them but also a position that allows them to practise some forms of agency, then we can escape the pitfalls of a static cultural identity. Whether we use Yuval-Davis’s idea of “projects of belonging” or Anthias’s “positionality”, both concepts use a changing, intersectional analysis of women’s roles in citizenship. Both also avoid falling into the culture trap of either passivity (relativism) or what Leila Ahmed calls “colonial feminism” – that is, saving women from their men (quoted in Abu‑Lughod, 2002).

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An important place to begin this analysis of intersectionality is to recognize the influence of class and place in fashioning attitudes that may seem to be repressive, traditional or culturally regressive. Katherine Pratt Ewing, in her study of German Muslim women, points to the rural, working-class backgrounds of many Turkish parents in Germany as contributing to their desire to maintain kinship ties through marriage with relatives in Turkey. However, this is construed to mean that they (Turks) are ‘backward, traditional and do not allow their children free choice in marriage’ (Pratt Ewing, 2006). Similarly, most Muslim migrants to Britain and North Africans in France come from rural, farming backgrounds and find themselves multiply disadvantaged in Britain and France (Werbner, 2000). This governs their choices for themselves and their children in ways determined by a complex conjuncture of class, lack of education and adherence to custom that can seem incomprehensible to social workers or to media determined to find “Islam” at the bottom of those choices. A contributing factor to the strict control of female sexuality has roots in the desire to observe proper rites of passage, rituals related to puberty, marriage and family honour, especially within regional groups from South Asia. As Werbner’s work (2002) points out, most Muslims in the British Midlands come from the area of Mirpur in Pakistani Kashmir. Most of their marriages occur within that regional and religious configuration. This is not specific to the Mirpuris. Similar examples can be found among Hindus, Sikhs and Muslims from rural northern India and Pakistan where the precipitating factor is not religion or culture but the process of migration and the resultant displacement. Pnina Werbner argues that the dislocation caused by migration results in two paradoxes of culture. In the first, migrants “encapsulate” themselves in communities that are set apart culturally and socially. Second, within those groups, culture is embodied in ritual, which confers agency and empowers a range of actors (Werbner, 2005). The word embodied is important to Werbner’s definition of how culture functions: neither simply as identity nor simplistically as an epiphenomenon, but as an experiential, embodied, dialogic field of power. She says that ‘in these three senses, culture is “real”, a force generating social conflict, defensive mobilization and creativity’ (ibid., p. 746). Its heterogeneity is marked by how it is used by different generational groups, by men or women, and by context. Werbner singles out wedding rituals and the wearing of dupattas (a length of material worn arranged in two folds over the chest and thrown back around the shoulders, typically with a salwar kameez) versus headscarves to exemplify the crucial role of context in relation to symbol. Contingently comprised community, patterns of diaspora creation and maintenance, links with the homeland, generational tensions, and national policies and history combine to define the meaning of female sexuality. What seems a clear case of an individual’s right to choose her clothing or partners can be an ambiguous case of societal, familial and religious norms situated at the cusp between the private and public spheres.

Women as citizens165 Two key examples of how female sexuality lies at the heart of the discourse about insufficient integration by minorities concern veiling (niqabs in the British case and headscarves in France) and the issue of forced marriages in Britain. The French and British states have enacted mandatory bans on both practices. The French passed a law against veiling in public schools in 2004, and the British Forced Marriage (Civil Protection) Act was passed in 2007 and made effective in 2008 through the Forced Marriage Protection Order. Women’s wearing of niqabs or veils covering the full head and face has been a political controversy in Britain since 2006.11 The link between the public (majority) perception of cultural otherness and state legislation concerning those issues is very clear in both these instances. The French law affected a very small number of students and proved quite controversial. But as Zakia Pathak explains in Going public: Feminism and the shifting boundaries of the private sphere (2004), the state’s laws are always built on preferred cultural discourses that claim “objective” status, regardless of actual need or necessity. Meanwhile, “subjective” truths about veiling, its meanings or need, are never heard or adjudicated because they are not considered to be within the realm of the state, which is public. The paradoxical underpinning of the public by the private, however, is not questioned. Pathak’s essay advocates a separation between the private and public spheres to prevent democratic states from routinely acting in the name of the majority. Legal rulings directed at particular communities in the name of the “law” have followed the growing visibility and marginalization of Muslim minorities in many countries of Western Europe. Sherene Razack, writing about postSeptember-2001 laws aimed at Muslims on both sides of the Atlantic, identifies three figures allegorically representative of new modes of inclusion and exclusion: ‘the dangerous Muslim man, the imperiled Muslim woman, and the civilized European, the latter a figure who is seldom explicitly named but who nevertheless anchors the first two figures’ (Razack, 2008). She examines a raft of laws and legal processes focused on surveillance, stigmatization, incarceration and torture to create what she calls, following Giorgio Agamben’s phrase, a ‘state of exception’. To both Agamben and Razack, under this state of exception, certain citizens lose their right to have rights. In order to justify a differential rightsgranting regime, the state has to define these exceptions as wanting or lacking in civilizational or cultural attributes that qualify them for citizenship. Many critics have pointed out the heavily gendered discourse surrounding these attributes. Razack’s essay includes many feminists who engage in what she calls ‘the work of Empire’ and whose work depicts ‘the West as a place of values, and the East as a place of culture’ (ibid., p. 17). Politically, these discourses have traditionally allowed, and continue to allow, the West to act militarily and politically across the world in the name of superior values. Besides the amount of attention, the form of attention paid to the foulard affair in France and to anti-veiling initiatives in other countries, including Germany

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and Britain, has been driven by legal and political initiatives, not merely by media or public discussion. This sharply distinguishes the debate from a case of simple prejudice, and gives it a political and an epistemological edge that reflects an entire way of thinking about and understanding the world. This is important because there is an imperial European legal and political history of decisions about what constitutes the norm and the exception when it comes to dealing with difference. Though this debate has often taken place in the more abstract realms of politics and international law, its arguments remain similar and current. Though not identical, there is a remarkable symmetry between the views of European corporations and imperia in early modernism and today. The attitude that regards veiling as either hostile, submissive, traditional or unmodern, in other words that regards gender issues as a cultural difference that needs to be eradicated, is not contemporary or an anomaly. It is rooted in historical legal and epistemological categories from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries that construct European civilization as both foundational and normative. These categories and standards were often applied to the rest of the world through conquest and force. Jennifer Pitts’s work on international law is quite instructive in this regard (see Pitts, 2005). Tracing the contours of secularization in international law from medieval to modern times during the eighteenth century, Pitts says, ‘If the dominant register in which the tension was expressed shifted from the religious to the civilizational, these shared a basic narrative structure: Europe was, for the moment, uniquely in possession of universal moral and political truths’ (Pitts, 2012). Through the nineteenth century, the increasing pressures by mercantilists and colonists hardened this perspective into a justification for the application of different standards in contracts and treatment of civilian populations, and unequal honouring of treaties. Not only did Europeans not recognize non-European laws and standards, they also ignored their own laws in the colonies. Pitts cites the example of the impeachment of Warren Hastings, the former governor-general of Bengal, in 1786. Edmund Burke argued in favour of the prosecution that Hastings had engaged in ‘unwarrantable and criminal practices’ against the natives of India (ibid., p. 109). With Hastings’ help, the East India Company had practised bribery, corruption, war and the mistreatment of Indian rulers. Hastings argued in his defence that since Indian rulers were not on a par with Europeans, he was not under any obligation to treat them coevally. In his ultimately unsuccessful prosecution of Hastings, Burke rebutted Hasting’s claim that Indians had ‘no laws [and] no rights’ (ibid., p. 112), and argued that the British, like all other nations, were constrained in their actions by the law of nations. Burke thus denied the exceptional status of the British in their relationships with other nations and peoples.

Women as citizens167 Veiled citizens A combination of exceptionalism and normativity continued in European countries through the twentieth and into the twenty-first centuries, despite attempts to construct genuinely universal laws governing international relations through the United Nations and its affiliates. By 2014, each country in the EU had slightly different laws and positions related to veiling. France had the most laws on the subject: its 2004 law banning “conspicuous” religious symbols at state schools, and a 2011 law banning the full-face niqab that was upheld in July 2014. Since 2011, wearing a niqab has incurred a 150€ fine. Anyone forcing a woman to cover her face is liable for a 30,000€ fine. In 2012, the BBC reported that between 2011 and 2012 in France, 425 women had been fined and 66 had been warned for violating the ban on headscarves. Belgium also banned the burka and the niqab. Spain had no ban at all. The United Kingdom has no national ban on veils of any kind. In place of a national law, various institutions like schools and courts were allowed to decide their own dress codes. In 2007, the British Government issued a directive allowing schools to decide on school uniforms. Similarly, courts issued directives disallowing a niqab only in cases where a witness had to provide testimony. However, with the advent of the Conservative Government under David Cameron and the rise of right-wing UKIP (United Kingdom Independence party) party, calls arose for a “national debate” about veiling, overturning Britain’s previous piecemeal approach. British courts had been ruling against any blanket bans on the veil. Britain’s key piece of legislation on the subject is the 1998 Human Rights Act, which broadly follows the European Convention on Human Rights. Under Article 9, all British citizens are entitled to freedom of thought, belief and religion, including the right to dress in accordance with their beliefs. On the website of the Equality and Human Rights Commission, there is a striking example of a case that set a legal precedent on full-face veiling.12 In that case, R (on the application of Begum) v. Denbigh High School, an unnamed Muslim schoolgirl claimed her rights were being infringed because she was not allowed to wear a jilbab (full face covering) in school. The House of Lords decided against her, saying that because she had a choice to attend other nearby schools which would allow her to wear it, her rights were not denied. Britain’s lack of a written constitution has led to a retrial of the issue in public debates each time a legal question around veiling arises. The topic is also sensitive because Muslims feel that they are being singled out from Catholics, Jews and Sikhs, who are allowed to wear symbols of their religions (Modood, 2005). Other cases have been similarly decided in a case-by-case manner, with judges declining to render a blanket resolution as France has done (Kilic, 2008). This non-regulatory approach differs greatly from the 2004 French national law, which banned headscarves in schools and which was upheld and reinforced by separate rulings in 2011 and 2014.

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Additional rationales have been invoked in France and Britain to justify laws opposing extreme forms of veiling on such grounds as security, transparency, communication and assimilation. Pitts points out that ‘the greater danger of the later hegemonic universalism, the one that Arjun Appadurai calls parochial, was that it assumed that the unfamiliar was unintelligible, irrational or inferior’ (Pitts, 2012). This combination of hegemonic universalism and parochialism informs the asymmetrical legal and political rhetoric surrounding headscarves. Joan Scott analysed the hearings on headscarves held in the French National Assembly to conclude that minority women and girls were intentionally depicted in very specific ways – using common tropes such as passive, oppressed or in need of protection – to present the need for the 2004 law (Scott, 2007). The tautological and convoluted logic that Scott details (ibid., pp. 129–132) shares many elements of the Hastings–Burke trial that Pitts traces. When a girl asked why she could not exercise her choice to wear a headscarf, the reply was that the state would protect minor females who were, by definition, unable to protect themselves; it would choose the true path of emancipation for them. This meant that the responsibility was being passed from one set of fathers to another. The law asserted the primacy of the nation over communal customs and practices. State power overruled those who would force girls to behave in what one witness called an “unnatural” way (Scott, 2007). Arguments by psychoanalysts, philosophers, ministers and sociologists referred to the headscarf as a veil, enhancing its meaning as a cover-up and a mask, Scott points out. This political and legal discourse builds on cultural assumptions and stereotypes to make absolute and unquestionable decisions. As Scott notes, even as culture is seen as a cause of communalism, communalism is actually a cumulative effect of ‘historically specific, political discourse, discrediting, if not silencing … alternative points of view’ (ibid., p. 7). Any criticism of this socio-political discourse has to take into account Western feminism’s complicity in positioning minority women as both invisible and too-visible, through the discourse on what Razack calls ‘the imperilled Muslim woman’. Turkish feminist Meyda Yegenoglu is among those who read the feminist debate on veiling as part and parcel of the historical, colonial, Enlightenment-inspired desire for truth and progress. Within this debate, the Enlightenment definition of modernity replaces traditional culture with reason and truth, a metaphor for unveiling. The pursuit of this goal historically ignored any feminist common goal with colonized women, instead defining women as part of the moral goal of colonialism. Antoinette Burton says, ‘feminists deliberately cultivated the civilising responsibility as their own modern womanly burden because it affirmed an emancipated role for them in the imperial Nation State’ (quoted in Yegenoglu, 1998, p. 106). Because it hindered what Yegenoglu calls the ‘scopic regime of colonialism’, the veil was perceived as an allegory for the unknowability of the colonized subject, resisting the gaze of the truth-seeking colonizer. On the other hand, unveiling symbolized the “panoptic” power of the

Women as citizens169 seeing subject. The link to culture is important because in both the colonial and the contemporary imaginations, religion and culture reject what is perceived as universal modernity. By rejecting the imperative to unveil, Muslim women were seen as rejecting modernity and questioning its benefits. In contemporary times, the veil clearly signifies much more than a piece of clothing or an imposed tradition. From the wearer’s perspective, it can be integral to a sense of identity. The third question raised at the beginning of this section, that of representation – who speaks for the minority-gendered subject – becomes central to this struggle over naming and interpretation. During the debates in France over veiling, much was made of the fact that first-generation women from North Africa often did not wear the veil while many of their daughters did, in an effort to carve out a new identity for themselves in postcolonial France (Klausen, 2005). According to Scott, in France only 14 per cent of Muslim women wore the hijab in 2004, even though 51 per cent identified themselves as practising Muslims (Scott, 2007). One of the most interesting documents about the veiling debate in the French context is the book, L’Une voilée, l’autre pas: Le témoignage de deux Musulmanes françaises. As mentioned earlier in the chapter, the book is structured as a debate between the two authors, Dounia Bouzar and Saïda Kada, interspersed with first-person accounts by French minority women who had made the choice either for or against wearing headscarves. The wide-ranging debate between the two co-authors, both from immigrant backgrounds as their names suggest, is over 200 pages long, and does not offer any neat resolution (Bouzar and Kada, 2003). Instead, it reveals the multifaceted nature of the decision to don headscarves, in which family, religion, choice, liberty, laïcité, secularism and the French state are among the many factors that weigh into the decision. Though the book’s publication predates the 2004 law banning headscarves in public, some of the passionate arguments raised reveal why many who were opposed to headscarves considered the law a bad idea. One first-person account comes from Sabina, a law student whose mother was a “modern” secretary and who self-identifies as a well-educated businesswoman. She says she wore the foulard as an injunction from God, and maintains that the decision should not be the state’s. If she does not wear the foulard, she says, ‘je me sentais mal vis-à-vis de Dieu’ (I feel uncomfortable with regard to God). However, she is cognisant that many people in French society are uncomfortable around women who wear the headscarf. Her concession to living in a society uncomfortable with her choice is to wear colourful foulards instead of black ones: ‘le but, c’est de vivre ma foi tout en rassurant les gens’ (the goal is to live with my faith while at the same time reassuring people) (Bouzar and Kada, 2003). Sabina attempts to find a compromise between French society’s expectations about public dress and her own desire to respect her faith. In both examples, Sabina asserts her identity as a member of French society. This contradicts those who see an adherence to religion as opposing assimilation.

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Some women in the book explain their decision to wear headscarves as a way to situate themselves culturally. Nassera, aged 19, speaks of feeling the need to understand Islam and also Islamic history. She says she does not want to be like her mother, for whom Islam is a matter of duties and rules. Her version of Islam brings her closer to the Occident; she speaks of reading Malcolm X to understand the meeting of Islam and the West. Others, like 26-year-old Suheila, an educator, speak about using Islam to question patriarchal family attitudes towards women and to demand rights at school. Co-author Bouzar interprets this as ‘l’Islam des banlieues: un certaine nombres des jeunes, le plus souvent issus de familles victimes des exclusion et de la discrimination, mettent en avant leurs crispation parentale et la crispation sociétale au milieu desquelles ils vivent’ (the Islam of the banlieues: some young people, most often those born in families that are themselves victims of prejudice and exclusion, feel torn between their families and the society in which they live) (Bouzar and Kada, 2003, p. 93). Islam becomes a way for them to forge an identity unlike that either of their parents or of the secularized French. However, their encounter with Islam is not always empowering. Fatima, a 21-year-old student, narrates the story of her neighbour, Vanessa, who grew up in the banlieue and became alienated from her family. The growing presence of Islamic fundamentalist groups in the neighbourhood led her to convert to Islam to find belonging. But her experience was the polar opposite of Suheila’s. Fatima says, ‘Elle avait troqué son survêt Nike contre un grand voile noir qui descendait jusqu’aux pieds. … Son seul projet personnel était de mettre au monde le plus d’enfants possible, pour renforcer le nombre de Musulmans sur terre’ (She traded her Nike tracksuit for a big black veil that reached her feet. … Her only personal project was to bring into the world as many children as possible, to increase the number of Muslims on this earth) (ibid., p. 102). This example points to how groups that proselytize in banlieues use the alienation that youth feel against society to win converts and impose a retrograde version of Islam. All of these examples are based on the testimony of women themselves and describe very different modes of resolving the issue of religion and identity. Some women came to Islam through reading and education. Others forged their own version of religion. Some regard their decisions as deeply private and personal. Still others were motivated to understand the political positions that Islam permits them to take in French society. Some women see Islam as colluding with patriarchy in an atavistic way to suppress women. A text like L’Une voilée, l’autre pas shows readers the variety of positions and encounters that can lead women to decide to wear the foulard. Through it readers can see the limitations of the discourse popularized by the media or by politicians and academics who ascribe motives and reasons to this multifaceted phenomenon in order to develop their own clear-cut positions on the subject. By including a wide range of positions and discourses, the authors have returned a measure of agency to

Women as citizens171 ordinary women and forged a portrait showing the complexity inherent in the dialogue between belief and citizenship. The book emphasizes that a piece of cloth can mean many things to many people; context makes all the difference. After all, some form of head covering was normal in European societies until the early twentieth century. Isn’t it better to see the foulard as a continuation of those histories rather than as an affront to secularism? Those who view the veil only in its symbolic iteration neither welcome nor support this complex, nuanced position. As a symbol, veiling acts to define minorities as inescapably different, or accords them an identity different from the national mainstream. Any position that plays upon narrow nationalism and a fear of difference sees the twin bogeys of patriarchy and religious fundamentalism as integral to its meaning. According to Cecile Laborde, cultural characteristics are deeply imbued with power relations including access and voice, which means that the category of “minorities” is not willingly chosen by minorities but assigned by the majority. The two defining features of a minority group are that they occupy a subordinate position in power relations and that they are assigned identity features by the majority (Laborde, 2008). Lacking a voice, they do not have the power to “reply” to the majority in order to redefine the qualities ascribed to them. ‘Immigrants and their children are not so much the bearers of discrete, authentic, and self-contained cultures, as they are the targets of identity assignation from the outside, finding themselves stigmatised as foreigners, Arabs, blacks, Pakistanis, Muslims, or (generically in France) immigrés’ (ibid., p. 10). Thus, any analysis of the veiling debate consists of voices who have access to public discourse, which automatically leaves out women who are marginalized due to class, race or religion. Conversely, the veil has been politicized and given significance as an antiWestern symbol, linking it even more strongly to an anti-colonial past. Or it has been associated closely with an ahistorical religious identity, making no distinction between traditional religion and politicized religion, particularly a fundamentalist Taliban-style Islam. Women in Britain and France often view wearing a veil not as a religious but as a political statement. Although the two are often conflated, in Britain the niqab – a form of veiling that involves covering all of the face except the eyes – has been the subject of debate, whereas in France headscarves have claimed the most attention. Britain has also debated the public suitability of wearing the burqa, a full-length covering from head to toe with eye slits that is common in some areas of South Asia. When the Stasi Commission, which ruled on the foulard issue in 2004, was conducting its study, it invited a number of women to act as “experts” on the issue. Unfortunately, all but one of them were Western feminists who spoke against the headscarf as a repressive sexual more and a threat to laïcité. Sharif Gemie has collated the following excerpts of this testimony in his book, French Muslims: New Voices in Contemporary France (2011):

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[The veil] symbolizes the place of women in Islam as interpreted by Islamism. That place is in the shade: it’s her relegation, her submission to men. (Anne Vigerie and Anne Zelensky)13 [The veil is] a symbol of degradation … it is a “marker” for discrimination, of sexual apartheid, preventing convergence, and preserving the tutelage of women. (Michèle Vianès)14 While the turban worn by Sikh boys and the kippa worn by practicing Jewish boys are not signs of sexual subjection, the headscarf is. (Raymonde Coudert and Thérèse Filippi)15 (All quoted in Gemie, 2010)

All these “expert” views of the headscarf contain broad generalizations and come from people who are neither Muslims nor experts in Islam. Laborde (2008) points out that only one Muslim, the activist Saïda Kada from Lyon, was invited to speak at the Stasi hearings, and that very perfunctorily. This points to a very selective choice of expert witnesses. Outside the Commission, Fadela Amara, the founder of Ni putes, ni soumises, a grass-roots organization that advocates for minority women in France, spoke out strongly against the veil. She agreed with Bernard Stasi that the veil stood for the alienation of women and should be outlawed. Amara said, ‘Let us not forget that [the veil] is above all a tool of oppression, of alienation, of discrimination, an instrument of the power of men over women’ (quoted in Joppke, 2009). Feminists and secular gender activists, whether Maghrebi or French, were uniformly against the veil and supported the state’s efforts to outlaw it. However, the law overlooked the views of women who were practicing Muslims. This is significant for revealing the French national imaginary’s absence of a place for women whose feminism may differ from secular, laic or even traditional feminism. Criticizing the fact that subaltern women were not allowed any discursive position to speak from, only to be spoken about, Laborde says, ‘the commission had no qualms silencing veiled women, because it assumed they had no authentic voice of their own, being the hapless victims of a Muslim patriarchal order’ (Laborde, 2008). Contrary to the views of these “experts”, as the preceding discussion of the Bouzar and Kada book has shown, headscarves may be worn for many reasons and have many effects. They can afford status and respectability, allow free entry and circulation in public spaces, and signal a new and modern reappropriation of Islam distinguishing wearers from their parents’ generation. Far from pre-modern or traditional, headscarves are a modern solution to a modern problem. A more open debate might have shown that the headscarf can signify different positions in different contexts. The testimony of people who occupy a variety of positions on the issue of headscarves can shift the terms of the French debate in marked ways, replacing the traditional colonial and Islamic understanding of the veil. The colonial viewpoint that sees Muslim women as the oppressed victims of

Women as citizens173 tradition, subject to imperatives of modesty, virginity and patriarchy, may have given way to one where second-generation Maghrebi women are seen to choose the veil as an identity marker of piety, respectability and independence, or in opposition to overt sexualization, objectification or definition by the mass media, etc. As the first part of this chapter showed, the discussion of the veil in France is deeply informed by colonial eroticism and anti-colonial hostility. The veil is not historically or ideologically neutral. It is a piece of cloth over-inscribed with political, religious, sexual and gendered associations. To reduce the debate to gender equality, particularly in the limited context of French republicanism, is to ignore the historical tags attached to these decisions and to ignore the important ways in which attitudes towards Muslims have been shaped by the events of 11 September 2001. Gaspard and Khosrokhavar distinguish amongst three kinds of veiling: religious, adolescent and the “autonomous” veil – the third worn to assert a publicly distinct, hybrid identity (Gaspard and Khosrokhavar, 1995). According to these authors, those who veil autonomously are most likely to be well integrated into French society. In their case, the veil is not a sign of separation or tradition or oppression; it is a badge of identity.16 But when we get to the realm of religious and adolescent veiling, outside pressure to veil can be detrimental to female equality. That debate has been foreclosed because the French state has insisted on a univocal reading, claiming that veiling in itself is “oppressive” to women. In limiting the right to wear a veil, the French state paradoxically violates its declared commitment to liberty. Doing so in defence of male–female equality is also ironic. Its aim is to create French citizens, but citizens defined traditionally. The concept of tradition is used variously in this debate, defined differently by the French state and by its young citizens who claim they are using tradition to forge new identities. France has historically insisted on creating citizens from outsiders through the use of schools, the army and laïcité. But that history is complicated. Drawing on the evolution of French nationality law through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, James Holston shows how the state veered between jus sanguinis (ethnicity- or blood-based citizenship) and jus soli ­(citizenship based on residence or nationalization). Two centuries of debates concerning French Jews and French Muslims have been astonishingly similar. Between 1789 and 1791, the National Constituent Assembly debated whether the “debased” nature of Jews was the result of culture or circumstances. However, all deputies agreed that the only way to incorporate them into French society was to make them into French citizens – i.e., individuals. As Clermont-Tonerre famously declared in 1789, ‘The Jews should be denied everything as a Nation, but granted everything as individuals. They must be citizens … It is intolerable that the Jews should become a separate political formation or class in the country. Every one of them must individually become a citizen. If they do not want this, they must inform us and we shall

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then be ­compelled to expel them. The existence of a Nation within a Nation is unacceptable to our country’ (quoted in Holston, 2008).17 The word “nation” here designates a group-based membership with adherence to its religion and religious customs, language, and culture (what Shachar has called nomos), versus French citizenship, which is individual, indivisible and unmediated by any group attribute, loyalty or privilege. Adherence to the nation is thus inimical to loyalty towards the state. And it is the state that ultimately grants, and guarantees, citizenship. For 300 years, people from different regions in France, and immigrants, have heeded this directive and have relinquished their identities in favour of a uniform French national identity, but not without debate. In the nineteenth century, deputy Clermont-Tonerre’s injunction that each Jew must ‘individually become a citizen’ was really an exhortation to forgo any form of cultural citizenship and commit to the ideology of the French state. In summary, minority women are conspicuous in the debates about French citizenship owing to France’s history of mission civilisatrice and because they are considered vulnerable to pressure from their own groups to maintain an exemplary and traditional cultural authenticity. Whatever the contradictions within these positions, they appear to position women as subservient to men, a position from which the state will emancipate them. Secondly, even when women claim to have “chosen” the veil, the veil is read as perpetuating religious authority and patriarchal communal norms (Fernando, 2010). In response to this position, many have seen the veil as empowering (Gaspard and Khosrokhavar, 1995), liberating and a conscious, individual choice. Still others see this trend as part of an Islamic revivalism in Europe and the Middle East (Fernando, 2010). Often lost within this debate is the voice of women, who are not allowed to articulate their position as religious subjects, only as gendered subjects spoken about by others. Few writers understand the issue as one of freedom of conscience and of a right to freedom of religion, where women should be able to demand freedom from the state and freedom of the state as well. Fernando is one of the few who questions the state’s role when she writes that ‘pious Muslim Frenchwomen reveal the intensely intertwined relationship between government, discipline and freedom that has been fundamental to the secular-republican project’ (ibid., p. 30). What remains unexamined in the debate about headscarves is the role of the French state in maintaining a very narrow and uncritical understanding of secularism or laïcité. Instead, the onus of maintaining the unexamined concept of laïcité, historically important as it may be, remains on minority-gendered citizens and their “culture”. Unless they accept the state-mandated norm of secular citizenship, they remain, like children, subject to the state’s authority. Britain, on the other hand, sees a commitment to “liberty” as the defining quality of national identity. British leaders and academics as diverse as Gordon Brown, the former prime minister, and historian Linda Colley have unanimously identified love of liberty as a cornerstone of British values (Joppke,

Women as citizens175 2009). Regarding the split between public and private spheres, the British have championed the cause of non-statism and autonomy of action and belief within the private sphere over the centralized statist policies of France. British multiculturalism also operates under the rubric of pluralism and liberalism instead of policy. Although there were some controversies surrounding veiling in schools, the Government did not use the situations as occasions to pass any general laws either allowing or banning veils in schools. Part of the reason may have been the small number of South Asian women using face veils or headscarves. Some South Asians wore burqas outside school, but that was a very small minority. Most first-generation South Asians wore dupattas or chunnis (scarves wrapped around the shoulders and sometimes covering the head). Second-generation women considered these garments old-fashioned and used the headscarf as the sign of a new Muslim identity, one that signified among other European Muslims as well (see Hargreaves, 2007). Often, first-generation immigrants from Somalia also wore headscarves but not niqabs. For all these reasons, veiling was not widely adopted by second- and third-generation minorities. Nor was veiling a public issue in Britain. This changed in October 2006 when Jack Straw, the leader of the House of Commons under Gordon Brown’s Labour Government, wrote an article in the Lancashire Evening Telegraph describing what he called his “discomfort” at not being able to see the faces of his Muslim women constituents who wore a niqab. Asked if he would like to see the garment banned, he concurred, saying it hindered communication. He said that while women had the freedom to decide whether or not to veil, he would like to see face veils banned in the interests of community cohesion (Straw, 2006).18 Straw’s intervention set off a huge public debate on television and in the newspapers about veiling and its role in integration. Legally and politically, however, Britain has not revised women’s rights to dress as they choose. Two topics at the forefront of the British Government’s intervention in minority gender issues are forced marriages and genital mutilation. (The former issue is less prominent in France.) Like veiling, these topics inhabit the arena of “culture” and sexuality. The British Government has been much more explicitly interventionist in the case of parents who have put their daughters in physical danger. The main examples of mistreatment around gender are identified as female genital mutilation (FGM), honour killings and forced marriages. Britain has often sent its officials abroad to rescue or aid women who are being abused by their families. In the case of FGM, the British Government passed a law banning it in 1985. In 2008, it passed a law allowing the state to stop minors being taken abroad for marriage, and in 2014 it became illegal to perform, help perform or transport a minor abroad to commit FGM in any of its forms. This was previously a felony but now is taken even more seriously and merits a jail term of seven years. Even though FGM is largely found within the country’s Somali-born population, and forced marriages occur overwhelmingly among

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its South Asian population, the laws do not mention minorities by name.19 Moreover, in both cases, the state works with local community groups to be more effective. FGM has been illegal since the 1980s, but was seldom reported. Now any teacher, social worker or medical worker who does not report instances of suspected FGM risks jail time. The first case of FGM prosecuted in Britain was only in 2014, whereas in France it was the subject of well-publicized trials in 1979, in 1984 and (two) in 1991. In the 1991 cases, both the exciseuse and the parents were given prison sentences (Winter, 1994). In all the French cases, much of the public debate followed culturalist lines, with so-called experts often making the case for “customs” and “family choice” and feminists describing it as straightforward sexual violence and bodily harm. Often, the voices of parents were never heard. Similarly, while awareness of the practice of forced marriages has seemingly increased, in reality the data have been unreliable. In 2012 the BBC estimated that about 8,000 British girls were forced into marriages per year, often through emotional, physical or familial “force” (BBC, 2012). It estimated 10,000 women and girls per year to be at risk. Most victims never reported it since that would involve criminalizing their own parents or family. Also, many people confused arranged marriages with forced marriages. In addition to ignorance, distance was another problem. Many forced marriages were performed abroad under the guise of going back to the home country “on holiday”. Most parents believed they were acting in the best interest of their daughters or sons since, in their generation, women’s choice was never taken into account. What they saw as “arranged” marriages, however, were forced marriages for their children because the children had no choice in the matter, and were often subject to physical and emotional pressure to comply with their parents’ choice. For British-educated children, this pressure contradicted their upbringing and their independence. Despite the qualms about criminalizing families, the Government in 2005 set up the Forced Marriage Unit (FMU). A report from the FMU, headed by two South Asian members of the House of Lords, defined forced marriages and, most importantly, stressed that prevention, not just exit (leaving the abusive marriage), was the aim of the unit. It emphasized the desirability of working with the community in this matter. In 2014, the state made forced marriage not just a civil but a criminal offence (see Foreign & Commonwealth Office and Home Office, 2016). Those who suspect their families of trying to forcibly marry them off can seek a protection order in advance. The FMU also operates a helpline and has a presence on the internet and Twitter. According to the BBC (2012), the Government suspects that 5,000–8,000 cases of forced marriage take place in the UK each year. The BBC’s own figures place the number somewhat higher, around 8,000. However, only a fraction of these cases are prevented or taken to trial. According to its own statistics, the FMU aided 1,302 people in 2013: 72 per cent female, 28 per cent

Women as citizens177 male and coming from 74 countries, led by Pakistan (42.7 per cent) and India (10.9 per cent) (FMU, 2014). Honour killings are another type of crime against women often linked to forced marriages or control of sexuality. All these actions are criminal in nature, and more resources are needed to raise awareness about these issues and prevent them from happening. Notably different from its top-down approach to the issue of veiling, the British Government has worked closely with local and national non-government organizations and women’s groups to provide help and resources to needy minority women. Groups working with specific communities on these issues include Karma Nirvana (deals mostly with South Asian women and forced marriage), IKWRO (Iranian and Kurdish Women’s Rights Organisation), Ashiana (the name means sanctuary), the Asian Women’s Resource Centre and Southall Black Sisters (the oldest and a cross-ethnic group working with both AfricanCaribbean and South Asian women). These organizations provide a range of services and act as a liaison between the state and constituents looking for immediate help, but also offer long-term resources like language training and help with visa issues, legal advice, jobs or childcare. They also serve as sounding boards for policies that the state might be considering. For example, when the bill against forced marriage was being discussed in 2012, many organizations felt it might not work since minors would not report their parents to the police. This provided some feedback to the state (Ebrahim, 2012). In conclusion, though France and Britain face similar tensions involving familial, cultural and religious claims on women and state demands for integration, each has responded differently. France has adopted a statist, top-down approach in response to a small minority of cases of veiling. However, its approach has been upheld by the European Court of Human Rights and the French Government shows no inclination to roll back the 2004 law’s provisions. The issue has been useful in galvanizing protests defending the right to veil, thus forcing its supporters to voice their concerns. At the same time, the emphasis on veiling has obfuscated other foundational, though less controversial, issues, such as inner city decay and the lack of jobs. These issues are not obviously gender issues but they have an impact on how genders are perceived. But because veiling is a more demagogic and spectacular issue, it carries more symbolic weight than many other problems. While Britain has maintained a top-down approach to veiling, its attitude in issues involving violence against women has been more gradualist and consensual. While the state has provided resources and legal consequences to discourage perpetrators of violence, it has involved groups working within those communities, thereby avoiding the trap of stigmatizing whole communities. This allows women to work with the state rather than in reaction to or against it.

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Does the disproportionately greater attention paid to an issue like veiling than to violence against women or FGM invite more women to practise engaged citizenship? If so, do they act as a group or as individuals? If not, what are the effects of public discourses that stigmatize minority women? Do these discourses lead to further alienation or do they force women to participate as citizens? One answer may be that part of the struggle over the hyphen between nation and state is played out in the boundaries between minority populations and the majority. Korteweg and Yurdakul distinguish between “bright” and “blurred” boundaries. Bright boundaries draw sharp distinctions between insiders and outsiders, whereas blurred boundaries accommodate a greater degree of complex, overlapping identities, whether ethnic or religious (Korteweg and Yurdakul, 2009). Although some may see the British Government’s handling of honour killings as risking the danger of evoking bright boundaries, the state has worked more cooperatively with women’s associations to label this a criminal act regardless of ethnic origin, instead of criminalizing an entire ethnic or racial group. This draws a blurred rather than a bright boundary, holding out the hope of gradual assimilation for subsequent generations of British South Asians. Conversely, the French crackdown on headscarves and niqabs, where less than 2,000 women actually chose to veil, drew a bright boundary that provoked a negative reaction from minorities who did not consider veiling an important issue (Joppke, 2009). This raises the question, why is it in the state’s interest to draw certain boundaries and not others at a given time? What other political or social discourses benefit from the use of the reductive us-versus-them rhetoric? And what does the use of women’s sexuality as the pretext for drawing boundaries achieve? Werbner argues that practices like veiling, honour killings and forced marriages have assumed additional meanings. ‘Such practices have come to be symbolically loaded with new connotations and to stand diacritically for wider religious and national symbols within the context of migration and industrialisation. The meaning of veiling and, indeed, of modesty … is now so loaded with higherorder symbolic elaborations as to emit ambiguously a range of contradictory messages. These endow or deny agency to young South Asian and Muslim women in highly ambivalent ways’ (Werbner, 2007). Thus, while wearing a headscarf can have multiple meanings and connotations ranging from local to international, the anti-headscarf discussion in the French public sphere reduces it to the level of backwardness or a refusal to integrate. It becomes profoundly de-territorialized and simplistic. Werbner calls it a simplistic politics of “embodiment” because it focuses on women’s sexuality and bodies. As Foucault has shown, sexuality is not just a private matter; it is in fact a normalizing discourse, closely tied to modernity and also to nation-building

Women as citizens179 (Werbner, 2007). Another important function of public normativity around sexuality is to gain social control over familial, political and social taboos and norms. The first decade of the twenty-first century saw repeated discussions in France over national identity, especially under Sarkozy (Sharma, 2013). One of the many answers to the question “what does it means to be French?” was an assertion of what being French was not. The symbolic weight of the headscarf was intimately related to notions of laïcité and republicanism, a citizen’s rights as an individual, and group rights. When Algeria was a part of France, Algerian Muslims were formally French citizens, but not substantively. To achieve full citizenship, they had to complete the same naturalization process as foreign immigrants did. Similarly, the children of immigrants, even those children born in France, must request and receive citizenship. Women have to remove their veils to be recognized as proper citizens. Until then they can only enjoy what Patrick Weil calls ‘citizenship without full nationality’ (Weil, 2008). Notes  1 The phrase is taken from Jane Freedman’s essay in the collection Women, immigration and identities in France (2000).  2 For more on this question, see Scott (1999, pp. 15–50).   3 Scott (2007) is interesting on this issue, particularly pp. 130–135.   4 Though I use the word veil in this chapter interchangeably with foulard and headscarf, the latter two are more widely used and appropriate in the French context. However, since writers in English often use the term veil, I will use it here, while recognizing a categorical error in equating all these terms.   5 I take the term nomos as used in Ayelet Shachar’s essay, where it suggests not just a religion but something closer to what Bourdieu calls a “habitus”, a context embedded in discourse. In her words, ‘the normative universe in which law and cultural narrative are inseparably related’ (Shachar, 2000, p. 65).   6 Joan Scott sees this mission as paradoxical because it coexisted with the view that Arabs were not capable of being civilized. Islam, she says, was at once the cause and effect of their inferiority (Scott, 2007, pp. 46–47).  7 For a more polemical but less scholarly treatment of this subject than Lazreg, see Kabbani (2008). Kabbani traces the representation of Muslim women in particular from the seventeenth to the twentieth centuries in art, poetry and literature.  8 Though Frantz Fanon has spoken about the equal and crucial work women performed in the Algerian Revolution, Lazreg makes the equally important point that neither the French occupation nor the FLN took serious legal or political measures to  ensure women’s equality in the colonial or post-Revolutionary period (Lazreg, 1990).  9 See Hall and Davidoff (1987). For a comparative look at British and Indian masculinities, see Sinha (1995). 10 An interesting collection of essays in this regard can be found in Hulme and McDougall (2007).

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11 For a taxonomy of different styles of veiling see the following website: www.bbc. co.uk/newsround/24118241. 12 See www.equalityhumanrights.com/your-rights/human-rights/what-are-human-rights %3F/the-human-rights-act/freedom-of-thought-belief-and-religion. The Human Rights Act was passed by Labour in 1998 to bring the country in line with the European Charter of Human Rights established in 1948. David Cameron’s 2015 government came to power planning to scrap this act. 13 Both are well-known laïque feminists in France. 14 She is the president of a feminist group Regard des femmes. Details can be found at www.regardsdefemmes.com/. 15 They are a feminist scholar of Proust and a writer for Le Monde, respectively. 16 See the results of polls conducted among French Muslims in Klausen (2005, pp. 171–201). 17 Not surprisingly, Holston observes that as an outcome of this debate, Protestants in France were granted full citizenship while Jews were denied citizenship until 1791. 18 The original article has been removed from the Lancashire Evening Telegraph’s website, but a version of it is available in the Telegraph. 19 According to the BBC (2014), 82 per cent of the victims of forced marriages were female, 18 per cent were male and 15 per cent were under the age of 15. About 43 per cent of the cases tried under the Act of 2008 were linked to Pakistan, 11 per cent to India and 10 per cent to Bangladesh.

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Index

7/7 bombings see London bombings 9/11 terrorist attacks 11, 14, 19, 40, 43, 46, 58, 87, 92 Abbas, T. 94 Abdeslam, Mohamed 60 Abu Ghraib prison scandal 46 ACB (Berber Culture Association) 114 acculturation 3, 8, 25, 91, 93, 105–108, 113, 115, 117, 121, 127, 137, 141n1 Action française 52 activism, grass-roots 32 Adebowajo people 34 Adebowale people 34 Advisory Group on Citizenship 115 affaire des foulards 6–7, 15, 50, 72, 91–92, 98, 115, 137 see also headscarf wearing; veiling affirmative action 12, 124 Afghanistan War 46 Africa, immigrants from 2 see also Algeria; East Africa; North Africa Agamben, Giorgio 165 Ahmad, Faiyazuddin 84 Ahmadiyya Islam 71 see also Islam Algeria colonialism in 50–51, 62, 78, 129–130, 152–157, 159 decolonization in 110 and France 32

French war with 32, 49, 51, 53, 60–61, 92, 94, 110, 130 and Islam in France 75 gender sexuality in 159–161 immigrants from 2 nationalism in 23 postcolonial issues 36n11, 76, 113 women in 51, 153–156, 160–161, 179 see also Algerians Algerians Beur generation 114 citizenship for 2, 31–32, 36n11, 53, 110, 179 French attacks on 48 generation des banlieues 114 group rights of 126, 130, 159 marginalization of 14 as Muslims 71, 73, 75, 99n8 radicalization of 57, 62, 63n12, 88 and religious identity 114 repatriation of 32 in World War II 49 see also Algeria; Beurs; Maghrebis Algerian War of Independence 32, 49, 51, 53, 60–61, 92, 94, 110, 130 Ali, Ayaan Hirsi 128, 141, 142n18 Aliens Act (1905) 30 al-Qaeda 56 Amara, Fadela 128, 172 Amin, Idi 30 amnesia, historical 130–131 Anderson, Benedict 27

186 Anglican Church 9, 13, 77, 84, 123, 136 anthropology, Manchester school of 12 anti-immigration policies and laws 43–44, 107 anti-racism 27, 43, 81, 117–118, 120 anti-republicanism 94 anti-Semitism 32, 120 anti-terrorism initiatives 60 Crime and Security Act (Britain) 58 Appadurai, Arjun 168 Arabs in France 110, 112–113, 129–130, 137 marginalization of 43, 54, 62, 69, 94, 171 representation of 50–51 stereotypes of 36n3, 52, 160–161 Asari, E.-M. 109 Asian Women’s Resource Centre 177 assimilation 3, 6, 7–8, 16, 17, 18, 27, 29, 30, 36n4, 89, 109, 111, 122, 140 cultural 54 opposition to 169 asylum seekers 1, 43–44 Auclert, Hubertine 51 autonomy cultural 11 and veiling 175 Azam, Sher 84 Balibar, Etienne 68, 81, 111 Balkans, cultural boundaries in 80 Bancel, Nicolas 50 Bangladesh, immigrants from 117, 118 banlieue riots (2005) 39, 42, 45, 61, 79, 88, 93–94, 105 banlieusards 61–62, 112, 114 al-Banna, Hassan 95 Barbieri, William 77 Barelvi Islam 71 see also Islam Bari, Muhammad 74 Barrett, Michèle 132 Barry, Brian 124 Batt, Chetan 34 Bauman, Zygmunt 105 Begag, Azouz 93, 114 Belgium ban of burqa and niqab in 167 Islam in 42 national movement in 31 right-wing politics in 17 Berber Cultural Movement 114

Index Berber Culture Association (ACB) 114 Berbers 41, 46, 114, 129–130 Berlusconi, Silvio 69 Beur FM radio 93, 115, 141n9 Beur movement 47–48, 112–114 Beur novels 48, 88 Beurs 70, 72, 76, 89, 92, 96, 113 see also Algerians; Arabs; Beur movement, Beur novels; Maghrebis; Marche des Beurs; Radio Beur Birmingham Local Educational Authority (LEA) 82 Birt, Jonathan 70 black family life 28 Blair, Tony 28, 33, 46, 58, 105 Blanchard, Pascal 50, 52 blasphemy laws 77, 84, 125, 126 Bleich, Erik 118, 120 Blunkett, David 116 BNP (British National Party) 151 Bonnivard, Odile 139 Bouamama, S. 55 Boubakeur, Dalil 75 Bouchareb, Rachid 49 Boudjellal, Farid 113 Bourdieu, Pierre 12 Bouzar, Dounia 94, 169, 170 Bowen, John 61 Bradford Council of Mosques 43, 84 Bradford demonstrations 31 Brah, Avtar 73 Braidotti, Rosi 131–132 Britain anti-veiling initiatives in 165–166 blasphemy laws in 77, 84, 125, 126 citizenship in 9, 28–30 citizenship classes in 18, 116 conservative politics in 1 education in 77, 82–83 management of Islam in 74–75 Midlands riots 7, 42, 45, 105, 106, 116–118 minorities in 2, 19n2, 86 multiculturalism in 4, 8, 11, 18, 27–29, 40, 58, 72, 76, 77, 86, 87, 94, 104, 105, 108–110, 115–121, 133–134, 136, 141 multi-ethnicity in 29 Muslims in 69, 71, 94, 98 national identity in 109–110, 174 postcolonial migration in 5–6 religion in 77, 177

Index 187 and the Rushdie affair 135–137 see also United Kingdom British Muslim Forum 74 British Muslims for Secular Democracy 74 British National Front 17 British National Party (BNP) 151 British Nationality Act 30 Brown, Gordon 174 Brubaker, Rogers 16, 28, 31, 140 Bruckner, Pascal 48, 53 Burke, Edmund 166 burqas bans on 47, 54, 167 wearing 171 see also dress issues Burton, Antoinette 168 Bush, George W. 46 Caglar, Ayse 122 Calais refugee camp 44 Cameron, David 44, 167 Canada 11, 132 Cantle, Ted 116 Cantle report 45, 106, 116, 117, 119 Caribbean, immigrants from 34, 115, 117 Catholic Church 77, 91, 123, 127, 136–137 Cesarani, D. 28, 30 Cesari, Jocelyne 45, 47, 56, 75 CFCM see Conseil français du culte Musulman CHALLENGE project (EU) 58 Charef, Mehdi 88 Charlie Hebdo killings 39, 49, 54, 59, 61 Chirac, Jacques 48–49, 94, 141n3 Choudary, Anjem 59 citizenship access to 61 assimilationist 32 British 9, 28, 30 in the Crick and Cantle reports 116 cultural 6, 26–28, 36n3, 77, 82, 86 and culture 12–14, 24–25, 28, 105–106 for diaspora populations 23–24 differentialist 28 dual 44 exclusionary 32 in France 9, 11, 31, 36n11, 89–91, 110, 173–174 gender issues in 147–151 history of 17, 26–33 and identity 15, 23–24 vs integration 8–11

for minorities 2, 6, 17–18, 174 and multiculturalism 8, 107–108 for Muslims 76, 98 partialism vs. impartialism 25 of praxis 105 and the public sphere 125–126 public/private debates 13–16 as racism 28 and religion 80, 105–106 social 18 in the US and Canada 11 for women 132, 151, 174, 178–179 Civil Code (France) 31 civil rights 35 civil unrest banlieue riots (2005) 39, 42, 45, 61, 79, 88, 93–94, 105 Bradford demonstrations 31 Marche des Beurs 32, 42, 81, 89, 93, 111, 113 Midlands riots (2001) 7, 42, 45, 105, 106, 116–118 Notting Hill riots 30 Clermont-Tonerre, Stanislas-Marie-Adélaide 173–174 CNDF (Collectif national des droits des femmes) 128–129 Code de l’indigénat 51, 130 Cohen, Robin 3 Collectif national des droits des femmes (CNDF) 128–129 Colley, Linda 24, 174 colonial historcolonialism, French 11 colonialism, French 50–53, 129–130 colonization 29, 111–112 history of 47–48 see also decolonization Commission for Racial Equality (CRE) 87, 106, 119 Commission on British Muslims and Islamophobia 86 Commission on Multi-Ethnic Britain 116 Commission to Reflect on the Application of the Principle of Secularism in the Republic see Stasi Commission Commonwealth Immigrants Act (Britain) 9, 82 communitarianism 25, 53, 97, 114, 124, 134 community 6–8, 10–11, 16–17, 23, 40, 43, 46, 61, 107, 159, 162, 164, 175–176 cultural 24–26

188 community (cont.) imagined 68, 114 immigrant 40–41 Islamic/Muslim 69–71, 74, 76, 84–87, 94, 97 minority 106, 115–120, 123–124, 126–127, 139–140 national 3, 6, 10, 24–25, 30, 36n3 political 25, 90, 91 religious 133 Comte, August 52 Conseil français du culte Musulman (CFCM) 75, 76, 99n7, 131 Corner Shop 40 Coty, François 52 CRE see Commission for Racial Equality Crick, Bernard 116 Crick report 18, 115–116 cultural relativism 17, 32, 129 cultural rights 15, 123 culture(s) and belonging 16–17 and citizenship 12–13, 14, 24–25, 28, 105–106 ethnicity and 35 and minority integration 28 and multiculturalism 122 musical 40 national 16, 150 plural 3 postwar 1 use of term 10 Daesh 56 Dahmani, Arezki 141n8 Dansk Folkeparti (Danish People’s Party) 17 Daumas, Eugène 51 Davis, Angela 132 Days of Glory (Les Indigènes) 49 de Beauvoir, Simone 132 decolonization 23, 30, 36, 50, 53, 68, 110 see also colonization de Gaulle, Charles 49, 53 de-industrialization 8, 95 Delphy, Christine 128, 132 Denmark, right-wing politics in 17 Deobandi Islam 71 see also Islam diaspora 12, 15, 23, 24, 43, 55, 150, 164 diaspora studies 12 discrimination 3, 18, 95

Index positive 124 postcolonial 50–55 diversity 1, 15, 58, 108, 121–124 in Britain 87, 99n11, 105, 106, 117, 134 cultural 89, 94 demographic 6 in France 41, 89, 94, 160 of Islam 87 management of 19 racial 3 religious 3, 15 social 55 Djavann, Chahdortt 149 dress issues burqas 47, 54, 167, 171 hijab 169 jilbabs 142n16, 167 niqab 47, 62, 167, 171 salwar-kamiz 83 school uniforms 83 see also headscarf wearing Dreyfus affair 32 Duchesne, Sophie 91 Dufoix, Stéphane 45 Dustin, M. 127 East Africa, immigrants from 110 see also Africa Eastern Europe, immigrants from 29–30 East India Company 136 ecclesiastical courts 123 Echchaibi, Nabil 93, 94 education in Britain 82–83 and citizenship 116–117 in faith-based schools 76, 125–126, 136–139, 142n22 in France 89 multicultural 77 options for Muslims 137 religious 83 Education Act (Britain) 77, 83 educational capital 3 Educational Priority Zones (ZEPs) 112 EHRC (Equality and Human Rights Commission) 87, 119, 167 endogamy 150, 152 equality 30 Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC) 87, 119, 167 ethnic ghettoes 121 ethnic populations, indigenous 26

Index 189 ethnic rights 8 ethnicity and culture 35 fictive 68 Eurabia 70, 99n4, 121 Eurocentrism 152 European Community (EC) 23 European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR) 135, 167 exceptionalism 167 exclusion 12, 68, 93, 111, 165 exogamy 152 externalization 10 Faist, T. 8 Falklands War 109 family reunification 1, 82, 112 FAS see Fond d’action social Fassin, Didier 61 fatwa 84–85 female genital mutilation (FGM) 127, 175 feminism in Europe 128 and multiculturalism 126–133 second-wave 132 and veiling issues 149 see also women feminist theory 132 Fernando, Mayanthi 61 Ferry, Jules 52 Fetzer, J.S. 91 FGM see female genital mutilation Finkielkraut, Alain 93–94 Finsbury Park Mosque 58 fiqh 96 FIS (Front islamique du salut) 57, 63n12 FLN see Front de liberation nationale Foi et pratique (Faith and Practice) 71 Fond d’action social (FAS) 112 forced marriage 127, 142n18 Foucault, Michel 62, 178 France banlieue riots 39, 42, 45, 61, 79, 88, 93–94, 105 and the Franco-Prussian War 31 Charlie Hebdo killings 39, 49, 54, 59, 61 citizenship in 9–11, 28–29, 31–32, 36n11 colonial 50–53, 62, 129–131 housing patterns in 19 hyphenated identities in 41

Islam in 75–76, 93 Jews in 48, 77, 125, 173–174 laïcité in 34, 40, 41, 47, 49, 53, 75–76, 89–91, 93, 114–115, 130–131, 147, 169, 171, 173–174, 179 minorities in 2, 19n2, 111–114 multiculturalism in 13, 18–19, 32, 41, 49, 72, 88, 89, 92, 94, 104, 105, 108, 110–115, 120–121, 130–132, 136–138, 141 Muslims in 69, 71–72, 93–94, 98 national identity in 106, 110–111, 179 postcolonial 62 postcolonial migration in 5 postwar migrants in 9 racism in 55 refugee camp at Calais 44 religion in 77–78, 177 right-wing politics in 1, 112, 115 secularism in 123, 135–137 veiling debate in 47, 127–129, 131–132, 167, 169–177 France-Plus 141n8 Franco-Prussian War 31 free speech 6–7, 31 Frégosi, Renee 92 French Front national see Front de liberation nationale (FLN) French National Institute of Statistics and Economic Studies (INSEE) 2–3 Friedman, S.S. 139 Front de liberation nationale (FLN) 17, 71, 92 Front islamique du salut (FIS) 57, 63n12 fundamentalism 3, 126, 171 Gaitskell, Hugh 9 Gallo, Max 48 Gandhi, Rajiv 84 Gaspard, F. 173 Gaullism 141n3 Gaza, Israeli invasion of 46 Geisser, Vincent 53 Gemie, Sharif 171 gender issues 175 see also feminism; women gender relations 19, 155 gender roles 4, 148, 156 Germany anti-veiling initiatives in 165–166 Islam in 135 labour migration in 4

190 Germany (cont.) national identity in 106 national movement in 31 GIA (Groupe islamique armé) 57 Gibney, Matthew 24–26 Gilroy, Paul 27, 132 girls dress codes for 83 education for 126–127 see also women Glick Schiller, Nina 12 globalization 1, 8, 17, 49, 79, 95 Gobineau, Joseph-Arthur 32 Goldberg, David Theo 11 governmentality 62, 120 Grand Mosque 71, 75, 99n8 Greece, national movements in 31 Grillo, Ralph 121–122, 134 group rights 124–125, 134, 150 vs. individual rights 132–140 religious 135, 138–139 Groupe d’intervention special 56 Groupe islamique armé (GIA) 57 Guantanamo Bay detention camp 46 Gulf Wars 14, 43, 76, 94 Habermas, Jürgen 6, 16, 105, 125, 132, 134–135 Hajjat, Abdellali 60 Hamas 58 Hargreaves, Alec 14, 47, 72, 79, 93, 113 Harman, Harriet 119 Hastings, Warren 166 Hastings–Burke trial 168 headscarf wearing 6–7 and the agency of women 169–170 ban on 47, 62, 69, 90, 91, 127–129, 167 debate over 18, 19, 173 negative interpretations of 171–172 opinions about 173 symbolism of 178 see also affaire des foulards; veiling heterophophobia 10 hierarchy, racial 50–51 hijab 169 see also dress issues; headscarf wearing Hippolyte 32 historical amnesia 130–131 Hizb ut-Tahrir 80 Holston, James 173 homosexuality 56, 74, 179 Honeyford, Ray 105, 141n1

Index honour killings 73, 123, 126, 127, 148, 152, 175, 177–178 hooks, bell 132 Hugo, Victor 52 human rights 9, 16, 111 universal 9, 41, 135 Human Rights Act (UK) 167 Human Rights Watch 128 Huysmans, Joris-Karl 16 hybridity 13, 15, 17–18, 40–41 in musical cultures 40 religious 42–43 ICSR (International Centre for the Study of Radicalisation) 59 identification, transnational 3 identity/ies Arab 41, 45, 46, 112 and citizenship 15, 27 collective 127 construction of 23–24 cultural 42, 150 debates about 14 ethnic 12 European Islamic 96 features of 6 French 48 gender 5 group 124, 133, 151, 174–174 hyphenated 124 Islamic/Muslim 18, 34, 43–45, 55–57, 69–70, 72, 74, 93–94, 170 issues of 6 national 1, 5, 8, 12, 35, 59, 68, 90, 95, 106, 109–110, 174, 179 political 24, 127 and radicalism 33–36 religious 5, 33–36, 76–77, 94, 123, 127 transnational 112 and veil wearing 169 “Western” 80 Identity Bloc 139 identity politics 94 IKWRO (Iranian and Kurdish Women’s Rights Organisation) 177 immigrant labour 110, 112–113 immigrants African 2, 110, 111 African-Caribbean 115, 117 Algerian 2 Asian 115 from Bangladesh 117, 118

Index 191 in Britain 2 children of 35, 170 citizenship status of 2 colonial 52 from Eastern Europe 29–30 in France 2–3, 112–113 Indian 110, 177 involvement in politics 114 Islamic 39 Jewish 30, 36n4 Maghrebi 35 Muslim 69, 80 non-European 9 Pakistani 2, 14, 45, 117, 118, 177 Polish 2, 91 political incorporation of 40 Portuguese 29 postcolonial 53, 131 postwar 29 rights of 151 securitization of 16, 43 Somali 175–176 South Asian 14, 34, 95, 117, 123, 126, 176, 177 Spanish 29, 91 standard of living of 3 Turkish 2 West Indian 30 see also immigration; Maghrebis; migrants immigration curtailment of 70 for family reunification 1, 82, 112 French policy on 32 postcolonial 44 postwar 107 primary 1, 43, 112 see also migration; immigrants Immigration Act (1966, Britain) 70, 82 immigration policies and laws 4, 12 imperialism 109, 112, 158 inclusion 4, 6, 9, 11, 12, 17, 19, 26, 43, 59, 69, 82, 113, 139–140, 163, 165 India immigrants from 2, 14, 110, 177 nationalism in 23 objection to Satanic verses in 83–84 religious tolerance in 132 Indian Workers Association (IWA) 27 Indonesia 132 inequality 6, 15, 30, 52, 79, 81, 88 class 149 economic 61

gender 150 structural 45 Institute of Race Relations (IRR) 117 integration in America 124 in Britain 18, 40, 42, 45, 58, 86, 95, 105, 116, 119–121, 137 in Europe 6, 8, 12, 13, 28, 33, 56, 98, 140–141 in France 3, 18, 36n4, 40–42, 45, 47, 53–54, 72, 76, 79, 81, 89–93, 111, 113 of women 149, 158, 160, 165, 175, 177 International Centre for the Study of Radicalisation (ICSR) 59 International Colonial Exposition (Paris 1931) 51 international law 166 Iranian and Kurdish Women’s Rights Organisation (IKWRO) 177 Iraq War 46, 69 Irigaray, Luce 132 IRR (Institute of Race Relations) 117 ISIS 54, 56, 59, 60 Islam distinctions of 70–71 European 95–98 in France 20n5, 93 as identity 34, 69–70, 84 official reaction to 72–73 radical 80–81 and religious hybridity 42–43 securitization of 79, 92 and terrorism 42, 56–57, 95 and the war on terrorism 69 westernization of 73 see also Muslims Islamic councils 74 Islamic Foundation of Leicester 84 Islamic fundamentalism 3, 126, 171 Islamists 10–11 Islamophobia 11, 15, 81, 94, 134 Islams, multiple 73 Israel, invasion of Gaza by 46 Italy immigrants from 29, 91 national movement in 31 IWA (Indian Workers Association) 27 Jamaat-i-Tablighi 71 see also Tablighi Jamaat Jennings, Jeremy 90

192 Jews in France 48, 77, 125, 173–174 jihadi movements 3, 43, 56–57 jilbab 142n16, 167 Joly, Danièle 83 Joppke, Christian 6, 15 jus sanguinis 14, 31, 104, 111, 173 jus soli 10, 14, 30–31, 61, 104, 111, 173 Kabyle populations 50, 112, 114, 130, 141n9 Kada, Saïda 169, 172 Karma Nirvana 177 Kashmir 34 Kassovitz, Mathieu 88, 114 Kastoryano, R. 123 Kaya, Ayhan 4, 10 Kechat, Larbi 131 Kelkal, Khaled 57 Kenya 23 Kepel, Gilles 70 Kettane, Nacer 115 Khaled, Cheb 40 Khalistan 42 Khan, Khurshed Alam 84 Khomeini, Ruhollah (Ayatollah) 74, 84 Khosrokhavar, Farhad 56, 93, 173 Kipfer, Stephen 62 Kiwan, Dina 116 Koopmans, R. 76, 108, 115 Kundnani, Arun 116–119 Kymlicka, Will 8, 24, 26, 28, 124, 133 Laborde, Cecile 171, 172 labour collectives 27 labour rights 110–111 La Femme Arabe (Daumas) 51 La Haine (film) 41, 88, 114 laïcité 34, 40, 41, 47, 49, 53, 75–76, 89–91, 93, 114–115, 130–131, 147, 169, 171, 173–174, 179 see also secularism language, and minority integration 28 Lawrence, Stephen 40, 105, 118 legislation Aliens Act (1905) 30 anti-terrorism 60 blasphemy laws 77, 84, 125, 126 British Nationality Act 30 Commonwealth Immigrants Act (Britain) 9, 82 Crime and Security Act (Britain) 58 Education Act (Britain) 77, 83

Index headscarf bans 47, 62, 69, 90, 91, 127–129, 167 Human Rights Act (UK) 167 immigration policies and laws 4, 12, 72, 82 international law 166 Méhaignerie Law 10 against Muslim practices 44–45 Pasqua legislation 110, 115 Race Relations Act (Britain, 1965) 63n1, 86, 87 Lehurau, Léon 52 Lemaire, Sandrine 50 Le Pen, Jean-Marie 11, 32, 110, 112, 115, 139 Les Indigènes (Days of Glory) 49 Les Minguettes 112 Le Thé au harem de Archi Ahmed (Charef) 88 Leveau, Rémy 71, 113 Lévy, Henri-Bernard 94 local education authorities (LEAs) 82, 116 London bombings 7, 10, 33, 39, 43, 56, 69, 74, 88, 94–95, 105 Lourde, Audre 132 Macpherson, William 118 Macpherson report 118 Madrid bombings (2004) 69 Maghrebis and the issue of citizenship 14, 18, 29, 35, 51 ethnic identity of 46–47, 55, 70 as immigrant population 34–35 Islamic 71, 73, 76, 90, 92 marginalization of 19, 45, 61, 93 in politics 36n7, 141n8 postcolonial relations with France 9, 11, 48–49 securitization of 49, 131 wearing headscarves 47, 90, 92, 128, 172 women 128–129, 172–173 see also Algerians; Beurs Major, John 109 Manchester school of anthropology 12 Marche des Beurs 32, 42, 81, 89, 93, 111, 113 marginalization 4, 5, 11, 16, 26, 27, 58, 76, 93 economic 13, 61 of immigrant youths 43, 54–55, 170 marriage arranged 123

Index 193 forced 127, 142n18 interfaith 72 Marshall, T. H. 8 Marxism 131, 132 Mas, Ruth 129–130 al-Masri, Abu Hamza 58 Maspero, François 62 Maurras, Charles 52, 53 MCB (Muslim Council of Britain) 10, 11, 174–175 Méhaignerie Law 10 memory colonial 50, 53, 55 politics of 47–49 Merah, Mohamed 33 Merah people 34 Midlands riots (2001) 7, 42, 45, 105, 106, 116–118 migrants ethnic identity of 20n6 and the nation-state 4–8 postcolonial 34–35 skilled 43 see also immigrants migration family reunification 1, 82, 112 irregular 43–44 postwar 1 see also immigration; migrants migration scholarship 25 Millennium Contract of Citizen Rights 24 MINAB (Mosques and Imams National Advisory Board) 75 minorities adaptation of 3–4 Arab 50 in Britain 2, 19n2, 86 exceptional rights for 108, 115–116 in France 2, 19n2, 111–114 identity of 5 Muslim 33, 54 non-Christian 13 non-European 8 postcolonial 10, 39, 45, 53, 56, 152 representation of 50 rights of 40, 80 see also assimilation; immigrants; migrants minority groups, women’s status in 19 Mitterrand, François 10, 11, 49, 110, 112 modernity 1, 122, 138–139, 148, 150, 168 and the role and treatment of women 151–153

Modood, Tariq 8, 30, 42, 94, 123–124, 126, 133–134, 139 solution for multiculturalism 133–135, 139–140 Monnot, C. 34 Morocco immigrants from 2 and Islam in France 75 mosques 58, 82–83 Mosques and Imams National Advisory Board (MINAB) 75 Mossuz-Lavau, Janine 149 Moussaoui, Mohammed 75 Moussaoui, Zaccharias 58 Mouvement contre le racism et pour l’amitié entre les peoples (MRAP) 113 al-Muhajiroun 33, 56 multiculturalism 3, 6, 13, 18, 40–41, 72 backlash against 140–141 in Britain 4, 8, 11, 18, 27–9, 40, 58, 72, 76, 77, 86, 87, 94, 104, 105, 108–110, 115–121, 133–134, 136, 141 in education 77 elements of 133 and feminism 126–133 in France 13, 18–19, 32, 41, 49, 72, 88, 89, 92, 94, 104, 105, 108, 110–115, 120–121, 130–132, 136–138, 141 individual vs. group rights 133–140 Modood’s solution for 133–135, 139–140 and national identity 106–108 objections to 44, 108–109, 121–124, 140–141, 149, 151, 162 private vs. public 125–126 and segregation 121–124 state 105 in the US 41 musical cultures, hybridity in 40 Muslim Association of Britain 58 Muslim Brotherhood 10, 58, 95 Muslim Council of Britain (MCB) 10, 11, 174–175 Muslim Liaison Committee 83 Muslims in Britain 69, 71, 94, 98 factors complicating assimilation 2 in France 69, 71–72, 93–94, 98 political involvement of 74, 82 and security issues 10–11 Muslim Youth Forum 88

194 Musulmans see Algerians; Arabs; Beurs; Maghrebis Nair, Sami 28 National Constituent Assembly 173 National Front (Front national) 32, 112, 115, 130–131, 139, 151 National Interim Committee for Muslim Unity (NICMU) 74 nationalism 10, 31–32, 41, 105 cultural 148 nationality 23 nation-state changes in 1, 9, 104 citizenship in 28, 30, 32, 41, 76, 80, 82, 107 colonial 110 as guarantor of rights 9, 36n7 migrants/minorities and 4–8, 12, 17, 23–28, 32–33, 95, 98, 106, 108, 141, 151 multiculturalism in 104, 121 and public security 39, 135 religion and 77–82 women and 147, 161 neo-liberalism 1 Netherlands 128 immigration policies in 3, 44 Islam in 42, 135 labour migration in 4 national identity in 106 right-wing politics in 17 NICMU (National Interim Committee for Muslim Unity) 74 Ni putes, ni soumises (NPNS) 128–129, 142n19, 172 niqab ban on 47, 62, 167 wearing 171 normativity 26, 167, 179 North Africa, immigrants from 111 see also Africa Notting Hill riots 30 NPNS see Ni putes, ni soumises OAS (Organisation de l’armée secrete) 53 OIO (Organisation of Islamic Cooperation) 84 Ong, Aihwa 6, 148 Organisation de l’armée secrète (OAS) 53 Organisation of Islamic Cooperation (OIO) 84

Index orientalism 152 orthopraxis 70–71 Other Algerian 154–156, 158, 160 colonial 68 cultures of 148 gendered 161 Muslim 53–54 racial/ethnic 42, 108 religious 99n13, 108 Otherness 7, 68, 79, 91, 150, 152, 158, 165 Pakistani immigrants 2, 14, 45, 117, 118, 177 Palestine 34 Parekh, Bhikhu 78–79, 116 Paris Grand Mosque 71, 75, 99n8 Paris terrorist attacks (2015) 49, 54, 55 partialism 25 Pasqua legislation 110, 115 patriarchy 91, 119, 147, 150, 152, 161, 170–171, 173 patriotism 27 Peach, Ceri 94 Phillips, Trevor 106, 119, 127 Pieterse, Jan Nederveen 134 Piettre, A. 34 Pim Fortyun List (Netherlands) 17 Pitts, Jennifer 166, 168 pluralism 27, 28, 139 cultural 11, 81 Polish immigrants 2, 91 Portuguese immigrants 29 postcolonial theory 50 postcolonialism 62 postsecularism 131–132 poverty 10, 55 Powell, Enoch 9–10 prejudice 4, 75, 87, 115, 122, 134, 166, 170 prostitution 155, 159 protectionism, cultural 118 public sphere, vs private realm 125–126, 175 al-Qaeda 56 Quilliam Foundation 11 race, theories of 32 Race Relations Act (Britain, 1965) 63n1, 86, 87 racial hierarchy 50–51

Index 195 racism 5, 6, 10, 11, 18, 34, 55, 79, 92, 99n11, 114, 116, 118 access 118 citizenship as 28 cultural 11, 41, 81, 110, 115, 127 dietary 139 institutional 105, 119 moral visibility of 34 nativist 139 “new” 6, 11, 17, 32, 81 structural 42 radicalism 33–36, 43, 92–95 radicalization of youth 17, 26, 33–34, 36, 36n2, 39, 43, 45, 47, 54–56, 57, 59–61, 114 causes and reasons for 58–59, 74 Radio Beur 93, 115, 141n9 Radstone, Susannah 53 Ramadan, Said 95 Ramadan, Tariq 88, 89, 95–98, 100n25, 141 Rassemblement pour la République (RPR) 1 Razack, Sherene 165, 168 recognition 134–135 recognizability 34 Reid, Richard 43, 58 relativism 41–42 cultural 17, 32, 129 religion and citizenship 105–106 group rights based on 18 and hybridity 42 and identity 3, 33–36 and the modern nation-state 77–82 in North Africa 77–78 place of 13 see also Anglican Church; Catholic Church; Islam; Muslims religious fundamentalism 3, 126, 171 religious rights 30, 77, 135 and women’s rights 127 Renan, Ernest 32, 52, 90, 107 Renseignements généraux (RG) 54 republicanism 4, 5, 8–9, 13–15, 19, 28, 41, 45, 52, 53, 59, 68, 76, 90–91, 94, 106–107, 110–111, 113, 120, 124, 130, 137, 150, 173–174, 179 responsibility 96–97 reterritorialization 3 Rich, Adrienne 132 Rigby, Lee 33

rights cultural 15, 123 ethnic 8 exceptional 76, 108, 115, 125 human 9, 16, 111 of immigrants 151 labour 110–111 minority 40 religion-based 30, 77, 127, 135 universal human 9, 41, 135 of women 126–133, 148–149, 150 see also group rights Rights of Man 31, 111 Robert, Jean 54 Rosaldo, Renato 6 Rowbotham, Sheila 132 Roy, Oliver 79 RPR (Rassemblement pour la République) 1 Runnymeade Trust 29, 86 Rushdie, Salman 42, 74, 85–86 “Rushdie affair” 6, 15, 18, 98, 31, 72 Sacranie, Iqbal 74 Safran, W. 12 Sahgal, Gita 126–127 Salafist organizations 47, 60 Samantrai, Ranu 139, 140 sans-papiers incidents 110, 141n4 Sarkozy, Nicolas 45, 47–48, 54, 61–63, 75, 114, 131, 141n3, 179 Sassen, Saskia 9 Satanic verses (Rushdie) 31, 42, 83–84 see also Rushdie controversy Sayad, Abdelmalek 55 scapegoating 10 Schnapper, Dominique 90, 105 Scott, Joan W. 149, 168 secularism 1, 3, 7, 8, 9, 16, 53, 75, 77, 87, 98, 104, 108, 123–124, 127–131, 134–138, 147, 150, 169, 171, 174 see also laïcité securitization 10 cultural 16 of Muslim immigrants 44–49 segregation 12, 59, 119 separatism, political 4 Sessions, Jennifer 51 sexuality control of 3, 19, 62, 147–150, 155, 158–160, 164–165, 175, 177 and identity 125

196 sexuality (cont.) norms of 40 of women 150–151, 153, 178–179 see also homosexuality Shachar, Ayelet 150, 174 Shahabuddin, Syed 84 shariah law 123, 142n17 Shi’a Islam 71 see also Islam Shiva, Vandana 132 Sikh fundamentalism 3 Sikhs, mobilization of 42 Silverstein, Alex 113, 114 Silverman, Mas 27 Sivanandan, A. 117–118 slavery 12 social capital 3 social justice 97–98 social mobility, of immigrants 3 Social Science Research Foundation (SSRC) 45 Somalia, immigrants from 175 Sonacotra movement 111, 112, 151 Soper, J.C. 91 SOS-Racisme 89, 111, 113 South Africa 132 South Asia immigrants from 14, 34, 95, 117, 123, 126, 176, 177 youths and violence in 34 see also India; Pakistan Southall Black Sisters (SBS) 127, 177 Soysal, Yasemin 99, 135 Spain cultural boundaries in 80 immigrants from 29, 91 Spivak, Gayatri 13, 149 Standing Advisory Council for Religious Education 83 Standing Consultative Forum 63n2 Stasi, Bernard 129, 172 Stasi Commission 115, 129, 171 state of exception 165 state violence 111 stereotypes, orientalist 56 stigmatization of group identities 133 of Islam 18, 54, 57, 62, 93, 95, 165 of minorities and immigrants 3, 28, 68, 89, 131, 171, 178 of religion 50 of women 151, 165, 178

Index Stora, Benjamin 52–53 Submission (film) 142n18 Sufi Islam 71 see also Islam Sufi Muslim Council 11 suicide bombings 33 Sweden, government support for immigrants 28 syncretism 13 Tablighi Jamaat 56, 71, 80, 97 Taguieff, Pierre-André 81 Taylor, Charles 18, 24, 26, 139 terrorism 33 in Britain 55, 56–61 in France 55, 59–61 Islamic 39 mediatization of 34 see also war on terrorism terrorist attacks 14, 33 9/11 terrorist attacks 11, 14, 19, 40, 43, 46, 58, 87, 92 Charlie Hebdo killings 39, 49, 54, 59, 61 London bombings 7, 10, 33, 39, 43, 56, 69, 74, 88, 94–95, 105 Madrid bombings 69 Paris (2015) 49, 54, 55 Tevanian, P. 55 Thatcher, Margaret 31, 84, 109 Thomas, Dominic 50 Tipton Three 46 tolerance 1, 10–11, 41, 89, 104, 110–112, 122, 124, 134, 136 Tololyan, K. 12 transnationalism 8 Tribalat, Michèle 91 tribalism 121 Turkey 132 immigrants from 2 Twin Towers bombings see 9/11 terrorist attacks Uganda 30 UK see United Kingdom UKACIA (United Kingdom Action Committee on Islamic Affairs) 74 UKIP (United Kingdom Independence party) 167 UMO (Union of Muslim Organisations) 84 UMP (Union pour un movement populaire) 1

Index 197 unemployment 2, 10, 35, 43, 55, 59, 76, 95, 100n27, 117, 118, 127 Union of Muslim Organisations (UMO) 84 Union pour un movement populaire (UMP) 1 United Kingdom citizenship legislation in 44 dress codes in 167 immigration reform in 44 see also Britain United Kingdom Action Committee on Islamic Affairs (UKACIA) 74 United Kingdom Independence party (UKIP) 167 United States citizenship in 11 ethnic identity in 20n6 foreign policy post–9/11 19 minorities in 142n13 multiculturalism in 41 universal (human) rights 9, 41, 135 universalism 112, 129, 168 Urban Regeneration Zones (ZUS) 54 US see United States Valls, Manuel 59 veiling different reasons for 174 in the EU 167–169 issues regarding 127–129, 131–132, 149, 169, 171, 173 three kinds of 173 see also affaire des foulards; headscarf wearing; veils veils 179n4 as sign of identity 173 as symbol 171, 178 see also headscarf wearing; veiling Vénissieux 112 Vichy regime 48 Vidal, Dominique 54 violence in France 49, 55, 59, 61, 62, 88, 112, 114 Islam and 39, 43, 86, 87 against minorities 20n5 racial 87 religious 33, 87

state 111 territorial 42 against women 152, 153, 155, 176–178 see also civil unrest; terrorism; terrorist attacks Vlaams Blok (Belgium) 17 Wahhab, Iqbal 86 Wahhabi organizations 47, 60 Walzer, Michael 24, 131 war on terrorism 40, 69, 74, 130–131 welfare-state systems 1, 8, 9 Werbner, Pnina 43, 122, 150 West Indies, immigrants from 30 Wieviorka, Michel 122, 124, 134 Wihtol de Wenden, Catherine 13–14, 35 Williams, Rowan 123 Winter, Bronwyn 128–129, 137, 138 women abuse of 127 agency of 91, 132 in Algeria 153–156, 160–161, 179 attitudes toward 6, 17, 19, 42 and citizenship 178–179 and colonialism 151–162 control of 3, 147–148, 150 and female genital mutilation 127, 175 Maghrebi 128–129, 172–173 minority 148–149, 174 Muslim 126, 131, 142n18, 168–169, 174 unveiling of 168–169 violence against 152, 153, 155, 176–178 see also feminism; girls; sexuality Women Against Fundamentalism (WAF) 127 women’s organizations 177 women’s rights 126–133, 148–149, 150 World Trade Center bombings 42, 58, 92 see also 9/11 terrorist attacks xenophobia 1, 10, 41, 50, 127, 132 Yegenoglu, Meyda 168 Yuva-Davis, Nira 126–127, 150 ZEPs (Educational Priority Zones) 112 zones of exclusion 68 ZUS (urban regeneration zones) 54