Go Back to Where You Came From

by Sasha Polakow-Suransky

  The harshest critics of hard-line French secularism tend to come from outside France. Ambassador Araud and others like him have hidden behind the intellectually lazy proposition that “a debate can’t be understood from the outside.”5 While the French have little problem expressing shock at America’s gun culture, the continued existence of the death penalty, and its lack of national health care, when it comes to France’s civil religion, foreign criticism is off limits. Ironically, Araud followed his spirited defence of laïcité with a not-so-secular wish of “Happy Festival of the Assumption” to his thirty thousand followers.6

  Context does matter, of course. And a society’s legal traditions, history, and traumas are worth taking into account. But to argue that outsiders can’t comprehend this debate and hiding behind context to defend a blatantly illiberal policy is tantamount to the American government choosing to defend the illegal removal of Arab and Middle Eastern passengers from planes by airline employees who had no grounds beyond the fears of fellow passengers who heard them speaking foreign languages or didn’t like the way they looked.7

  It is worth recalling that there were numerous violent attacks on Muslims and Sikhs (mistaken for Muslims) after 9/11, a moment when much of America, like France after the Nice attack, was understandably afraid of terrorist acts committed by men from the Middle East, but the highest officials of state did not attempt to excuse or condone the targeting of religious minorities.

  Many French people like to believe that a sprinkling of references to Catholic holidays and the odd nativity scene at Christmastime represent “French culture” and are therefore perfectly neutral and in no way infringe on the holy principles of state secularism. It is not seen the same way from the banlieues of Paris, where young women have been barred from wearing veils to their graduation ceremonies. In those forgotten corners of the republic, many young French citizens do not see themselves as fully French because they are not seen that way by the majority of the French.

  Farhad Khosrokhavar, a sociologist at the prestigious École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales and an expert on radicalization, has pointed to the gulf between laïcité in theory and its actual application that is angering and alienating many French citizens. This is due in part to the fact that France’s conception of citizenship, “which strongly insists on adherence to a few exalted political values, has seriously eroded over time,” he argues. While Germany opted for the more modest goal of lifting all boats through economic growth, France has remained, as Khosrokhavar puts it, “resolutely universalist and claims it still has both the desire and the power to enforce inclusion. Yet its assimilationist ambitions are increasingly at odds with everyday reality.”8

  There is an unrealized fantasy of absolute racial and religious equality, which is compounded by the fact that France forbids the collection of data disaggregated along those lines, meaning that there is no way to accurately measure whether the state is living up to its ideals or massively failing certain groups of citizens. It means that both successes and failures are invisible to policy makers, and those who are left behind in a society that hides behind the veneer of absolute equality between citizens are likely to become increasingly frustrated.9

  This is especially the case in heavily minority communities where poverty is rampant and where radicalized young men tend to grow up. The pitfalls of harsh restrictions in the name of secularism are also dangerous on a strategic level if the state wants to reduce the appeal of Islamist recruiters. Implementing and encouraging the enforcement of laws like the head scarf ban and the current burkini row gives Islamists a ready-made pretext to accuse France of Islamophobia and lure angry young men into their orbit.

  France has no doubt succeeded in integrating many North Africans and their children, but those left behind are far more bitter than in other countries. That is largely because the French model of integration is so rigid. Rather than fine every modestly clad Muslim at the beach, France needs to come to terms with the multicultural nation it has become and refrain from turning to the police to enforce secular morals.10

  The political scientists and terrorism scholars Will McCants and Chris Meserole have attempted to quantify this argument by linking the number of foreign fighters in Syria from Francophone countries to the radicalizing effect of strict laïcité.11 Their methodology has come under attack, but the data is telling. France and Belgium have a hugely disproportionate number of citizens fighting for ISIS compared to other European countries on a per capita basis. The closest countries are Lebanon and Jordan, which are both direct neighbours to the Syrian conflict and have long histories of Islamist groups operating and recruiting.

  According to the researchers, rigid state secularism like France’s “helps jihadist recruiters who want to sign up Muslims who believe they don’t belong.” They point out that one of the primary goals of jihadist attacks is “to force western societies to over-react such that they start discriminating against their Muslim populations. In that sense, the ultimate goal of the violence is not so much to kill as it is to force the Muslims within those populations to make a black and white choice between identifying as Muslim and identifying as western,” they explain. ISIS has a name for this strategy: eliminating the grey zone.

  “When a state seeks to ban the niqab or hijab, it forces that same choice,” they argue. While this may not be the proximate cause of radicalization for all French and Belgian jihadists, McCants and Meserole insist that there is a strong correlation, and their data backs this up. “For jihadist recruiters in the west,” debates like the burkini spat “play right into their hands.” Some French foreign fighters who have gone to Syria have cited the burqa ban as a catalyst for their radicalization. They regarded it as a law targeting only Muslims and it sent a message that Islam “was not welcome in France.”12

  There is no doubt that the news from the beaches of Cannes might have a similar effect on angry and alienated young men in some depressed corner of France, far from the rarefied diplomatic world that men like Ambassador Araud inhabit.

  Critics will argue that this theory is yet another case of Western self-hatred, apologetics, and victim blaming, like Western leftists who reacted to 9/11 by focusing on the sins of US and European foreign policy rather than blaming the perpetrators of the attacks, or those who refuse to criticize totalitarian and fundamentalist governments on the grounds that Western standards do not apply in other cultures.13 After all, it is France that has been attacked multiple times by Islamic extremists—why, they argue, should a proud secular democracy cave into the archaic demands and fundamentalist hypersensitivities of a group of people that refuses to live by the rules of a modern society?

  But there is a crucial distinction between the justification put forward for the burkini ban—the state must protect women from being oppressed by a religious dress code—and the rousing defence of freedom of expression at the heart of Danish newspaper editor Flemming Rose’s insistence on publishing and republishing the Mohammed cartoons.

  When the French newspaper Charlie Hebdo decided to reprint those cartoons—an act that earned it the ire of Islamic extremists—the principle cited was freedom of expression and equal opportunity lampooning of various religions. Many have argued that both Jyllands-Posten and Charlie Hebdo overstepped the bounds of decency and were needlessly provocative and offensive. That debate, like those about permitting Holocaust denial and neo-Nazi marches through Jewish areas, is one worth having, but the bedrock principle that in a free society a citizen has the right to draw, say, and publish what she likes—short of incitement to murder—is an admirable one. Rose is correct that the right not to be offended should not exist in modern liberal democracies. It is a slippery slope as soon as speech (or beach attire) is banned in order to protect certain groups from potentially being insulted or provoked.

  If Catholics or Jews or Muslims did not appreciate the offensive caricatures in Charlie Hebdo, they could choose not to buy the newspaper or organize a boycott. Those offended by the
Jyllands-Posten cartoons had the choice not to read that paper and to purchase others. While upsetting, it did not fundamentally impact their freedom as citizens to move, dress, and assemble as they please. The burkini ban is different. For women who, for whatever reason, choose to cover up when they go to the sea, the immediate effect is the inability to visit a public space unless they remove certain items of clothing. They are effectively being banned from the local beach or forced to strip for police and wear attire deemed appropriate by the state. There is not another public beach they can visit.

  Finkielkraut defended the bans on the grounds that “the burkini is a flag.… The women in burkinis only hide their bodies to better exhibit their submission and their separation. They offer to other beachgoers the doubly painful spectacle of servitude and rejection.”14 But there is a substantial difference between shrugging off the display of nativity scenes on Christmas, as he does, and instructing pious women to remove some of their clothes. It is the difference between looking the other way and active enforcement—in choosing when and how to police the boundaries of secularism and whom to punish for transgressing them.

  When talking about secularism, Finkielkraut likes to say he’s never asked for Yom Kippur to be a national holiday, and if he chose to fast, that is his affair. Likewise, Christmas parties do not offend him. The difference, of course, is that no one forced Finkielkraut to refrain from fasting on Yom Kippur or to work on the Jewish Sabbath under threat of exclusion. Women who were asked to remove modest swimwear were either humiliated or excluded.

  As one woman, Siam, complained after being forced by armed police to remove her veil in Cannes: “because people who have nothing to do with my religion kill, I no longer have the right to go to the beach! Because they carry out attacks, I’m deprived of my rights,” the thirty-four-year-old woman told Le Nouvel Observateur. “Today we’re banned from the beach. Tomorrow from the street?” she asked. “I’m disgusted that this can happen in France.”

  The incident was witnessed by a journalist and quickly gained national attention. She was fined eleven euros for not having “proper attire, respectful of good morals and secularism.” The police chose not to intervene to stop a dozen or so bystanders shouting racist insults at her and her crying daughter, including “Go back to your country,” and “France is a Catholic country.”15

  The insults were both upsetting and ironic given that Siam was, as she put it, “a bit française de souche”—a term used by nationalists and identitarians to denote deep French roots—having been born in France, as were her parents and grandparents. There is nowhere to go back to, as the racists on the beach demanded. In fact, she is more “de souche” than Finkielkraut, whose parents were Polish Jewish refugees, yet she was removed from a beach while he is hailed as a champion of French values. Only by conflating true Frenchness with an explicitly Catholic or Judeo-Christian identity is it possible to exclude a third-generation French woman from the national community.

  The far right likes to blame Muslim Europeans for failing to integrate, forming parallel societies, and rejecting their wonderfully generous new homelands. What they neglect to consider is that even second-generation Europeans, who in many cases were born in Europe and are citizens, are still not recognized as fully equal compatriots by society at large, dismissed as “French on paper” or not authentically Danish simply because of their skin colour or name. And those who aren’t citizens have it worse.

  Unlike the United States—aside from the white supremacist circles of Steve Bannon and Richard Spencer—in Europe, national identity is still largely perceived as being ethnically defined. A French citizen of Algerian heritage or a Dane with Moroccan parents will almost always be referred to, in casual conversation and in the press, as a Muslim or North African rather than by his citizenship. The populist right laments the failure of integration in these communities, and they are correct that there is a problem. But the lack of inclusion and recognition of fellow citizens in ways as basic as everyday language and newspaper references is also fueling radicalism and inhibiting the broadened notion of citizenship and national identity that critics of current policies tirelessly promote as a way to prevent extremism.

  There are frequent public clashes that illustrate this problem. In early 2016, there was a debate about closing a mosque in the Danish city of Aarhus, which was led by an extremist imam who was secretly recorded encouraging the stoning of adulterous women and has also reportedly encouraged radicalized young men to travel to Syria. “They are a kind of travel agency for Islamic State. Why should we accept it?” the Danish MP Naser Khader insists. It’s no problem, he says, if a mainstream imam takes over this mosque. “The problem is not the house. It’s what’s in the house,” he argues.16

  The debate over closing the extremist mosque was in full swing during one of my visits to Denmark, and it focused on an obscure paragraph of the Danish constitution, which allows the government to disband groups instigating violence or seeking to use it to achieve their goals.17 “Of course we have full religious freedom in the country. We stick to that,” says the Danish People’s Party’s Søren Espersen. The DPP wants to use the constitutional provision to shut down the mosque. They also want to cut off all funding from abroad and from Danish local institutions. He complains that radical Muslim communities receive funding for everything from education to sports clubs.

  The journalistic sting that sparked the controversy sent hidden cameras into the mosque, revealing things that rightly made most Danes shudder, including what sounded like encouragement of domestic violence. The imam was saying one thing in public and another in the mosque. Espersen was appalled. They were saying “if your wife does not want to go to bed with you, you can beat her up until she does and all these sort of horrendous things,” and telling worshipers not to go to the police. He is convinced that “they have built up their own society with the Sharia law, and we cannot have that,” Espersen insists. If groups preach violence and don’t submit to the Danish constitution, “they must be shut down.”18

  Rabbi Melchior is not convinced. “You fight it by getting the Muslim minorities into the mainstream of Danish life by giving them jobs, by educating them, and you’ll find that, all right, the odd one person will fall out of this.” He mentions Anders Behring Breivik massacring children in Norway, despite being a blond, blue-eyed Norwegian. “You have crazy people” everywhere, he argues, “but you don’t solve the problem by closing down a mosque. It’s ridiculous.”19 Even the police opposed shutting it down on the grounds that they knew where these people were and could easily place them under surveillance. Now, there was a risk that they’d go off the grid.20

  Public debates like the one about shutting the mosque tend to fuel extremist sentiments, according to Jakob Scharf, the former Danish spy chief. Imams like the one filmed at Grimhøj Mosque “are not good for integration, clearly,” says Scharf, but, he adds, “it has absolutely nothing to do with terrorists, more radicalization, or extremism.” Everything gets muddled in public debate, and while extremist imams might hamper integration, condone misogynistic behavior, and have a decidedly negative impact on their followers, they are not necessarily the catalysts for radicalization.

  These days, argues Scharf, “the imams are not really relevant,” because radicalization tends to happen outside through other actors, like recruiters, luring young men to Syria. Contrary to popular belief, “religion has very little to do with the terrorist issue.” He describes the radicalization process in very different terms than most politicians. “People think this happens in mosques. That’s not how radicalization takes place,” he tells me. “It’s also not top down. The individual is often looking for it” and seeks charismatic figures with strong views. These days, recruiting happens mostly online and through social networks.21

  In Holland, like in Denmark, faith was not always front and centre in politics. Those who were once defined by national origin overnight became labeled—and feared—because of their faith, even if they
had never set foot in a mosque.

  It was as if religious identity didn’t matter, and then suddenly it did. This went for young Muslims as much as for white Dutch people. No one was particularly interested in the fact that you were Muslim until the question of one’s religion became politically loaded and required a response. Likewise, for angry young men feeling alienated, there wasn’t much chance of becoming an extremist before everyone had Internet access at home and on their phones. Now it’s not hard at all to find Salafi propaganda in dark corners of the Internet.

  When the debate about integration did begin in earnest, its starting point was negative. “We were pushed to debate about it because of Theo van Gogh and Pim Fortuyn,” says the Dutch politician Ahmed Marcouch. And when the Dutch talk about Islam, they talk about violence or oppression of women or the impossibility of reconciling it with democracy. Many Muslims hear nothing more and assume that society rejects them.

  Marcouch, a former cop, was one of the first to discuss the radicalization of young Dutch-born men in his role as chairman of a community organization in the neighborhood Van Gogh’s killer came from. “There was no policy after the killing of Theo van Gogh; only the repression policy, but that’s not enough.” To prevent the next Mohammed Bouyeri, he is adamant, “we have to start in the education in the families.” The schools and local institutions didn’t want to take responsibility, he recalls, or they said they didn’t have the right expertise.

  Part of deradicalization, Marcouch insists, is presenting a different vision of Islam than what ISIS recruiters offer to young men. Instead of support from intellectuals and local government, he says the response is often something along the lines of “our tradition is different; we have separation of church and state.” But just as abstinence education has proven to be a fairly useless tool in promoting safe sex among teenagers, pushing absolute secularism is not going to reduce the numbers of Dutch kids running off to Syria. The real problem, Marcouch argues, is that many Dutch people under the age of fifty have no idea how to talk about any religion, let alone Islam, because they have grown up in an aggressively and proudly secular society. The churches are empty in big Dutch cities, he points out, and the mosques are increasingly full.22