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- Author: François Burgat x
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Research centers dedicated to the study of the Arab world have long cultivated a kind of emotional block with respect to the key figures of political Islam. Often, whosoever wishes to speak on Islamists must invite their most bitter opponents (whether those in power, or from the left)—and … those opponents only. Countering these instincts, this chapter covers the author’s formative encounters with the key Tunisian figure Rached Ghannouchi, and its role in building the foundations of his approach to theorizing political Islam. It analyzes the reasons behind his divergence with the rejection of the all-but-undifferentiated rejection of Islamism, and their likely origin in the fact that the author’s first contacts in the field of political Islam were sociological and human—rather than merely reading based and theoretical.
To this day, the (very) French difficulty in reaching a rational relationship with Islamic Otherness is expressed through a tendency to refuse to communicate directly with the Other in corporal form. How much cosier it is to not have to look in the eye the hideous Arabic-speaking, Muslim, Arab male, guilty of every sin. So what if, along with his hijab-clad wife, they make up the demographic majority in the region? We more or less consciously prefer to deal with those who, in the immediate vicinity of those creatures, have the good taste to be (like us honest folk) in tension or in a competitive relationship with them. Since time immemorial, we have displayed a consistent tendency. We are willing to enter into this Other’s world only through the door of its “minorities,” whether these be ethnic, religious, generational, or, more recently, sexual. Anyone, that is, except the Other “in person”—that impertinent, formerly colonized subject. So it is that France has always indulged in a proven fondness for “Berbers,” “Copts,” and “Maronites,” a fondness who nature and consequences this chapter analyzes.
Even before the alchemy of the rise of political Islam took us from the era of the “fellagas” into the age of the “fundamentalists,” the ethnic and linguistic Othering of Arabness had been quite enough to create powerful reflexes of rejection towards it. Things took a distinct turn for the worse, however, once the Other, after he had “spoken Arab” to us, got it into his head to start wanting to “speak Muslim” too. However, to this day, a strand of the Arab political classes—the one that has easiest access to our media—has remained stuck in a stance of indiscriminate rejection of the Islamist generation, which this chapter examines in detail.
At their core, the public relations of the “Arab Pinochets” towards their Western partners have rested on the deterrent power of the “fundamentalism” of their bogeyman dissidents. The idea was thus absolutely unacceptable to them that anyone might convince a Western public that some of these bogeymen might be declared innocent—or that their “crimes” might be reduced to the level of the counter-violence of an opposition forced into legitimate self-defense. This chapter thus examines one testing-ground for this struggle in which the author was closely involved, in particular as when called as an expert-witness for the highly politically contested asylum claims of Islamist figures in several countries.
Over the course of a scholarly career, the nature and the quality of interaction with those who share the same field of research is a thorny and important question. The question of which of the representations of the Muslim “Other” is to dominate the public sphere is altogether more important than the individualized ego-quarrels which the hastier (and often the laziest) commentators of academic debates wrap it up in. This chapter synthesizes the author’s critical examination of two main rival theses, associated with the French scholars Olivier Roy and Gilles Kepel, which have structured the French debate on the issue of political Islam.
This chapter continues the critical examination of the theses associated with Roy and Kepel that structure the French debate on the issue of Islamist radicalization. Kepel’s approach, like Roy’s, exacerbated an already-apparent contradiction. This consisted of minimizing the impact of ancient and ongoing North/South relations of domination on the behavior of the players concerned—if not ignoring it altogether. Fixated upon the form in which hostility to the Other is expressed, Kepel’s reading sidelines investigation into—or that takes into any sufficient account—the roots of the rising hostility towards the Western world across whole swaths of the Muslim world. To arrive at a nearly identical result, Roy, almost from thin air, created a jihadi who sprung from nowhere, asking us to believe that this figure was entirely disconnected from its original milieu (Muslims in France). The result was to make it impossible to think through any short-term or historical correlation with the injustices of all kinds endured in this milieu. Kepel, for his part, mentioned such suffering only in passing—all the better to gloss over it.
The weapon of mass destruction against terrorism might well have already been invented. One thing lies at the root of the repeated failure of our “war” against the terrorist: a blind refusal to put that weapon into practice. Granted, the weapon is especially expensive. The privileged of the world order of the 21st century, great and small, “Western” and “Muslim,” seem unwilling to pay its price. The weapon has a name which those who hold power in all its forms have little time for. That name is “sharing.”
The tensions and rifts between France and the Muslim world, whether domestic or regional, may be analysed as resulting from various historic dynamics. The most important of these rifts is an internal one. It is by far the most structural – and the most decisive. Above all, it is rooted in the contemporary, post-Revolutionary history of French society. This rift has, however, been made more explicit and amplified by recent political power struggles, particularly since 2018. Like many of their European counterparts, for several decades, French political forces had thrown themselves into defiant electioneering one-upmanship against their fellow citizens descended from Muslim backgrounds. Since 2018, this posture has no longer been the sole preserve of far-right political forces. It has become the position of a quasi-majority of the political landscape. Far more consequentially, it has become the policy of the government of President Emmanuel Macron. This chapter examines the historical roots of Islamophobia in the French context, as well as how the issue of Muslims and Islamophobia has become deeply politicised in France.