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Islam in France
Since it’s Islamic Appreciation Week here on Ricochet, I thought I’d share the findings of an interesting study of French Muslims just been published here in France.
Unlike the US, where the government obsessively counts and classifies those among us who have, say, strands of Cherokee DNA, the French government is not permitted to classify people by ethnicity nor to ask census questions about race or origins. The republic is based on the idea that all citizens are equal and free from distinctions of class, race, or religion. (And after a while here, this really starts to seem like common sense. When recently I filled out a form requesting my absentee ballot, complete with the standard box to check indicating my race, it struck me how inappropriate, intrusive, and obsessive it is constantly to ask American citizens to report their own skin color.)
It’s refreshing that the French government is genuinely color-blind, or at least, that it insists upon this ideal. On the other hand, lack of data about minorities hampers the state’s ability to measure how well these minorities are doing or recognize when a group, however artificial, is having problems best addressed qua group.
Because the government doesn’t count minorities, studies like this one are the closest thing we have to detailed census data, and thus especially valuable to those of us trying to figure out just what’s really going on here amid all the mostly pointless noise. A study like this is worth far more than anecdotal reports, especially when those reports are massaged so better improve site traffic and clicks. The author, Hakim El Karoui, is a professional geographer; he worked with the polling company iFOP, and the report seems well-designed and methodologically rigorous. They began with a nationally representative sample of more than 15,000 people, from which they extracted a sub-sample of 1029 who claimed to be Muslim or to have at least one Muslim parent. If you read French, you can read the whole thing here.
It’s very interesting, and none of this will be reported in the US, I’m sure, but it’s far too long for me to translate in one post. So today I’ll translate some of the highlights, add a few thoughts of my own, and summarize the chapters that follow. If any of them interest you, let me know, and I’ll translate them for you, or summarize them, in the coming week.
The highlights:
- Self-identified Muslims constitute 5.6 percent of the metropolitan population in France. (This is far less than commonly claimed in the US media, which often says they’re 10 percent of the French population, and sometimes puts the figure as high as 15 percent. I knew those numbers were too high, but didn’t realize the real figure was this low — although it’s consistent with what I see around me. This also means that the commonly-quoted claim that France’s Muslim population is the highest in Europe is probably wrong, although I don’t know if our estimates of the number of Muslims in other European countries are much more accurate.)
- Of the sample of 1029, 15 percent say they are not Muslims, but have at least one Muslim parent — meaning this group is about 1 percent of France’s population.
- Only 7.5 percent of the respondents identify as Muslims despite having neither a Muslim father nor mother. So the exit rate from Islam is twice as high as the entry rate. (This is obviously significant: Scandalized reports that France is being “Islamized” and the French are converting to Islam at a significant rate are fantasy and invention. Muslims have much more reason to fear secularization than vice-versa.)
- More than one in two of the respondents’ parents were born in France; 24 percent were naturalized French citizens, and 26 percent were foreign nationals.
- The average age of the respondent was 35.8. (This is younger than the average French citizen, but not really young enough to be a frighteningly virile cohort that will somehow outbreed non-Muslims.)
- The respondents’ fathers mainly come from Algeria and Morocco: 31 and 20 percent, respectively. Tunisia accounts for another 8 percent, the rest of Africa a bit more than 15 percent, and Turkey about 5 percent. The respondents’ mothers exhibited a similar profile, with very little endogamy.
- People who belong to the working classes (the authors’ term) and day laborers are over-represented. Almost 25 percent are blue-collar workers, as opposed to 13.1 percent in the overall sample; and 38% are unemployed: This is twice the average French unemployment rate. (“Average” rates here are what they extrapolated from the general sample.)
- Muslims tend to be overrepresented in precarious forms of employment (fixed term, temporary, part-time). But we’re also seeing the emergence of a middle and upper class: 10 percent were in middle management and 5 percent were very highly-skilled workers. (“Highly-skilled” is my best effort at translating a term no American would use: “professions intellectuelles supérieures.” Literally: “intellectually superior professions.”)
- The community is characterized by four traits. 1. Regular religious practice: 31 percent went to a mosque or prayer room once a week, as opposed to 8.2 percent of regular churchgoers (or appropriate analogue) in the general population; 2. A marked preference for halal food: 70 percent of the respondents said they “always” buy halal meat, 22 percent bought it “sometimes” and only 6 percent said “never”; 3. The majority supports veiling, despite major divisions: 65 percent are in favor of the veil; 4. The absence of widespread Muslim communalism: 78 percent of the respondents who are registered on electoral lists said they don’t always vote for Muslim candidates.
- Interestingly, contrary to popular opinion, men are less conservative than women. Among men, 26 percent reject veiling. Only 18 percent of women agree. (The phrasing of the question: “Do you look favorably upon veiling?”) Men were also more likely to say, “Everyone should do what they want.” The authors note the difficulty of interpreting the answer to this question, given that the full face veil is illegal in France. Does the response reflect a genuine preference for veiling, they wonder, or does it represent resentment of a meddlesome state? They’re particularly perplexed, because only 23 percent of women said that they “always” wore hijab; 7 percent said they wore it except when they were at work or school; and 5 percent wore it “rarely.”
The authors of the study count three broad groups:
- The “silent majority,” comprising 46 percent of respondents. “Their value system aligns with French society, they thus contribute to the evolution of the particularities of their faith.”
- “Conservatives.” This is something of a composite group. “They make up 25 percent of the sample and are at the heart of the political and ideological battle. The proposals in our report are tools for winning this battle. Proud to be Muslims, they claim the right to express their religion in public spaces. Very pious (Sharia is of great importance to them, so long as it’s in the boundaries of the Republic’s laws), they feel positively about expressions of religion in the workplace, and have widely adopted the “halal” standard as the definition of “a real Muslim” They firmly reject the niqab and polygamy and accept secularism.”
- “Authoritarians,” who make up 28 percent. They are mostly young, low-skilled, and at the bottom of the employment hierarchies. They live in the large suburbs around the cities. This group is defined more by its use of Islam to signify revolt from the rest of French society than by its conservatism.
Here are the chapter headings. You’ll probably be able to see from them that interesting things are made possible by the French tradition of dirigisme and its lack of a free exercise clause. Let me know if you see something you’d like to learn more about; I’ll translate it for you this week.
Summary
Foreward by Hakim El Karoui
1. A PORTRAIT OF MUSLIMS IN FRANCE
1.1. Methodology
1.2. Sociological and demographic characteristics of Muslims in France
1.2.1. Demography
1.2.2. Nationality
1.2.3. Country of Origin
1.2.4. Other Characteristics
1.3. Typology of Muslims according to their Religiosity and Sociodemographic Description of Groups
1.4. Which Islamic Practices?
1.4.1. Halal and Dietary Norms
1.4.2. The Wearing of the Veil: What Motivates It?
1.4.3. Which Religious Authorities?
1.4.4. How Often Do they Visit the Mosque?
1.5. Relationship to France, its Institutions, and Society
1.5.1. Attachment
1.5.2. Defiance
1.5.3. Openness to Others and Diversity
1.5.4. Political Opinions about French Society
1.5.5. Relationship to Politics
1.6. Conclusions of the Inquiry
2. FRENCH ISLAM: ORGANZED FROM THE TOP
a. Consular Islam
i. Foreign Countries that Transmit Islam
ii. Foreign Countries that Transmit a Fundamentalist Islam
b. L’UOIF (The Union of Islamic Organizations in France): An Islam à la française?
i. Origins and Organization
ii. An Agent of French Islam
iii. Notoriety and Institutionalization: Decline or Neutralization of the UOIF?
c. Salafism: A Rampant Ideology without a Central Organizaton
i. A Modern Fundamentalism
ii. Public Targets
iii. Differences between Brotherhood Fundamentalism and Salafist Fundamentalism
d. State Efforts to Organize a French Islam
i. Pierre Joxe and the Creation of the Conseil de Réflexion sur l’Islam en France (French Deliberative Council on Islam) or CORIF (1989- 1993)
ii. The Pasqua Method, or The Algerian Choice
iii. Jean-Louis Debré, or the Laisser-faire Method
iv. Jean-Pierre Chevènement : From Istichâra to the Premises of the CFCM
v. Nicolas Sarkozy and the Birth of the CFCM
vi. Results and Perspectives from Today’s CFCM
vii. Relations between Islam and the Republic: The Methods and the Men
viii. Relations between the State and Islam in Europe: An imperfect Institutionalization
3. ISLAM FROM THE BOTTOM
a. Everyday Islam
i. Everyday Islam: The Pyramid and the Rhizome
ii. Weight and Role of the Mosques
iii. Weight and Role of the Imams
b. Islam on the Internet: The Islam of the Multitude
4. RECOMMENDATIONS
a. Proposals
i. Create The French Foundation for Islam and the Muslim Association for a French Islam: Two Major Institutions
ii. A Chief Imam of France to Express an Islamic Doctrine Compatible with Republican Values
iii. Extend the Alsace-Morelle Concordat to Islam
iv. Accelerate Arab-Language Education
v. Create and Professionalize Chaplains
vi. Facilitate the Management of Everyday Islamic Life
vii. Create a Secretary of State, named by the Prime Minister, for Religious Affairs and Secularism
viii. Develop Knowledge of Islam
ix. Optional Scenario — Studied but not Recommended by this Report: Update the Law of 1905 to take into Account New Sects
IS A FRENCH ISLAM POSSIBLE? For and Against
And please don’t forget: If you’d like to know a lot more about this, I’m writing a book about it — and funded entirely by my readers:
…the culture shock is going to be much, much more traumatic than if they’re educated physicians or architects or physicists moving from Istanbul to Berlin.
I think one of the most distressing aspects of this problem has been the disproportionate number of medical doctors or engineering professors that have been involved in terrorist plots in the north of England or the US.
This is where we slip into wishful thinking. I know lots of normal Jews. Haven’t put their tefillin on since Bar Mitzvah. Might drop into a Synagogue on the High Holy Days but aren’t even a member. If asked their opinion on various issues you will get the usual left of center hoo-hah.
Now we throw in a variable. In Judaism, it is called Baal Teshuvah. In Hebrew, this just means “return” as in returning to Gd. The person becomes very observant. The person may wish to visit Israel. This happens in a very unpredictable fashion. It is very common for very secular parents and grandparents to discover that their child or grandchild has become a Baal Teshuvah and wants to go to Israel to study Torah at a Yeshiva there. When they come home engaged to a very religious girl the parents experience the culture shock and go find an American Orthodox Rabbi to explain “what the heck is going on?!” What they don’t do is go to Afghanistan to acquire training in Jihad and then come home and kill many innocent people at random in a suicidal act.
cont.
cont. from #62
When any one of those “normal Muslims” goes looking for their roots, something that is bound to happen in this unbelievably shallow secular society, they are at risk. If the Imam that they stumble on gives them the course on Jihad in the vulnerable state they are in they may be swayed. Unless and until the vast majority of the French Muslim community is willing to openly break with Jihad inside the Mosque then this phenomenon will continue.
Regards,
Jim
The saddest thing about some cities in the US, like Chicago, is that some of the most scary places are not slums. South Shore, where I grew up 50 years ago, is a beautiful area and has probably the highest murder rate in the city. I will leave to your imagination what changed since I lived there but it is not geography.
I am reassured by your article as I love Paris and was in Belgium last year between terrorist attacks.
If it ever was 0.1%, those days are long gone.
The poll Claire cites can be framed differently and equally accurately:
15-25 year olds are a key demographic. It’s certainly possible to outgrow beliefs, but if one follows them by marrying early (and at times, and in France clandestinely, often) and begins to raise children in a Sharia centered community, there’s a lot of reinforcement for the attitude both from the community and because the individuals have invested a lot in it and built their families around it.
Worldwide, “separation from Western society/values” and “Sharia is more important/valid/authoritative than secular law” map pretty well with support for violent jihad. As Mao said, “the guerrilla must move amongst the people as a fish swims in the sea.” 25% of the French Muslim population is a pretty big sea, even if it’s “only” 1-2% of the total of the population of France.
How much better it would be if they became Sufis and recite poetry while drinking wine? Sadly, Wahabist Islam purged the more reflective and thoughtful variants of Islam from the Middle East. Now we have all this jihadi garbage.
Sufis have to commit to the whole of the Koran. Let’s say that some may not commit as hard as others.
Some of them commit pretty hard. The notion that Sufism is pacifistic or anti-jihad-of-the-sword is historically illiterate.
Huh. I never knew al-ghazali was Sufi.
Yep.
Oh, I get it. I was taught clarinet by students of Daniel Bonade in the manner of the Paris Conservatory. It is drilled into me. Learning the Boehm system clarinet in the classical manner is an inherently French process. Structure, rigor and inevitability.
Do you really think that “going to Israel to study Torah” and “picking up a weapon and slaughtering your neighbors” are acts so similar that ceteris parabus, the kind of person who does the former will do the latter if he or she finds himself suffering from a sense of spiritual longing? I don’t.
Claire,
He clearly said:
This is the fundamental difference between Judaism, Christianity, and Islam.
A secular Jew may find religion and the result is keeping kosher and keeping the sabbath. A secular Christian who finds religion may start tithing and turning the other cheek. A secular Muslim discovers the Jihad.
Claire,
I don’t think you grasped the meaning of my comment at all. The search for one’s religious identity will be universal especially in a highly secular society that puts faith in a marginal position. The difference will be what one’s faith has in store for one when one goes looking for it. The Jewish Baal Shuva will experience some cultural friction between themselves and their highly secular relatives and the experience will probably be benign if not beneficial. The Muslim who goes looking for Islam may or may not be drawn into a circle that involves violent Jihad. This isn’t a possibility for the Jew. I am suggesting that it is upon the Muslim community to remove all support for Jihad from the Mosque or from online Imams. Violent Jihad is as much a threat to them as it is to everyone else.
Regards,
Jim
Amen!
@claire is is, I think (I shall try to be systematic) conflating not so much the Jewish and Islamist paths that young people may travel down, and also ignoring some important differences.
There are commonalities in the paths – or can be – but the important ones haven’t been addressed in this discussion. First, the commonalities. In my experience of many years ago, young Jews with no background interested in getting their toes wet on the shores of the vast ocean of Jewish learning were often spotted, groomed, and when possible encouraged to go to yeshivas and seminaries. In some cases a great deal of pressure was put on them, and they were, at times quite wrongly, encouraged to distance themselves from their families in order to consolidate their new lives.
This “technology” has long been used. It was part of the toolbox of Communist, Socialist, and Fascist youth movements and is used by criminal gangs and, in its own way, military basic training.
First world militaries are willing to spend a lot of money making their basic training as safe as possible. The Islamists have an advantage there: death in training is, like death in battle, dying for Allah. They are willing to use more dangerous training, and let troops serve more of a battle apprenticeship on operations. Casualties there are, again a religious good. And when the talented and fortunate survive combat or clandestine urban operations, they quickly get better at what they do.
[continued below]
The men who have been there and done that can also serve as models, part of the grooming process: “If you do this, and this, and this, then perhaps Ahmed can spend time telling you about things we can’t talk about publicly.”
Good recruiters tailor their approach to the prospect: likes deep text study? Wants to be engaged in a difficult physical challenge, maybe prove himself as a fighter in the way of Allah? Want some discipline in his chaotic and disorderly life? There’s something for all of them. Since its founding,Islam’s been telling criminals they can earn Allah’s favor by selecting their crime victims appropriately.
When our young man has demonstrated commitment in the form of assiduous study and piety, and for some, perhaps rigorous physical training and basic combat skills, the prospect of admission to an inner circle that knows can be very seductive. A small, well trained cadre can set up a boot camp under the noses of the authorities in most Western countries. For the cadres getting caught is the price of doing business; doing prison dawa is also serving Allah.
When our young man is told by revered teacher or guy whom “everybody knows” has been there and done that “you should go to Afghanistan/Pakistan/Saudi Arabia to immerse yourself in a life of authentic Islam,” our young man with a spiritual longing will then get such a thrill that [the arousal] helps overcome the fear.
For some young Muslims, the path to jihad may lead to the madrassa – an approach not unlike the path to yeshiva that Jewish young men take – but jihad is not part of the yeshiva curriculum.
A while back, I went with a friend to a then trendy cafe but on being treated to a diatribe by the Palestinian owner with delusional ideas about Israeli territorial claims: “The stripes on the Tallit represent the Nile and the Euphrates, they claim everything in between” I left.
The thing is, even had it been true (which even according to most territorially grandiose traditional Jewish commentaries it isn’t,) those claims are quite limited in their ambitions compared to the jihadi goal that the dar al Islam should extend over the whole earth.
The Muslim difference isn’t so much what kind of kids get recruited, or necessarily in the recruiting methods. It’s in the end goals, and in the socially and religiously acceptable means.
Ceteris parabus… it’s often the indoctrination that makes the jihadi, not the “kind of person” he may have been before he went down his religiously valued path.
That probably explains why I’m so messed up. The transition isn’t really complete for me. It’ll take another generation, probably.
But this isn’t so. Secular Muslims who become more devout do not necessarily join ISIS or other jihadi groups; in fact, the best evidence we have suggests that ISIS recruits have a poor grasp of the faith, and fit a sociological profile more typical of young people who join other radical groups than of young people who have become more devout:
In this sense, the evidence fits Roy’s hypothesis.
In my experience (in Turkey), Muslims can indeed become more devout in roughly the same way Jews and Christians do. I’ve spoken to women who had an experience you could find in the pages of William James, after which they started covering themselves; I’ve spoken to people who begin taking the dietary restrictions very seriously, people who stop drinking alcohol, people who begin going to the mosque and prioritizing the daily prayers. (And just as a child’s newfound devotion can be unsettling to secular Jewish families, this is often unsettling to secular Muslim families, or deeply embarrassing — it’s seen as superstitious, backward, etc.)
An ISIS-like interpretation of the doctrine of jihad is not a mainstream one in the Islamic world. It’s seen as a heresy by the large majority of Islamic clergy. A young person has to choose an ISIS-like interpretation above other interpretations he or she is apt to be exposed to in French mosques — don’t forget, the French have now spent years razing radical mosques to the ground, so jihadis here are largely recruited in prisons or on the Internet, not at the mosque.
Of course Islam lends itself more readily to certain species of jihadism than Christianity and Judaism as now practiced do — it’s ridiculous to say there’s no connection at all between Islam and what ISIS believe. But we’re left with the question of why some Muslims but not all are attracted to ISIS, and since our survival depends on figuring out why, we can’t just wave our hands and say, “Oh, it’s just Islam.” It’s not. Other things seem to be going on in the lives of people who become jihadis, too.
My further point about this, which I didn’t make clear enough, is that for anyone born and raised in France — educated in French schools, exposed to French people every day — it is a huge leap to embrace a theology and way of life that’s viewed by your own culture (French culture — often they only speak French!) — not as harmlessly strange, like turning off the lights on the sabbath, but evil. Public Enemy Number One. France isn’t a country of psychopaths. These people have been raised in a prosperous, First World country where people don’t kill each other for being infidels. It’s not a simple matter to go from being members of Western culture to being terrorists who kill people, and kill people just like the people they’ve known all their lives: women, children, their classmates and neighbors. I would even go so far as to say it’s against human nature, a universal human nature. I don’t think the process that gets someone there is the same process that gets a secular Jew to orthodoxy.
Do you have friends who have become more devout Muslims? If you do, what do they say when you talk to them about what that means to them?
Claire,
OK, we agree that this is something modern, which is pretty significant. It suggests that this species of jihadism isn’t an immutable fixture of the religion, or at least, that older Muslims don’t see it as one. The Quran itself didn’t change over the course of a generation. My point is that the question, “Are you a Muslim” isn’t precise enough to identify with any likelihood who is apt to commit an act of terrorism. It will result in many false positives, which is a) an injustice; and b) a waste of scarce security resources. Many other indicators, in conjunction with that question, might get us closer to a useful profile. If you look at the rap sheets of actual terrorists in France, you see what the elements of that profile might be. They’ve all been mentally unstable hooligans and delinquents. None of them just “spontaneously radicalize” — they’ve all been people who’ve dropped obvious hints about what they were going to do for a long time, and been known and wanted to the police for all sorts of petty (and more serious) crime. When you look at their criminal trajectories you don’t see “becomes more devout,” you see “becomes more criminal and more noticeable to law enforcement.” Everyone they catch is “Fiche S” — under surveillance, on parole, etc.
If you can puzzle it out through Google translate, I thought this was a good article about it by a French criminologist whose background you can Google — not exactly a limp-wristed leftist. The terrorists responsible for the recent atrocities, he writes, “have characteristic features of what is called hybrid: they’re individuals halfway between terrorism and organized crime. They start by stealing a car; they go to the slums to negotiate buying an assault rifle; they hang around Charlie Hebdo (an internationally known target for Islamists since the cartoons of the Prophet); they purchase hoods and put them all in a car … do you need to be Sherlock Holmes to realize what they will do? If you watch preventively, you see what I just indicated and you can intervene at the time.”
You’d be wasting time and police resources if you put every Muslim who prays more often or starts eating halal food under surveillance. Wasted time and resources cost real lives, so using the wrong model here comes at a terrible cost. It’s not naive to say there’s something going on here beyond “Islam, devoutly practiced.” It is naive — or at least, “wrong, in a way that will cost lives” to say that “Islam” is all you need to know.
You are creating an impossible standard of no false positives and no misses.
Back in our generation, the Muslims lacked numbers and access. If you were the only Muslim family in town, you assimilated. You did not go to a Wahabbi mosque to hear the latest in anti-assimilation. You might have had a copy of the Quran (in Arabic), but not internet access to those preaching (in English) Jihad from it.
Times have changed.
One HUGE question I would have asked of Mr. and Mrs. Khan after their DNC appearance is: “Your son was born in 1976. He grew up in the 1980s and early 90s, before the internet came to be what it is now. If he had been born 15 or 20 years later, would it have been as easy to raise him to be the patriotic American he became?”
Immutable in the sense of a significant motivator for all Muslims? No. But it is a hardy perennial in the history of Islam and has been the key driver of Islam’s expansion.
Wikipedia:
The more things change…
It is more of a cyclical thing, like America’s Great Awakenings.
Christianity and Islam share an eschatological vision in which the respective religion will have universal sway over the world.
Both have spread by persuasion (explicit missionaries and the example of believers) and by coercion.
Islam gained political power by war from the outset and its founder sanctified expansive war, pillage, murder, and sex slavery.
Christianity incorporated warfare into its expansion toolkit after gaining political power; this took centuries to come about.
Fifteen centuries into the Christian enterprise, conquistadores and missionaries were both involved in spreading the “good news,” and bloody warfare between Christian denominations was already happening. After a couple of centuries of that, Christian countries agreed to fight each other only for secular reasons.
We are now about fifteen centuries into the Muslim enterprise. Christian missionaries are no longer active in the Muslim heartlands (or if they are, it’s necessarily so secretive that it’s not public knowledge.) Islam has conquered the original Christian heartlands and is not letting go, though its grip was pried away from Israel. Islam continues to send missionaries to the rest of Christendom, and ghazi activity is resuming. This is significant:
There is significant historical and theological basis in Islam for their joining ghazi brotherhoods – a religious act in Islam.
“French Authorities Detain Two Women Suspected of Planning ISIS Terrorist Attack.”
Segue: if cyclical tendencies to extremism find a home in whatever is at hand (arguably yes) could one say that America’s cyclical urge for purification and renewal is currently being expressed for the first time through secular paradigms?
Meaning SJWs are the Holy Rollers of our time. Do they they feel similar wrt their cultural function? The focus on one silver bullet seems similar. Yes?
And maybe these brotherhoods were always filled by a society’s borderline criminal misfits? We have no idea.
My feeling is yes – things like jihad and crusades may be driven by ideology, but they get a lot of their energy from jobless lumpen looking for something to do. Everybody else has food to put on the table and no time for nonsense.
I think these are two different phenomena, although they do perhaps have parallels, although they happen at different soul ages. The Great Awakenings are more likely with child souls and the SJW with maturing souls, just out of the soul’s equivalent of the teen years where it is all about that soul and nothing else. The Great Awakenings were more tribal/small town affairs, where the SJW movements need very large city/civilizational movements. To put it another way, the Great Awakenings were where large numbers understood and turned to the “God of our Fathers.” The SJW movements are much more cynical affairs. While there might be some true believers, there is much more WIIFM, or more accurately, “How does my group get ours?”
And, this is at least the fourth, possibly the sixth, go-round of the SJW type movement in America, with more cynicism at the top each time. Last time, in the 1960’s, we had the Ralph Naders and Saul Alinskys. This time we have the Rachel Dolezals.