The following article is excerpted from a larger piece published in 2021. Its relevance for today is the fact that many countries are struggling to assimilate Muslim immigrants. Dr. Remi Brague provides critical insight on the issue.
France has the largest Muslim population in Western Europe. 8 to 10% of its population is Islamic. It has also endured the most terrorist attacks of any EU nation. 85 attacks have been committed on its soil between 1979 and April 2024. At least 334 people were killed in these attacks. The period of 2013-April 2024 was the deadliest with 53 attacks and 294 deaths.
Some of the recent killings were quite brutal, with two victims being beheaded. One of the victims was Samuel Paty, who taught his middle school class about the breadth of France’s freedom of expression by showing them a caricature of Islam’s founder, Mohammad. A few days later on October 16, 2020, as Paty departed the school where he taught, College du Bois d’Aulne, a radicalized Chechen teenager beheaded him.
Dr. Remi Brague, emeritus professor of medieval and Arabic philosophy at the University of Paris I, believes many people do not understand fundamental issues about Islam. He sees a key aspect of Islam that, if understood, would greatly aid the citizenry and policymakers: Islam is more of a civilization entering into another civilization.
“More often than not, we reduce Islam to the beliefs and behaviors of the people who claim to be Muslims, or who are supposed to be so. Hence a sociological and/or psychological approach fills the columns of our newspapers. The majority of our ‘analysts’ simply don’t take religious issues seriously. They haven’t yet recovered from their Marxist-Leninist hangover and still consider that religions are hardly more than ‘superstructures’ covering up the economic ‘infrastructure’ from which they emanate.”
Dr. Brague continued, “As a consequence, our intellectuals imagine that they understand terrorists better than the terrorists themselves do. The latter may slit the throat of priests or of people praying in a church, shouting ‘Allahu akbar’; they may pick Coptic Christians out of their Egyptian prisoners and kill them. Never mind, many among our intellectuals and journalists react [thusly]: ‘No, no, nothing to do with religion! This is only the expression of social problems, etc.’ Taking Islam seriously means taking its theology seriously. The way in which you conceive of God and of His relationship to His creatures weighs upon your whole worldview.”
The importance of worldview cannot be overstated. The Christian worldview was the driving force of the development of religious freedom in the West. Seeing that France has forsaken its Christian heritage and chosen secularism, I asked Dr. Brague if a void now exists in France’s political philosophy. In 1905, the state said no to both the presence and the counsel of Christianity in the halls of Parliament. Are there tools in the tenets of Christianity that might help France build better relations with the French Muslim community?
“Strangely, the break was between the church and the state, not between the church and civil society. The people remained largely evangelized, baptized, etc. ‘til the ’60s, when the gap enlarged. Unfortunately, many polls show that it is still growing larger.
“Moreover, a separation can be understood in two meanings at least: when you tear asunder a sheet of paper, both halves are separated; when married people get a divorce, they are separated. Church and state were separated in this second way only. They never constituted a single unity. Their ‘separation’ simply meant that two independent institutions that had cooperated ceased to do. Now, the independent existence of the two institutions should not be taken for granted. It hardly existed in the Greek cities, in the Roman republic.
“Christian tenets may have a social effect as long as they are shared by a majority of people, crossing the social divides. On this point, they do no better than the tenets of other religions. Yet, this is not what they are meant to do. What they are first and foremost is true, not useful, not subservient to any political or social goal.”
While Christianity should not be used pragmatically, Dr. Brague argues, its polar opposite, secularism, is a pragmatic tool the powerful wield. In the U.S., it is being used to silence religious speech and dissenting opinions, but in France, President Macron esteems secularism as the political diamond of the Republic. “We will defend the freedom that you taught so well, and we will strongly proclaim the concept of laïcité,” he declared in his tribute to Samuel Paty. (In France, laïcité expresses the state of being free from the influence of religion.) Dr. Brague sees two faults with laïcité: (1) it cannot carry the weight French society has placed on its shoulders, and (2) in a civil society, it has to defend blasphemous speech.
“I fear that our laïcité [is] mistaken for a kind of secularism, the sacred cow of our times. Such merely negative ideas are not a match against militants of all ilk, including the Islamic kind. Freedom of speech is an excellent thing, and it deserves to be defended and, at least, protected by the law. This includes the refusal of any law against ‘blasphemy’—a rather vague notion, by the way. But what, if freedom of speech includes the right to slander and vilify?” Dr. Brague said.
Early on, Muslims were temporary migrants from countries such as Algeria, Morocco, and Turkey. Because of their temporary status, France outsourced the oversight of the migrants’ practice of Islam to the countries they came from. The temporary status became permanent after the 1973 oil crisis. Fearing they would not be allowed to return to France if they left, Muslim migrants brought their families to the Republic to live permanently.
Since 2018, Macron has been striving to do more to integrate Muslims into French society. He has talked about creating a role for a mediator who would work on behalf of French Muslims with the government toward greater assimilation. (Such a mediator was formed in 2022, the Forum of Islam in France.) He would like to see the government step up and relieve foreign nations (Morocco, Turkey, Algeria, and others) of their oversight and financing of the majority of Islamic activities in France. It is through this arrangement that Islamic extremism has been creeping in since the ’80s. As one commentator put it, Macron is now seeking to transform the “Islam in France” into an “Islam of France.”
In this face off between secularism and religious freedom, can one be prioritized more without the other being noticeably diminished? Brague believes freedom of religion can be misapplied to all practices of a religion that are not truly religious in nature.
“Putting all so-called ‘religions’ on the same level is already misleading, not to say shocking. The worst parallel is the one which is too often drawn between the situation of Jews in the ’30s and the situation of Muslims in the present day. Did Jews, in the ’30s, assault and kill priests or policemen?
“Is the freedom which has to be curtailed really ‘religious’ in nature? Nobody forbids praying, fasting, etc. What is limited is the way in which social pressure compels people to do as if they prayed or to fast even if they don’t want [to], or wearing some clothes, etc. To stick to the last example, suppose a woman is placed in front of the choice: either putting on a veil or being considered as a whore whom one can harass, and even rape if one feels like it. Is her choice in favor of the veil an expression of ‘religious freedom’?” Brague contended.
While many are focused on the violent acts perpetrated by Islamists, Dr. Brague sees another danger simmering below the public’s awareness.
“Some French Muslims (how many exactly, who knows?) say they ‘understand’ extremist factions. Other ones observe that the menace of terrorist attacks is enough to exert a soft pressure on French authorities so that they become more compliant with the demands of ‘moderate’ Muslims: special diet in school canteens (no pork), building new mosques, some of them huge, bowdlerizing high school courses on biology (no Darwin) and history (no Shoah), etc. This kind of soft pressure might prove in the long run more detrimental to our culture than terrorism, which has the great drawback of being visible, hence, of awaking reactions of defense,” Dr. Brague said.
The desire of certain Muslims to change French culture is an indicator that assimilation (or integration, as French politicians prefer to term it) is a challenging project.
Remi Brague explained, “The trouble with Islam is that it is not merely a ‘religion,’ i.e. a system of cult, consisting of religious practices like prayer, fasting, pilgrimage, etc. which are present in many religions, including Christianity. Islam is a legal system which, in principle at least, can tell the believer what he/she has to do in any circumstance of everyday life. The same could be said with Judaism, the difference being that the 613 commands of Jewish Law hold good for Jews only, non-Jews having to put up with the seven commands given to Noah, whereas Islamic Law should be obeyed by each and every human being. Islam kind of combines Christian universalism (which is not legal) and Jewish legalism (which is not universal).”
Furthermore, Muslims are told that “the West (which they, more often than not, mistake for Christendom) is rotten to the core and they should carefully avoid assimilation, organizing into self-chosen ghettos, and rather wait ’til the fruit should fall.”
Salafism, a school of Islam present in France, encourages the isolating ghettos Dr. Brague referenced. It advocates Muslims separate socially and culturally from the community. And some of the most radical imams in France are not foreign, but Salafist, French imams, according to Bernard Godard, former head of the Central Office of Worship [advisor regarding Islam] to the Interior Ministry. President Macron has proposed that imams be trained regarding the cultural values of France. But this would mean the government would be involved in the shaping of a religion. Plus, it would not address the current reality: radicalization is mostly taking place in places other than mosques.
Radicalization is taking place online and in prisons where hardline, Salafist materials are readily available. In particular, this is true for those who committed the massacres in Paris and Nice who were in prison for non-terrorist activity and were radicalized. “The idea that if all of the imams in France embrace a moderate Islam there will be no more terrorism is ridiculous and irrelevant,” said Olivier Roy, an Islamic scholar at the European University Institute in Florence.
For French Christians, Dr. Brague sees a clear pathway for them to follow to make an impact and secure the French people. For centuries, Muslims’ impression of Christianity has been significantly dismal. He stated these “legends about Christianity” need to be dispelled and then the Gospel needs to be “preached to them” so that they, like many other Gentiles, might believe and be grafted onto the Living Root. Assimilation accomplished more by changed minds, and perhaps transformed hearts, and less by the stroke of the legislature’s pen.
***
For relevance and length, this article has been edited. It was originally published by Providence.
Leave a Reply