French Muslims fear 'state within state'

[Tony]

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/europe/3482641.stm ...full article


Young French Muslims in the Lyon suburb of Les Minguettes - which 20 years ago saw angry protest marches as Muslims fought for full French nationality - are again angry at what they see as continued exclusion.

Already frustrated by poverty and what they perceive to be discrimination, their anger has been further increased by the French Parliament's passing of a law banning headscarves and other religious symbols from schools.

Some have even said that there is a risk French Muslims may choose to live in their own "state within a state".



Any French posters wish to comment on this?

[ceo_esq]

I’m not a native of France, but I’ve spent enough time there as an immigrant to recognize that there is a significant portion (albeit still a minority within a minority) of France’s Muslim population that has failed to be integrated into the mainstream. Some of the blame for this failure lies with the French government and mainstream culture themselves, but it would be unfair to accuse France of not having employed a number of strategies in an effort to harmonize its various social elements. The greater difficulty arises from the nature of Islam itself.

The Times of London once wrote during the Salman Rushdie affair: "Islam does not know how to exist as a minority culture. For it is not just a set of private, individual principles and beliefs. Islam is a social creed above all, a radically different way of organizing society as a whole." While this view of Islam is not shared by all European Muslims, I think it’s nonetheless true in a general sense - and as a result, there will always be a significant minority among Muslims living in secular or largely non-Muslim societies who cannot successfully reconcile their religious and civic identities.

During the slow building-up period to the Iraq war, I was a frequent observer at French anti-war rallies. Many of these events degenerated into Arab-dominated expressions of Muslim identity and rage, where American and Israeli flags were publicly burned just as you might expect to see on the streets of Iran or Syria. Once a I heard young Arab Frenchman, in the process of being arrested, shout to the police that Islam would carry the jihad to France and "bring down your Eiffel Tower."

Your Eiffel Tower. This young man carried a French passport and in all likelihood had been born not far from Paris, but he didn't consider it his Eiffel Tower. Such people, and there are many of them in France, are unbelievably alienated from their own civic society. Their sense of group identity and loyalty is often first to their religion, second to the Arab country (usually North African) from which their parents or even their grandparents emigrated, and last and least to the French nation and culture.

I think what it would mean for French Muslims to exist in a "state within a state" is that the most inflexible and alienated part of the Muslim population would further retreat from participation in the mainstream civic life of the country, relying more and more on the community of their peers (and less and less on the government) to provide things like education, social services and the like, and becoming further entrenched in the "us versus them" mentality I've observed. In my view, this would be a terrible thing for all concerned. It could happen, though - and we may already be witnessing the beginning of the end.

[bignickel]

Good post Ceo_esq. Where were you when the "Are the French nuts?" thread was on the front page? Your post perfectly encapculates the issue.

[zenith-nadir]

If living in France is so horrible for some of these people why do they continue to live there? Why don't they move away?

Why does France have to conform to them? Why can't they conform to the customs and culture of a country they have chosen to live in?

That for me is the real issue.