The World of Religions, September-October 2009 —
France is the European country with the largest Muslim population. However, the rapid development of Islam in the land of Pascal and Descartes over the past few decades has raised fears and questions. Let's not even mention the fantastical discourse of the far right, which attempts to fuel these fears by prophesying an upheaval in French society under the "pressure of a religion destined to become the majority." More seriously, some concerns are entirely legitimate: how can we reconcile our secular tradition, which relegates religion to the private sphere, with new religious demands specific to schools, hospitals, and public places? How can we reconcile our vision of an emancipated woman with the rise of a religion with strong identity symbols, such as the famous headscarf—not to mention the full-face veil—which evoke for us the submission of women to male power? There is indeed a cultural clash and a conflict of values that it would be dangerous to deny. But questioning, or making criticisms, does not necessarily mean transmitting prejudices and stigmatizing in a defensive attitude, driven by fear of the other and their difference. This is why Le Monde des Religions wanted to devote a large, exceptional 36-page dossier to French Muslims and the question of Islam in France. This question has been posed concretely for two centuries with the arrival of the first emigrants and has even been rooted in our imagination for more than twelve centuries with the wars against the Saracens and the famous Battle of Poitiers. It is therefore necessary to take a historical look at the question to better appreciate the fears, prejudices and value judgments that we make about the religion of Mohammed (and not
"Muhammad" , as the media write, without knowing that it is a Turkish-speaking name for the Prophet inherited from the fight against the Ottoman Empire). We then attempted to explore the galaxy of French Muslims through reports on five large, very diverse (and not exclusive) groups: former Algerian immigrants who came to work in France from 1945; young French Muslims who put their religious identity at the forefront; those who, while assuming a Muslim identity, intend first to examine it through the sieve of critical reason and humanist values inherited from the Enlightenment; those who have distanced themselves from Islam as a religion; and finally those who are in the fundamentalist Salafist movement. This mosaic of identities reveals the extreme complexity of a highly emotional and politically very sensitive issue. to the point that the public authorities refuse to use the
religious and ethnic affiliations for censuses, which would allow us to better understand French Muslims and know their number. We therefore thought it would be useful to close this issue with articles analyzing the relationship between Islam and the Republic, or the question of "Islamophobia," and to give a voice to several academics with a detached view.
Islam is the second largest religion in humanity in terms of the number of followers after Christianity. It is also the second largest religion in France, far behind Catholicism, but far ahead of Protestantism, Judaism, and Buddhism. Whatever one's opinion of this religion, it is a fact. One of the greatest challenges facing our society is to work towards the best possible harmonization of Islam with French cultural and political tradition. This cannot be achieved, for Muslims and non-Muslims alike, in a climate of ignorance, mistrust, or aggression...