Since the Paris attacks of 2015 until now, “the logic of suspicion has become the compass of the French state” towards the Islamic faith, and it has gradually turned towards managing Islam in an increasingly authoritarian manner, manifested in prolonged states of emergency and the law against “separatism”, to witness an unprecedented decline in public and religious freedoms, which caused It caused a form of despair among the more moderate or liberal fringes of Islam in France.
With this paragraph, the French Mediapart website paved the way for an interview with House Sniger, a specialist in political Islam, drawing it from his book entitled "The Authoritarian Republic... Islam of France and the Delusions of the Republicans", in which he talks about the way in which the French state has gradually slipped towards strict security and administration. of Islam in France since 2015.
In his interview with Lucy Delaporte, a lecturer at the Faculty of Political Sciences in Lyon, he said that he felt uncomfortable when the government authorities began to address the issue of extremism to try to understand its motives, because they put the different and diverse Islamic religious behaviors under the vague concept of extremism, and they even considered changing habits. Eating, stopping listening to music, mixed sports and girls' revealing clothing are "alarming signs".
The logic of doubt
Thus, the logic of doubt began to be implanted in the state apparatus - as the lecturer says - bearing in mind that the state needs to establish a permanent dialogue with religions in general and Islam in particular, whether it is related to moral issues or the practical regulation of some religious manifestations.
However, dialogue with the Islamic faith after the wave of attacks in the 1990s knew more security language, before witnessing a qualitative shift in 2015, when we moved from observing and controlling the external behavior of Muslims, to questioning strict and conservative Islamic doctrines and practices, which was embodied in the law August 24, 2021.
Perhaps the shift from secularism understood as a “principle” to secularism that gradually changed under the pressure of a number of opinion leaders, to a “value”, which generated trouble for many Muslims - according to the specialist - so that secularism turns into an official legal framework that they adhere to to a large extent. into a moral tool, and a tool for discipline of body and mind.
The writer drew attention to the media's focus after 2015, on many opinion polls that show that a certain percentage of Muslims believe that God's law is higher than the law of men, without noting that this does not contradict strictly respecting and adhering to human law.
This anxiety and tension from apparent Islam may be related to a form of shock or fear, some of which are structural and others circumstantial, especially since France has long believed that secularization was an important achievement, with the loss of the social influence of religion and its relative withdrawal from the public sphere.
The Iranian Islamic Revolution in 1979, the emergence of the Islamic Salvation Front in Algeria in the 1980s, and Khomeini’s bloodshed of the writer Salman Rushdie, which coincided with the emergence of the first veil in France, constituted many factors of subversion to an increasingly visible Islam, and it is seen through these events as calling for Distrust.
Thus - as the author says - the veil was equated with the decline of women's acquired rights, and the Islamic sabotage directed from the outside or from the inside by agents, so that the idea of rigor expressed by the veil becomes antithetical to "living together" and "undesirable" and "not compatible with civilization." In the words of former Minister Jean-Michel Blanquer and President Emmanuel Macron.
On this basis, former minister Jean-Pierre Schevenman, in his proposed "Charter of Secular Appreciation", calls for acceptance of "discreet" and "invisible" Muslims, who strip themselves of their religious symbols in public places, but he forgot - according to the author - that this is "concealment". In a system that wants to be pluralistic, it is only an option, not an obligation.
misunderstanding
One cannot fail to notice a misunderstanding of the Islamic truth among some representatives of the state, which is manifested in a crude distinction between a secular or liberal Islam that is supposed to be good, and the Islam of religious practice that is characterized as fanatical, conservative, and anti-knowledge, and its example - according to House Sniger - is the Charter of Principles of Islam in France. Prepared by the Elysee in 2020 and approved by the dissolved French Council of the Islamic Religion, with its content full of prejudices.
And it appears - according to the writer - that the deep distrust that seized the state is fueled by the analyzes of some "experts" on Islam, and they contribute to fueling this logic of suspicion by placing an academic stamp on it.
Regarding the idea that this logic of doubt gradually affects all Muslims, because the circle of acceptable religiosity continues to shrink in public agencies, the political scientist explained that this shift is embodied in the logic of a specific classification, as the classification of Muslims as "separatists" and "moderates" and " Republicans,” “Muslim Brothers,” “Salafis,” “secularists,” and “liberals,” refers to the inability to comprehend the Islamic religious phenomenon in its complexity and in the variety of nuances that define it.
The word “Islamist”, for example, in the discourse of social actors means “extremist”, and even accomplices to violence and terrorism, and one should not speak with an “Islamist” or with “my brothers”, and this has led to the closure of bank accounts, including the accounts of Muslim actors "Ordinary," says the author.
House Sniger concluded that he felt among some Muslim leaders or dignitaries he met a kind of moral discontent among the "moderates", after suspicion in the fringes of the spectrum of Islam shifted to its less suspicious parts, which led to a breach of the social contract between them and the state and society.