Looking at Muslims: the visibility of Islam in contemporary French cinema

ABSTRACT

Tarr analyses the representation of Islam in five feature films made since 2006 that centre on the changing identities of Muslims in contemporary France. She locates the films within the context of the rise in Islamophobia in France following 9/11 and anxieties about immigration and terrorism, but also in relation to France's troubled postcolonial history and French republican ideology. In particular, the French notion of laïcité (secularism) has given rise to active hostility to any public expression of religious or cultural difference, particularly on the part of Muslims. Cinematic representations of Muslims, and particularly of the children of migrants from the Maghreb, have, therefore, since the mid-1980s, been treated with caution in order not to alienate mainstream Franco-French audiences and to facilitate the second generation's integration into French society. However, the five feature films addressed here—two mainstream popular comedies, Mauvaise foi/Bad Faith (2006) and L'Italien/The Italian (2010), and three independent, low budget, auteur-led, realist films, Dans la vie/Two Ladies (2008), Dernier maquis (2008) and La Désintégration/Disintegration (2012)—offer new narratives that challenge fears of Islam by foregrounding the protagonists' negotiation of their Muslim identities in a French context and, by implication, argue for the integration of Islam as a legitimate referent of French identity. However, their construction of Islam does not extend to positive representations of young veiled women, and they thus still risk confirming the oppressive majority view that certain practices associated with Islam, such as the wearing of the veil, are incompatible with the secularism of the French Republic.     

Accommodating Islam and the Utility of National Models: The German Case

This article questions the claim that the way German governments have responded to Muslim demands for accommodating Islam fits a German national model. The empirical focus is on Islamic religious instruction in five German Länder. The evidence presented shows that there is not one but several German models. Länder with Christian Democratic dominance were more supportive of confessional religious instruction than Länder where the left was stronger. At the same time Christian Democrats initially were more reluctant to extend the privilege of religious instruction to Muslim groups. In Länder where Article 7 III of the German constitution applied, corporatist hurdles were an obstacle for Muslim groups, but this was less the case in Berlin. Religion–state institutions are important for understanding how European countries have dealt with the growing presence of Islam, but it is equally important to understand the politically contested nature of these institutions.     

Muslim Diaspora in Western Europe: The Islamic Headscarf ( Hijab ), the Media and Muslims' Integration in France

The hijab , an Arabic word that is related to Islamic proper dressing, has become a buzzword in contemporary French popular discourse. In the Islamic tradition, both men and women are required to dress modestly. Women traditionally cover their hair, a practice called hijab. This hijab (Islamic scarf) seems to have created a controversy in France in recent years, and the French media have exploited the matter even further. Even scholars seem to have abstracted the cultural/ religious symbol from its proper context. The controversy of the hijab in France therefore has actually revealed more about the character of the French society/ mentality than about the Muslim community. I intend to use the controversy over the hijab to question and challenge the conventional reading of the integration of the Muslim Maghrebin people into secular French society. I will explore the concept of integration and the way this integration functioned as a source of privilege as well as a source of discrimination. I will use the debate over the hijab to further investigate the interplay of religion, immigration and citizenship in France.     

Towards Autogestion in socialist France? The impact of industrial relations reform

Industrial relations reform (the ‘Auroux laws') represented a test case of the French Socialists’ intentions to bring about workers’ self‐management (autogestion). This article examines (1) the laws’ major provisions, (2) reactions by employer and worker groups, and (3) primary impacts of the reforms. The analysis argues that the Auroux laws do not challenge employers’ authority, and thus do not embody the principles of autogestion; rather, the laws attempt to modernise labour‐management relations by encouraging bargaining and providing workers a stronger institutional voice. The article concludes by explaining why the Socialists, once in power, abandoned autogestion as a governing principle.     

Muslim feminism: Citizenship in the shelter of corporatist Islam 1

It appears that Muslim feminists the world over are struggling against both Islamic patriarchy and authoritarian governments that are unwilling or unable to grant women social equality. Yet, Malaysia, a developing country in Southeast Asia, seems to be an exception. There, Islam is a patchwork of the most liberal as well as radical strands of Islam, a collage that is represented in cities by Muslim women in full purdah mingling with others in body‐conscious dresses and jeans. This contrast is reflected in the struggle between a small group of feminists called Sisters in Islam and resurgent ulamas over issues of marriage, domesticity, and public life. Feminist groups seek not only to express a female voice in Islam but also to renegotiate a wide range of issues pertaining to Islamic kinship codes, male‐female relations, and citizenship. This paper will argue that local feminism is shaped by the wider structure of state power as the national elite seeks to position itself in relation to global capital.     

Tariq Ramadan and the Quest for a Moderate Islam

Tariq Ramadan calls himself a bridge builder between Muslims and European culture, but contradictions in his theology prevent him from fulfilling this role. He is an Islamic intellectual who espouses democracy and pluralism, yet he believes that shari‘a law is universal. He exhorts his European followers to refrain from anti-Semitic violence, yet he cites as an authority Sheikh Yusuf al-Qaradawi, who is an apologist for Palestinian suicide bombers. He calls for Muslims to be full participants in Western civic societies, yet he calls on Muslims to “resist” the neo-liberal economic order that forms the basis of Western society. Ramadan has made alliances with left wing politicians and academics in France, Britain, the Netherlands, and the United States, but he has a pattern of disappointing and frustrating his leftist allies. In the wake of terrorist attacks in Britain and the Netherlands, the British and Dutch governments called upon Ramadan to support peaceable brands of Islam in these traumatized countries. These efforts failed because Ramadan’s most important constituency has always been “the Muslim street,” and this makes it difficult for him to embrace liberal principles.     

Islam,immigration and group recognition 1

Islam generally, and Muslim immigrant communities in particular, have recently been targeted for criticism by Western academics and in popular Western media. This article explores the substance of these criticisms and weighs them against the beliefs and practices of Muslim immigrants in Western liberal democracies. The article addresses three distinct questions. First, what sorts of cultural adaptations is it reasonable for liberal democratic states and societies to expect immigrants to make, and what kinds of adaptation is it unreasonable to demand? Second, how vulnerable are Islamic beliefs and practices to the criticisms commonly leveled against them in the name of liberal democracy and gender equality? Finally, how strong are the parallels between the claims for political recognition and accommodation that issue from immigrant cultural communities and the claims for recognition and inclusion that issue from groups that have historically been marginalized within liberal democratic societies? Although the authors do not dismiss the notion that there may be tensions between the core commitments of liberal democratic societies and some Islamic practices, they conclude that these tensions are exaggerated by Western writers. Muslim communities generally pose no greater challenge to liberal societies than do other religious and immigrant communities. Western writers should be chary of rejecting their claims to toleration and accommodation too swiftly.     

Decentralising France: How the socialists discovered pluralism

Reversing European trends toward the consolidation of local government and the imposition of stronger central controls, the French Socialist government undertook a major legislative programme to restructure French local government. This experience is examined in the light of early Socialist commitment to municipal Socialism and their return to power in the Fifth Republic using their local power base. Local reform posed three dilemmas for the Socialists: how to avoid turning local government over to the extreme left or autogestion forces in the party; how to meet the economic demands of locally elected officials without losing fiscal and financial control; and how to enhance decision‐making powers of elected officials at all three levels (municipal, département and region) while also achieving managerial reforms. Their pluralist response was a pragmatic blend of political, economic and budgetary concessions. Participation was enhanced by vigorous efforts to revive voluntary associations; contractual arrangements were devised to put economic programmes for unemployed youth, the elderly and industrial assistance more squarely in local hands; and new managerial methods were coupled to limits on prefectoral powers and budgetary initiatives. The reforms offer important new opportunities for the growth of local government while confirming Socialist dedication to republican ideals.     

Communism,federalism and Islam

Andreas Kappeler, Gerhard Simon and Georg Brunner (eds.), Muslim Communities Re‐emerge. Historical Perspectives on Nationality, Politics and Opposition in the Former Soviet Union and Yugoslavia, trans, from the German and French by Caroline Sawyer, English edn. ed. Edward Allworth. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1994. xiv+365pp. Append. Ind. Tables. £23.50 pbk.     

Islam and democracy: a response

A debate has emerged whether countries with Muslim majorities are intrinsically more likely to be autocratic. Recent studies have traced this to the allegedly repressive nature of Islam. This article replicates the most recent study on this topic, published in Public Choice (Potrafke in Public Choice 151:185–192, 2012), and demonstrates that the effect is not robust to a number of sensible alterations to the statistical specification. The effect between Islam and democracy is spurious. There is no causal relationship between Islam and democracy.     

The discourse of 19th-century French liberal socialism

ABSTRACT

This article analyses late 19th-century French liberal socialist syntheses of liberty and equality, building on the existing body of literature on liberal socialism to illustrate the influence of the non-Marxist left on its development through a focus on the work of the Radical, Célestin Bouglé, and the Socialists, Benoît Malon and Charles Andler. The analysis of these thinkers demonstrates the ideological similarities of liberal socialisms of thinkers hailing from both the non-Marxist left and the new liberalism. A concluding section suggests that liberal socialism offers social democrats and progressive liberals an ideological heritage from which to pose a radical alternative to contemporary forms of neoliberalism.     

Industrial politics in France: Nationalisation under Mitterrand

The first part of this article looks at the reasons why nationalisation featured in the 1981 French Socialist programme, and concludes that while in the abstract it was an issue that encouraged left‐wing unity, the Socialists and the Communists expected very different things from it. The second and third parts look at the implementation of the policy, stressing the continuity with which the Socialists', rather than the Communists', aims have been pursued.     

Social Capital,Islam, and the Arab Spring in the Middle East

To what extent do participatory civil society dynamics, rooted in self-assertive social capital, help explain the Arab Spring uprisings in 2011? How do pro-democratic Arab attitudes matter in promoting elite-challenging collective actions? Does Islam support or hinder elite-challenging, self-assertive social capital? To answer these questions, this study systematically examines the variation in self-assertive (emancipative) social capital in Egypt and Jordan from a comparative perspective. By using emancipative social capital theory, this article embarks on an individual-level quantitative analysis derived from the World Values Survey database to explore the empirical nexus between pro-democratic attitudes, elite-challenging actions, and Islamic values in order to partly explain comparatively high-intensive and persistent uprisings in Egypt and relatively low-intensive and less persistent demonstrations in Jordan. The findings offer critical insights in understanding the social capital dimension of the Arab Spring uprisings in 2011 and contribute new clues about empirical interactions between Islamic resurgence and civil society dynamics in the Muslim world.     

Revealing and concealing: Islamist discourse on human rights

Historically as well as contemporarily, the relationship between religion and democratic pluralism in the Muslim world has been problematic. In the Muslim world, both governments and popular movements are using religious documents (the Qur'an and the hadith) to inspire political and social change. In the process, the fusion of religion and politics that characterizes revivalist Islam has impeded the development of both democracy and religious pluralism. An area of particular concern has been the reluctance of Muslim countries to implement international standards of human rights as defined in the United Nation's Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR). Since the adoption of the UDHR in 1948, there has been disagreement in the Muslim world about the relevance of this document for Islamic countries. The reactions have ranged from an angry rejection of human rights as destructive to Islam to claims that Islamic law guarantees the same rights as those embodied in the United Nation's documents. The two most influential international Islamic statements on Human Rights (the Universal Islamic Declaration on Human Rights and the Cairo Declaration on Human Rights) attempt to reconcile Islamic law and modern norms of human rights. These documents claim that human rights are an inherent part of Islam. Such arguments are cause for concern because since the adoption of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948, documents proposing regional alternatives to international law almost always entail the weakening of international standards. The incorporation of the Cairo Declaration into the UN corpus means that what were once informal, regional obstacles to implementing the protections guaranteed by the UDHR have become formal, regional norms that legitimate Islamist restrictions on rights.     

Classical Islam and Medieval Europe: A Comparison of Political Philosophies and Cultures

There were fundamental differences in political philosophy and culture between Islamic and westem-Christian or European civilization in the period up to c. 1500, notably concerning the nature of the political community, of religious law and of the mode of political discourse. Europe proved open to Greco-Roman influences and thus developed, as Islam did not, a notion of the legitimate secular state.     

From being to nothingness: The extinction of the communist intellectual in France

One of the numerous symptoms of the crisis of French Communism in the 1980s has been its inability to retain the support of intellectuals. The process of intellectual disaffiliation from the PCF was triggered by the failure of the party leadership to accede to internal demands for reform, which included the development of greater democracy and autonomy of intellectual activity in the party, and a loosening of the PCFs ideological and institutional links with the Soviet system. These internal problems were compounded by the decline in the status of Marxism in the French intellectual community, which heralded substantial ideological changes on the left in the 1980s. Spurned by its own intellectuals, and unable to appeal to a wider audience on the left, the PCFs intellectual isolation was complete.     

Testing Islam's Political Advantage: Evidence from Indonesia

Across the Muslim world, Islamic political parties and social organizations have capitalized upon economic grievances to win votes and popular support. But existing research has been unable to disentangle the role of Islamic party ideology from programmatic economic appeals and social services in explaining these parties' popular support. We argue that Islamic party platforms function as informational shortcuts to Muslim voters, and only confer a political advantage when voters are uncertain about parties' economic policies. Using a series of experiments embedded in an original nationwide survey in Indonesia, we find that Islamic parties are systematically more popular than otherwise identical non‐Islamic parties only under cases of economic policy uncertainty. When respondents know economic policy platforms, Islamic parties never have an advantage over non‐Islamic parties. Our findings demonstrate that Islam's political advantage is real, but critically circumscribed by parties' economic platforms and voters' knowledge of them.     

The Catholic Church in Poland on Muslims and Islam

ABSTRACT

The politicization of the increased influx of migrants to Europe in recent years, as well as Islamist terrorist attacks carried out in European cities, have led to a situation in which anti-Muslim sentiments have reached unprecedented levels. It is not only those European countries directly affected by the growth of the Muslim population that register increased generalized negative feelings towards that population, but also those that are home to very small and partially autochthonous Muslim populations, like Poland, which has not served as a transit point or a destination for the increased number of people arriving from Syria and elsewhere to claim asylum in Europe. P?dziwiatr’s article explores the ambiguity of attitudes in the Polish Catholic Church towards Muslims and Islam in these new circumstances. It examines both the Church’s official statements and the opinions of students in Catholic seminaries, which diverge significantly. When the positions of some of these present and future priests are communicated to the public, they contribute to a strengthening of hegemonic representations of Muslims as Others, rather than a deconstruction of them.     

Civil Society,Moderate Islam,and Politics in Indonesia and Malaysia

What role do moderate Islamic organizations play in promoting democratization in Malaysia and Indonesia? What is the difference between large, grassroots organizations and newer more urban-based non-governmental organization (NGOs)? Is one type of organization more effective than the other? This paper looks at the changing dynamics of moderate or progressive Islamic organizations in Malaysia and Indonesia. It examines organizations such as the Liberal Islam Network in Indonesia and Sisters in Islam in Malaysia, as well as others, to try and understand the conflict between moderate or progressive Islamic groups and more conservative Islamic forces and to evaluate the role such moderate organizations play in advocating for greater protection of rights and liberties. The article finds that under moderately open conditions (like in Indonesia after 1998), Islamic NGOs do play an important and constructive role in promoting democracy.     

Europe and Islam: Alarmists,Victimists, and Integration by Law

This article reviews the minefield of Muslim integration in Europe, paying special attention to the legal integration of Islam, which has not yet found the attention that it deserves. In a first step, the article contrasts ‘victimist’ and ‘alarmist’ views on contemporary Muslim integration, both of which are found misleading. Instead, as argued in the second part, significant progress has been made through the legal route. The conclusion provides a reflection on the role of Islam for Europe’s ‘liberal identity’ today.