The Republic Unsettled: Muslim French and the Contradictions of Secularism

by Mayanthi L. Fernando

In 1989 three Muslim schoolgirls from a Paris suburb refused to remove their Islamic headscarves in class. The headscarf crisis signaled an Islamic revival among the children of North African immigrants; it also ignited an ongoing debate about the place of Muslims within the secular nation-state. Based on ten years of ethnographic research, The Republic Unsettled alternates between an analysis of Muslim French religiosity and the contradictions of French secularism that this emergent religiosity precipitated. Mayanthi L. Fernando explores how Muslim French draw on both Islamic and secular-republican traditions to create novel modes of ethical and political life, reconfiguring those traditions to imagine a new future for France. She also examines how the political discourses, institutions, and laws that constitute French secularism regulate Islam, transforming the Islamic tradition and what it means to be Muslim. Fernando traces how long-standing tensions within secularism and republican citizenship are displaced onto France's Muslims, who, as a result, are rendered illegitimate as political citizens and moral subjects. She argues, ultimately, that the Muslim question is as much about secularism as it is about Islam.

Genres: Islam, Politics, Anthropology, Religion, Nonfiction, History, Philosophy

328 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2014

Reviews

[Sara Salem · Rating 5 out of 5]

Such a brilliant book on Muslims in France and the ways in which French secularism is white, exclusionary and undemocratic, and how Muslims and "Muslim intolerance" have been used time and again in Europe to disguise this fact.

[Julian Olbinski · Rating 5 out of 5]

Brilliant book. It opened my eyes to what the "veil ban" in France really meant, and how much the ban itself - and the orientalist talking points shared by the right and left in support of it - call into question just how universalist and tolerant Europe really is.

[Rifat Islam · Rating 4 out of 5]

Interesting work that is still amazingly relevant. The title belies the fact that what she calls "Muslim French" is a small group of patriotic French Muslims who wear both identities proudly, or as one interviewee puts, the right to "indifference" rather than the right of difference, a line which plays into the central case in her book. Fernando shows how not only French secularism is inchoate but the concept of secularism itself. There is a decent amount of theory but I primarily enjoyed the ethnographic field surveys of early 2000s France and the heated conversations surrounding Islam and secularism.

[graceofgod · Rating 4 out of 5]

While I really enjoyed the book, what bothered me was what seemed to me (at least) as the inconsistencies in the author's position towards the end of the book. While she rightly critiques the way that secular Muslim's are used by the French public sphere as tools of exclusion, she also (at least to me) does the exact thing with those Muslim students she interviewed. Insofar as she seems to posit these people as the "ideal postmodern subjects." This is done by explicitly pointing out the "instability" of their identity. In short, I feel as if the author did not treat the question of those religious and non-secular subjects who do not share the instability that some Muslim French do with their identity (but rather act as convicted religious subjects), adequality enough.

That being said. I think the book is a valuable resource for both understanding and analyzing the contradictions that spring from secular-republicanism.

[versarbre · Rating 4 out of 5]

Well-written contemporary anthropological treatises engaging with public debate and agenda-setting. It will be interesting to keep track of these group of scholars who try to reconcile the Muslim standing with the early Enlightenment/Republican ideal in Europe and particularly France.