[Sigaba]

FWIW, The Economist explored the issue of multiculturalism in France in a 2004 article available here.

A graphic showing polling results is available here.

Integrating minorities

The war of the headscarves
Feb 5th 2004 | EVRY
From The Economist print edition

France and Britain have radically different approaches to ethnic and religious diversity. Each can learn from the other

BY THE grassy banks of the Seine, under a vast white marquee the size of a football pitch, 4,000 sheep are bleating. In the muddy field outside, a makeshift sign has been nailed to a wooden post: “Aid-el-Kebir”. This middling town south of Paris, home to some 15,000 Muslims (nearly a third of its population), is preparing for the Islamic festival of Eid.

The sheep-slaughter, which used to take place in living rooms, has been highly organised. Each family identifies and tags its own sheep. An official Muslim sacrificateur dispatches it, and each family then takes its animal home for the feast. In a country that is battling to protect the separation of religion and state, the entire event has been run by the town hall. “The French must understand that France is changing,” says a local official. “Islam has its place here now.”

Evry is particularly ethnically diverse. Some 40 different creeds, colours, faiths or tongues crowd into the town's rain-streaked tower-blocks. Croissants are on sale at the local boulangerie, mint tea and foufou at the halal butcher, and the “Afro-Coiffure” has skin-whitening cream and hair extensions on special offer. In the local paper, death announcements speak of “Pierre” and “Charles”; the births are of “Moussa” and “Fatih”. Half the town's housing is publicly owned, over three times the French average. Joblessness is high, particularly among young men. “It's not the Bronx,” suggests an official, but some estates “are a bit like a ghetto.”

While the French remain mesmerised by the proposed ban on the Muslim headscarf in state schools, other matters have preoccupied Evry. Last year, for instance, the mayor kicked up a fuss when the Muslim managers of a local Franprix supermarket stopped selling alcohol and pork. Local French shoppers, he argued, could not do without their saucisson and red wine. In vain: the supermarket is now another halal butcher.

In general, however, Evry wears multi-culturalism with confidence. It hosts evenings of Algerian poetry or Malian music. It is home to the biggest mosque in France. A multicultural team of youth workers—“Hamid, Bachir, Souleymane, Claire and Pétroline”—is on hand to get jobless young people back to work, with the help of “positive discrimination”. And ritual slaughter is now an official activity.

Evry illustrates clearly the issues troubling France in dealing with ethnic diversity. At root are difficult questions of identity, social mobility and religious expression. In particular, Islam is challenging the strict form of secularism, known as laïcité, which marks France out from most other western democracies. Under this doctrine, equality before the law of all citizens, regardless of their private beliefs, is supposed to be guaranteed by barring religion from the public arena. Even the “So help me God” intoned by incoming American presidents would be unthinkable in France.

A ban unveiled

Under the version of history which all French schools teach, the rigorously secular character of the state is a hard-won victory against the dark forces of obscurantism, anti-Semitism and authoritarian Catholicism which previously held sway. In theory, the involvement of Evry town hall in sheep-slaughter flies in the face of secularist principle. In practice, it shows increasing pragmatism and accommodation in ordinary French life.

At national level, however, debate has been reduced to a single issue: President Jacques Chirac's proposed ban on the wearing of the Islamic headscarf and other “conspicuous” religious symbols in state schools. Next week parliament will vote on the new law, which enjoys wide cross-party support. After that, further laws to protect secularism in public hospitals and public offices are expected.

Outside France the headscarf ban has caused bafflement and indignation, and not only in the Arab world. Yet French support for the ban remains strong (see chart), and unites unlikely bedfellows. Secularists join ranks with feminists, who are dismayed that daughters now choose to wear the veil their mothers battled to discard. Politically, the ban is seen as a way to take support from the far-right National Front.

It is also regarded as a message to fundamentalist Islamists, whose certainties are seducing disaffected young French Muslims. The government stresses that its new law refers to all religions, but nobody is fooled. How many schoolchildren turn up to class wearing crucifixes of a “manifestly excessive dimension”? “It's not the crucifix or the kippa that is targeted,” insists Khalil Merroun, the rector of the Evry mosque, “but Islam.”

Many French people feel deeply uncomfortable about defiant, assertive Islam. France, after all, is home to Europe's biggest Muslim population (outside Turkey): some 5m, next to 3m in Germany and 1.5m in Britain. The country has about 1,600 mosques or prayer halls. Many young French Muslims find no difficulty in balancing private faith with French secularism. But an increasingly vocal minority, many of whom speak no Arabic and freely mix Nike trainers with the hijab, finds such compromise unacceptable.

This ban is widely seen as a test of what obligations modern France is willing to, or can, impose on its ethnically and ideologically diverse citizens. Either it can attempt a compromise, and allow Islam and other ethnic groups and religions a public voice, on condition that they at least pay lip-service to the secular republic. This, crudely, is the position of Nicolas Sarkozy, the outspoken interior minister, who has set up an official body, the French Council of the Muslim Faith, to that end. Or France can continue to try to defend its integrationist tradition and refuse compromise, as Mr Chirac is trying to do with the ban.

For those defending the existing model, the fear is that giving in to one demand will lead to many more. If, for religious reasons, women are allowed separate hours in municipal swimming pools, will the country end up separating whites and blacks? On this argument, there seems nothing to stop France sliding towards communautarisme, a dreaded state of affairs in which ethnic or religious groups could freely segregate themselves and form “states within a state” with their own rules and values. “I refuse to take France in that direction,” Mr Chirac said when announcing the ban. Not least because it leads, in French minds, to Britain's laisser-faire multiculturalism.

Meanwhile, in Finsbury Park

For French observers, the dire consequences of British sloppiness are clear to see in Finsbury Park, an edgy area of north London. There, the local mosque is boarded up with corrugated iron. The storming of the mosque by armed police a year ago, the arrest of seven men suspected of terrorism and the deportation order for its former imam, Abu Hamza al-Masri, confirmed every French fear about Britain's multiculturalism. “I told you so,” was the reaction across the Channel.

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