Alec G.

Hargreaves

French Muslims and the Middle East

French Muslims and the Middle East

Recent jihadist attacks have raised important questions concerning the

relationship between the Muslim population in France and the politics
of the Middle East. This article highlights the importance of perceptual
frames informed by the legacy of colonialism in shaping the experiences of
Muslims in France, most of whom are migrants or descendants of migrants
from former French colonies in North and West Africa. Discontent over
social exclusion in France has fueled identification with the cause of the
Palestinians, stimulating an upsurge in anti-Semitism since the beginning
of the second Intifada, and more recently the emergence of an extremist
fringe that has thrown in its lot with Middle East-based jihadist groups.
Les attentats djihadistes de janvier 2015 Paris ont soulev dimportantes
questions concernant les rapports entre les musulmans de France et les
conflits politiques au Moyen-Orient. Cet article souligne limportance des
squelles du colonialisme dans le vcu des populations musulmanes de
France, qui sont pour la plupart originaires danciennes colonies franaises
au Maghreb et en Afrique sub-saharienne. Leur mcontentement face
lexclusion sociale a suscit une trs forte identification avec la cause
des Palestiniens ainsi quune pousse de lantismitisme depuis le dbut
de la seconde Intifada et, plus rcemment, lmergence dune frange
dextrmistes qui se sont rallis des groupes djihadistes bass au
Moyen-Orient.

In July 2014, against a backdrop of highly charged demonstrations sparked

by Israels latest military incursion into Gaza, President Franois Hollande
declared: Le conflit isralo-palestinien ne peut pas simporter [en France].
The Presidents statement was belied not only by the demonstrations that
were taking place in Paris and other French cities almost literally as he
spoke but also by the fact that these were just the latest in a long series of
instances in which events in the Middle East have ricocheted across France,
especially among the populations of Jewish and Muslim heritage respectively.1 These reverberations have their roots in a long history of French
involvement in predominantly Islamic regions stretching from the Middle
Contemporary French Civilization, vol.40, no.2

doi:10.3828/cfc.2015.14

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East to North and West Africa, large portions of which formed part of the
French colonial empire. Following the dissolution of that empire, France
retained significant interests in those regions and was the target of a number
of attacks in the 1970s and 1980s carried out by terrorists from the Middle
East designed to influence French policy there and/or kill members of the
Jewish population in France. Since the 1990s, new actors have come to
the fore: young men from Muslim immigrant families who have grown
up in France, small but growing numbers of whom have engaged in acts
of terrorist violence within and outside the hexagon linked to the politics
and religions of the Middle East. In January 2015 France suffered its most
murderous terrorist attacks in over half a century, the slaying of 17 people
including Charlie Hebdo journalists, police officers and hostages seized in
a Jewish food store by a trio of young men born in France of immigrant
parents who presented themselves as acting on behalf of Middle East-based
jihadist groups. At a lower level of violence but on a wider scale, displays
of anti-Semitism have risen sharply in France since the beginning of the
second Intifada in Israeli-occupied territories in the fall of 2000. The riots
of 2005, the worst civil disorders seen in France in almost 40 years, were
seen by some as a French Intifada.2
My aim in this article is to try to clarify the nature of the dynamics
at work here. What exactly is the relationship between the population of
Muslim heritage in France and events in the Middle East? In considering
this question, it is important to avoid the dangers of cultural essentialism.
Migrants from predominantly Muslim countries are not all Muslims. Neither
do all those who recognize themselves as Muslims view or practice their
faith in the same way. This is all the more true of their descendants who,
far from passively replicating the beliefs of their parents or grand-parents,
frequently adapt that heritage and in some cases abandon it altogether. This
is not always understood by members of the majority ethnic population,
too many (though not all) of whom are inclined to mechanically equate
persons of Arab appearance with adherence to Muslim beliefs and/or
the pursuit of Islamist politics. The negative connotations often attached
to perceptions of that nature have had the cumulative effect of stigmatizing persons presumed to be Muslim and the spaces in which they are
most visibly concentrated, i.e., socially disadvantaged urban areas that are
euphemistically referred to as les banlieues, les cits, or les quartiers. Majority
ethnic perceptions of this nature have been at least as important as the selfperceptions of Muslims and their descendants in shaping the experiences
of minority ethnic populations within French society. For this reason, the

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237

first section of the analysis that follows seeks to clarify the concepts and
categories within which perceptions of these populations have been framed
and the historical circumstances that have informed them. The second
section examines the importance of the Palestinian cause in the eyes of
Frances postcolonial minorities, most of whom are of Muslim heritage,
and the role of the Second Intifada in focusing attention on this. The final
section considers the rise of self-styled jihadists in France and assesses their
representativeness in relation to the Muslim population as a whole.
Perceptual frames
France has both the largest population of Muslim heritage (generally
estimated at between three and five million) and the largest Jewish minority
(around 500,000600,000) of any west European country.3 Few of those
concerned came to France from the Middle East, i.e., the region stretching
from the eastern edge of the Mediterranean to the Gulf. Although parts
of that region most notably Syria and Lebanon were for a time part of
Frances overseas empire, migrants from those countries are relatively small
in number compared with those originating in other formerly colonized
parts of the Islamic world. Most of the Muslims and Jews living in France
today are migrants or descendants of migrants who came to France from
former French colonies in the Maghreb, i.e., Algeria, Morocco and Tunisia.
Around four fifths of Frances Muslim population is of Maghrebi origin.
Most of the remainder come from former French colonies in sub-Saharan
Africa.4 Ashkenazis from central and eastern Europe accounted for the
vast majority of Jews in France until 1962, when Algerian independence
marked the end of the French colonial empire and important demographic
shifts. Until then, the Maghreb had been home to considerable numbers of
Sephardic Jews, whose forbears had fled from the Iberian peninsula in the
late fifteenth century and resettled in various parts of the Mediterranean
littoral. In colonial Algeria, Sephardic Jews were granted French citizenship
alongside European settlers, whereas the Muslim majority consisting
mainly of Arabs, together with significant Berber minorities were denied
the rights of citizenship and the educational, socio-economic and political
opportunities that went with this. The colonized masses were formally
classified by the administration as Muslims. In everyday parlance, they
were referred to by the settler population as Arabs, though many were
in fact Berbers. Thus in the colonial context, the terms Muslim and

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Arab served to designate not simply or even primarily religious or

ethnic categories but above all a condition of political, social and economic
subordination.
With the advent of independence, when the European settler population
fled North Africa en masse, most Sephardic Jews followed suit, settling
in many cases in France,5 where they came to outnumber Ashkenazis.
Simultaneously the number of Muslims in France originating in North
Africa grew rapidly. Some were harkis, who had aided the French military
in their unsuccessful fight against Algerian nationalists during the war of
independence. Most were economic migrants who, unlike the harkis, were
now Algerian nationals (or, in other cases, Moroccans or Tunisians) with no
citizenship rights in France. While this made the residence status of those
who had migrated for economic reasons more precarious than that of the
harkis, who held French citizenship, both groups had low levels of literacy,
occupied low-level social and economic positions, and experienced high
levels of discrimination. They and their families were to remain widely
referred to in popular discourse as Arabs, which continued to carry strong
echoes of the pejorative connotations that were often attached to that term
during the colonial period. In formal administrative discourse, national
categories Algerian, Moroccan, and Tunisian and the overarching term
Maghrebi replaced the terminology of the colonial period. Until the
mid-1980s the religious affiliations of the Maghrebi minority attracted little
attention; since then, these populations have become widely perceived and
frequently stigmatized as Muslims. A key driver in this was the Islamist
revolution of 1979 in Iran, which marked the rise of vigorously antiWestern Islamic forces in the politics of the Middle East and the wider
international arena. While few of the Muslims in France came from Iran
or other parts of the Middle East in which Islamism i.e., the pursuit of
Islamic goals through political means was on the rise, this was often lost
sight of in French media and political discourse, which tended to blur the
distinction between Islam as a system of religious belief and Islamism as a
political project and called increasingly into question the compatibility of
the nations Muslim minority as a whole with the secular principles of the
Republic (Deltombe).
In contrast with the situation several decades ago, when the population of
Muslim heritage in France was composed mainly of international migrants
who were born and had grown up in predominantly Islamic countries,
today the majority are the children or grand-children of migrants who are
both more French and less Muslim than is often thought. By virtue of their

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birth on French soil, most of these younger generations are neither migrants
nor foreigners but natives and citizens of France. But they continue to suffer
high levels of discrimination based on widespread perceptions of them as
un-French, notably because of their supposed Muslim culture (Hargreaves
18499). Ironically, compared with their immigrant parents or grand-parents,
those born in France have often been less attached to Islam and closer to the
secular cultural norms dominant in France. Studies conducted in the 1980s
and 1990s found that, in contrast with their migrant parents, almost all of
whom self-identified as Muslims, around a quarter of second-generation
Maghrebis said they were not Muslim believers, and among believers the
rates of religious observance were significantly lower than among the older
generation (tienne, La France et lislam; Tribalat, Faire France). While recent
surveys indicate that the proportion of non-believers has remained fairly
stable, since the turn of the new century external signs of religious observance
appear to have grown among young people of Muslim heritage, especially
in matters such as diet (as evidenced by eating halal foods and fasting during
Ramadan) and clothing (notably in the wearing of headscarves by women in
public places); in many cases this may have been motivated less by an increase
in doctrinal conviction than out of a sense of defiance against the stigmatization of Muslims together with a quest for alternative forms of conviviality
and community in the face of exclusion from mainstream French society
(Dargent; IFOP, Analyse, 1989-2011; Kepel).
In these circumstances, it is vital to think carefully about the terms we
use when referring to populations of Muslim heritage, for if we describe
them all simply and categorically as Muslims this carries a serious danger
not only of over-estimating the number of Muslims in France but also of
suggesting that Islam is somehow the sole or overriding determinant in
their identity and behavior. In reality, their sense of who they are is shaped
by a much more diverse range of factors including age, gender, social
class, citizenship, and a wide range of cultural influences emanating at
least as much from secular Anglophone sources as from the Islamic world
rather than by religion alone (Roy, Globalized Islam). My references to
these populations as being of Muslim heritage are thus to be understood
as a way of signaling that while those roots are certainly significant, it
would be wrong to see in them an iron-cast form of cultural determinism.
Especially among the children and grand-children of migrants, a sense of
identification with Islam may be shaped less by inner doctrinal conviction
than by the experience of being perceived and often stigmatized in
majority ethnic eyes as Muslims.

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The Sephardic Jews who migrated to France when the overseas empire
collapsed were generally well educated, most were French citizens and they
and their descendants have experienced lower levels of discrimination than
those of Arabo-Berbero Muslim heritage, all of which has helped them
to integrate more successfully in social and economic terms. Until the
mid-twentieth century Jews had suffered high levels of discrimination and
indeed persecution, exemplified in the Dreyfus affair and later in the antiSemitic policies pursued by the Vichy regime, which collaborated with the
Nazis in rounding up Jews who were to perish in the death camps.6 The
sense of shame attaching to this led Frances post-war leaders to adopt a firm
stance, which has remained uncompromising with the passage of time, in
repressing any expression of anti-Semitism.
Discrimination against Arabs or Muslims has never attracted a comparable degree of public concern. On the contrary, during the past 30 years
Muslims have been the target of countless political polemics and a raft of
government initiatives such as the anti-headscarf law of 2004 and the
anti-burqa law of 2010 restricting their rights to practice their religion.
This history of colonial subordination and postcolonial disadvantage
and discrimination has been fundamental in shaping the experiences of
Muslims in France and their attitudes towards events in the Middle East.
In particular it has engendered a wide and long-standing identification with
the cause of the Palestinians.
The second Intifada: A turning point
Since the beginning of the 1990s police data on what may be broadly
termed racially and ethnically motivated offences have been published in
the annual reports of the Commission nationale consultative des droits de
lhomme (CNCDH). The system of nomenclature used by the police and
the CNCDH is somewhat rough and ready. From the outset, a tripartite
distinction has been drawn between anti-Semitism, racism and xenophobia
but in the tabulation of data, the last two of these categories have generally
been conflated, producing a binary distinction between anti-Semitism
on the one hand and racism on the other, where racism serves de facto
to denote all forms of racially or ethnically motivated offences be these
on the basis of skin color, real or supposed religious affiliations, or national
origins except for anti-Semitism. Throughout the 1990s anti-Semitic
offences were far outnumbered by other forms of racism, whose victims

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were formally classified by the police on the basis of nationality. Maghrebis

people of Algerian, Moroccan and Tunisian origin were the victims of
the vast majority of offences classified by the police as racist. As Maghrebis
overlap to a large extent in popular thinking with Arabs and Muslims, it
is probable that some of the attacks on Maghrebis might more properly be
regarded as Islamophobic in nature, though it is impossible to quantify these
with precision; most of the other acts classified as racist were against persons
commonly perceived as Blacks. The overall picture changed dramatically in
the year 2000 when recorded cases of anti-Semitism rose sharply, outnumbering for the first time offences against other groups. Anti-Semitic offences
continued to outnumber other forms of racist acts for most of the decade
that followed (Interior Ministry data for 19932010 in CNCDH, 2010 98).
Almost all of the anti-Semitic offences recorded in 2000 came in the
fall of that year, following the launch of the second Intifada by Palestinians
opposed to the Israeli occupation of their territory. Beginning that year,
monthly statistics compiled in the Paris region by a Jewish support group,
the Service de protection de la communaut juive (SPCJ), showed a strong
correlation between events in or directly linked to the Middle East and the
pace of anti-Semitic acts. After the initial flare-up sparked by the beginning
of the second Intifada, there were further spikes following Al-Qaedas
attacks in the United States in September 2001, Israels launching of an
extended security wall in March 2002, and the beginning of the Iraq war
in March 2003 (SPCJ data in CNCDH, 2003 470). Simultaneously, police
records indicated a radical change in the backgrounds of perpetrators of
anti-Semitic offences. Prior to 2000, practically all such acts were attributed
to white extreme-right groups that have a long history on the fringes of
French politics. Groups of that nature have been blamed for only a minority
of anti-Semitic offences committed from 2000 onwards, the bulk of which
have instead been attributed by the police to inhabitants of quartiers sensibles
containing dense concentrations of postcolonial immigrant minorities.
Around two thirds of those questioned by the police in connection with
anti-Semitic offences in 2002 were of Maghrebi origin; the rest were of
sub-Saharan African and unspecified origins (CNCDH, 2002 8587). How
are we to explain this?
If the second Intifada unquestionably constitutes the spark that ignited
the upsurge in manifestations of anti-Semitism that occurred in 2000,
the powder keg that exploded in that way had been building up for many
years. It was rooted in the profound and long-standing sense of injustice
that was widely shared by inhabitants of the banlieues and that became

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acute during the 1990s, when a new, deeply resentful, generation began
to emerge from among the nations postcolonial minorities. In the present
context, the notion of a generation is to be understood less in terms of
biological filiation and more in the sense proposed by Karl Mannheim as
a cohort of people of similar age shaped by shared formative experiences,
usually in adolescence or early adulthood, at a given historical time. On this
basis, three generations may be broadly distinguished among postcolonial
minorities in France. The first consisted primarily of young men who came
to France as unskilled immigrant workers mainly from the Maghreb,
together with smaller numbers from former colonies in sub-Saharan Africa
and the Caribbean in response to labor shortages during the post-war
economic boom. The second, for the most part born in France of migrant
parents, emerged into adulthood during the period of rising unemployment
that followed the oil shocks of the 1970s. Educated in France, this second
generation largely shared the values and aspirations of majority ethnic
youths but often found its path blocked by poverty and discrimination.
The third generation has come into view since the 1990s. It includes not
only grand-children of migrants who came to France several decades ago,
but also youngsters born in France of migrants who arrived more recently
and others born abroad whose migrant parents brought them to France at
a young age. Generational differences from the point of view of biological
filiation have mattered less than the experiences in which the members
of this socio-historical generation have shared by virtue of growing up
in an environment where the prospects of finding a fulfilling future have
appeared ever dimmer.
In the 1980s, through initiatives such as the Marche pour lgalit et
contre le racisme and SOS-Racisme, members of the second generation
sought to improve their lot by calling on the French Republic to honor its
promises of equality before the law. But the authorities did little to combat
discrimination, which excluded large numbers of minority ethnic youths
from a fair chance of finding a job. Census data show that unemployment
rates among young men rose nationally from 15 to 22% between 1990 and
1999. During the same period they leapt from 25 to 40% among young
men in the quartiers sensibles where ethnic minorities are concentrated.
More specifically, surveys by the sociologist Michle Tribalat indicate that
among young men of Algerian origin the jobless rate, already running at
around 40% in 1990 (Faire France 175), rose to almost 50% in the course
of the decade (Une estimation 75). Since the financial crisis of 2008,
conditions in the quartiers sensibles have worsened still further, with yet

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another disproportionate rise in unemployment compared with other areas

(Observatoire national des zones sensibles). In this way, the period since
the 1990s has seen the emergence of a new, third, generation for which
deepening disadvantage is the norm, that unlike the second generation,
the children of migrant workers who came to France during a period of
full employment has no memories of a better past, and that can see few
reasons to hope for a better future. While their aspirations have in general
remained broadly similar to those of the second generation to share on
an equal footing in the material opportunities afforded by French society
they have been less inclined to mobilize in organized political movements
and more inclined to engage in gestures of anger and resentment.
Over a long period, feelings of this nature have fueled violent confrontations with the police, seen as guardians of an unjust and discriminatory
social system. Sporadic confrontations of this type date as far back as the
late 1970s. They became endemic in the banlieues during the 1990s, graphically portrayed in Mathieu Kassovitzs 1995 film La Haine, and reached
their paroxysm in the riots that engulfed the banlieues of virtually every
major city in France in 2005. If, in parallel with this, the second Intifada
resonated so profoundly with minority ethnic youths in the banlieues, it was
because they identified with the sense of injustice felt by Palestinians in the
face of the prevailing social order in the Middle East. Within this optic,
the affinity felt with Palestinians was not primarily ethnic or religious but
political: the status of Palestinians in territories under Israeli occupation
appeared to parallel both the subordination of colonized peoples under
French domination during the colonial period and the discrimination
suffered by postcolonial immigrant minorities in present-day France. And
in the eyes of some, the Palestinian struggle against Israeli occupation of
Arab lands suggested a seemingly comparable target to scapegoat in France:
Jews perceived as part of a privileged ruling class with colonial antecedents
in North Africa. The Interior Ministry reported that in this new wave of
anti-Semitism les insultes stigmatisant les membres de la communaut
juive de France visent aussi trs souvent, dans le mme temps, les institutions publiques, les policiers, les gardiens dimmeubles, les pompiers, les
mdecins, les enseignants, etc. et se rvlent autant dindicateurs dune
excration de tout ce qui peut constituer une reprsentation de lordre
public tabli (CNCDH, 2002 84).
This does not mean that support for the Palestinian cause always goes
hand in hand with anti-Semitism, with an Islamist agenda or with support
for Arab dictators. An opinion survey conducted among persons of Muslim

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heritage in France in the aftermath of 9/11 found that the Al-Qaeda leader,
Oussama Ben Laden, was viewed almost as negatively as the Israeli Prime
Minister, Ariel Sharon. Similarly, the Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein was
viewed as negatively as the American President who was soon to oust him,
George W.Bush. By contrast, the Palestinian leader, Yasser Arafat, enjoyed
a high level of popularity (IFOP 2001). This support for Arafat, seen as a
champion of the downtrodden and dispossessed, was grounded neither in
Islamist jihadism nor in Arab nationalism but in a thirst for social justice.
Thus then, as now, it is important to distinguish between four different
phenomena: pro-Palestinianism, anti-Zionism (in the sense of opposition to
the existence to the state of Israel as distinct from criticism of Israeli policy),
anti-Semitism (meaning hatred of Jews per se, whether Israelis or not), and
jihadism (i.e. war waged in the name of an Islamist agenda). If support for
the Palestinian cause is virtually universal among the Muslim population
in France and postcolonial minorities in general, anti-Zionism and antiSemitism are less prevalent though they are certainly present to a significant
degree, while jihadism is confined to small though growing numbers of
extremists (Wieviorka; Brouard and Tiberj; Laurence and Vaisse).
The rise of jihadism
In the Middle East, major fault lines are marked by struggles over territory
and religion. Neither of these is of comparable salience in France. Unlike
Palestinians, who seek to liberate their national territory from Israeli
occupation, most people of Muslim heritage and other postcolonial groups
concentrated in Frances banlieues seek to improve their lot within rather
than outside the French polity. The major line of differentiation among
them lies not so much in a distinction between secularism and Islamism but
in the division between those who have jobs and those who do not. On this
basis, a typology may be constructed in which four main groups two large
and two small may be distinguished among minorities of Muslim heritage
and postcolonial groups more generally. The two largest are relatively
anonymous, with few individual cases emerging into public visibility. They
are composed on the one hand of most of those who have jobs of some kind,
often in the lower echelons of the socio-professional ladder, and on the
other hand of most of the remainder, who are largely or completely disconnected from the labor market. At the outer edges of these groups are two
much smaller groups that gain greater public visibility. On the one hand,

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among those who have jobs, there is a small elite who have made successful
professional careers and in some cases gained significant public recognition.
Examples include the writer and sociologist Azouz Begag, the womens
rights activist Fadela Amara and the film-maker Yamina Benguigui, all
of whom have served as government ministers, a clear illustration of their
commitment to public service within the prevailing social order, albeit
while criticizing its inequalities and injustices. On the other hand, among
those who are more or less disconnected from the labor market there are
varying degrees of resignation, frustration and resentment, leading some of
the most disaffected elements to emerge into public visibility as criminals,
rioters, anti-Semites, jihadists and/or terrorists.
While certain individuals combine all of those forms of deviant
behavior, the general pattern is more diverse and in some cases it is not
easy to distinguish between different types of motivation, as the following
instances illustrate. Among Muslims imprisoned in France, most have been
convicted of purely criminal offences such as robbery and drug-dealing,
with no religious or political motivation.7 In 1996 the members of a gang
originating in the northern city of Roubaix who presented themselves as
jihadists committed a series of armed robberies before attempting to bomb
a police station during a meeting of G7 economic leaders. The self-styled
Gang des barbares, which in 2006 kidnapped, tortured and eventually
murdered Ilan Halimi after demanding a ransom in exchange for his
release, was motivated primarily by a desire to derive private profit from
the captives supposed wealth as a Jew; the gang did not present its actions
in jihadist terms (Vigoureux). The terrorists who in January 2015 slayed 17
persons including Charlie Hebdo journalists, police officers, and patrons of a
Jewish food store framed their actions squarely as part of a jihadist war on
behalf of Islam and against Jews and the French state. For their part, while
challenging the police and other representatives of the state, the rioters
of 2005 showed no sign of any interest in Islam. Far from being driven
by Islamist ideology, they consistently ignored appeals by Muslim leaders
to halt the disturbances, the flames of which were sparked by anger over
the deaths of two minority ethnic youths in the face of what the rioters
regarded as aggressive policing and inflammatory remarks by the then
Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy, who described disruptive youths in the
banlieues as racaille (scum). While Sarkozy sought to dismiss the riots as
purely criminal in nature and other government ministers tried to smear
them with supposed Islamic and/or Islamist causes, the governments own
intelligence services found these claims to be unfounded and attributed

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the riots unequivocally to feelings of injustice grounded in social exclusion

(Dubois).
In contrast with rioters who have vented exasperation over social
injustice while presenting no organized program of reform and common
criminals who have sought to make personal gains in unlawful ways while
leaving the broad structures of French society intact, jihadists portray
themselves as combatants working for a divinely sanctioned transnational
collectivity that includes among its objectives the destruction of western
states. Until a few years ago, natives of France taking a jihadist path were
relatively small in number dozens, scores or perhaps a few hundred
and most of their activity took place in theaters of war outside France.
Following the beginning of the Syrian civil war in 2011, their numbers
increased sharply. In June 2015, the French Interior Ministry reported that
1,750 French citizens or residents involved in jihadist networks based in
Syria and Iraq and that 457 of them were currently in the war zone there;
hundreds of others were considered a serious security threat within France
(Le Monde.fr).
Many factors including the relative proximity of Syria, with easier
access than to more distant theaters such as Afghanistan, and the proliferation of the internet and social media as recruitment tools have no doubt
contributed to this upsurge. But opportunities of this nature could not have
borne fruit as readily as they have done had it not been for the scale and
entrenchment of disaffection arising from social exclusion in France. Many
young people of Muslim heritage who have grown up in France since the
1990s have lived all of their lives in a marginalized environment where it
is assumed the dice are loaded against them, with little or no prospect of
obtaining a decent-paying job even if suitably qualified. As the length of
time over which this sense of despair has extended, so the attraction of
increasingly extremist forms of behavior has grown, favoring the upsurge
in anti-Semitism following the second Intifada and more recently the rapid
expansion of jihadist networks after early stirrings in the mid-1990s.
Commenting on the Roubaix gang in 1996, right-of-center Interior
Minister Jean-Louis Debr said: Traduisant une radicalisation de milieux
dj marginaliss, dveloppant une rvolte qui se serait de toute faon
exprime, cette violence sincarne dans ce que le march idologique
offre aujourdhui comme valeur contestataire: lislamisme radical. []
La rislamisation apparat moins dans sa dimension religieuse que dans
sa vocation offrir un cadre de contestation sociale. Asked about the
backgrounds of police suspects following the flare-up in anti-Semitism in

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the fall of 2000, Socialist Interior Minister Daniel Vaillant replied: Sur
lensemble des personnes interpelles, seules deux avaient des sympathies
avres avec lextrme droite. Les autres voulaient surtout protester contre
un sentiment dexclusion de la socit franaise. A subsequent governmentcommissioned report by Jean-Christophe Rufin found that the new wave
of anti-Semitism was rooted less in Islamic culture than in a French version
of what the American anthropologist Oscar Lewis had called the culture
of poverty:
Le nouvel antismitisme apparat [] plus htrogne que ne le supposent
ceux qui en font une spcificit maghrbine et une consquence naturelle
des vnements du Moyen Orient. Une immense majorit de Maghrbins
est engage dans des parcours dintgration et fort loigne de la violence
antismite. Inversement des jeunes dautres origines (Africains, Antillais
voire Franais mtropolitains de souche) peuvent, au terme dun bricolage
identitaire propre la culture de la pauvret, sidentifier la lutte palestinienne, voire se convertir lIslam et prendre part des agressions
antismites. (Rufin 17)

Thus if persons of Muslim heritage are to the fore among anti-Semites and
jihadists in present-day France, this may be less because they were brought up
as Muslims than because they are concentrated among the most marginalized
and disaffected sections of French society.8 All of those who have committed
jihadist murders within France have come from backgrounds of this kind.
At the time of writing, five young men of immigrant descent have carried
out such attacks: Khaled Kelkal, who in 1995 played a key role in attacks
aimed at pressuring the French government into dropping its support for
the Algerian governments repression of Islamist insurgents; Mohammed
Merad, who in 2012 targeted Jewish schoolchildren and Muslims serving
in the French army; and Chrif Kouachi, his brother Sad and their friend
Amedy Coulibaly, whose victims in 2015 included Charlie Hebdo journalists
whom they regarded as blasphemers, police officers assigned to protect them,
and Jews taken hostage in a foodstore.9 While all the attackers were born
of Muslim immigrant parents, none was brought up in an environment
of Islamist militancy. Several experienced family breakup during their
formative years. Orphaned in early adolescence, the Kouachi brothers spent
several years in French social care institutions, as did Merah, whose parents
divorced when he was five years old. All five of the future killers fell behind
at school. While some of them drifted briefly in and out of short-term casual
employment, none of them appears ever to have held a steady, decent-paying
job. As teenagers, Kelkal, Merad and Coulibaly built up criminal records

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for robbery and other offences, leading to prison sentences that played a key
role in their radicalization. It was while in prison that they fell under the
influence of Muslim radicals who led them to believe that jihadism offered
them a chance to turn around their lives, switching from victims of social
marginalization to victors in a divinely ordained war against infidels. Chrif
Kouachi began to turn in a similar direction after he and his brother Sad
were discharged from the care of the social services in their late teens and left
to fend for themselves in a working-class district of north-eastern Paris. There
Chrif was taken under the wing of Muslim extremists recruiting young
men to fight in Iraq against the US-led invasion launched in 2003. While
preparing to leave for Iraq, Chrif was arrested and imprisoned in 2005. In
prison, his commitment to jihadism was hardened through contact with the
radical Islamist Djamel Beghal, who was simultaneously leading a fellow
prisoner, Coulibaly, in the same direction. Together with Sad Kouachi, who
underwent weapons training at an Al-Qaedi camp in Yemen in 2011, Chrif
Kouachi and Coulibaly were to carry out the terrorist murders that began
with the attack on the offices of Charlie Hebdo in January 2015 (Bronner;
Cazi).
How representative of the Muslim population is the rise in the numbers
of French jihadists seen in recent years? While the largest organizations
of Muslim believers, such as the Conseil franais du culte musulman
(CFCM), were quick to condemn the attacks perpetrated by Coulibaly
and the Kouachi brothers, other voices were more ambivalent or in some
cases sympathetic towards the killers. Not only were the attackers directly
aided by a number of accomplices. The refusal of pupils in scores of public
schools to observe a minutes silence in memory of the dead was widely
interpreted as a form of acquiescence or even of endorsement of the killings,
as were tweets dissenting from the JesuisCharlie hashtag. Within a week
of the attacks, legal proceedings had begun against more than 50 people
accused of expressing support for terrorism, the best known of whom was
the humorist-turned-polemicist and convicted anti-Semite Dieudonn.10
Yet it is difficult to determine on the basis of the available evidence the
precise extent of the support that may exist for jihadist killings. Tweeting
JenesuispasCharlie, refusing to observe a minutes silence or staying away
from rallies designed to demonstrate national unity in the face of terrorist
attacks did not necessarily betoken support for those acts. Some of those
who declared themselves not to be Charlie were unwilling to identify with
Charlie Hebdo because they were offended by its cartoons of the Prophet
Mohammed but that was not to say they were in favor of murdering

French Muslims and the Middle East

249

the magazines staff. The sending of 38,000 tweets under the hashtag
JeSuisKouachi in the days immediately following the attacks appeared
extremely disturbing at first sight, but an analysis by Camille Kaelblen
found that the vast majority were messages denouncing the pro-Kouachi
hashtag. More broadly, while many accustomed to being marginalized in
the banlieues apparently felt disinclined to participate in displays of national
unity, this is not the same as saying that they supported jihadist killers.
While jihadists undoubtedly tap into deep-seated currents of resentment
and in some cases hatred among minority ethnic populations, it would
be wrong to conclude that they speak for the whole or even the majority
of Muslims in France. One cannot but be struck by the ethnic diversity
of those killed in the January 2015 attacks who, alongside whites
and Jews, included a black policewoman from Martinique, a secularlyminded Franco-Algerian proofreader in the offices of Charlie Hebdo, and a
policeman of Algerian immigrant descent who was a practicing Muslim.
The death of the latter, Ahmed Merabet, and the actions of another
Muslim, Lassana Bathily, who risked his life to protect Jews in the store
attacked by Coulibaly, illustrate not only the law-abiding nature of most
people of Muslim heritage but also the willingness of some among them
to put their lives on the line in defending the Republic and the values for
which it stands. As Olivier Roy has observed, en France, il y a plus de
musulmans dans larme, la police et la gendarmerie que dans les rseaux
Al-Qaida, sans parler de ladministration, des hpitaux, du barreau ou de
lenseignement (Roy, La Peur).
The veracity of Roys comment was already apparent at the time of
Merahs attacks in 2012. Several days before shooting dead three Jewish
schoolchildren and one of their teachers, Merah had killed three young
French soldiers of Maghrebi origin, targeted because of their membership in
an army that was fighting against Islamist insurgents in Afghanistan. Their
deaths were soon to be overshadowed by those that were to follow outside
the Jewish school in Toulouse but if we pause to look at them they open a
window onto a little known avenue through which significant numbers of
minority ethnic youths have been seeking to overcome the obstacles placed
in their way in many areas of French society. Following Jacques Chiracs
abolition of compulsory military service in 1996, the French armed
forces began to recruit actively young men from the banlieues, whose high
unemployment rates were believed to provide a strong motivating force
for enlisting. Research conducted by Elyamine Settoul among such volunteers has shown that even among those joining up mainly as a way out of

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unemployment without any great sense of allegiance to the Republic, their

incorporation into the armed forces has generally gone hand in hand with
stronger levels of identification with the nation served by those forces, not
least because they have found in military service greater opportunities than
in civilian life. In Merahs targeting of men he regarded as co-religionists
who had betrayed the Islamist cause (one of the slain soldiers was in fact
Catholic, though all three were of Maghrebi origin and two were Muslims),
we see pitted against each other the two ends of the typology that I sketched
out earlier: a hate-filled marginalized have-not striking out against
socially incorporated haves. The same polarity is apparent in the contrast
between jihadist killer Amedy Coulibaly and shop worker Lassana Bathily,
who concealed potential victims from Coulibaly. Both were born of Malian
parents who were practicing Muslims. Their taking up of such opposite sides
cannot be explained by their shared national origins or Muslim heritage.
The differences lie rather in the circumstances in which they grew up and
in their contrasting visions of the opportunities open to them in French
society. Bathily was born and raised in Mali, one of the poorest nations on
earth, from the distance of which France appeared as a kind of promised
land in which he was determined to make his future by dint of hard work
when the chance to do so arose in his late teens, even though he lacked
the papers to do this legally. Coulibaly grew up in La Grande Borne, one
of the most disadvantaged banlieues of south-eastern Paris, where among
young people of minority ethnic origin who had experienced France at first
hand there was a widespread belief that the gates of equal opportunity were
firmly closed to them despite the birth certificates, identity cards and other
papers that attested to their formal rights as natives and citizens of France.
In contrast with Bathily, whose vision of France was that of an idealistic
newcomer, Coulibaly, the Kouachi brothers, Merad and Kelkal were the
hate-filled products of long-standing fissures within French society, and
above all of systemic failures by governments of both left and right to ensure
fair treatment for all, irrespective of ethnic origins or religious beliefs.
Conclusion
In 1989 Bruno tienne published the results of one of the first extensive
pieces of fieldwork conducted among Muslims in France. tienne found
that only a minority of those surveyed engaged in regular religious observance, and the rate of observance was especially low among the second

French Muslims and the Middle East

251

generation raised in France by immigrant parents. But, tienne remarked

in an interview:
On les dfinit, on les stigmatise comme musulmans et, du coup, ils se
dfinissent comme tels. Le type des Minguettes qui dit Moi je suis
musulman le dit par dfi. Une grande majorit des jeunes arabes sont
relativement indiffrents lIslam. Mais si on ne sait pas les intgrer, les
nouvelles gnrations, elles, deviendront islamistes. Si on ny prend pas
garde, la troisime gnration nous mettra des bombes. On sera islamiste
comme on a t dlinquant, loubard ou coiff laffro

Insufficiently heeded, tiennes words were to prove sadly prophetic. In a

tragic fashion, the Muslim soldiers gunned down by Merad, the Muslim
police officer slain by the Kouachi brothers and the Muslim shop worker
who protected Jews from Coulibalys attack are proof that all is not yet lost.
But the challenge of rolling back extremists is now very much greater than
it might have been had the necessary action to open the doors of equal
opportunity been taken decades ago.
Emeritus Winthrop-King Professor of Transcultural French Studies,
Florida State University

Notes
1 For an interdisciplinary collection of articles on majority and minority ethnic
attitudes in France towards the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, see Reader. The political
fallout of that conflict in France is analyzed by Hecker.
2 Journalistic use of this term was often irresponsible or polemical; there is no record
of it having been used by the rioters themselves (Roy, Intifada des banlieues).
Husseys use of the term is marred by sensationalism. A more balanced analysis is
presented by Hecker.
3 In the present context, persons of Muslim heritage are to be understood as those
having parents who self-identify as Muslims. The term thus embraces a broad
spectrum of people from Muslim backgrounds ranging from practicing Muslims to
non-practicing believers and non-believers raised in Muslim homes. As no information on religious affiliations is collected in French censuses, it is impossible to
calculate with precision the numbers adhering to different religious beliefs. Estimates
of the total number of Muslims in France have generally been made on the basis of
the number of migrants and their descendants originating in predominantly Islamic
countries. As noted by Tribalat (Le nombre), a major drawback of this methodology
is that it takes insufficient account of the personal choices made by individuals, not
all of whom follow mechanically the norms prevailing in their countries of origin
or family homes. This weakness is partially overcome in estimates made by extrapolating from individual responses to large-scale social science surveys, which in some

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cases include estimates for the number of converts from non-Muslim backgrounds:
see, for example, Beauchemin, Hamel and Simon. Estimates of the number of Jews
have drawn on information compiled by Jewish organizations and extrapolations
from data collected by opinion-sampling organizations (Cohen).
4 While postcolonial minorities are predominantly of Muslim heritage, they also
include persons of other religious faiths, including Christianity, which predominates
among persons of Caribbean origin; Christianity also has a significant presence
among minorities originating in sub-Saharan Africa. The largest group of Muslims
originating outside the former French empire comes from Turkey.
5 Others resettled in Israel, North America and elsewhere.
6 The Vichy government also stripped Jews in Algeria of French citizenship; this was
restored to them after the Liberation.
7 While no official statistics are collected in France on the basis of religious affiliations, estimates produced by Farhad Khosrokhavar suggest that Muslims account
for the majority of the prison population, compared with around 7 or 8% of the
general population. In fieldwork by Didier Fassin around two thirds of the prison
population was found to be composed of Black and Arab men. It would be wide of
the mark to attribute the over-representation of Muslims to their religious beliefs; it
is rather a reflection of their concentration among the most disadvantaged sections
of French society.
8 Recruits from non-Muslim families, who according to the Interior Ministry account
for around 20% of French jihadists, come from more socially diverse backgrounds.
Many of them appear to have been traversing adolescent identity crises (Bouzar,
Caupenne and Valsan).
9 One person was also killed during the getaway from a robbery by the Roubaix
gang in 1996. As the victim, a passer-by whose car the gang wanted to hijack, was
not targeted for ideological reasons, his death is not included among the jihadist
murders discussed here.
10 On the very diverse backgrounds and motivations of those against whom legal
proceedings were brought, see Johanns.

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