Macron Seeks an Enlightened Islam Laïcité worked well with Catholicism, but how hard is it to tame a domestic religion? By Christopher Caldwell
https://www.wsj.com/articles/macron-seeks-an-enlightened-islam-11607037298?mod=opinion_lead_pos10
Emmanuel Macron has resolved to be the president who finally eases tensions over France’s young and growing Muslim population. Every president since Valéry Giscard d’Estaing in the 1970s has resolved to do that. None succeeded, and the stakes have risen with each failure.
On Oct. 16, a Chechen-born 18-year-old living west of Paris decapitated the schoolteacher Samuel Paty, who had lately shown cartoons mocking the Prophet Muhammad to junior-high-age kids in a civics class on free speech. On Oct. 29, a 20-year-old Tunisian, who had been refused asylum in Italy after arriving by boat the month before, showed up in the south of France. He stabbed to death two worshipers and a sacristan in the Notre Dame Basilica in Nice.
Even before the incidents Mr. Macron had made a major speech about Islamist “separatism.” He aims to limit the sponsoring of imams by foreign governments. He has dissolved organizations allegedly sympathetic to Islamic radicalism, such as the charity BarakaCity and the “antiracist” Collective against Islamophobia. He plans to ban home schooling, popular among religious Muslims.
Mr. Macron is putting almost all his eggs in the basket of laïcité, the 115-year-old French system for regulating religion. (The word means “secularism.”) At a meeting with the French Council of the Muslim Faith (CFCM), an official Islamic umbrella group created almost two decades ago by then Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy, Mr. Macron added more detail. The CFCM would create a “national council of imams.” Preachers would be accredited, or licensed, like doctors and lawyers. By next week the CFCM is expected to create a “Charter of Republican Values” to which the organizations that make it up will adhere. “Some will sign and some will not,” the president reportedly said at the meeting. “We will be watching. Either you are with the Republic or you are not.”
In recent weeks Mr. Macron has taken to browbeating the Anglophone press, notably the Financial Times and the New York Times. They mistake his hostility to Islamism for a hostility to Islam, he complains, and misunderstand the logic by which laïcité mediates between religion and the state. Do they really? More likely they have simply looked at France’s Islam policy over the past two decades and begun to question whether laïcité is the right tool for it.
Laïcité was not enacted prospectively as a means of securing religious freedom, the way America’s First Amendment was. The Left-Bloc government of Radical Prime Minister Émile Combes conceived of laïcité as the centerpiece of an explicitly anticlerical program. Passed in 1905, it aimed to drive the Catholic Church out of France’s institutional and educational life. A decade before, the church had taken the side of the army in the Dreyfus affair, a scandal in which senior officers collaborated in the framing of a Jewish captain on espionage charges.
Devout Catholics have often chafed under laïcité. But having either lived through or studied the Dreyfus era, they understood laïcité’s historic logic. Today’s young Muslims have no such folk memory. And history has moved on. In 1905, mass movements—socialism above all—were ready to provide antireligious muscle for the state. Today they are weaker, and they face a different religion, one that does not feature “turn the other cheek” among its precepts.
Nor does Islam have any hierarchy through which the state’s commands can efficiently resonate. When Combes told the church to close thousands of schools, bishops obliged. Laïcité requires such institutional interlocutors. Where France once tore down Catholic institutions, it must now build up Muslim ones. The CFCM is one example. As part of his antifundamentalist push, Mr. Macron has called for more Arabic instruction in schools.
The French leaders who invented laïcité knew the church. They were often lapsed Catholics themselves. Now when they sing the praises of an “Islam of the Enlightenment,” one wonders whether this is a realistic prospect or a figment of their ideological imaginations. Muslims may prefer the real Islam they have studied and lived to the licensed, accredited Islam of “Republican values” that Mr. Macron is proposing.
Every Western country has a version of this problem. All our treasured “values” were formulated for a society more uniform and more orderly than today’s. Why do we assume these values will survive diversity? Why does France assume that a system devised to subordinate its historic religion can serve just as well to mediate between its more recent secularism and a (rising) foreign religion? For a long time laïcité has rested less on its own logic than on the forbearance of its citizens. Under conditions of globalization, mass migration and the ethnic and religious recomposition of that citizenry, such forbearance can no longer be assumed.
Mr. Caldwell is a contributing editor of the Claremont Review of Books and author of “The Age of Entitlement: America Since the Sixties” (Simon & Schuster, 2020).
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