Posted on by Mark Movsesian · 1 Comment

Agent Provocateur

It’s getting hard to keep up with developments surrounding “The Innocence of Muslims,” the YouTube video that ridicules the Prophet Muhammad and has sparked violent protests throughout the Muslim world. On Tuesday, Egypt announced that it had issued arrest warrants for several Americans connected with the film’s production and distribution, including Florida Pastor Terry Jones, who promoted the film. Jones was last in the news for putting the Quran “on trial” and threatening to burn it. Egypt’s action followed Germany’s announcement that it would forbid Jones, who has been invited to speak by far-right political parties, from entering the county. The Interior Ministry argues that allowing the “hate preacher” in the country would upset public order. So that’s another country the pastor must cross off his vacation list.

Then, yesterday, the French satirical magazine, Charlie Hebdo, entered the fray over the film, running a series of cartoons mocking the Prophet. The French government, which had asked Charlie Hebdo not to run the cartoons, responded by announcing that it would close embassies in twenty countries this Friday as a precaution. The Foreign Minister, Laurent Fabuis, said the cartoons were “a provocation,” and called on “all” people — by “all,” Fabius presumably had in mind particularly Charlie Hebdo‘s editor, Stephane Charbonnier — “to behave responsibly.”

For his part, Chabonnier is unrepentant. Already under police guard as a result of an earlier episode in which his magazine ran a caricature of the Prophet, Charbonnier says he sees a double standard developing in France, according to which it is considered acceptable to mock some religions but not others. “We have the impression that it’s officially allowed for Charlie Hebdo to attack the Catholic far-right but we cannot poke fun at fundamental Islamists,” he explained. It’s an interesting point that other commentators, including in the US, as making, too. Charbonnier should be calling his lawyer. Unlike the US, France has laws that ban speech that insults a group because of its religion. In 2006, in fact, Charlie Hebdo was prosecuted when the newspaper  reprinted some of the infamous cartoons of the Prophet that had appeared in a Danish newspaper. In that case, Charlie Hebdo was acquitted on the ground that the cartoons insulted terrorists, not Muslims generally. It wouldn’t be surprising if Charlie Hebdo faced prosecution again now.

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Davidson, “Only Muslim”

In July, Cornell University Press published Only Muslim: Embodying Islam in Twentieth-Century France by Naomi Davidson (University of Ottawa).  The publisher’s description follows.

The French state has long had a troubled relationship with its diverse Muslim populations. In Only Muslim, Naomi Davidson traces this turbulence to the 1920s and 1930s, when North Africans first immigrated to French cities in significant numbers. Drawing on police reports, architectural blueprints, posters, propaganda films, and documentation from metropolitan and colonial officials as well as anticolonial nationalists, she reveals the ways in which French politicians and social scientists created a distinctly French vision of Islam that would inform public policy and political attitudes toward Muslims for the rest of the century—Islam français. French Muslims were cast into a permanent “otherness” that functioned in the same way as racial difference. This notion that one was only and forever Muslim was attributed to all immigrants from North Africa, though in time “Muslim” came to function as a synonym for Algerian, despite the diversity of the North and West African population.

Davidson grounds her narrative in the history of the Mosquée de Paris, which was inaugurated in 1926 and epitomized the concept of Islam français. Built in official gratitude to the tens of thousands of Muslim subjects of France who fought and were killed in World War I, the site also provided the state with a means to regulate Muslim life throughout the metropole beginning during the interwar period. Later chapters turn to the consequences of the state’s essentialized view of Muslims in the Vichy years and during the Algerian War. Davidson concludes with current debates over plans to build a Muslim cultural institute in the middle of a Parisian immigrant neighborhood, showing how Islam remains today a marker of an unassimilable difference.

Posted on by Mark Movsesian

Good Thing They Didn’t Try It in France

Anatole France famously observed that the law, in its majestic equality, forbids both rich and poor from sleeping under bridges. What would he have said about this weekend’s events in Marseille? At a rally in solidarity with Pussy Riot, the Russian punk band currently in prison for hooliganism, a group of protesters donned the band’s trademark neon balaclavas (above). The police immediately arrested the protesters for violating the French ban on veiling one’s face in public. The ban, which went into effect last year, was obviously directed at Islamic niqabs. To avoid any appearance of bias, however, the law formally forbids face veils generally. If tried and convicted, the protesters are subject to a fine of €150 and a compulsory citizenship course. CLR published a symposium on the ban and other aspects of church-state relation in France in 2010 – check it out here.

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Adida, Laitin & Valfort on Muslims in France

Claire L. Adida (University of California, San Diego), David Laitin (Stanford University) and Marie-Anne Valfort (Université Paris I Panthéon-Sorbonne) have posted Muslims in France: Identifying a Discriminatory Equilibrium. The abstract follows.

Evidence about the assimilation patterns of Muslim immigrants in Western countries is inconclusive because current research fails to isolate the effect of religion from that of typical confounds, such as race, ethnicity or nationality. A unique identification strategy allows us to isolate the effect of religion. Survey data collected in France in 2009 indicate that Muslim immigrants assimilate less than do their Christian counterparts, and that this difference does not decrease with the time immigrants spend in France. Experimental games reveal that the persistence of Muslims’ lower assimilation is consistent with Muslims and rooted French being locked in a bad equilibrium whereby: (i) rooted French exhibit taste-based discrimination against those they are able to identify as Muslims; (ii) Muslims trust rooted French and French institutions less than do Christians.

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Tourkochoriti on Freedom of Religion in France and the USA

Ioanna Tourkochoriti (Committee on Degrees in Social Studies, Harvard University) has posted The Burka Ban: Divergent Approaches to Freedom of Religion in France and in the USA. The abstract follows.

Six years after prohibiting the wearing of headscarves by students in public schools, the French state passed a law prohibiting the wearing of burkas in public places. Compared to France, in the United States there is more tolerance for wearing signs of religious affiliation. The difference in legal responses can be understood in reference to a different background understanding of the fundamental presuppositions of republicanism in the two legal and political orders, which also define their conception of secularism. The law enacted in France can be understood in a general frame of a paternalistic state, which is seen as permitted to dictate the proper exercise of their reason to the citizens. In the United States, the dominant understanding of republicanism attempts to reconcile the natural rights philosophy with the conception of the common good. The trust in the use of collective power and the legislature dominant in France can be opposed to the distrust towards the same elements in the United States.

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Prélot on France’s Full Veil Prohibition

Pierre-Henri Prélot (University of Cergy-Pontoise) has posted Religious Symbols and the Law of 1905: Reflections on the Prohibition of the Full Veil in Light of the French Law on Religious Practice. The abstract follows.

There is a recurrent debate in France on the conflict between the principle of secularism and the expression of religious convictions in public places. The liberal approach, which is open to all forms of public expression including the religious convictions of individuals, is opposed to a much more restrictive conception, which understands secularism as limiting religious convictions to the private sphere, with the corollary of the interdiction, or at least a strict restriction, of their public manifestation, whether they be individual or collective. In today’s highly secularized French society, which feels itself undermined by religious factors deriving from international conflicts and internal tensions, the sometimes radical affirmation of identities tends to weaken the liberal interpretation which is at the basis of the law of 1905, in favor of a much more restrictive vision of the principle of secularism. That is revealed by the law of October 11, 2010, on the prohibition of the covering of the face in public places, which falls within the very old royal tradition, derived from Gallicanism, of the public regulation of religious practices. Although it carefully avoids any reference to religious practices or convictions, the law of October 11, 2010 must be understood as a law implementing a religious policy.

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Posted on by Marc O. DeGirolami

French PM to Jews and Muslims: Modernize!

Very interesting story here (h/t Faithworld):

France’s prime minister urged Muslims and Jews to consider scrapping their halal and kosher slaughter laws on Monday as President Nicolas Sarkozy and his allies stepped up their efforts to woo far-right voters….

“Religions should think about keeping traditions that don’t have much in common with today’s state of science, technology and health problems,” Fillon told Europe 1 radio….

The “ancestral traditions” of ritual slaughter were justified for hygienic reasons in the past but were now outdated, he said. “We live in a modern society.”

I appreciate the persistent irritation that the Prime Minister must feel.  These are frustrating times for the agents of progress on both right and left — and, it seems, nationally and abroad.  It’s difficult to get folks to realize that modern society and contemporary science, technology, and medicine have simply eclipsed and obviated their ancient moralities and traditions.  But if we can’t persuade them, I suppose coercive law stands ready to help.

Posted on by Mark Movsesian

Paris Mayor Opposes New Cathedral

Bernard Delanoe, the Mayor of Paris, this week expressed his opposition to a proposed Russian Orthodox Cathedral on the banks of the Seine near the Eiffel Tower. According to Reuters’s FaithWorld blog, Delanoe’s opposition has nothing to do with religion. He simply thinks the proposed design of the cathedral, with onion-shaped domes and a wavy glass roof, lacks éclat. The design is “mediocre architecture conceived in haste,” he complains. France gave its approval for the project two years ago — “without the agreement of the city of Paris,” Delanoe notes — and Delanoe seems to lack authority to stop it now. In fact, he’s asking for UNESCO, the UN body that granted protected “World Heritage Site” status to the Seine riverbank,  to intervene “so that no permission” for construction “can be given without the endorsement of international experts.” Wonder if France has a version of RLUIPA.

Posted on by Mark Movsesian · 2 Comments

Can the State Order a Church to “De-Baptize” Someone?

Here’s a puzzling story. According to the Washington Post, a civil court in France has ordered the Catholic Church to remove a disgruntled parishioner from the baptismal register. The parishioner sought the court order after the Church declined to comply with his request to “de-baptize” him:

A decade ago, Rene Lebouvier requested that his local Catholic church erase his name from the baptismal register. The church noted his demands on the margins of its records and the chapter was closed.

But the clergy abuse scandals rocking Europe, coupled with Pope Benedict XVI’s conservative stances on contraception, hardened Lebouvier’s views. Last October, a court in Normandy ruled in favor of his lawsuit to have his name permanently deleted from church records — making the 71-year-old retiree the first Frenchman to be officially “de-baptized.”

“I took the judicial route to get myself de-baptized because of the church’s excesses,” said Lebouvier, speaking by telephone from his village of Fleury, near the D-Day beaches.

The Post article does not say what the cause of action was, or why the civil court believed it had jurisdiction of such matters. It seems baffling. In some European countries, like Germany, church membership has civil law consequences — church members are liable for a “church tax” the government collects on behalf of the religious body.  So I could see why  German courts would have authority to determine who is or is not a church member for tax purposes — though it’s not clear the court’s determination could bind the church itself, without the church’s consent. No such “church tax” exists in France, though. So why is a civil court getting involved? H/T: Mirror of Justice