PART II
Analyzing the different forms of Salafist socialization tells us nothing about the macrosociological reasons that may motivate embarking on the Salafist career. The sole explanation furnished by the actor is linked to the attraction exercised by a discourse presenting itself as objective and orthodox in the religious sense. Yet the ambition to restore a morality abandoned by all nourishes a shared feeling that cements the relationship to a world of individuals united, on a sociological level, by certain weighty or primary characteristics. By way of examples, we can cite the youthfulness of the practicants, the fact that the majority come from the suburbs and from families strongly stamped by the migratory epoch, and the serious difficulty they have calling themselves French. (This also goes for the converts.) This background is in turn linked to a sincere empathy for their parents’ native country, the search for an extraterritorial identity, an attraction to material success, open disdain for political affairs, and deprecation of engaging in the public sphere. The mobilization of a different epistemology is needed to shed light on this career choice. To the study of the resocialization which the identification with Salafism ultimately results in must be added the analysis of conditions that explain the adoption of certain ways of thinking. Therefore, when it comes to interpreting the relative success of the Daʾwa Salafiyya, it is important to establish an epistemological distance that allows us to shift away from the actor’s own perspective on his course. After the manner of Émile Durkheim, we need to change our points of reference with the aim of examining the individual and the environment from which he can or cannot innovate in identity terms as he forges a place in a social world he judges to be dangerous. Socialization no longer is confined to an assimilation of norms and ways of being; it is equally a form of communication addressed to a reified society, a sort of debate, an exchange, or, in the case of Salafism, a conflict by which the individual defines a new space in a society that he despises in theory. The Salafist identity thus must be understood as an identity strategy, which means that the resource symbolized by authentic Islam is first the result of a quest for positioning in a social space. The search for an alternative and oppositional identity matrix is then understandable as the fruit of a project that aims at breaking a kind of domination by the rest of society to which an actor can or cannot belong.1 It therefore behooves us to interrogate Salafist socialization as a response to a position in the French social space featuring certain characteristics that more or less influence the emergence of identity strategies of rupture: “Socialization invariably takes place in the context of a specific social structure. Sociocultural conditions circumscribe its content but also its measure of ‘success.’ In other words, microsociological or sociopsychological analysis of phenomena of interiorization must always be accompanied in the background by a macrosociological understanding of their structural aspects.”2
1 Riutort, Précis de sociologie, 253. We could even add that “identity, which is essentially social, is to be seen more as a ‘problem’ to be solved than as an explanatory concept.” Roger Brubaker, “Au-delà de l’identité” (Beyond identity), Social Science Research Acts, no. 139 (2001): 66–85. Also see Joseph Kastersztein, “The Identity Strategies of Social Actors: Dynamic Approach of the Objectives,” in Carmel Camilleri, Joseph Kastersztein, Edmond Marc Lipiansky, Hanna Malewska-Peyre, Isabelle Taboada-Leonetti, and Ana Vasquez, Stratégies identitaires (Identity strategies) (Paris: PUF, “Psychologie d’aujourd’hui” [Modern psychology], 1990), 30–31.
2 Berger and Luckmann, La construction sociale de la réalité, 222.
4
The Suburbs as a Symbolic Space for Differentiation and the Emergence of Counterworlds
The Suburb: A Space for Forming an Antagonistic Habitus
Quietist Salafism has its greatest success in the suburbs. Most of the practicants have been socialized in exurban areas marked by symbolic conflict with the rest of society. This point must be understood in a wider sense, because it is principally the symbolic and psychological dimension of the suburban youth identity that must be taken into account in analyzing the relationship they maintain with society. If Islam can be understood as a social fact in effect acting as a constraint on individuals, studying why certain social profiles appropriate the Islamic reference must take a finely honed approach. This religion is a brute given, a referent without any psychological, sociological, or cultural essence or its own politics. The penchant for a Salafist viaticum becomes a tendency that we can observe in persons sharing a number of sociological patterns. Principal among these is origins: of the Salafis we met, totaling more than one hundred individuals, over 90% were socialized in the suburbs. While that makes the suburbs a space for creating identities, we nevertheless find a number of traits in common with other eras when it comes to the content of a connection maintained with a center considered a dominating force.
This center supposedly acts in a hostile manner toward the denizens of a part of society that it does not consider to be like those in the center, so that it finds itself negatively integrated in the representations of many young people. These youth in turn develop a number of identity strategies stamped with the seal of defiance and structured around the overturning of the center’s dominance. Knowing this, it is possible to understand the advent of a religious discourse that makes no concessions. The oppositional habitus that finds in Salafism a sacred legitimation draws in reality on the idea, anchored in the perception of many suburban youths, that they are the other and, as such, under attack by “the system.” The inability to think of yourself as symbolically integrated can result in an anomic situation in which the part of your identity that is a legacy of immigration is accentuated. This dynamic of socioterritorial peripheralization and symbolic, if not cultural, marginalization explains the propensity of certain profiles to set themselves up in counterworlds. The vindictive character of the relationship between the center and the periphery spills over into the nature of the sociological careers adopted by individuals. On a religious level, the Islamic option can incorporate a dimension of the “class warfare” type, a characteristic in other eras of the relations between working-class categories and a society viewed as illegitimate. The state is regarded as privately owned and the government as a biased actor that from the start represents only part of the population. In that sense France is perceived as an abstract entity, both geographically and symbolically. It is understood as the prerogative of persons who benefit from it and the national identity as a socioeconomic affiliation, so that a pauper, for example, cannot consider himself to be French. The national is therefore someone who obtains tangible benefits from his French citizenship, while some social positions prohibit identification with the nation. These spaces, which are just as much “French ghettos,”3 distinguish themselves by a negative integration into sociopolitical institutions and norms reigning in the rest of society. Thus Didier Lapeyronnie notes that many urban districts contain “grey zones,” spaces forming ghettos in which the powerlessness of the inhabitants is institutionalized. Stripped of sovereignty, with norms defined elsewhere, these suburban dwellers suffer feelings of dispossession.4
The ghetto is the privileged space for forming counterworlds, the alternative meaning-making framework permitting identifications that run counter to the identity considered normal in French society. The young who embrace Salafism are therefore, on this level, children of the ghetto. While the ghetto cannot be analyzed apart from the difficulties that characterize it (racism, discriminatory practices, poverty, violence, etc.), the pathological dimension does not suffice as analysis. In fact it is the actor’s subjectivity that is important in the emergence of antisystem identities capable of mobilizing the dominant cultural codes while contesting others as it chooses:
The ghetto presupposes an internal and positive definition. It is not solely a poor quarter of immigrants whose inhabitants stay trapped by social difficulties. It is also a place whose population ended up putting together particular modes of life, visions of the world organized around its own values; in short, it is a form of social organization that lets it confront social difficulties and deal with the wounds inflicted by society. The ghetto is constructed from the outside. It is the product of racial segregation, poverty, and social relegation. The resident population lives there in a more or less forced manner for reasons both racial and social. But the ghetto is also constructed from the inside. It is an urban territory apart in which the population, or at least a part of it, has worked out a special way of life, a particular kind of counterworld that protects it collectively against the external society. It is the conjunction of this dual construction, internal and external, that defines the ghetto in the most descriptive and widest sense of the term.5
A ghetto religiosity despite its pretensions to the universal, the Minhaj Salafi in France is a reversal of the peripheralization dynamic and the practical and symbolic marginalization that touches the suburbs and the young, the children of asphalt and bitumen, there where the same religious message finds a ready hearing among other social categories under other heavens. This current of Islam is more of a middle-class religiosity in the Gulf countries, especially in Saudi Arabia, attracting practicants with a puritan religious message that is politically legitimist, socially conservative, and economically liberal. French Salafism primarily recruits suburban youth who have difficult relations with institutions. Benefiting from the security and redistribution of oil income, the Saudi middle class makes up one of the principal sociological bases of Saudi power. What Olivier Carré terms “politically moderate Islam” in effect rests on pious social groups that are disposed to integrating a puritan religious ethic underpinning political stability and economic liberalism:
The political Islam advocated in Riyad is more to the right than the classic ideas of the Muslim Brotherhood. . . . This right wing Islam is also more elaborate. It insists on the practical benefits of global capitalism and on the blessing that the immense oil income represents for the Muslim community. The equation appears simple, both for the religious men and the technocrats. . . : The Koran (read with Wahhabi rigor in the practices and with accommodation of the common interest in economic and financial matters) combined with the petrodollars assures the security and rebirth of this Arab and Muslim world bullied to such a degree by the West as a divine punishment for a loss of authentic Muslim piety. . . . This moderate political Islam gets a ready hearing among the middle classes, often disappointed by the Arab nationalist “revolutions” with socialist tendencies. Arab-nation loyalty has not been abolished, but favored are state loyalties and Islamic loyalty.6
Conversely, in French society the quietist Salafis are more widely visible than the revolutionary Salafis, who have been targeted by the security forces since September 11, 2011, and epitomize a different contestation. If the suburb and the ghetto are geographic and mental spaces of marginalization, the Daʾwa Salafiyya represents the most accomplished form of delegitimization of the symbolic order on which the godless preeminence is constructed:
The ghetto therefore is not the consequence of a natural evolution of things. It cannot conceive of itself as a pathological excrescence of society. On the contrary, it is more of a solution than a problem. It is the product of collective choices that find their expression in the urban division by social and racial groups as segregated and hierarchized. In French society today, urban segregation is a mode of distributing inequalities and managing the tensions between social and ethnic groups. Distances have replaced the conflicts between classes.7
Militant Apoliticism: Between an Anti-imperialist Ethic, Disdain for Engagement, and Unfulfilled Politicization, a Relationship to Endogenous Politics?
The Salafist viaticum inculcates in adherents the immorality of protesting and the illegitimacy of classic political participation, requiring reliance on a cleric’s judgment instead.8 The political ethos distinguishes a dual aspect of contemporary challenges: the impossibility of nourishing an activist vision and the necessity nevertheless of praising the good and reproving the bad. This double constraint results in assuming moral stances unaccompanied by any form of organized militancy. The aristocratic dimension of the Salafi positioning in a way translates into a direct progression from the state of pre-mobilization to that of demobilization, the state of mobilization somehow having been skipped. We can therefore read in the relationship to politics two complementary rather than opposing tensions. The practicants mobilize a discourse of a political nature without embracing an activist logic. Steering toward the militant sphere in the name of praising the good without, however, biting the bullet—that is how the Salafis position themselves. This translates two ideas. The first attaches to the existence among Salafis of a political critique of French society, which, not being religiously based, is delegitimized for what it does but especially for what it is. The second is associated with the fact that they do not feel sufficiently integrated into this society to reform it by means of a religiously motivated activism. The Salafis are integrated intellectually in a political field in which they feel like strangers. The resemblance is striking with some NGOs with an interest in politics but unwilling to enter a potentially corrupting sphere.9 If quietist Salafism is perceived as a religiosity that canonically forbids resort to the militant act, the audience that it encounters in the youth of the ghetto constitutes a reason to situate itself politically in relation to a dominant order. Placing itself in a contractual logic vis-à-vis the prevailing institutional order in France is comparable to signing a nonaggression pact, which leads to living a parallel life, eschewing any interest in an eventual mobilization against the disavowed state and society. Two temporalities are therefore key: one, protesting an antisystem inherited from socialization in the ghetto; the other, reasonable because conservative, stemming from a widely shared view of politics today, notably among young people, that is mistrustful of organized militancy and dialogue with institutions.10 Their duty consisting solely of calling their peers to honor the principles preached by orthodoxy, they benefit from public goods (security, state welfarism, citizenship, etc.) while still conceiving of themselves as existing in an alternative space vis-à-vis society and the state. They fulfill their responsibility to reject unbelief while actually benefiting from a peaceful life in a societal framework that they despise.11
Salafi ghetto youth do not refrain from adopting an anti-imperialist rhetoric against the West, but in order not to heighten the risk of generalized chaos, they refuse to normalize their rejection by resorting to the classic tools of mobilization, such as strikes and political parties. They thus develop a dual, apparently contradictory habitus. On the one hand, we observe in their espousing a certain vision of politics a will to opposition, a wish to delegitimize the structures of power and authority, illustrated, for example, by the caustic view of the Islamophobia imputed to the deciders and shapers of French opinion.12 By viewing themselves as the new “damned of the earth,”13 that is, people at the margin of society for the sake of a blessed religious membership, they perpetuate the anti-imperialist tradition of the red suburbs characterized by a strong worker culture of social struggle. Even so, they fail to convert this antagonism into a militant project. It is interesting that the three regions once known as strongholds of social conflict framed by the extreme left—northern France (around Lille, Roubaix, and Tourcoing) and the suburbs of Paris and Lyon—are the principal zones where the Minhaj Salafi has taken hold today. The most media-hyped illustration of this evolution is without doubt the campaign waged in 2009 by the Communist mayor of Vénissieux, André Gérin, against the widespread wearing of the niqab in his town, which he saw as the clearest sign yet of the growing hold that “Islamist integrationists” had on populations with an immigrant background. This leftist or revolutionary habitus couched in religious terms informs the will of a majority of Salafis to delegitimize the French institutional order. Viewed as a crutch of imperialism in the service of anti-Islamic interests, state institutions and political personnel become objects of a stigmatizing discourse structured around a sacred perception of the world. The dominator becomes the kafir (unbeliever); the state becomes taghout (tyrant, idol); distancing oneself from society becomes rejection. The semantic change is no less linked to a primary reality, a synonym for a major antagonism between the losers in the system and its privileged ones.
However, this oppositional predisposition structured by a leftist habitus characteristic of heavy sociological membership in working-class categories coexists with a much more conservative and legitimist modality of institutions and political stakes. While Salafist socialization forbids political engagement, the practicants are distinct in their categorical refusal to question society’s structures. However subversive its preaching may be with respect to its relationship to the institutions and values of society, Salafism rejects any undertaking of destabilization so that it ends up neutralizing the oppositional discourse that it propagates. We could describe their politicization as the superpositioning of a discourse of nonengagement on a terrain that is propitious for making demands (socioeconomic membership in the lumpen and religious belonging to the stigmatized).
If it is possible to see in the Daʾwa Salafiyya a factor that anesthetizes the partisan point of view, this religiosity presents the comparative double advantage of being able to revile a delegitimized political order without having to make an effort to change the world. This last element explains why the appetite for the entrepreneurial world and mass consumer society is favored: believers benefit from an economically developed society, civil rights, and the context of an exit from politics. The religious impossibility of engaging in confrontation is explained by the simple fact that for this generation of young people politics in its militant and organized version figures in a very relative manner; besides, this position seems to justify religiously an agenda that is widely observable beyond Salafi communities.
The desire to enrich oneself and integrate in the mass-consumption society is thus multiplied by the religious carte blanche accorded the Salafi. Moreover, for some people this militant apoliticism is reinforced the more that business success is encountered, so that investment in the economic area is accompanied by rejection of political engagement. Likewise, being focused on the imperative of migrating to the pious land furnishes a supplementary safety valve for depoliticization. The decreasing identification with society, already weak before conversion to Salafism, intensifies the closer his career brings the practicant to the great departure. This doctrine thus both serves to reinforce the resentment many individuals socialized in the ghetto harbor and to dispense the seemingly paradoxical advice to eschew institutionalized protest. Salafist socialization in its political aspect therefore takes on a tribunitial dimension to the extent that the political relationship can be viewed as a win-win situation. With the pious contemporary legitimizing his stance toward society through the religious, we can observe here the diffusion of a feeling of frustration and a demand for recognition that are not called on to engender an organized conflict with the rest of society.14 We can assume that the Salafist counterculture has an integrationist relationship to institutions that is simultaneously imprinted by defiance; the initial conditions of Salafist apoliticism have to be sought in the prior socialization of its practicants.
An Example of This Dual Habitus: The Conspiracy Theory
The conspiratorial analysis of the Muslim situation both on the French level and globally enjoys widespread popularity in Salafi communities. Acquiring an axial dimension informed by thinking themselves the favorite enemies of the more powerful civilization, Salafis count on Allah and their faith to see them through this trial. This antagonism facilitates a perception of themselves as the last resisters against a new world order. The West is presented as an impersonal figure, with the Jews, the Americans, the kuffar (nonbeliever), the Freemasons, and the rich vilified at one time or another. The anti-imperialist dimension underlying this analytical matrix is interpreted with a logic of religious struggle but equally a logic of class conflict. Impoverished because they are plundered by the rules of the global economy and dominated by the fact of their status as enemies of the imperialists, Salafis redress their situation by blaming an undefined group for the harm they have suffered. From this perspective, their identification is no longer with the Daʾwa Salafiyya but with Islam, which supposedly authorizes defenders like Osama bin Laden, as echoed by the example that follows. The projected frame properly speaking is no longer true Islam but individuals defying Western imperialism all over the world.
We are once more in Cairo, in the Maʾadi quarter’s Carrefour shopping center. We spent an afternoon in this symbol of globalization, frequented by the middle class that has benefited from the policy of economic liberalization since the 1980s. After immigrating, French Salafis manifestly maintain the typically French or Western structure of consumption, so we were sure we would find some in this hypermarket. And in fact we routinely came across Salafis from all backgrounds and countries. We met Omar and Ilyas, both in their thirties and from Lyon, accompanied by ten-year-old Mohamed, Omar’s son. Ilyas is a convert from a family originally from Spain; Omar is a child of the Algerian immigration. The two practicants have been in Egypt for a year and a half and say that they came to “perfect their religion.” We surmise from the presence of his son that Omar is in Cairo on a hijra of origin, the length of his stay buttressing the guess. Ilyas says that arrived in the country at the same time. We conducted the interview on June 28, 2009, in the shopping center’s food court:
AUTHOR:And so you’re done with France? You have no plans to go back? For you the hijra is it, you’ve done it, there’s no going back?[The two Salafis look at each and smile.]
OMAR:Ah, no, we’ve made our choice, we are fine here in Egypt. We’re here to study, to learn, to perfect our religion. France, that’s . . . There’s such a big difference now. . . . We’re not going. . . . Honestly, there’s a big difference between France and Egypt. On many levels.
AUTHOR:Such as?
OMAR:Such as? [Thinks a moment] For instance, soon Muslims won’t even be allowed to wear the veil. Looking at it, at this moment, you would say this is it: everybody lets go of Islam, that’s it, it’s gone. I would really like to know what the problem is.
AUTHOR:You’re talking about the niqab, for example?
OMAR:Yeah, the niqab, but not just the niqab. There are lots of things. You think, for example, that the kouffar, when they talk about the niqab they are only talking about the niqab. Beyond the veil, there’s prayer and the rituals. And that’s a fact.
AUTHOR:What do you say to people who say it doesn’t matter in Islam, you can wear the veil or not in the case of the women, they remain Muslim if they don’t put on the veil?
OMAR:I answer you by telling you to return to the Sunna. Let me ask you a question: Does the Koran say you have to pray?
AUTHOR:Hmm. Yes, yes, prayer, that’s in the Koran, yes, that’s found in it, yes.
OMAR:[In a professorial tone] So then what do you do? If you want to pray, what do you do?
AUTHOR:You mean, if you’re Muslim, how do you do it? I have a feeling you’re going to tell me.
OMAR:You refer to the Sunna, you’ll look up in the Sunna if they tell you to do something in the kitab Allah [book of God, i.e., the Koran]. And, bah, as to the veil, it’s the same thing. What does the book tell you about the niqab? Eh bah, afterwards, you’ll see by the example of the Prophet how it was done back then. There you have it. Does the Prophet tell people to wear the niqab? The answer is yes. There is the niqab in his tradition.
AUTHOR:So, for you, this is the ultimate secret as far as you are concerned?
OMAR:I guarantee you that the Muslims won’t get anywhere if they don’t return to the Book and the Prophet. You see very well what kind of state they’re in. Don’t be fooled, it’s the end of the world. We’ll soon get to the end. Look at the wars, the politics, all that. We’re coming to the end.
AUTHOR:For example? What makes you think that?
OMAR:Bah, look around you. You see it, in Palestine, Gaza, in the Muslim countries. You don’t think there’s a meaning to all that? We are in the end times there.
AUTHOR:And for example, Palestine, the Gaza, what does that tell you?
OMAR:It tells me that . . . Well, the Jews, we know them, and you know they mean to harm Islam. We know, but all right. . . . Hamas, frankly, you can’t say it followed the Book and the advice of the scholars. It’s well known that Palestine, where there are kouffar now . . . Just as with the niqab, they must get back to the Sunna. We know that Palestine has to be left behind, it’s a country now in the hands of the kouffar. Like Sheikh Albani said, the Palestinians must quit their country. Just like the sheikh said, rahimahou Allah [May God hold him in His Holy Mercy], as Sheikh Albani indicated, the Palestinians must leave the country. They must have confidence in Allah and quit the country. If not, did you see what Hamas did? They started a war, they massacred, you saw that? You could say they handed the, the, the . . . Like they say in the Maghreb, they handed white soap [a pretext] to the Israelis. There, that’s the result of an ʿaquida batila [false dogma], and like the scholars of the Sunna put it, “al-ʿaquida al-batila hiya al-fassed fil-ard” [An erroneous belief or dogma is corruption on earth].
AUTHOR:And so, for you, Hamas, for example, is a movement that did not apply Islam?
OMAR:Not just Hamas, the Muslim Brotherhood. And the Muslim Brotherhood is a corrupted ʿaquida [dogma], that’s what got them to where they are today. They did the opposite of what should have been done.
AUTHOR:And so, what is this ʿaquida by the Muslim Brotherhood?
OMAR:The Muslim Brotherhood, they have an ʿaquida takfiriyya [excommunication dogma]. They put the takfir on the rulers. They tell them they are finished . . . that they left Islam. However, that’s very serious. There are also takfiri in France. They say weird things. When you hear them, you just want to . . .
AUTHOR:For example, what do they say? What do they say that’s strange?
OMAR:For example, you see, they say what to do with the kouffar in France, that it’s bilad al-kufr [a country of unbelief], you can loot them, you can . . . It’s a war, and so you can steal from them, you can even sell them drugs, some say, it’s halal for them. You can also take the women, it’s the spoils of war, as they say, just like that, it lets them have more women than is permitted in Islam.
AUTHOR:And you, Ilyas, what do you think about all that?
ILYAS:Ah, me, I tell you, it doesn’t concern me. I live according to the Prophet’s example. Those political doings, I mean . . . The Prophet, they offered him power, but he said no. He did the hijra. And yet . . . [Wide-eyed] He could have had anything, but he chose the religion.
AUTHOR:One question: tell me, things went well with your family when you told them about becoming a Muslim?
ILYAS:[Pained look] Ah, no, it was . . . difficult.
AUTHOR:Meaning what? That is, if you want to talk about it.
ILYAS:How to describe it? My parents didn’t at all, at all accept it. They told me . . . well, I won’t . . . But it was hot. [Brief silence] My grandmother, even she said to me, “But why did you do that? You’re not an Arab!” So there it is, all right, but all right, al-hamdoulillah....
AUTHOR:Omar, what do you say to people who say that Muslims are targeted these days? That it’s not their fault what’s happening to them, because people have it in for them regardless? There’s some kind of overall conspiracy?
OMAR:But of course. It’s clear, no need for debate about that. Listen, for example, me, I understand things, I see things, I tell myself, “It’s not normal, it can’t possibly be.” If Muslims think they are going to succeed outside the kitab and the Sunna, they’re mistaken. Modern life, as they call it, it’s not . . . We know that, well, there are people who have it in for Islam.
AUTHOR:Would you mind being a bit more specific?
OMAR:For instance, I don’t believe the theories about September 11. I’m sure they’re trying to make us believe things that are completely . . . If you don’t know that there is, like you say, a conspiracy . . . Yes, there’s a conspiracy. Do you know the Illuminati,15 the Freemasons, all that? And bah, let me tell you there are things that happen. . . .
AUTHOR:For example, you don’t believe the American thesis about September 11?
OMAR:Listen, I’m going to tell you something. I love bin Laden because of what he says about the rulers, when he puts the takfir and all that on them. But there are some things that are questionable. First of all, bin Laden denied he did it. He never said it was him. Moreover, I saw on TV that he wears a gold ring. Everyone knows that gold is forbidden in Islam for men. Also, they showed him eating with his left hand, but, I’m sorry to say, you just don’t eat with your left according to the Sunna. There has never been a Muslim who, so to speak, knows his religion and wore a gold ring and ate with his left: I’m sorry, but that’s odd. . . . After, I can tell you, I don’t agree with bin Laden, and, I tell you, me . . . For me, I tell you . . . He left, he turned back to the hukam [rulers], so I don’t care for him.
AUTHOR:So you believe in the theory of a September 11 conspiracy?
OMAR:If you don’t believe me, type “Loose change French” into Google.16 It’s a documentary that explains all about September 11. You’ll see, it explains a lot of things.. . . .
AUTHOR:So, you don’t trust the Western leaders, regardless of who? In France, for example, you don’t see any difference between Sarkozy and Chirac?
OMAR:None. There is no difference. I’m even going to tell you this: for me, Sarkozy is much worse. I heard him say once he wanted to change the Koran. He said that some things in the Koran needed to be changed. People indeed believe in progress, that is, by detaching themselves from religion, but, bah, let me tell you, it’s false. Muslims today haven’t understood that. It’s in religion that they’ll find their solution.
AUTHOR:Sarkozy said the Koran needed changing? You sure about that?
OMAR:[A short laugh] You don’t believe me. And bah, you know he even put out some verse that caused him problems. I’m telling you, he said there are some verses that needed changing. And I’m going to tell you another thing. Do you know the book The Signs of the End Times?17
AUTHOR:Yes, I know it, sure.
OMAR:He even gave the pages. He said page 241 needed changing, 242, and 243. It caused him a problem. You realize, now, they are going to make us change Islam.
Toward a Politicized Puritanism for Some Salafis: Premises for a Mutation?
Despite disclaimers by a number of practicants, the Salafist field must not be thought of as a fixed space where the sole logic prevailing is that of a pure and simple application of norms established by the movement’s clerics. While the majority of the faithful internalize the principle of political nonintervention, certain evolutions in the relations between Islam and French society lead others to reevaluate this principle. We thus find among the contemporary pious with a university degree a greater propensity for “existing politically,”18 making it seem as if the intellectual capital as well as the mastery of social and political militancy’s codes influence the perception of a doctrine that is less conservative and more subject to certain reconstructions than might be apparent.
The struggle against Islamophobia, for example, may be seen as a reinforcing factor in this Salafism of protests, illustrating the premises of a more classic politicization and militancy. Incapable of allowing itself to forgo a strategy of speaking out on this problematic of concern to a large number of Muslims in France, it illustrates the influence of context on the actors. The affair of the Muhammad cartoons in 200619 is a choice example of this new state of mind characterizing a segment, minimal but growing, of the practicants. Sometimes spread across generations, some believers are linked by an approach that is more militant than their preaching and driven to expand beyond strictly religious and private circles.
Nordine is a family man of Algerian extraction. He comes from a family of scholars; for instance, during the 1990s his brother knew Ali Belhadj (former leader of the Algerian Islamic Front for Salvation), who tried to save the ʿaquida batila [false dogma]. In his fifties, Nordine is a professor of management sciences in a business school. Awarded a doctorate in mass market retailing in the 1990s, he holds noticeably different views from those of the young practicants. While he is versed in the references and writings of the movement’s major clerics, he does not dress like them; moreover he chooses to vote. Sometime after the affair of the caricatures exploded, he and Abdelwahid got the idea of writing a book to present a view of the Prophet’s image opposed to that being conveyed by the media.20 The collaboration between the two believers yielded the book The True Face of the Prophet Muhammad: Beyond the Caricatures; tens of thousands of copies were distributed free of charge.
Abdelwahid put his business and management skills in the service of the production, distribution, and promotion of this book. Based on texts about the Prophet sourced from Western literature (Victor Hugo, Bernard Shaw, Voltaire, Tolstoy, Goethe, etc.), the book even led to some conversions to Islam, according to Abdelwahid, a source of pride for him. Given away in large quantities at Islamic conferences, in bookstores, and at diverse other venues, this book, beyond its social impact, illustrates a “going upscale.” Far from adhering to the ethic of retreat adopted by the majority of practicants, The True Face of the Prophet Muhammad gives material form to the posture of speaking out that would henceforth characterize some of the practicants. Reactive instead of proactive as their position may be regarding transforming a society judged to be nefarious, Nordine and Abdelwahid can be seen as examples of the potential a dynamic assimilation of Salafist meaning holds. Because they own intellectual and social capital and are tuned in to an environment seen as dangerous to Islam, they embody a new Salafism, aligning itself with an agenda that is increasingly evident in France, characterized in particular by a growing desire to forestall animosity from the rest of society.
Abdelwahid is a good example of this new believer profile, seeking to translate the orthodox pious reference into the classic militant domain. His trajectory—he comes from a neotraditionalist family and has a college degree—makes him someone who is repulsed by life in France but who nevertheless engages in a defense of Muslim interests there. He subscribes to the conspiracy theory that September 11 was arranged by the U.S. Government and does not hide it. On a professional level, he trusts only entrepreneurship and business, seeking to imitate the Pious Ancients. He is condescending toward women who do not wear the hijab; in Algeria we watched him tell a woman with uncovered head, “God condemns the woman who goes out without her hijab.” On the other hand, the prohibition on voting poses a problem for him. Indeed, after hearing Sheikh Ferkous’s view of voting, he gave the following response, calibrated by the fact that he was disagreeing with a person of the religious stature of an ʿalim: “He did not convince me.” It is true that, back in Paris, Abdelwahid did not hesitate to take part in any demonstration involving the image of Islam. We observed him joining dozens of people in front of the German embassy demonstrating on behalf of the collective Against Islamophobia in France21 several days after a young Egyptian mother who was studying in Germany was murdered for wearing a veil. Intent on defending her right and that of her coreligionists to wear the veil, the pregnant Marwa el-Sherbini was in a Dresden courtroom when she was knifed eighteen times, while her three-year-old son watched. Abdelwahid did not shrink from taking action; standing up for the “martyr of the veil” and hoping to sensitize people to the growing Islamophobia in Europe, he made T-shirts and distributed badges in memory of the young mother. In his Al-Mouslim bookstore, polemical works are stacked beside commentaries by Sunni clerics. One can also find books there on how to mount a legal defense when discriminated against because of a religious affiliation.
We came to know Abdelwahid during the release in 2008 by the CCIF in Paris (Group against Islamophobia in France, most visible organization against anti-Islam and anti-Muslims hatred in France) of its first report on Islamophobia. Only his qamis actually conformed to the Sunna, which clashed with the suits, ties, and sweaters worn by cadres of a more militant Islam. His attachment to a politically active approach by the Daʾwa Salafiyya reveals a believer whose morality is at the core of the various tensions characterizing the Salafist sphere. He does not consider himself to be French and seeks to get back to Algeria, where a restaurant awaits him whose operation is supposed to provide him and his wife with a living. He is turned off by violent activism and appeals by some Muslims to overthrow the powers that he views as legitimate. Moreover he has developed an intensive entrepreneurial ethic, as attested to by his creation of the Halaldom retail business brand for marketing sheep sacrificed according to the Islamic home rite. He plans to profit from his firm’s brand by contracting with one of the biggest Algerian delicatessens in France, a specialist in Oriental baked goods, in order to sell through his website products that a part of the Maghrebian population in France is very partial to. Besides that, his bookstore puts into practice his religious effort, allowing him to preach to people passing by on Jean-Pierre Timbaud Street. He says he does not like the kouffar, including the political officeholders he accuses of conspiring against Islam and Muslims, but he has empathy for some who challenge the “imperialist” order. The following vignette is illustrative. As a matter of fact, we were struck by remarks Abdelwahid had made on our sojourn in Algiers during Ramadan in 2009. We were watching a TV report on the visit to Algeria that day by the president of Venezuela, Hugo Chavez. The flagbearer of Bolivarism had come to discuss oil prices and production levels with his counterpart, Abdelaziz Bouteflika, to help stabilize the global market for black gold. The report prompted an enthusiastic, spontaneous reaction from the young entrepreneur, who pointed his finger at the South American statesman and exclaimed:
ABDELWAHID:Oh la la, I dig that guy! He’s a star, all right! I like the guy. A fine guy!
AUTHOR:Who are you talking about? Chavez?
ABDELWAHID:Him, yes. A resister, someone who says no to the Americans, who doesn’t roll over, who says “You can’t roll me over.” I really like the guy. He tells them “No!”
This is a rather surprising admiration, especially keeping in mind the principles of rejecting that which is not Islamic and detesting what God disapproves of, principles Salafis regularly proclaim. Regardless, the fact that a Catholic, leftist, anticapitalist head of state appeared on Algerian TV was enough to genuinely thrill the young orthodox entrepreneur. Abdelwahid’s political and moral perspectives are joined by tendencies that we would have a fair amount of difficulty finding in other social groups. The hatred of the imperialist Western domination of the world, the appetite for the market economy, business and individual freedom associated with a distaste for the harm done by liberalism, the refusal to take part in a political project clearly out of fear of stirring up sedition, all the while recognizing the necessity of fighting in defense of Islam, are elements at the confluence of differing socializations that shaped a person like Abdelwahid. The scene we just described can therefore be interpreted on a microsociological level as a moment of reemergence of the peripheral and marginal socialization that Abdelwahid had known before his conversion to the Minhaj Salafi.
A Cultural Heritage of Antagonism as a Factor in Rupture Identity Formation
The second prism for breaking down the predisposition to rupture formalized in sacred terms by the Salafist way attaches to the weight of familial socialization, one of whose consequences is distrusting society. Socialized affectively in an extraterritorial framework, Salafis conceive of the familial hearth as an extension of the family’s country and of the cultural codes imported from the bled (country of origin); such a climate fosters an antagonistic religious socialization. The reappropriation of religious principles is in large part determined by the preexistence in the family of a difficult relationship with France; thus the assimilation of one ethic over another results from the road to be traveled between the native milieu and a new religious community preaching hierarchy and differentialism. While it is not the only factor authorizing the emergence of the “emmigré” (immured immigrant) who perceives himself as a stranger in the receiving society, primary socialization plays an important role in predisposing him to embrace the Salafist morality. The same observation applies to the post-Christian Salafis belonging to native French families who also are not sustained by a strong sentiment of belonging to the nation even before they embrace orthodoxy. The emmigré in this sense echoes the “marginal man,” “torn between two worlds and with a conscience that is simultaneously revived and murdered by his condition [and] susceptible to creativity given his critical position toward a milieu which he confronts first of all as unfamiliar and which then is always in a position that potentially can be relativized. Never imprisoned in just one manner of interpreting situations, he enjoys a margin of supplementary maneuver, a distance.”22
The Maghrebians: Inertia More than a Return to the Religious
Aside from the fact that from a demographic point of view the Maghrebian community is the prime face of the Muslim presence in France, the initially North African character of Salafist Islam in France is also explained by the attraction of a religiosity harking back to a positive image of Arabness. The dearth of individuals from the Turkish immigration, which totals between 200,000 and 250,000 individuals in France, tends to nuance the thesis of a sociocultural universality of this identity. Among different communities that, even if not proportional, are observable, the ethnic composition of Salafi communities reveals that the Maghrebians are most susceptible to the orthodox discourse. Due to this socialization, the individual rediscovers the spiritual charms of the Orient and, more specifically, of Saudi Arabia, the country that is at the epicenter of the movement on a global scale. Parental education has maintained the practicant in a logic of identification with the country of origin. However, in entering upon this career, the Salafi amplifies his empathy for the bled by including henceforth the entirety of the Arab or Muslim world in the list of societies he approves of in the name of his religious values. The hijra best illustrates this, since the choice of destination is between the country the family emigrated from and a country with even greater symbolic value thanks to the supposed respect for Islamic injunctions and its economic success (Malaysia, the Emirates, etc., not to mention Saudi Arabia). Salafist socialization can be understood as much as an assimilation of the identity of one part of the parents, starting with formal religious membership and the “myth of the lost paradise,” that is, the country of origin, as a reaction against this religious socialization that is more ethnic than scientific. Certainly Islam is transmitted, but without the modus vivendi that normally accompanies the passing on of this religious heritage. Opposed to this Islam of “us,” the Minhaj Salafi is much more an Islam of “me,” the individual becoming conscious of himself and his responsibility for the need to revive an abandoned model of society. For the Maghrebian practicants, adherence to true precepts includes allegiance to the extraterritorial vision of the parents and the reaction against the incompleteness of their religious design for their offspring. As such, perceiving yourself as the equivalent of a born-again Muslim is highly debatable.
The rediscovery of a purified Islam is, in effect, perceived as the true point of departure for the Salafist career, theoretically symbolizing the true act of birth of the religious engagement. However, it can be explained only by the phenomenon of an inertia that predisposes the practicant to such a metamorphosis. Indeed, we observe among Salafis of Maghrebian ancestry a completely relative estrangement from the Islamic reference valued before their conversion, despite a discourse that praises the divine grace inherent in having been guided toward the Salafiyya. The pre-Salafi trajectory is in reality a synonym for integration of the religious norm, even if the behaviors and social practices were not always aligned with Islamic morality. Even though the identification with Islam is only derived from the Salaf reference, the religious life under parental auspices in a certain sense being neutralized by it, the Salafi has never cut himself off from the Muslim faith. The puritan offer thus touches individuals profoundly associated with a parental conscience that the migratory experience and settling on foreign soil have disadjusted. This notion of disadjustment is key for understanding the memory of the Salafi coming from a Maghrebian environment. On a religious level, he has not inherited any structuring practice that might have gone hand in hand with this essentially nominal Islamic socialization. Finding himself disadjusted will contribute to an individuation of the religious identity that situates itself both in continuity and in rupture relative to the primary Islamic socialization.23
The logic prevailing in the case of Salafist socialization, secondary to the primary familial stage, is one of passing beyond the inherited religious norm, all the while claiming prolongation of the Muslim affiliation stemming from parental education. Emancipating themselves by a certain kind of continuity, the Maghrebian Salafis end up satisfying their parents after a period of conflict and their peers as well as the scholars by dynamically perpetuating the heritage whose bearers they are. Above all, they enrich their heritage through a more rigorous and drastic approach to the religion. The sociocultural innovation that the Minhaj Salafi represents in fact can be understood as a differentialist response by some social actors situating themselves in a representational framework and religious matrix that are reinforced. Being Salafi means going beyond, in the name of denser Islamic references, a familial socialization that willingly accepts settling in France for socioeconomic reasons but is recalcitrant in fully identifying psychologically with this society.
Judging from this, Salafism must be seen as the perpetuation of an immigrant identity that crosses the assimilation of modernity’s socioeconomic and cultural codes with the rejection of political and symbolic integration that prior familial socialization rendered irreconcilable with belonging to Islam. The parental instance constituting as much a model as a challenge, Salafist socialization among practicants from a Maghrebian background is a form of reaction and continuity. The phenomenon of inertia represented by inscribing his social being in a religious and communitarian perspective embodies the belief that Islam, as a sociological fact, cannot take root in France. This intransigent Islam simultaneously crystallizes both the victory and the defeat of religious socialization initiated by the parents discovering in religious affiliation a symbol of their national and cultural origin. Even if some of their offspring again take up a religious identity in an absolutist and antagonistic mode, doing so promotes a denationalized Islamic practice. Having noted the disconnection between “cultural parentage” and “puritan genealogy,”24 it perceives the refusal to embrace the substance of the parental faith as a key moment while partaking of a real sociocultural inertia. This uncoupling is what is interpreted as a rebirth in the shadow of Islamic purity, when it fact it is a question of an identity strategy allowing a symbolic “rising above” a modernity that is in fact assimilated while continuing to take advantage of it in practical terms.
The familial memory determined a relationship of mistrust with society, justified especially by the impossibility of thinking of the Muslim condition in an endogenous manner, but it did so without offering a religious modus operandi. One of the most striking examples of this phenomenon is undoubtedly the relation to religious ostentation, which differs in singular fashion between children and parents. Where the first-generation immigrants were set on not making waves and contented themselves with a low-key demonstration of their religious affiliation, the Salafist ethic considers their presence on non-Muslim soil an unacceptable reason for downplaying demonstrations of Islamic affiliation. In this regard, it is possible to see the mark of a higher respect among earlier generations for the receiving society or a wish not to attract the symbolic reproaches of the natives. This is different from the younger generation’s disdain for the opinion of their fellows and for integration with a despised society, which nonetheless remains a pole they identify with.
This facilitates an understanding of why Turkish Islam paradoxically is more impervious to Salafist discourse. Taking this route must be analyzed as the product not of a return to Islam but of a dual dynamic: the inertia of the religious and then being clamped in a symbolic and sociological vise that is both French and globalized at the same time.
The weight of family history, and most especially of its migratory dimension, is palpable in the discourse of Salafis who have taken the step to hijra, for example. This rupture, represented as a liberation from the ungodly, can be seen as the best illustration of the symbolic weakness of the tie between Salafis and France. Hassan is forty years old. In his own words, he is “an Algerian who live[d] in France.” Today he has given up on this country and rejoices because of it. For some years now Hassan has been able to enjoy his house in Algiers, in the Qoba district, near the mosque where Sheikh Ferkous officiates. We met Hassan by its exit; a friend of Abdelwahid introduced us. Not in the least intimidated by us, he began to describe the route he took from Villeneuve-la-Garenne to the Algerian capital. His journey is all the more interesting because it is emblematic of one by a person who never liked living in France. Hassan does not have a single empathetic word for France, even after having spent most of his life there. He speaks of his hijra as if it were a liberation and a successful conclusion. His son, all of ten years old, is close to him—seemingly very close, by the way Hassan holds him by the shoulder. Hassan juggles his interview with a few seconds of play with the boy, who, like his father, is dressed in Sunna style. Their complicity is such that when Hassan responds to our queries, he looks at his child, as if addressing him is of higher priority, ostensibly in the hope that the little boy will pursue the road he himself has traveled to provide his child the opportunity to live on Islamic soil.
In France Hassan was a tile layer, plying his trade in many houses owned by the French. That experience contributed to feeding an attitude toward them that oscillates between condescension and distaste. While he responded to our questions only by swearing by God and warning against any person who would argue for iqamat fi bilad al-kufr (living in the country of unbelief), two moments during our interview stayed with us. The first dealt with his vision of Algeria as his own country. Justifying his return by the religious necessity of living in a Muslim country, he cites the rhythm of life prevailing in France as the reason for having settled here and rejecting the uprooting that some Muslims have accepted:
HASSAN:But, tell me, when do we benefit from our country? When can we finally live in the house that we earned with the sweat of our brow? The people over there, I know how they think. They keep a house in their country, but they never benefit from it. Maybe . . . ten days, fifteen days, a month, a month and a half per year . . . I don’t know what they are thinking. They say, “Yes, yes, let’s retire, inchʾallah.” But when they finally get to retire, they’re still over there, they can’t leave. They take as their pretext the children, the routine; they are used to life in France. I don’t get it. Here is their country [points to the ground to indicate Algeria]. When are they finally going to enjoy their home, their country?
AUTHOR:And so, for you, living in Algeria is fundamental because that’s the place you must live? The fact that you have a house here, for example, that doesn’t keep you from having one in France and enjoying both?
HASSAN:Let me tell you. I don’t think of France as my country. I’ll tell you a story. You know I have a Moroccan family. A part of my family is Moroccan. Well, let’s say they are cousins. They mostly have girls, most of them are girls. You know what they did? They decided they had to buy a house in France because, well, that’s where they lived, and so it was normal. You have to favor a house in France. As a result, you know what happened? They never bought a house in Morocco. And then they practically never again went to Morocco. Do you find that to be normal? They lost their country, their roots. Okay, they had their house, but they lived with the French. We, we live with Muslims. So the bottom line is, what did it get them?
The return journey occasions a sociological scene revelatory of the state of mind of numerous Salafis, starting with those with Algerian ancestry, which, as previously noted, constitute the principal community. We were riding in the car with Abdelwahid on the way back to downtown Algiers and asked him if he would mind making a detour past the French consulate, adjoining the embassy, the complex housing all French diplomatic institutions that spreads over a vast area (about thirty-nine acres) in the heart of the capital’s Embassy Row. After taking longer than anticipated to find the consulate entrance, we finally were able to conclude our business. On the return trip, we again had to pass the administrative citadel, with its armed guards, who are actually a unit of French expatriate policemen in Algiers. At the sight of them, Abdelwahid exclaimed indignantly, “But that’s not possible! Just look at it! You saw it! It’s out of the question! It’s finished, the era of colonialism! French Algeria is finished! But just have a look, their embassy takes up half the city. Look at the other embassies around it, over there, they’re not like that. They think they can do anything, as if the country still belongs to them! It’s not normal! It’s intolerable! Who do they think they are?” When we answered that Algeria has more ties to France than any other country, making the imposing character of France’s diplomatic and consular area in the city reasonable, he replied even more brusquely, “No! It’s over, the Algerian war!” In a veritable syndrome of origins or paradise lost, Abdelwahid conveys the Salafi’s complete identification with the country of his birth. Blending into the Algerian sociocultural landscape, Abdelwahid’s journey to the cradle of his origins corresponds to a relegitimization of his own self. The Salafi, by his visceral attachment to the country of Algeria, refutes the thesis of a “double illegitimacy” of the children of the Maghrebian immigration.25
Surprised by the fervor of his outburst on seeing how deeply France is planted in the Algerian body, we learn a few days later that the young entrepreneur is a nephew of the first martyr of the national war of liberation. Indeed, while we accompanied him to exchange some currency near the harbor where young Algerians make money on the black market, we passed in front of an athletic field in downtown Algiers. This is where Abdelwahid told us the following: “You see this field, it’s the Boualem Rahal Field. The first martyr casualty during the Battle of Algiers [in 1957] was my uncle. Every year, on the anniversary of his death, the TV runs a documentary about him.” The emotion in the young Salafi’s voice was audible.26 This love of his country reemerged the day he took us to the airport for our return to France. He took us to a souvenir shop in the airport, telling us he wanted to give us a present. Even though we politely begged off, the Salafi suddenly exclaimed, “Ah, of course! I know, you like books. I know just the thing for you.” He went to the shelves full of books about Algeria and brought us one by Chems Eddine Chitour, Algeria: The Past Revisited,27 which he was eager for us to have as a souvenir of our visit to his country.
The Turks, or the All-Included Religious Socialization: A Turnkey Islam
The near-absence in the Salafist communities of individuals from Turkish origins is an interesting indicator of the logics underpinning entry into this career. Addressing itself to all of humanity, this religiosity finds an echo foremost in individuals with memories of the Maghreb. But the extreme rarity of Salafis born to Turkish families is nevertheless striking. Practically nonexistent in France, the Turkish dimension of Salafism allows us to analyze in depth the success of this doctrine in other communities, Maghrebian ones above all. Based on our observations, a weak presence of believers from this origin is also a hallmark of the Tablighi movement; we noticed that the Tablighian religiosity, just like its Salafist competition, was distinctly more popular among Maghrebians, sub-Saharans, and converts. If such a balance sheet tends to confirm the idea that exclusive Islam is above all an affair of decultured people, it also reinforces the hypothesis that, despite the strictly religious differences, the Minhaj Salafi is a sociological continuation of the re-Islamization initiated by the Jamaʾat Tabligh.
In effect, it is a certain level of destructuring and deculturing that seems to explain differing predispositions between, for example, young Maghrebians and young Turks when it comes to embracing the Salafist morality. By “destructuration” we understand that settling in France was accompanied by a rupture, partial or total, between the generations, which also affected religious representation. It notably engendered a reappropriation of the religious norm by the autochthonous generations on a basis that has little to do with the cultural tissue of the country of emigration. As such, the children’s Islamic identity is integrated in a logic of differentiation relative to their parents’ and is determined in the first place by the importing of religious conceptions from the country of origin. The profile of the emmigré thus assimilates the idea of not being of this country yet still not embracing the parental religious vision in its entirety.
The transmission of the religious norm is configured differently among the Turks. There we see a greater permeability to the influence of the state, for instance in the way worship is organized. It deploys by means of Turkish government-related structures such as DITIB (Türk-Islam Birliği de Diyanet Işleri, Turko-Islamic Union for Religious Affairs)28 or the Milli Görüs (National Vision),29 a transnational entity whose thinking is close to that of the Muslim Brotherhood but that primarily addresses itself to Turkish émigré communities in Europe. And here we are not even evoking other currents, like Süleymanci30 or the movements close to thinkers like Fethullah Gülen.31 More structured and more audible than Maghrebian consular Islam, with its proportionately fewer immigrant individuals in France, Turkish Islam appears as a more limited identity. The schools and mosques operated within this community framework are more youth oriented, for example. The religious socialization that results leads to a stronger identification with Turkey, which offers an explanation of the distance felt from the Daʾwa Salafiyya, a religiosity perceived as being more Arab or Saudi.
Another, more fundamental vector of impermeability to Salafism is the compartmentalization of numerous families of Turkish origin, most of them from rural backgrounds. It should be noted that neither Tablighi nor Salafist preaching has ever really made inroads in the mosques operated by a Turkish community. This being an Islam in a sense partitioned off within the French Islamic terrain, the religious socialization engenders distance between itself and any form of concurrent Islamic acculturation. Religion, culture, and national or communitarian affiliation being perceived as consubstantial, to import a different Islamic referent would resonate like splitting from a clearly defined united group.
This second factor of deculturation is thus relatively weaker among Muslims of Turkish ancestry then among the Maghrebians. Adopting the Salafist norm results in real distancing from the parental cultural heritage. The act of embracing this career, theoretically refractory with regard to nationalist feelings, can occur only with individuals predisposed by their environment to think of religious practice independently of this communitarian vise grip. In this respect, the ability of some young Muslims of Maghrebian ancestry to embrace an Islam that is a-national in theory translates above all as a sociocultural porosity that is greater in the North African than the Turkish milieu. The religious strategies of young Maghrebians, such as quietist Salafism, can be understood only as being in the spirit of the greater sociological openness of Maghrebian families compared to their Turkish counterparts. Even though without question the worldviews are influenced by the “ghetto effect,” the adoption of Salafist morals must be grasped while keeping in mind a complementary dynamic. This concerns the permeability of many children of the Maghrebian immigration to social practices generally interpreted as signs of opening, despite the facility with which they paradoxically think of themselves as representing a counterworld. This is the case, for example, with socioethnic exogamy, which is higher among the Maghrebians than in Turkish circles, or the mastery and usage of the French language, which is much less prevalent among the latter.32 In this regard, the Salafist career is the indicator of a sociological opening that coexists with psychological partitioning and produces a phenomenon of religious exclusion.
The Converts, or the Melting-Pot Socialization
The sociological uniformity that is representative of the overwhelming proportion of individuals who have embraced Islam, even those not born into Muslim circles, illustrates another Minhaj Sahih trait. From the perspective of converts, the composition of these communities is once again very close to that of communities linked to the Tabligh. While not the main subgroup within the Salafi ensemble, the visibility of converts in both movements must be acknowledged. Although, in a sense, those embracing the Salafist principles consider themselves converts, even if they never abandoned the faith of their Muslim parents, we apply the term “convert” in this section to the individual born outside a milieu in which Islam is claimed as the constitutive faith.
This figure is without doubt one of the most important in the landscape of beliefs in contemporary Western societies. If the Salafi prides himself on an individualistic conception of the religious, the convert chooses disethnicization. A modern man of faith in our age, he reflects the serious developments of the religious field in a country like France. Two dynamics must be highlighted. The first concerns the sociological secularization of French society. It authorizes the individual’s distancing with respect to the entirety of the religious discourse on the way to choosing what best suits his aspirations. Structured in the manner of a true marketplace of beliefs, in the individualist societies that tend to reinforce the effect of anomie tied to certain heritages, such as the immigrant legacy or territorial and symbolic apartness, the contemporary religious landscape permits the individuation of religiosity. In the case of Salafism, the project envisages the uniformization of belief and practice; adhering to this conception nevertheless occurs on an individual basis. The second dynamic operates in the decline of the regulatory power of the authorities of traditional religious socialization that are, for example, the family, the mosque, and to a lesser degree the structures connecting to consular Islam. The Turkish resistance to Salafism is explained in addition by the cultural solidity of immigrant families as well as by the proportionately higher and more effective density of structures of public regulation. This framework explains the porosity of one offer of Islam presenting itself as authentic, antisystem, and antirelativist; this is why the permeability of many converts is higher. Whether in cases of Tablighi or Salafi socialization, the receptivity to this type of discourse is due to the absence of intermediaries between the offer and the need for meaning.
The converts, who at a minimum constitute a quarter of all practicants, represent the ultimate state of modern religiosity.33 Two kinds of explanation make it possible to identify the reasons why their numbers are so high in the Salafist movement. The first is of a sociological order and relates to the life the converts led before their first contact with the Islamic norm. The conversion of some of the individuals to this religion, for many resulting from immigration, cannot be understood without keeping in mind the existence of a melting-pot socialization that has young Muslims rub shoulders with non-Muslims in the districts where Islam is a social given. Despite what practicants say when they insist on a strong feeling of being the elect, there are marked similarities between youth in the suburbs in regard to identity strategies. Even before they decided to consciously embrace the Muslim credo, our interviewees evinced a real empathy for the fact of Islam. Mingling with the “brothers in the same boat” or “brothers in the hood,” for many legacy Muslims the non-Muslims are distinguished by an unconscious religious socialization. This is the case with Adnan, who, even though he downplayed the influence of “mingling”34with Muslim friends during adolescence, hardly manages to hide the fact that Islam occupied an important place in his environment as a commonplace, legitimate source of identity. The link of brotherhood, in this sense, preexists the conversion, even if the Salafist morality establishes a symbolic demarcation between the initiated and those who are not. This emblematic closeness and group solidarity, if not class, within which the feeling of being relegated and dominated is structural, facilitates the integration of a more social than spiritual religious identity. Identifying with children of immigrants whom the system discriminates against, the convert is distinguished first by a predisposition for Islamizing his existence. Muslim by “absorption,”35 whose prior life rendered him Muslimophile through solidarity and defiance in the face of an abhorrent symbolic order that rides roughshod over the inhabitants of the suburbs, the convert has access to the offer of Salafist meaning just like his ghetto brothers.
The second explanation touches on the nature of the links between practicants. If they are conceived as the pyramid type, the internal sociality of the movement sees itself as profoundly egalitarian, the sole source of hierarchy that is acceptable being linked to mastery of the ʿilm (holy science). To the extent that the sole criterion of differentiation is religious culture, it is this personal investment that becomes the key to recognition within the Salafist field. In this scheme, in addition to the prestige connected with the fact of having passed more stages than those born Muslim, they line up with their peers, for example the Maghrebians. Salafism is a form of Islamic expression that in theory is not very sensitive to the influence of a culture based on the episteme of the Sunna; thus the differentiation criteria are neutralized, since the only reading filter attaches to the opinion of the ʿoulama. If the scientific capital is assimilated, then the practicant sees his prestige increase, be he Arab, black, or convert. This egalitarian dimension of Salafist preaching contrasts singularly with what can be observed in other Islamic socializations. For example, it works differently in an organization like PSM (Presence and Spirituality of Muslims), which gets its inspiration from that historic Moroccan opponent of Hassan II, the theoretician Sheikh Abdessalam Yassine, who died in 2012 after founding the antimonarchist Islamist movement Justice and Charity (al-ʿadl wal-ihssane). Attracting primarily Moroccan Muslims and converts with a Moroccan background, though fewer than the Minhaj Salafi, the preaching is strongly hierarchized. Here too the Tabligh and the Salafiyya are comparable in that the convert is less differentiated in them than in other preachings. By staying in a Muslim country for a religious apprenticeship, by immersing himself in a country of faith framed as a salutary migration, or by studying the authorized sources, the convert can claim a certain degree of precedence and act as a religious reference by climbing the ladder of orthodox apprenticeship.
The Life Cycle of Quietist Salafism: The Generational Effect
While the Salafist codes mostly affect postadolescents and young adults, it is useful to examine their age structure in order to highlight a dynamic vision of this identification. The path taken by these practicants involves a radicality differential in the approach to Islam that depends on the duration of this career. This is how their trajectory reveals an evolution in referencing the Salafist norm. Similar to the changes of perception that characterize the religiosity of many Tablighis36 in the course of their religious commitment, Salafis also pass through several phases. To the extent that the stages inherent in their socialization are realized, with the salutary abandonment (hijra) ranking first among them, we observe a certain deradicalization both in discourse and in social practices. Four periods can be identified.
The first of these is linked to the figure of the “anti-me.” This moment of Salafist memory is certainly not directly integrated with the orthodox journey, but it is crucial for understanding the practicant’s psychology. The anti-me is what the pious contemporary was before conversion and what he should never have been. It is the result of deviant and soiled socialization induced by immersion in a society that is in all respects execrable. Synonymous with the erstwhile subjugation by the norms of the contemporary era, the Salafi rejects this self, especially because it symbolizes the moment in his life when he was “feminized” by being dominated by modern society. The Salafi in general refuses to talk about this period of his life, preferring to present himself as “born again” in Islam. We noticed the extreme difficulty our conversation partners had in divulging the content of their existence before their Salafization, even though we know their previous course proved decisive for their adopting Salafist morals.
The second phase begins at the moment of election. The pariah becomes the elect, the lost individual is saved by entering into the group of victors. If the practicant regards this moment as the first stage of his religious career, it is all the more an essential phase because it marks a moral reorientation. During adolescence, postadolescence, or young adulthood (under thirty years of age), the conversion to Salafism is plainly the expression of a quest for coherence but also the product of interactions between the individual and an environment in which Islam occupies an important place. What matters is that the religion represents a potential for eventual rupture and opposition. The stage of election is thus decisive in the anomic individual’s course as he is carried toward a radical understanding of the sacred. The discovery of the orthodox canons corresponds to a period of psychological wonderment, when the practicant becomes progressively sensitive to the enveloping perfume of the truth as the proofs of his religious superiority accrue to him. It is also a period of opening up to other people. The elect is happy with his fate, and the wonder that he feels ebbs dynamically with the project of setting others on the same path. The state of election lasts through the pyramidal socialization and begins to decline in step with the immunizing sociality beginning to replace the preceding stage. The time when Salafists interact with other Muslims according to an aristocratic logic is short compared with the period that follows. Still, it lingers for as long as there is hope for a conversion of coreligionists to his way of seeing outweighing the menace of perversion that stalks intrinsic purity. As long as the proselytizing effort induced through a unity of marginal extraversion prevails over the risk incurred of sullying himself, the pyramidal socialization is perpetuated.
In the opposite case, a phase of positive retrogression occurs. This is the longest and most radical stage. After the period of zeal, the practicant falls back on himself, deepening and bettering his condition. This third anthropological moment coincides with the phenomenon that most merits the term “rupture.” It certainly is the moment that contributes the most to the view of Salafism in France as a sectarian and asocial religion. The check on the offensive posture leads Daʾwa Salafiyya adherents to a more defensive positioning. The pious contemporary generally devotes several years of his career to this period. This withdrawal for deepening his Salafity in a country and era hostile to true believers coincides with the years of youth, when the Salafi situates himself betwixt and between. Usually single and still living at home, often performing insecure socioprofessional functions, emblematic of an incomplete integration into the labor market, the practicant during these years also retreats to the peer group. The involution that depicts the sociality of this phase is one of retreat to a religious path that badly accommodates alterity and bases itself on the ethic of resistance against contemporary developments. While Salafis are aware of the criticism that is leveled at them in this regard, with some inhabitants of the suburbs humorously turning the Salaf into the talaf (lost/disoriented ones), they respond that this drift is nothing more than the application pure and simple of Islamic injunctions. This period of retrogression, experienced as beneficial, fixes the young practicant in a posture of salutary renunciation and specialized existence. The fertile retrogression is long and drawn out to the extent that it translates into several years of limitations on interacting with those who are dissimilar, although the time is actually not spent totally cut off from the environment. These years of closing off express, ceteris paribus, the propensity to identify with a political group viewed as radical, whether of the right or the left, just as the university years do for students at the age of intellectual awakening. The involution phenomenon is reinforced if the practicant makes the leap to physical migration to the Muslim country of rebirth. With certain exceptions, the hijra is mostly an affair of young singles or young couples, triggered in that case by the birth of the first child and the wish not to make the same mistakes with their offspring that the first-generation immigrants made. Marriage, life as a couple, and starting a family are reasons for pursuing a positive retrogression, which is reinforced in a nonhostile country. Feeding on each other, migration and starting a family combine to effect a change of degree but also a change in the nature of the rupture.
However, these two factors must also be interpreted as dual to the extent that they echo a ritual passage important in the Salafist career: they have effects that are going to reorient the course of the rupture. Positive retrogression and what it implies about healthy reclusion last only a short while. While Salafis tend to see in marriage the foundation of a pious family and see in the departure to a majority-Muslim society a successful outcome, these positionings can also initiate a relativization of radicality. Getting married or emigrating can redefine the drastic relationship that characterizes the preceding phase. While still being as uncompromising in relation to the religion’s ritual and dogmatic dimension, the Salafi no longer systematically seeks confrontation with his congeners. When telling him about legal decisions or the deviant behaviors of certain sects claiming Islam as their own, we can hear him say, Allah ihdihoum (May God guide them).
Another important factor in diluting the rupture’s drastic aspect in certain cases is the hijra itself. Conceived as an experience from which the individual expects a revelation about himself, settlement in the believing country, permanently or not, leads a great many practicants to lower some of their ideals relating to Muslim countries. A social practice that permits gauging the tenor of the break, the hijra also offers the possibility of measuring the developments in their religious socialization. The fact of having sojourned in a Muslim country leads many promoters of the Salafiyya to envisage a return to France under the impact of an incomplete or defective integration in the receiving country.
3 Éric Maurin, Le ghetto français: Enquête sur le séparatisme social (The French ghetto: Inquiry into social separatism) (Paris: Seuil, 2004). In this work the author identifies the dualisms and contrasts of a socioeconomic order on which may come to be superimposed a map of the geographic division of ethnic or sectarian groups. The author thus speaks of a continuum of fissures between, for example, the central city and suburban districts.
4 Didier Lapeyronnie with Laurent Courtois, Ghetto urbain: Ségrégation, violence, pauvreté en France aujourd’hui (Urban ghetto: Segregation, violence, poverty in present-day France) (Paris: Robert Laffont, “Le monde comme il va,” 2008), 249–250.
5 Ibid., 11–12.
6 Olivier Carré, L’Orient arabe aujourd’hui (The Arab Orient today) (Paris: Complexe, 1990), 42–43.
7 Lapeyronnie and Courtois, Ghetto urbain, 14–15.
8 Johanna Siméant highlights the fact that moral judgment serves as a “functional equivalent” of political engagement when describing the position of people engaged in humanitarian action. Johanna Siméant, “Un humanitaire ‘apolitique’? Démarcations, socialisations au politique et espaces de la réalisation de soi” (An “apolitical” humanitarianism? Dividing lines, socialization in politics and spaces for self-realization), in Jacques Lagroye (ed.), La politisation (Paris: Belin, 2003), 165.
9 Ibid., 169, 173.
10 Anne Muxel, Avoir 20 ans en politique: Les enfants du désenchantement (Twenty years in politics: The children of disenchantment) (Paris: Seuil, 2010).
11 Kirstine Sinclair, a specialist in the radical Hizb al-tahrir (Party of Liberation), in researching the establishment of the caliphate and installation of an Islamic state, notes that its hardline rhetoric does not result in violent action. She thus suggests, “For [this movement], language does not function like a safety valve. Strong criticisms are leveled and violence is no longer necessary.” Quoted in Jean-François Mayer, “Hizb‑ut‑Tahrir: L’évolution d’un parti islamiste transnational en Occident (Grande‑Bretagne et Danemark) (Hizb-ut-Tahrir: Evolution of a transnational Islamic party in the West [Great Britain and Denmark]), in Amghar, Islamismes d’Occident, 101. This suggestion seems to fit the Minhaj Salafi.
12 Vincent Geisser, La nouvelle islamophobie (The new Islamophobia) (Paris: La Découverte, 2003).
13 Frantz Fanon, Les damnés de la terre (The wretched of the earth), preface by Jean-Paul Sartre (Paris: La Découverte, 2002).
14 The hypothesis of a tribunician function pertaining to some Islamic currents was formulated in the early 1980s by Rémy Leveau and Gilles Kepel at a time when preaching the Tabligh was in vogue among the first-generation immigrants, before they found a place in a French society in crisis and an often difficult relationship with immigrant populations. See Rémy Leveau and Gilles Kepel (eds.), Les musulmans dans la société française (Muslims in French society) (Paris: Presses de Sciences Po, “Références,” 1988), 37; Georges Lavau, À quoi sert le Parti communiste français? (What good is the French Communist Party?) (Paris: Fayard, 1981).
15 Latin for “the illuminated.” The name of a secret society whose project is to dominate the world by infiltrating governments and organizing revolutions.
16 Here Omar makes references to a documentary series made by Dylan Avery whose main thesis is that the attacks of September 11, 2001, were not carried out by Islamic terrorists but by members of the U.S. government.
17 Yusuf Al-Wabil, Les signes de la fin des temps (The signs of the end times) (Paris: Al-Hadith, 2006).
18 Salafis making the move to organized militancy thus are appropriating Abdelmalek Sayad’s thesis that “to exist is to exist politically.” See Abdelmalek Sayad, “Exister, c’est exister politiquement” (To exist is to exist politically), Presses et immigrés en France (Press and immigrants in France), nos. 135–136, 13–21 (December 1985).
19 An intellectual and diplomatic crisis stirred up in 2006 by the publication of drawings in the Danish magazine Jyllands Posten showing the Prophet Muhammad in situations that offended Muslims worldwide (for example, wearing a bomb as a turban). An international debate then ensued on how far freedom of expression can go, the defenders of the right to satire opposing those who saw in the caricatures an amalgamation of Muslims and terrorists.
20 Kepel, Beyond Terror and Martyrdom, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010; Olivier Roy, “Caricatures: Géopolitique de l’indignation” (The caricatures: Geopolitics of indignation), Le Monde, February 8, 2006.
21 www.islamophobie.net.
22 Le Breton, L’interactionnisme symbolique, 31; E. V. Stonequist, The Marginal Man (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1937).
23 William Thomas, On Social Organization and Social Personality (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1966), 61.
24 Olivier Roy, La Sainte Ignorance: Le temps de la religion sans culture (Holy ignorance: The time of religion without culture) (Paris: Seuil, 2008).
25 Abdelmalek Sayad, L’immigration ou les paradoxes de l’altérité: 2. Les enfants illégitimes (Immigration or the paradoxes of otherness: 2. The illegitimate children) (Paris: Raisons d’agir, “Cours et travaux” [Reasons to act, “Courses and works”], 2006).
26 On a conversational tangent about Algeria’s political history with Abdelwahid one day, he shared a lesson on the importance of his country in the nonaligned movement following independence. He also discussed the importance of President Houari Boumediene, who made his mark with a voluntarist policy of getting out from under the East-West split to the benefit of defending his country’s Arab identity. Here are Abdelwahid’s words about the former Algerian head of state, spoken proudly: “He was the first ever to speak Arabic from the UN podium. The people were ecstatic about Algeria.”
27 Chems Eddine Chitour, Algérie: Le passé revisité. Une brève histoire de l’Algérie (Algeria: The past revisited. A short history of Algeria) (Algiers: Casbah Editions, 2004).
28 This is the main new consular organ. It operates most Turkish mosques in France and so constitutes the key religious and communitarian regulatory authority in France’s Turkish Islamic landscape.
29 Today it counts approximately 500,000 members in Europe. It is a re-Islamization movement created in 1971 in Braunschweig, Germany, stimulated by the Islamic leader Necmettin Erbakan (died February 2011), a cadre of the Refah Partisi (Party of Prosperity) and Turkish prime minister between 1996 and 1997. He also headed up the Saadet Parti (Happiness Party). He was one of the mentors of Reccep Tayyib Erdogan, current prime minister of Turkey, and one of the leaders in Adalet ve Kalkinma Partisi (Party of Justice and Development), in power since 2002 in Turkey.
30 Sunni brotherhood founded by Sheikh Süleyman Hilmi Tunahan in the 1950s. See Samim Akgönül, “Islam turc, islams de Turquie: Acteurs et réseaux en Europe” (Turkish Islam, Islams of Turkey), Politique étrangère, no. 1 (2005): 35–47.
31 Turkish imam, writer, and thinker (born in 1938) who influenced a great brotherhood movement that spread beyond Turkey. He is known for his role in interfaith dialogue.
32 Trajectoires et origines, “Enquête sur la diversité des populations en France” (Trajectories and origins, Inquiry into the diverse populations of France), document de travail [working document] no. 168, October 2010, http://teo.site.ined.fr/.
33 Danièle Hervieu‑Léger, Le pèlerin et le converti: La religion en mouvement (The pilgrim and the convert: Religion in motion) (Paris: Flammarion, “Champs,” 2001).
34 François de Singly, Libres ensemble: L’individualisme dans la vie commune (Together apart: Individualism in communal life) (Paris: Armand Colin, 2005).
35 As for Jean‑François Mayer, he brings up the case of “conversion by osmosis” in certain quarters of French and Swiss cities as a result of the structuring proximity between Muslims and non-Muslims where the former are in the majority. https://www.mayer.im/suisse-des-conversions-a-lislam-par-osmose/.
36 This part about Salafism, and specifically its dilution in a life cycle that, ultimately, encourages moderation of the demand for breaking with the rest of society, owes a great deal to the analysis by a specialist in the Tablighi movement in France, Moussa Khedimellah, a researcher at the École des hautes études en sciences sociales (School for Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences). Even if we identify stages in the Salafist career and explanatory logics distinct from Tablighi sociality, we owe much to his epistemological intuition.