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Released during a period of heightened racial tension over the impact of racism in the United States and Europe, the 2021 films Stillwater and Dune Part One reveal the pervasiveness of Arab Muslim misrepresentations in Hollywood and the subtilty of white supremacist ideology as it re-emerges in new cinematic productions. With many symbolic and pronounced references to the delusions of the "great replacement" theory, the foundational blueprint of white supremacist identity in both stories, this article contends that these films recentre whiteness to either villainise Arab Muslims or totally erase them. Stillwater disguises the stereotypes on which Arab racialisation is predicated by embedding them in the details of a subplot. Dune , by contrast, is set in an imaginary Arab space with no Arabs, and yet portrayals of Arabs and Islam are front, and centre and it imagines a world with fierce but "generic" coloured people serving their great white leaders. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores the possibility of a spiritual Islam in the West as a viable alternative to traditionalist and political Islam. It looks at the capabilities and limitations of two French Muslim voices, Abdennour Bidar and Éric Geoffroy, who are the most vocal Muslim intellectuals in favor of spiritual Islam in France. A careful examination of their writings reveals that post-modernism, French secularism, and religious freedom all support the spread of spiritual Islam. However, because of its elitism, overemphasis on individualism, and lack of formal religious institutions for knowledge and practice, spiritual Islam struggles. Overall, spiritual Islam flourishes in a secular society, but it is too intellectual to truly oppose political and conservative Islam. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In a context when Islamophobia peaked in the wake of the 2015 terrorist attacks, evidence has been mounting that a growing number of French Muslims have been leaving the country. This article explores, through a combination of quantitative (survey) and qualitative (semi-directed interviews) methods, some of the key drivers of this flight from France. Moral panics around secularism but more crucially questions of discrimination on the job market are at the heart of this silent flight from the country these people were born in. Ultimately, this emigration from France constitutes a real brain drain, as it is primarily highly educated French Muslims who decide to leave. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An introduction is presented in which editor discusses various articles within the issue on topics including mode of governance which increasingly focuses on France's Muslim citizens; law of ‘separation' and counterinsurgency and the dissolution of the Collective against Islamophobia in France.

No other form of group antagonism affects the fate of so many people in France as anti-Muslim racism. While negative attitudes toward Muslims and Muslims' experience of discrimination are well documented, studies of anti-Muslim behaviour are rare, especially in the context of everyday interpersonal encounters. To fill this void, we conducted a field experiment on platforms of the Paris metro (n = 270) in which a bearded confederate asked for help to randomly selected passengers giving additional indirect cues of being Muslim in the experimental condition. The outcomes under investigation were the probability of helping the confederate and various behaviours indicative of interpersonal warmth or involvement. Interactions were videotaped, the outcomes objectively measured, and the data analysed using Generalized Linear Models estimated with Bayesian inference. Passengers were found to offer help less often and to show lower interpersonal warmth in the experimental condition. Also, when considered in isolation the young turn out to discriminate but not the middle-aged. Given that these negative effects were observed despite the use of a minimal stimulus, the results probably underestimate the actual level of anti-Muslim discrimination that Muslim men face in their everyday dealings with non Muslims. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

After the 2015 European refugee crisis, immigrant integration has reemerged as a pressing issue endangering France’s social and political stability. France is one of the main asylum host countries in Europe. In the past few years, terrorist attacks have become more frequent in France, and the spread of xenophobia has led to a social crisis that threatens the country’s national security. It has prompted France to consider returning to Laïcité in response to this situation. So the purpose of this paper is to analyze France’s immigrant integration policy in 2020 and reveal the discourse of Laïcité and republican values in France.

This article explores the possibility of a spiritual Islam in the West as a viable alternative to traditionalist and political Islam. It looks at the capabilities and limitations of two French Muslim voices, Abdennour Bidar and Éric Geoffroy, who are the most vocal Muslim intellectuals in favor of spiritual Islam in France. A careful examination of their writings reveals that post-modernism, French secularism, and religious freedom all support the spread of spiritual Islam. However, because of its elitism, overemphasis on individualism, and lack of formal religious institutions for knowledge and practice, spiritual Islam struggles. Overall, spiritual Islam flourishes in a secular society, but it is too intellectual to truly oppose political and conservative Islam.

The number of international migrants is estimated to be almost 272 million globally (IOM, 2020), with nearly two-thirds being labor migrants. A significant proportion of these migrants are Muslims who have left their native countries to live in the West. For the specific case of France, this population ranges between 4.7 to 5.1 million according to recent surveys, i.e. about 8% of the total population of the country. This paper is concerned about the present and future of these communities and aims at answering the specific question of their changing transnational economic behavior in today's world economy. The paper hypothesizes that the international economic decisions of migrants are no longer explained by origin and destination country pairs only but also in relation to other countries with both higher and lower wages. A simple microeconomic framework is proposed to explain how these migrant populations make rational choices about their decision to permanently stay, migrate back to their country of origin or migrate to a third country. The model identifies successive waves of migrants with differentiated economic behavior. In particular, a specific class of migrants is identified for which wage differentials are not the main driver of migration or remigration decisions due to the inelasticity of their labor demand to wages. These migrants rather seek to create and manage their own companies and invest in a better comfort of living in countries other than France. Descriptive statistics demonstrate the potential for such framework to explain simultaneously the observed increasing migrations of French Muslims to high-income countries driven by wage differentials, a rapidly expanding migration to Turkey and Malaysia, and a resurgence of migration to former colonies which had previously experienced a consistent reduction in migration flows since the 1980s. The paper also estimates the economic impact of remigrations of Muslims from France, which represents today a minimum of €5.5 billion on annual basis, and calls for more research in these hybrid migration decisions to better analyze and map the future economic behaviors of Muslim populations in the West. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Islamophobia is a new disease that is looming over the 1.8 billion population of Muslims in the world. The term has most recently garnered the attention of people globally. In this paper, I will try to dissect the underlining causes behind the rise of Islamophobia in recent times. For this, I will be discussing one country from Europe in particular from which of late we have seen the clash between state and religion take place: France. This paper will look at how big a concern should Islamophobia be for the Muslim populace in France and widely around the world.1 I have chosen to examine three events in France whose root causes were Islamophobia, and how this affected the Muslim population in the country. I will start by providing the etymology and then discuss three particular incidents in the country that demanded the attention of the French Muslims. In addition, I shall discuss how the Muslim population around the world reacts every time such Islamophobic incidents happen, and a lack of responsible reaction by Muslim leadership to them can be seen. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The visibility of women and their freedoms in the French public sphere is envisaged in this article on the basis of laïcité and gender equality. Within the debate about the rights and limitations of Muslim women, French feminist ideology seems to be torn between two totally contradictory positions. Anti-veil and anti-burqa laws are on the one hand defended in the name of laïcité and the emancipation of women. On the other hand, the laws are severely criticized because they marginalize Muslim women from the majority of French society. The main aim of this research is to analyze anti-veil and anti-burqa laws in France by focusing on their historical and social foundations from a feminist perspective. Next, this study argues that the visibility of Muslim women in the French public space, which is banned in the name of republican and laic values, is actually valued by some feminist groups who cast an exclusionary and othering glance at the clothing of Muslim women, such as the headscarf or the burqa. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In European countries, a large number of people feel that Islam is incompatible with secularism. France's legal principle of laïcité (a type of state "secularism") has governed the relationship between religion and society since 1905. However, recent research suggests that there coexist two distinct lay conceptions of laïcité that differ most notably in their tolerance for the presence of religious symbols in public places, one inclusive, the other restrictive. This latter conception appears to target mainly Muslims. The present research examined the lay conceptions of laïcité held by Catholics, Muslims, and nonbelievers. Analyses of participants' responses (N = 375) to a scale measuring lay beliefs about laïcité confirmed the existence of two distinct lay conceptions of laïcité that differed in the importance given to public expression of religious beliefs, religious neutrality of the state, and equal treatment of different religions. The results also showed that, independent of participants' religiosity, the restrictive conception was more prevalent among nonbelievers, the two conceptions were equally prevalent among Catholics, and the inclusive conception was more prevalent among Muslims. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A minority whose representation has attracted a lot of interest in France over the last two decades is undeniably the Muslim minority. Political and public interest in Islam closely followed 9/11 in France. A couple of years later, interest in Islam and discussions on the integration of Muslims were triggered anew by the 2003–2004 'headscarf affair' and the debates on Islamic patriarchy that surrounded them. This article will examine how in this context Mohamed Sifaoui and Chahdortt Djavann, both commentators identified as Muslims by the French mainstream media, have emerged as authoritative figures or representatives of an Islam endorsed by the French intelligentsia. Through the rhetorical analysis of both authors' bestselling books, it will argue that Sifaoui and Djavann have respectively embodied the figures of 'reluctant witness' and 'model minority' and paved the way for Muslim commentators endorsing French assimilationism and condemning communautarisme. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In response to rising immigration flows and the fear of Islamic radicalization, several Western countries have enacted policies to restrict religious expression and emphasize secularism and Western values. Despite intense public debate, there is little systematic evidence on how such policies influence the behavior of the religious minorities they target. In this paper, we use rich quantitative and qualitative data to evaluate the effects of the 2004 French headscarf ban on the socioeconomic integration of French Muslim women. We find that the law reduces the secondary educational attainment of Muslim girls and affects their trajectory in the labor market and family composition in the long run. We provide evidence that the ban operates through increased perceptions of discrimination and that it strengthens both national and religious identities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

France is one of the European countries having large numbers of Muslims. The latter are confronted with the principle of laicité that France adopts. This principle is incompatible with some of Muslims' rituals and practices since laicité bans public religious practices. Equally important, due to many attacks that have hit France, and which are allegedly attributed to Muslims, this minority suffers vilification and discrimination. However, Muslims should be treated and reported fairly in France as the Article One of the French Constitution declares that "it [France] shall ensure the equality of all citizens before the law, without distinction of origin, race, or religion". This signifies that French institutions, especially the media, should apply the article above and try to present a fair image of its citizens including Muslims. Media, in this regard, are at play in their representation of this minority of French citizens. Nevertheless, most Western media rely on the Orientalist views to report Muslims and Islam (Edward Said, Orientalism, New York: Vintage, 1977). In this study, both qualitative and quantitative approaches will be used to examine the representation of Muslims in the two French newspapers, which are Le Figaro and Le Monde. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

To date, scholars have rarely talked about contemporary antisemitism and Islamophobia in France as part of a single story. When they have, it has typically been as part of a framework for analyzing racism that is essentially competitive: some depict Islamophobia as less a real problem than a frequent excuse to ignore antisemitism; others minimize antisemitism as an unfortunate but marginal phenomenon by comparison with the pervasive nature of anti-Muslim racism in French society. This article argues that the two are inseparable, and it focuses on a hitherto overlooked set of connections: in the era since the attacks on Charlie Hebdo and Hyper Cacher in January 2015, at key flash points that question Muslim belonging in France, the position of Jews has repeatedly been invoked in ambiguous, contradictory ways. Participants in these public debates have sometimes forcefully maintained that Jews are unlike Muslims, since they have long been fully integrated French citizens. At other moments, these discussions have raised the specter of Jewish ethnic and religious difference. By emphasizing Jewish particularity, such debates evoke, perforce, the past twenty-five years of controversies about the allegedly problematic attire, food, and beliefs of France's Muslims. The article focuses on several key moments, from the speech of Prime Minister Manuel Valls before the French parliament in the wake of the Charlie Hebdo and Hyper Cacher attacks, to the kippah and burkini affairs of 2016, to the provocative comments of candidates in the 2017 presidential elections concerning Muslim and Jewish religious and ethnic markers of difference. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay argues that we cannot fully grasp what has been at stake in discussions following the January 2015 attacks in Paris, nor the symbolic place Charlie Hebdo has subsequently come to hold in French society, unless we pay attention to the ways in which gender, sex, and race have shaped both Charlie Hebdo's visual register and contemporary representations of Frenchness and difference. Within the French context, difference has historically been assigned to bodies that are imagined to disrupt the proper gendered and sexual ordering of the nation, focusing recently on "Arab" and "Muslim" gendered bodies, just as Jewish bodies had been caricatured earlier in the twentieth century. This essay therefore argues that understanding Charlie Hebdo's satire requires examining how the sexualization of race in representations of those deemed different, especially Muslims, has become incredibly banal in contemporary France. The magazine participated in rather than exposed what came to be seen as commonsense beliefs that both Left and Right relied on and that marginalized Muslims from the republican order. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article opens with an assessment of the narratives that emerged in the immediate wake of the Charlie Hebdo / Hyper Cacher events in January 2015. It does so by examining the differing hashtags of the moment—#jesuisCharlie, #jesuisjuif, #LassBat—and how each offered a distilled account of what the moment meant; these competing interpretations were echoed in the news coverage and the commentary that followed. The article proceeds to set out how this special issue reframes and reevaluates the recent history of relations between Jews and Muslims in France. Each author suggests that Judeophobia and Islamophobia are inextricably entangled in ways more complicated than simple formulas or hashtags can encapsulate. Taking on the suggestion that "Muslims are the new Jews" in France (or in Europe), the special issue instead urges an appreciation of the interlocked vulnerabilities and insecurities of both Jews and Muslims. Such an approach requires a recognition of the structural and institutional forces and ideologies that have shaped their interconnected destinies in the last generation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Today, a number of European states' policies on religion aim at creating a nationalized Islam. In many Western European countries, the Ministries of the Interior have institutionalized 'dialogue platforms' to discuss issues of Islam, society, inclusion and extremism with Muslim actors. This reveals the implicit assumptions of these governments when talking to Muslims. The underlying message is that Muslims pose a security threat to the state and society, a perception that is manifested in many countries, and that Muslims are seen simultaneously as a threat and an ally. This article analyzes the Ministry of Interior's attempts to institutionalize Islam in the cases of Austria, Germany, and France and it compares these states in order to investigate different modes of operation, similarities and differences. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Based on qualitative research, this article aims to shed some light on the criticism of the functioning of French society by youths of North African origin influenced by a Salafist reading of Islam. The arguments put forward, which draw largely on a religious theme, must be taken seriously. However, the references to a "Salafised" world of meaning are not exclusive and they coexist with an attachment to other, more liberal values. We will therefore endeavour to determine whether the criticism expressed generates separatist attitudes or whether it leads to individual and collective strategies founded on a dual cultural allegiance. Without denying the ambivalences or weaknesses, it is necessary to accurately clarify the identity constructs and social trajectories of the working-class youths studied here. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A moral panic is afoot in contemporary France surrounding what place French-Muslim youth hold within the national identity. The French state, in particular, is actively engaged in regimenting what it means to be a young Muslim person from France. This article examines how, during Marseille’s year (2013) as the European Capital of Culture, the municipal government and the local branch of the Ministère de l’Éducation Nationale spearheaded several initiatives, a number of which focused on Arabic-language education, with the aim of transforming French-Muslim youth from Marseille’s housing projects into secular, upwardly mobile individuals. Ethnographic inquiry with the youth targeted by such “linguistic gentrification” programs reveals that the state’s reimagining of them in these terms remained largely at odds with how they themselves understood their identities. This article, as such, illustrates the analytical importance of attending to people’s uptake when evaluating the eventual scope of top-down discourses and projects, while also offering an example of how the label “Mediterranean” functions as a spatiotemporal shifter, deployed by different groups to activate alternative accounts of history, the present, and the future. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores and analyzes private Muslim schooling in France using ethnographic research performed in 2013-2014 in Lille-, Lyon-, and Paris-based Muslim schools. The article discusses the course content and the interpretations of Islam that are taught, demonstrating how French republican values are fused together with Islam to promote a specific brand of French Muslim citizenship and identity. I argue that Muslim schools should be seen as part of the process of the normalization of Muslim-based civic engagement and that they represent a particular response to France's new plurality that reinterprets the boundaries of “French” and “Muslim.” [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This Essay recounts how feminist theorists and activists managed to write their ideals into the fabric of French law and culture, and how nonfeminists began to appropriate those ideals. Parite, the 2000 law that requires half of all candidates for public office be women, saw French feminists first engineer a change in French universalism to respect sex difference; although not wholly successful, Parite advanced women's political inclusion. Then, like a dmp of water in a pond, these feminist ideas disappeared in plain sight: they became intrinsic to French state norms and public values. As they became woven into such norms, however, politicians began to use them to promote exclusions: first excluding Muslims from full participation in the Republic with veil and burqa bans, then supporting exclusions of sex and class with a corporate board quota (CBQ). Most recently, feminist ideas have been called upon to exclude French Muslims with proposed burkini bans. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article the "Muslim Question" of France in terms of Turkish immigrants, who are the subjects of a relatively recent migration movement compared to other immigrant groups in France, was examined. The findings that support the study are based on a qualitative research conducted in Paris between 2014 and 2015. In the first chapter of the study, the focal point was a critical interpretation of formation of the "Muslim Question". Whether this question is a fiction or based on solid facts was another subject tackled in this chapter. In the second chapter, by focusing on the migration process of the Turkish immigrants, the experiences of Turkish immigrants who are struggling to form a hybrid identity by acting within a social structure without ignoring the origin country codes. The basic argument of the article, however, is that the integration policies imposing themselves as the absolute truth should be put aside and at the same time a common culture should be created, also the Muslim origin immigrants should not ignore every criticism as for being "Islamophobia" and they should revise their attitudes in this regard. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The growing diversity of affective and sexual trajectories, the waning influence of institutional principles governing behaviours and representations, and the individualization of both sexual and religious practices raise questions about the influence of religion on contemporary sexuality in France. Drawing on data from three French surveys on sexuality conducted in 1970, 1992 and 2006, this article characterizes the sexual practices and representations of Catholics and Muslims in France, focusing on the combined effects of gender and religion. We show that over the period, for a series of sexual practices, including contraception, masturbation and pornography, the behavior of Catholics moved closer to that of people with no religion. But the age at first sexual intercourse remained higher for Catholic and Muslim women than for non-religious women in 2006. This interaction between gender and religion relative to certain sexual practices is also observed for representations of sexuality, notably of homosexuality and same-sex parenting. Compared with non-religious people, Catholics and Muslims, men in particular, are strongly attached to the heterosexual family. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the role of the French state school classroom as a scene of moral pedagogy from the point of view of the French state and Muslim community activists. I argue that in both sets of discourses, the state school classroom is consistently figured as the front lines of a battleground, in which teachers, students, and parents are all combatants, but the sides and stakes of the battle are drawn differently. In each account, though, the stakes of the battle centre on the moral education of the rising generation. The state discourses fit with the history of French pedagogical theory since the inception of the state schools, and mark a recent ‘return of the moral’ in French public discourse and policy making. In response to the increased securitisation of the state school classroom in the aftermath of the attacks of January and November 2015, French Muslim activists have addressed a variety of conflicts related to the schools as a single coordinated fight against Islamophobia, discrimination, and persistent inequalities. By both paralleling and inverting the state’s ‘battleground’ rhetoric in their critiques, these activists situate themselves at the heart of the national conversation about how to form the rising generation as ethical subjects. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In January 2015, French society was shocked by a sequence of fatal attacks at the offices of satirical magazineCharlie Hebdoand a kosher supermarket in Paris. In the wake of these tragic events, many social and political commentators interpreted the killings as an assault on freedom of expression and core French values of liberty, equality andlaïcité. Prime Minister Manuel Valls described the perpetrators as disciples of Islamofascism. More than this, the terrorists were represented as the extreme manifestation of a deviant and nihilistic ‘other’—largely concentrated in France’s infamousbanlieues—that rejected the Republic and embraced a form of ideological extremism that originated beyond France’s borders. Yet this interpretation fails to adequately consider the complexity of the situation. Drawing on the work on radicalisation by Wiktorowicz, and illustrated with lessons learned from research into the causes of the 2005 French riots, this article has two objectives: to highlight the importance of everyday exclusion in the web of causal factors that frames the path to violent extremism in France; and to offer an alternative view of the role and influence of thebanlieuesin this context. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Michel Houellebecq has an unusual gift for revealing the nervous underside of modern life, so when his "futuristic" novel about an Islamic France, Submission, was released on the very day of the Charlie Hebdo attacks, the coincidence was both horrific and apropos. Most criticism focuses on the anti-Muslim and anti-Enlightenment elements of the novel, but in this article I argue that Submission should be seen primarily as an engaged work of cultural politics. Houellebecq, measuring the temperature of today's France, presents a culturally collapsed nation of the near future and focuses on women and Jews as the victims--sacrificed, as it were, by the secular elite. In so doing, I maintain, he pulls heavily from current events, all the while drawing on the memory of Vichy and the Occupation. The novel's premises, topical at the time of its publication, are even more so today. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How do purist Salafist communities frame the issue of politics? Known to display a reluctance towards political engagement and activism, unlike Islamists and Jihadists, purist Salafists, especially those who live within a non-Muslim-majority country such as France, highlight that Islam has nothing to do with classical political activism. Consequently, a major issue that needs to be examined is how purist Salafists reconcile their desires to preach and shape society through a process of public involvement and their efforts to refrain from engaging with political institutions. This article explores to what extent the notion of militant apoliticism is useful in describing this strategy of public engagement. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In May 1953, a group of Lyon’s political and social leaders hosted a series of Ramadan celebrations in honour of the region’s growing Muslim North African migrant population. While it seems strange that civil authorities in the secular French Republic would publically observe a Muslim holiday, the French Empire had, for decades, engaged in activities to promote Muslim attachment to France and demonstrate its support for Muslim cultural and religious practices. From declarations that France was a ‘Muslim power’ through the campaigns of the Algerian War, the French consistently waived the ideals of strict laïcité in order to strengthen the imperial system. This pragmatic willingness to relax secular positions when greater state interests were at stake contrasts with contemporary claims that the Republic can make no accommodations to Islam or its observance. More importantly, this history proves that there are strong French precedents for allowing the Republic to make space for its Muslim citizens. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Pierre Manent's recent works are marked by what he describes as a sense of realistic political possibility, which he uses to form a political response to the challenge of Islamic radicalism. Manent's “politics of the possible” differs from the usual alternatives that propose to integrate Islamic communities on liberal-individualist terms, or to repatriate Islamic immigrants to their countries of origin. Neither of those alternatives involves “politics” in the sense of articulating a political form within the polity given to us—a polity that now includes a sizable antiliberal minority. Manent's proposal to incorporate Muslim communities formally into the French polity by way of a certain social contract is thus a “politics of the possible” even if it is unlikely to be pursued. This article outlines Manent's account of political possibility and discusses two difficulties with his approach. First, the modern state's success and account of its legitimacy have distanced it from the foundational experiences in which it was capable of addressing the question of religion. Second, the situation caused by the radicalization of existing and new Muslim communities occurs at a different juncture in European political history from that which gave rise to the modern state. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In the frame of European Islam, imams assume a fundamental socio-theological relevance. In a minority context, they have to face the main task of, on the one hand, preserving religion, on the other, adapting God's message to daily life, filtering it between different universes of sense, elaborating new interpretations to legitimate diverse practices and habits. The increase of imams' tasks and skills has raised the question of their training, in particular that provided in European Institutes. Using an approach conjugating an islamological analysis with some concepts of the phenomenological sociology, the article analyses the history and the training programs of the main institutes for imam in France, in order to highlight their main limits, opportunities and risks. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Paris Attacks of November 13, 2015, left an indelible mark on France's culture war with Islam and are poised to permanently reform the identity of French counterterrorism policy. Since the beginning of the Jacques Chirac Administration in 1995, the State has maintained a hardline cultural assimilation campaign as the foundation of its counterterror program. This campaign culminated in 2004 with the "Headscarf Ban," and six years later--under President Nicolas Sarkozy--the enactment of the "Face Concealment Ban." The emerging threat of "homegrown radicalization" shifted the State's focus from an assimilationist policy to Countering Violent Extremism (CVE) Policing in 2012. This counterterror approach, employed in the United States, the United Kingdom, and some European states, is facilitated by building inroads within Muslim communities and developing the social capital within them to enhance on-site monitoring, electronic surveillance, and symbiotic collaboration as the fulcrum of policing and preventing radicalization. The hardline cultural assimilation approach employed by France, however, undermines advancement of these vital CVE Policing goals, ultimately curbing its effectiveness. First, this Article analyzes the strategic tensions between the cultural assimilation counterterror philosophy, championed by Chirac and Sarkozy, and the emergent CVE Policing paradigm. Second, it proposes that the State's interest in advancing its counterterrorism goals requires retrenching hardline cultural assimilation policies. Dissolution of such policies, most notably the Headscarf and Face Concealment Bans, is a vital step toward implementing a sustainable and effective CVE Policing program. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the social and legal aspects of wearing the burqa in Europe, including the European Court of Human Rights' (ECHR's) decision to uphold France's law banning of the burqa. An overview of claims that the banning of the burqa derives from Islamophobic sentiments is provided. The relationship between the burqa and human rights is discussed.

In 2010, the French government passed a law banning face coverings in public places. This includes shopping malls, restaurants and schools. Although worded widely, the law was drafted to prevent Muslim women from wearing the Islamic face veil in public. Those who wear it now risk facing a criminal conviction. In February 2014, the House of Commons held a Second Reading of the Face Coverings (Prohibition) Bill, which is very similar to the French law. Though it did not complete its passage through Parliament, the Bill signals an intention by some to ban face veils in British streets. This paper will examine the main arguments for and against the policy to criminalise the burqa and how a ban undermines the autonomy and identity of Muslim women. It will argue that a paternalistic law that instructs women what they can (or cannot) wear would be very alien to British culture. Analysis will also be provided on the Grand Chamber’s decision in SAS v France (2015) and the potential impact this might have for the UK and human rights law. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article is an attempt to apply some operative methodologies in the research on Jewish languages to the specific blend of French used by French Jews born in France to parents with a North-African background. After a classification of the linguistic material gathered during years of fieldwork in France and Israel according to word origin (Algeria; Morocco; Tunisia; general Maghrebi), it goes on to compare the status of the Arabic word in the Jewish mouth with that of the same words in the colloquial speech of young Muslims born in France to immigrant parents. The analysis of the Arabic elements integrated within the colloquial French speech of Jews and Muslims in today's France goes further, taking into account the last echoes of the speech specific to Catholic pieds-noirs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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This article uses conversion to Islam as a lens through which to explore the intricacies of race and religion in France and the United States. Using in-depth interviewing and ethnography, the author explores how white converts relate to their allegedly dissonant racial and religious identities in national contexts where Islam has been racialized as ‘Brown’ and foreign. Focusing on two countries that have historically had highly contrasted understandings of race and religion, she offers a comparative analysis of how race operates in the lives of Muslim converts on both sides of the Atlantic. The article shows that, even though processes of racial assignation work in a similar manner in both cases, French and American converts report different experiences with race, thereby suggesting that the racialization of Islam is endowed with different textures and meanings across national contexts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The 2015 Charlie Hebdo attacks warrant a detailed profile of the French approach to counteringJihaditerrorism. Much has been written about the tough French counterterrorism regime, which originated in 1986 and remains unique among Western democracies. There has been less analysis of France's lengthy list of post-9/11 reforms, and even less discussion of the French approach to counterradicalization. In fact, France was among only few European countries that did not engage in any “soft” counterradicalization programs after the 2004 Madrid and the 2005 London bombings. The mass exodus of foreign fighters to Syria led to a first national counterradicalization plan in 2014. In response to the Paris attacks, much in line with its security-oriented methods and outlook, the French government increased counterterrorism spending and surveillance powers. Various other measures are noteworthy, however, as they focus on prison radicalization and represent an effort to strengthen the counterradicalization campaign. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]