These two gentlemen are my heros in French journalism.
It was a disaster. I write here in a fraternal spirit, as my admiration for these two gentlemen and their journalism is in no way diminished by their commentaries on this one question. Ne nous y trompons pas: Quatremer, you are laboring under some misconceptions here. En effet, ce que vous dites est sans fondement. Everyone views it as a cult une secte. And they all think the Scientologists are a weird cult. So why are the Scientologists considered a religion in the US and with the US government scolding the French and Germans for their anti-Scientology campaigns?
So what the Scientologists—who are not nice people—did was to initiate an underhanded campaign of intimidation against the agents of the IRS who were handling the Scientology dossier. The second part of the story is the International Religious Freedom Act of , which was cooked up by the Republican-controlled Congress of the time, enacted with a veto-proof majority, and signed into law by President Clinton. The Act made the promotion of religious freedom an objective of US foreign policy and, entre autres, obligated the State Department to submit an annual report to Congress on the state of religious freedom in every country in the world.
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So in conformity with the law, the US embassy in Paris has reported annually to its hierarchical superiors in Washington on the state of religious freedom in France—and noting the status in France of the Church of Scientology, recognized as a religion in the US—which the State Department has dutifully noted in turn in its obligatory report, and with the US government—conforming to the law—expressing its pro forma concerns on the matter to the French government. And with the French government taking the American letter of concern and throwing it in the poubelle—and with no one saying anything more about it.
I guarantee you, M. Quatremer, that no one in Washington or at the embassy in Paris could have cared less about the anti-Scientology lawsuits in France or the French state considering the Scientologists to be a profit-making enterprise and not a religion. Do you have any examples? As for Muslim and other women having the right to cover their bodies on the beach and elsewhere, well, that is their right, is it not?
I mean, France is not only a free country but also a civilized one, which is not going to tell women what clothes they may or may or not wear when they venture out of their homes. One certainly hopes not. Seriously, this burkini hysteria in France is completely ridiculous. It is an only-in-France affair.
The law of ? The United Kingdom has an official church—the Church of England—whereas in the United States of America church and state are separated. Et ainsi de suite. Mais, la religion est partout. Religion is indeed more present in the USA, as is the overall level of religiosity in American society.
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But this is cultural. It has nothing to do with the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment of the constitution—which you cite—which defines the relationship between religion and the state. That French society may be non-practicing or atheist in its majority or, rather, deeply religious—as was the case for a sizable portion of Frenchmen in —is immaterial in regard to the law. The law, as with the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment of the US constitution, speaks to law , not to culture.
This has been deemed constitutional, as it refers to god, who is common to all and not to a specific religion. During the intermission I had the opportunity to ask these two august scholars about the constitutionality of the president swearing the oath of office on the Bible.
They both told me that, in their well-considered view, this did indeed violate the letter of the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment, and certainly did its spirit. But so long as a citizen did not file a formal lawsuit against a newly elected president doing this, there would be no jurisprudence on the question. Juridically speaking, the term is not defined, either in France or the US. Is that a lot?
On an atheist being elected president of the United States, who knows? By the way, do you believe that class consciousness has been less important in France than in Great Britain? Or that the hierarchies in British society are steeper? Academic studies of the question e. Until very recently homosexuality was repressed everywhere , not just outre-Manche et Atlantique.
In this respect, the state of Utah, which was founded by the Mormons, could not be admitted into the union which it was in until the Mormon church formally abolished polygamy. Quatremer, the United States of America is a big country—the size of a continent—with a large population and a federal system of government. America is a country and society where one finds everything and its opposite. Aux USA, on a tout et son contraire. In America, if you look for it, you will find it.
The laws and ordinances you mention were enacted a long time ago—many in the 19th century—and most have been long forgotten. In any case, none of these silly laws in any way affects the lives of the near totality of the American population. What do imprisoned Afro-Americans have to do with the personal opinion of one Muslim woman on the way she feels treated in France? Personally speaking, I do not see the connection. And by the way, you are mistaken that the ville de New York opposed the Ground Zero mosque. The mayor of the time, Michael Bloomberg, strongly supported the project, as did the Manhattan borough president and many other local elected officials, plus the current mayor, Bill de Blasio.
Freedom of expression—a value that I think we are all deeply attached to—is not total anywhere. And commercial speech in the US is not protected by the First Amendment. And in France, there are several domains where the church-state separation is not total, e.
There is no such official interlocutor with organized religion at any level of the American state. Je ne rigole pas. Many countries in the world have an official language and which is inscribed in its constitution. This is incomprehensible to no one. France has the largest Muslim population in the Western world—in both percentage and absolute number—on account of its colonial past. It begins with a question by Patrick Cohen, followed by M. A couple of remarks. No European who is not slightly batty can comprend the unrestricted, over-the-counter sale of semi-automatic rifles and other weapons of war such as exists in large parts of the United States, and of the legal right of people to parade around in public with these, including in schools and stores.
Yes, the world-view of the National Rifle Association is indeed a difficult one to explain in Europe and including in Anglo-Saxon Great Britain, where the consensus view is that Americans are crazy when it comes to firearms. Legrand implicitly essentializes Islam and then implies that it is telling women what to do and wear.
But no one has any evidence that Muslim women in France who wear a headscarf or burkini are being ordered to do this, that anyone is telling them to do anything.
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It is a French fantasy. A figment of the French imagination. I have much to say about this passage, which has a number of problems, but will limit myself to two comments: First, if, as suggested above, a Frenchman is having difficulty in making an argument about France to educated foreigners—and particularly to those from the Western world—then maybe his argument is flawed. Maybe he needs to rethink his argument. Second, Americans are as open-minded as anyone else, and certainly as much so as Frenchmen.
Educated Americans are not so different from educated Frenchmen or other Europeans. If you explain something to them and do it well—including the story about Lionel Jospin which I have also done many times to Americans —they will understand you. Islam and the secular state. Listen to it here. It is certainly a must-read. An update to this update October 31st: Posted in France , France: It would have been truly stunning had the Conseil ruled otherwise, as, in point of fact, there is no serious argument for legally banning the burkini.
The psychodrama France has descended into over this fabricated issue has to be the most preposterous and irrational in the odd years I have lived in this country—not to mention one of the more pernicious, in view of the overt Muslimophobia that has been unleashed by politicians and media alike. And all over a piece of clothing that practically no one in France had heard of—and even fewer had actually seen —before this month of August Numerous commentaries over the past two weeks on the absurd burkini affair have gotten it exactly right, e.
Majorities can be wrong, of course. Politicians, as one may also expect, have been indulging and stoking the fears of the public—naturally traumatized over the recent terrorist atrocities—with, not surprisingly, the unspeakable Nicolas Sarkozy, now on the campaign trail, leading the demagogic charge, demanding, entre autres , a legislative ban of the burkini —though Sarko knows full well, in principle at least, that any such law is impossible, that it would be nullified illico by the sages of the Conseil Constitutionnel.
Even academic savants have been echoing these themes, e. Let me make an assertion: The burkini-detractors could not credibly support their assertions if their lives depended on it.
And the threat to public order that the burkini supposedly constitutes, which was one of the stated reasons for the municipal ordinances? But what if, for the sake of argument, some of the above allegations were at least partly true? As social scientist and friend Nadia Marzouki wrote on social media the other day. Yes, if some Muslim women do, in fact, seek to make a statement in wearing a burkini, if they are indeed signaling that their religious faith is primordial in their lives, what of it? And what about the burkini itself?
Even pundits critical of the anti-burkini campaign have felt the need to assure readers that they do not approve of the offending swimsuit. In the great majority of cases, it is a religiously ostentatious signifier reflecting a rigorous interpretation of sacred texts that relegates women to a secondary role.
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I beg to differ, though this is admittedly a complex question. I actually agree with the critique of veiling. These are old questions. Veiling, objectively speaking, does reflect patriarchy. What else is new? Gender relations in that society and cultural attitudes toward the body are what they are. As Saul Alinsky used to say , in order to change the world we first need to see the world as it is, not as we would like it to be. As for the burkini not symbolizing Islam, good point. One may bet that it will find a growing market among women of all faiths—or of no faith at all—and particularly in a country like India, where women traditionally do not wear swimsuits on the beach those who actually go to one.
There are a lot of women out there—including a member of the older generation in my own family—who have never felt comfortable in a bathing suit. They feel self-conscious wearing the stupid thing. The burkini is probably not a solution for them but can be for women. For Scott, the greatest irony in the entire affair is that the burkini in fact embodies the achievement of a secular, integrated society. The women who wear burkinis, she said, cannot be called oppressed. They are not the women subservient to a conservative Islam; they are the women who sit on beaches unsupervised by men, enjoying their leisure time in mixed social company.
But because of the same type of secularism ostensibly designed to foster equality among citizens, those same women could in fact be driven further from the social mainstream. In conclusion, check out the images of the burkini here and here. How can anyone object?
This passage is particularly interesting:. Pourquoi tant de stress? Moroccan sociologist Abdessamad Dialmy—who specializes in sexuality, gender, and religion—has two pieces in Al Huffington Post that are worth reading: Dialmy is equally opposed to the burkini and attempts to ban it. The irony of the swimsuit crisis is that the laws—and their enforcement—shamed the Muslim women who want to participate in French society.
Also see the article by Alissa J. On the European left—not to mention the left in the Americas, north and south—only in France does the sight of a Muslim woman wearing a headscarf provoke a negative reaction—and automatically excludes her from participation in a left-wing political party. But then, even if a burkini-wearing woman did have these things in mind, eh alors? What is this supposed to mean? But no one has even hinted that the burkini is religiously required.
The burkini is, above all, a business proposition that aims to satisfy a heretofore underserved market. But what underlying message?! And sent by whom precisely? The notion that there is a message in the burkini is a collective French phantasm. Please, there is no message here. No burkini-wearing woman is sending a message, even subliminal. This I promise you. Moreover, the burkini, which was seemingly absent from beaches before this year, is seen as a mere episode in a broader pattern of every-day incidents in which republican principles are challenged by a radical minority constantly testing and pushing the boundaries of what is or is not acceptable.
It is not a religious issue, but the symbol of a broader political struggle. Who are you talking about? There have been numerous anecdotes over the years of disturbing and unacceptable things happening—as there inevitably will be in a society of 65 million inhabitants—but the extent of this has not been established. In June, a young Muslim waitress was attacked in the name of Islam in downtown Nice for serving alcohol during Ramadan.
It was outrageous and with the perpetrators meriting prosecution, but it was still just one incident. But not reacting to the burkini also has its consequences and runs the risk of normalizing such practices. In point of fact, it should be normalized. In the coming years, Europeans will continue to grapple with the tension between their liberal principles and the necessity of rolling back the hold of a radical minority.
The establishment claim they want Muslim women to achieve independence yet are depriving them the means to do so. The piece is a doozy. Il faut donc choisir son camp: This article aims at describing and analysing this process and, by implication, the changes that Italian Islam has undergone over the past decade, as well as the conflicts that the public assertion of Islam has inevitably triggered. In particular, it shows that it is exclusively at the local level that integration, inclusion and participation of Muslims in Italy actually take place,. Son panorama religieux se pluralise rapidement: En , avec Le retour de l'islam de S.
Schmidt di Friedberg, C'est ce que souligne D. Roy , N. Burgat ou F. Avec cette vision, nous avons une ouverture vers ceux qui ne sont pas musulmans Policy issues and trends , Londres, Network of European Foundations, A nderson Benedict, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism , London: D al L ago Alessandro, Non-persone: