Daily Times

As a highly charged and deeply polarising debate on the burkini rages on in France, where 30 towns dotting its southeastern coastline have banned the swimsuit version of the burqa on public beaches, it would be far too easy for us in the Muslim world to unequivocally affirm the French state as inherently ‘Islamophobic’. Hardcore feminists, coincidentally, have counter-spun this ban to represent the greater gender war by deep-seated patriarchy i.e. another attempt by men to control women’s bodies.

Such sweeping verdicts distort France’s historical experience. Lest we forget, laïcité, its constitutional guarantee of secularism enshrined in 1905, was forged in the bloodbath of a seismic late 18th century revolution that spawned the First Republic. This subsequently premised decades of continental conflict as the revolutionary government, and later Napoleon, sought to export the new state manifesto to monarchies in Europe snugly ensconced in the Catholic Church’s embrace. The separation of faith and state, naturally, is the very jugular of republican France.

Moreover, it is premature to celebrate countries like Scotland and Canada — where local law enforcement has recently sanctioned the hijab as an acceptable adjunct to official uniform — as standard-bearers of communal diversity and interfaith harmony based on legislation of a limited scope. Neither is a giant melting pot like America, for example, where the terrorist attacks of 9/11 sparked a global crusade against fringe radical Islamists who soon became synonymous with the majority of Muslims, and culminated this year with the Republican party’s nomination of Donald Trump for president — a man who wants to “temporarily” ban all Muslims from entering the country.

France’s regression into nativism is regrettable, but then it has had to deal with mass, unprecedented casualties from terrorism in Paris and Nice arising from conditions that threaten the very fabric of its cherished laïcité. It remains to be seen how Scotland and Canada will react to such unprovoked hits on the homeland. The preceding paragraphs, however, are not meant to give the impression that the French state is blameless in the rise of domestic terrorism attributed to its Muslim citizenry, or that France’s antagonism towards Islam is a relatively new development. Far from it.

In the early 8th century, Europe was in danger of being overrun by the expansionist zeal of Islamic Iberia — al-Andalus. When Aquitaine in what is now southwestern France fell to the Emirate of Cordoba, alarm bells rang throughout the continent. Left unchecked, the conqueror’s binary conception of a world order neatly divided into Dar al-Islam (realm of peace) and Dar-al Harb (realm of war) would forever liquidate the Roman, Christian character of Europe. It fell upon Charles Martel, ruler of the Franks (who inspired the name France), to permanently arrest Muslim expansion northwards by inflicting a crushing defeat on the forces of Abd-ar-Rahman, then governor of Cordoba, in the Battle of Tours in 732 C.E.

That said, the French Revolution of 1789 that sanctified secularism had nothing to do with Islam and everything to do with the Catholic Church. Or more specifically, the Church’s role in blessing a procession of incompetent monarchs who had hollowed out France on personal whims and pointless wars while the clergy’s coffers grew exponentially. The Bourbon rulers of France could raise massive armies to project power, but their legitimacy in post-Westphalian Europe, surprisingly, still rested with the Church. The luminaries of the revolution — Robespierre, Danton and Marrat — inspired by the Enlightenment-era thinkers naturally loathed this incestuous relationship. Napoleon sought to straddle both worlds with his “Concordat” pronouncement of 1801, since he aspired to become emperor, however the Law of 1905 summarily divorced the clergy from matters of governance.

Advocates of laïcité often cite France’s large Muslim population — five million by some estimates and certainly the largest in Europe — as adequate proof that the country champions multiculturalism. This is a specious argument. For while they have acquired French passports, and many are now second or third generation citizens, the vast majority cannot mix with mainstream, white France. Mainly of North African descent, these Muslims have been socioeconomically banished to the “banlieues” (ghettos), most notably in Paris, where unemployment numbers are easily twice the national average. Among French citizens of Algerian or Moroccan ancestry, this number is 30 percent as compared to the 10 percent nationwide.

But hold on. If France had such a deep desire to protect its way of life, why let Muslims in at all? Even as colonial subjects, they were obviously attuned to a completely different set of moral prescriptions. Especially when in French Algeria as early as the 1870s, Catholics and Jews could acquire citizenship of the motherland but not Muslims. Economics, my dear Watson. If France was to get back on its feet after the second great war, bodies were needed. Bodies to grind themselves to the bone firing up the state’s devastated industrial base. In return, there was the promise of a better life. Well, sort of.

Recent studies show “Frenchness” as defined by society and tacitly endorsed by the secularist state entails having Gallic-Celtic blood coursing through your veins. In 2006, Sorbonne University Professor Jean-François Amadieu found that all things beings equal, French citizens with Muslims surnames were six times less likely to land job interviews. Yet for a demographic making up less than 10 percent of France, more than 50 percent of inmates in the national correctional system are Muslims. This can’t be a coincidence.

Poverty and low literacy levels are both valid social inhibitors, yet cannot account for such lopsided stats. The Foreign Affairs magazine in 2006 offered a glimpse of France’s dark undertow. It quoted Vincent Geisser of the French think-tank National de la Recherche Scientifique explaining: “Islamophobia in France, unlike elsewhere in Europe, is largely an intellectual phenomenon driven by the elites, and it stems less from insecurity than from racialist ideology.” This is how he rationalised the 2004 ban on the hijab in public schools, brought to bear without any real pressure on the Jacques Chirac government.

Things are very different 12 years on, of course. France extended its state of emergency to six months in July after the Bastille Day killings in Nice amid a rising tide of ultra-nationalism throughout Europe precipitated by the migrant crisis. The question France must ask itself today is whether the burkini ban and its heavy-handed enforcement is any better than the Islamic State militantly enforcing burqas. In both cases, after all, the fundamental rights of women are being assailed.

The writer is an Islamabad-based freelance journalist