IN ITS DEALINGS with its Muslim population, the French government, whether out of nobility or naivete, has not reciprocated radical Islam's distrust. Each of the last four interior ministers has sought to bring Islam into agreement with the country's 1905 laws, which mandate a separation of church and state so strict that at times in the 20th century they were interpreted as barring professing Catholics from political office. Unlike the American dispensation, which is meant to protect religious practice from political interference, the French one is meant to protect the political system from religious influence. In fact, it is designed to drive religion out of the public square altogether. This is why various controversies over permitting Muslim girls to wear the veil to public schools have been so explosive.
Each French government since 1990 has pursued two goals: to give Islam "a place at the French table," and to wean it from foreign influence. Each has failed. That's because most of France's Muslim organizations have sought to be brought into the country's religious fabric in a way that would allow for more public practice of religion. Under the recently dismissed Jospin government, the UOIF won the ear of interior minister Jean-Pierre Chevenement, who pursued a strategy of negotiating with the "great federations"--shutting lay Muslims out of the discussion and letting the process be hijacked by the Pakistan-influenced Tabligh movement (which, in France, is called Faith and Practice), the UOIF, and Ffaiaca (a consortium of Islamic groups, of varying degrees of radicalism, from
France's former empire). Chevenement's successor Daniel Vaillant decided that he too wanted these radicals inside the tent pissing out. Dalil Boubakeur--rector of the Algerian-run Grand Mosque of Paris, who is sneered at by young Muslims as a petty bourgeois, and whom the French government therefore clings to all the more desperately as its last hope of pretending that practicing Muslims in France are predominantly liberal--warned that dialogue was delivering Islam into the hands of Saudi Wahhabis, whose faith had nothing to do with the malekite faith of most North Africans.
But let's be very clear about a paradox here: Taken in isolation, it is the Muslim side, and not the French government's side, that is most consistent with the American way of thinking about the constitutional protection of religion. Fouad Alaoui, secretary-general of the UOIF, okayed a secular agreement, only to stipulate later that he rejected a "definition of secularism that seals off religion in the private sphere." Thami Breze, president of the same organization, called for a "modification of secularism, in order to respect certain specificities of Islam." In the French context, the Muslim side is calling for special status--in fact, for its establishment as the only religion that may be practiced in public. Chevenement's plan was, in fact, the hatching of a social catastrophe, an outcome that was averted only by accident.
If it was averted. Chirac's new interior minister, Nicholas Sarkozy, has promised the same groups he will continue the "national consultation" Chevenement launched. He may mean it. Chirac himself, whether as an alternative to this process or as a complement to it, seems bent on winning the beur vote through a media strategy that has much in common with Karl Rove's trolling for the votes of California's Mexicans. Parts of this strategy are already in place: The year 2003, for instance, has been designated "National Algeria Year" in France. But the new centerpiece of the government's beur policy is affirmative action. Quotas were considered an impermissible breach of French equality of citizenship five years ago, but they are now making their appearance. The prestigious Institut d'etudes politiques has announced that it will forgo its traditional meritocratic examinations in order to take 20 students in its next entering class from "precarious" school districts.
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