Lounsbury: France: Muslims and the Kidnapping Issue

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September 02, 2004

France: Muslims and the Kidnapping Issue

From a generally rather silly article in the Washington Post
See http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A54215-2004Sep1.html

Some reflections on the potential results:
As a result, said Antoine Sfeir, director of Cahiers de l'Orient, a journal of Middle East affairs, "it is possible that the French line will come closer to the American, in the sense that what is being fought is a globalized war. Even if the French perception of itself is different, France is still part of the West and therefore a target."

But Olivier Roy, an author and expert on Islam, said he believed that French policy would remain unchanged. If anything, France is demonstrating an ability to mobilize Arab Muslim governments and popular opinion in its favor over the crisis, he said.

Actually my read would be Roy's read is the right one. I don't believe anyone in French governmental circles saw the stance on Iraq as "immunizing - they've dealt with the Algerian issue and generally the Middle East and North Africa to have quite such a stupid and simplistic take, but rather a good call given the situation. Realpolitik.

And it was, mind you.

Leaders of France's Muslim population of 6 million, many of whom had protested the head-scarf ban, roundly condemned the kidnapping. The official French Council of the Muslim Faith originally opposed the ban, but in the wake of the kidnapping, it said the ban should be observed for the time being. On Wednesday, the group dispatched envoys to Iraq in hopes of winning the reporters' release.

"The goal is to mark French Muslim history by showing we are fully and respectfully a French community . . . and to tell the extremists they do not resolve our issues by doing this," said Mohamed Bechar, the council's vice president.

Such attitudes prompted the French newspaper Le Monde to declare a kind of triumph of French identity. "It all demonstrates that the Muslim community has seized the occasion to express, more than it ever has, its attachment to France," the paper said in an editorial.

At the Grand Mosque in downtown Paris, the sense among some worshipers was less effusive. "First, the law on head scarves is useless. Some Muslims will simply refuse to obey and separate from the French," said Ben, who described himself primarily as Muslim and secondarily French Algerian. He declined to give his last name.

Ben and Miram, another worshiper who also gave only her first name, speculated that the kidnapping was an American plot to change French opinion about the war in Iraq. "Still, I oppose kidnapping of any sort," Miriam said. "It is not Islamic."

Of note, two things. Mosque goers strike me as the most likely to express the above sentiments, second, n.b. that while the two French Muslims noted supra condemn the kidnapping, note the tendancy to externalize. It's not us, it's some outside plot.

Nasty tendancy in Arab circles, cultural habit to do that. Mind you, it's a univeral human habit as well, but my sense is that the Arab world's present cultural habits tend to reinforce rather than mitigate.

I find the issue of externalizing and denying responsibility - one which plays on many levels - to be among the societal issues that needs to be addressed badly in education in the region, for it plays negatively in the economic field in terms of being able to correct errors.

September 02, 2004

France: Muslims and the Kidnapping Issue

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