Why, then, did the French public debate in the aftermath of ji-hadist attacks concentrate on banlieues? Because banlieues have be-come the symbol of a perceived inherent “Alterity” condensing all possible “dangers” and “threats”: poverty, delinquency, migration and, above all, Islam. The concentration of immigrant workers in industrial peripheral neighbourhoods and especially the progressive impoverishment experienced by these areas, together with the emergence of large-scale violence and deviance phenomena, have forged the image of “Other-ness”, already historically associated with the banlieue, considered the threatening “dark side” of modern “civilised” cities, since their ori-gin.25 At the same time, as the degradation of these neighbourhoods grew, the emergence of the first conflicts connected with the building of mosques and of the so-called affaires du foulard made the presence
24 R. Alba, N. Foner, Strangers No More: Immigration and the Challenges of Integration in North America and Western Europe (Princeton: Princeton University Press: Princeton, 2015).
25 Although there exists some positive development, specifically concerning schooling-see L. Arslan, Enfants d'Islam et de Marianne. Des banlieues à l’Université (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2010) -and housing careers-see J.-L. Pan Ké Shon, “Residential Segregation of Immigrants in France: an Overview”, INED, Popu-lation and Societies, n. 477 (April 2011). Tellingly, the public discourse systematically overlooks such developments, thus reinforcing the myth of an irremediable “illness”
of banlieues.
and rootedness of Islam in these areas gradually more visible and evident. As various scholars have pointed out, this is when the public discourse started adopting an explanation of the problems of the ban-lieues based on the cultural and religious variables.26 The concept of banlieue has come to be equated with that of Islam, which, in turn, has morphed into a category of collective representation with a strongly negative connotation,27 assigning an a priori derogatory identity to Muslims, who are considered radically “different”, problematic and
“non-integrable”. According to this narrative, Islam is to be blamed for their alleged refusal to integrate and for their presumed desire to live “parallel lives”, separate from and in opposition to the rest of so-ciety, in territories-the banlieues-which are “lost” to the République.28
This leads us to consider the other point made by McCants and Meserole in their argument concerning the treatment of Muslim minorities in the framework of what they call “the French political culture”. Indeed, European countries in general, and France in particu-lar, have developed a terribly fraught relationship with Islam and Muslim migrants over the past decades. According to Foner and Alba, this is due to two main reasons:
Muslim immigrants confront, on the one hand, majority populations that are mainly secular and therefore suspicious of claims based on religion and its requirements and, on the other, societal institutions and national identities that remain anchored to an important extent in Christianity and do not make equal room for Islam.29
This distrustful attitude towards the practice of Islam is exem-plified by the controversies that have emerged and recurrently emerge across Europe over the “visibility” of Islamic symbols and over
reli-26 G. Kepel, Banlieue de la République. Société, politique et religion à Clichy-sous-Bois et Montfermeil (Paris: Gallimard, 2012).
27 C. Avenel, Sociologie des quartiers sensibles (Paris: Armand Colin, 2010);
R. Epstein, La rénovation urbaine. Démolition-reconstruction de l'état (Paris: Presses de Sciences Po, 2013).
28 E. Préteceille, “La ségrégation ethno-raciale a-t-elle augmenté dans la metropole parisienne?”, Revue française de sociologie, 50, 3 (2009), pp. 489-519.
29 N. Foner, R. Alba, “Immigrant Religion in the U.S. and Western Europe:
Bridge or Barrier to Inclusion?”, International Migration Review, 42, 2 (2008), pp.
360-392.
gion-based demands: conflicts over mosques have taken place in al-most every European immigration country –Italy, Germany, the UK;30 the first harsh disputes on headscarves date back to the late '80s with the polemics generated by the affaire du foulard in France, then reached a peak when France introduced a ban on the wearing of hijab in its public schools in 2004, were revived by the ban on full veils ad-opted by both France and Belgium between 2010 and 2011 and finally erupted again in 2016 when some French municipalities prohibited wearing the burkini in public. While conflicts over mosques have to do with an acceptance of the visibility of the increasing diversification of the cultural and religious landscape of Western societies (e.g. the 2009 referendum held in Switzerland against “minarets”), headscarf-related controversies alternatively assume different tones: they either portray the veil as a sign of women's oppression in a backward reli-gious community (the Muslim one), or depict it as a bold defiance of the purported principle of neutrality of the State towards religions (es-pecially in France). Either way, at the core of these disputes is the al-leged threat that Muslims, with their “outrageous” demands, would represent for Western democratic values, heralded as morally super-ior.31 This negative depiction of Muslims could not but be reinforced following the 9/11 attacks, the killing of Theo Van Gogh, the Jyllands-Posten Muhammad cartoons controversy in Denmark and elsewhere.
These events contributed to the “success” of the Huntingtonian thesis regarding the existence of a “clash of civilizations” between Is-lam and the West, which gained currency in most public debates at the global level.
While these portrayals of Islam as a “public enemy” are com-mon to Western societies, there is indeed something specific to France, where the crystallisation of the public discourse on the compatibility of Islam with claimed Republican “values” and laïcité has led to a representation of the integration of Muslim immigrants as
30 S. Allievi (ed.), Mosques in Europe: Why a solution has become a prob-lem- NEF Initiative on Religion and Democracy in Europe, 2010.
31 J. Bowen, “How the French State Justifies Controlling Muslim Bodies:
From Harm-based to Values-based Reasoning”, Social Research, 78, 2 (2008), pp. 1-24.
“failed”.32Indeed, France is characterized by a marked secularism. At the institutional level, this is the result of a century-old history of bitter confrontation between the French State and religious powers, through which the political power sought independence from and control over religious authorities. At the societal level, France was arguably more affected than other countries by the secularist tendencies that transformed Western societies in the second half of the 20th century. From the institutional point of view, this secularist approach, on which State-church relations are based, translated into a principle of absolute neutrality towards manifestations of religion in the public sphere. Moreover, France's political tradition has historically been wary of the development of communitarian allegiances and identities, which postulates that there should be no intermediaries between the République and the citizen, who is depicted in universalistic terms, deprived of any cultural or religious affiliation or belonging. Thus, the citizen's religion has no room or legitimation within the political arena: it is to be strictly confined to his or her private sphere and should not form the basis for communitarian claims, which are perceived as particularistic, contrary to the universality and equality of rights. As Roy puts it, laïcité, from being a simple juridical principle of neutrality and equality, has been gradually transformed into a “principle of exclusion of religion from the public sphere”, becoming “nothing but the most ideological and explicit form of secularization”.33From the societal point of view, this tendency took the form of a fierce aversion to any manifestation of religion, perceived as regressive and obscurantist —particularly Islam, which has come to be automatically associated with pre-modern attitudes and practices.
In light of this, J. Césari concludes that Islam has not been gran-ted “symbolic integration” into French society.34By symbolic integra-tion, we may refer to the definition of integration as the process of
be-32 J. Fredette, Constructing Muslims in France. Discourse, Public Identity and the Politics of Citizenship (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2014).
33 O. Roy, Le djihad et la mort (Paris: Seuil, 2016), p. 115 –our translation.
34 J. Césari, Why the West Fears Islam: An Exploration of Muslims in Liberal Democracies (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013).
coming an accepted part of society, provided by Penninx.35For Césari, the lack of symbolic integration “means that Islam as a religion has been outcast from the main public secular cultures of Europe, as well as securitized”36 with a public discourse growing more and more hostile towards Islam, and more and more reluctant to include Islam within the national narrative. This, in turn, leads many young Muslims to feel deep sentiments of humiliation and frustration in relation to their origins, religion and identity.