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Introduction
I was born French, but for me, the way I seeit, it’s only in France that I’m French becauseour parents are foreign. But [in France] youhave to be French. You have to be French todo anything here, like at school, or howyou’re educated. But in my head, I’m aforeigner.
—Mariama (of Malian origin)
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Me, I find myself totally integrated in France,so I feel at home everywhere. Given that Iwas born in France, that I speak French, thatmy culture is French, that I learned Frenchhistory, France is my country . . . My identityis French of Algerian origin, of Muslimreligion.
—Fatima (of Algerian origin)
[W]e are French and Muslim and proud of it.
—Protester against the law banningheadscarves in schools
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Individuals or groups are objectively definednot only by what they are, but by what theyare reputed to be, a “being perceived” which,even if it closely depends on their being, isnever totally reducible to this.
—Pierre Bourdieu,
The Logic of Practice
When people think of France, they do not typically attribute theracialized
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forms and formations of violence, so commonplace in theUnited States, to the French urban landscape. However, the targetsand effects of identity politics, educational inequality, blighted pub-
lic housing projects that risk becoming little more than feeders forprisons, and generalized feelings of insecurity are very much adifferent “normal” in multiethnic France and Europe. Though ur- ban violence (both real and anticipated) derives from a variety ofsources, image-savvy politicians and media “experts” have identi-fied, shaped, and honed “suitable enemies,”
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enemies whom thepublic is taught to fear. In France, they are youths of immigrationand of color from the outer cities—those high-rise public housingcomplexes on the periphery of urban centers. The sum and summa-tion of all such enemies are Muslims, and most visibly headscarf-wearing Muslim girls. However, the underlying factors contributingto the public’s alarm have less to do with reported increases in urbanviolence over the years and more with one glaring realization. Be-cause France has failed to discern its grown and evolving popula-tions of non-Europeans—an estimated four to five million of whomare Muslim
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—its carefully crafted nation-state is now a more diversestate of ethnic nationals whose French-born or -reared childrenhave come home to roost . . . permanently. That is, the consequencesof history are making themselves felt in France. More importantly,these youths are shaping a “new” France and are one face of the Eu-rope of tomorrow. Therein lies the actual source of the public’s fears,which are now amplified by the attacks of September 11, 2001, inthe U.S. and of March 11, 2004, in Spain, suicide bombings in Mo-rocco and the Middle East, the expanding war on terror, and memo-ries of wars and attacks previously visited upon French shores, suchas the bombings of the mid-1980s and the summer of 1995. Thesememories are roused by threats of more attacks, spurred by the 2004law banning “Islamic” headscarves and by the deportation of “radi-cal” Imams allegedly for “spreading extremist Islamic thought,”
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and by the kidnapping and subsequent release of French journalists inIraq toward the end of 2004, also in response to the headscarf ban.In the absence of a necessary conversation about the systemiccauses of urban violence, a politicized rhetoric conjures an imag-inary hydra of immigration, itself seen as the threat to France’scoveted “national identity.” Yet the real challenge to the nationalrepresentation and culture is posed by stigmatized youths of non-European origins who assert that they are French and expect to betreated as such in their country: France. As young people from theouter cities, they are typecast as violent delinquents, feared as ter-rorists in the making, and objectified as criminals—the fodder ofprisons and the targets of racialized profiling, secular laws, and cur-fews that apply solely to their neighborhoods. While they are made
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Muslim Girls and the Other France
to be seen by the public as living manifestations of every social ill,what they are not
perceived
as is French. Born or raised in France,the only country that they know well, they did not become Frenchthrough any conscious social movement or through political de-mands. Rather, they were made so through social structures andmore directly through French national education, whose historicaland expressed objective remains franco-conformity—an arrogantassimilationism toward the “national identity” in keeping with theinterest of national unity (Noiriel 1988, 1992; Weil 1996, 1997;Bleich 1998).
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Such youths are not, however, accorded the socialrecognition and currency that assimilation presumes.Drawing from a multiyear study, this book examines this para-dox in the lives of Muslim girls of African origins, and of youths ofcolor in general, living in the French outer cities. The literature onthe topic of Muslims in France continues to expand, though it typi-cally focuses on North African or Maghrebin Muslims, and is often inFrench (Ben Jelloun 1984; Leveau 1986; Sayad 1991; Kepel 1991;Etienne 1989; Lacoste-Dujardin 1992; Hargreaves 1993, 1997; Ce-sari 1994; Raissiguier 1994; Khosrokhavar 1997; Wihtol de Wendenand Leveau 2001; Venel 1999; Gaspard 2004).
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This attention toMaghrebin experiences is largely due to sociohistorical factors thatdrive a type of “Algerian exceptionalism.” These factors include thefact that Algeria was a settler colony from the 1830s to 1962, as op-posed to a protectorate; its bitter, bloody war of independence,which reached French soil; massive immigration and family recruit-ment from Algeria; and the fact that many Algerians hold dual Al-gerian and French nationality. Thus “Muslims” and “Muslim issues” become quasi-synonymous with the Magrebins and more specifi-cally Arabs in discourse, writings, and public perception. The head-scarf ban, for example, is portrayed as affecting only “Arabs,” andnot West Africans or Asians.
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Nonetheless, anti-Arab violence andsentiment have been on the rise in France for more than two dec-ades, as have intolerance and violence toward those identified as mi-nority groups in general (Taguieff 1987; Tribalat 1995; Geisser 2003;CNCDH 2000–2002; 2004; Bleich 2003).Although the majority of my focal participants
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are of NorthAfrican origin, they represent a range of ethno-national origins, col-ors, and color consciousness. In fact, in the U.S. context, some would be identified as “black,”
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not Arab. This study seeks, then, to bridgethat gap somewhat, by focusing on teenage girls of North and WestAfrican origins whose experiences merge through the politics of na-tional identity and social exclusion in France. While these youths
Introduction
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