In this fourth in the series, we look at how France has politically and intellectually nurtured and fostered the forces of radical Islam. At first glance this may seem incongruous. It was France after all which pioneered a radical form of secularism, a total separation of religion and state. The source of this secularist dogma lies in the French Revolution of 1789 which engendered a complete break with the past in its famous refrain of liberty, equality and fraternity of all peoples. Yet where expedient France has armed the forces of Islamic power, notably with Napoleon being a staunch ally of Tipu Sultan in southern India. 2015 may have begun with France being the victim of attack by jihadist elements. Yet it is French foreign policy, domestic social programmes and above all its much hyped intellectualism which has fed into what became radical Islam. At the same time France has produced so-called India experts like Christophe Jaffrelot which warn the public of an impending apocalypse brought on by Hindu fundamentalism and with every breath in their body defend the racist and colonialist Aryan Invasion Theory. Jaffrelot is seemingly oblivious to the social debris and flotsam elements which are wreaking havoc in his own fatherland, preferring the alternate reality of a new world order threatened by the his invented Hindu menace of a saffron plague.
The new year of 2015 had just set in when Paris was rocked by a massacre which left seventeen dead on 9 January 2015. The satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo had outraged Muslims worldwide with its mocking of Islam’s founder. But the attackers were not some foreign illegals who had sneaked into the country. They were French-raised and born. France likes to think of itself as more enlightened than Britain and America in both its domestic and foreign policy.
It tries to offer an intellectual alternative to the brash capitalism of the dominant Anglo-Saxon powers with which it has vied for international stature. The Rights of Man were promulgated by the French Revolution in a decisive break with feudalism and privilege. But in reality has France really offered an alternative? From examining historical facts much of what we call radical Islam has extensive roots in both political theory and practice of French statecraft, intellectual constructs and adherence to a dogma that is akin to monotheism defined by national boundaries rather than cosmic precepts. France has rigorously enforced secularism against any outward display of religion, especially Islamic headscarves. Yet it has backed jihad in Syria. Its crushing of religious and ethnic minority identity has led to a monstrous chimera that actually thrives on radical Islam.
“J’accuse …!“ (“I accuse”) was an open letter published on 13 January 1898 in the newspaper L’Aurore by the influential French writer Émile Zola. In the letter, Zola addressed President Félix Faure and accused the government of anti-Semitism and the unlawful jailing of Alfred Dreyfus, a French Army General Staff officer who was sentenced to lifelong penal servitude for espionage. Zola pointed out judicial errors and lack of serious evidence. The letter was printed on the front page of the newspaper and caused a stir in France and abroad. Zola was prosecuted for and found guilty of libel on 23 February 1898. To avoid imprisonment, he fled to England, returning home in June 1899. He began:
“The truth I will say, because I promised to say it, if justice, regularly seized, did not do it, full and whole. My duty is to speak, I do not want to be an accomplice. My nights would be haunted by the spectre of innocence that suffer there, through the most dreadful of tortures, for a crime it did not commit… I have only one passion, that of the light, in the name of humanity which has suffered so much and is entitled to happiness. My ignited protest is nothing more than the cry of my heart. So may one dare bring me to criminal court, and may the investigation take place in broad daylight!”
The 1898 article by Émile Zola is widely marked in France as the most prominent manifestation of the new power of the intellectuals in shaping public opinion, the media and state policy. Writers always enjoyed a special status in France, especially since the Revolution of 1789, when wielding the pen was as powerful as using the sword. Due the importance of literacy, intellectuals were accorded great respect and played a special role in French society. Entry to the elite grands écoles would guarantee them a salary for life. The image of the French thinker, siting in the coffee shop, in a thick tobacco haze as he draws on his Gaulois has long portrayed this image – at least until the ban on smoking in public places.
This is of profound importance now when one stands aghast in horror at the recent massacre which took place in Paris against the staff of Charlie Hebdo magazine and the Jewish supermarket, fortified by an ideology every bit as toxic and nefarious as the anti-Semitism and biologically determinist and organic French nationalism which haunted Zola and persecuted Dreyfus..
A massive manhunt led to the discovery on 9 January of the suspects, brothers Saïd and Chérif Kouachi, who exchanged fire with police. The brothers took hostages at a signage company in Dammartin-en-Goële, and were gunned down when they emerged firing from the building. The same day Amedy Coulibaly and Hayat Boumeddiene were at a kosher supermarket engaged in a ‘sympathy’ hostage taking. Boumedienne married Coulibaly in 2009 in an Islamic ceremony that is not recognized by French law, and turned from ‘bikini babe’ to holy warrior.
It is also necessary in order to understand why the jihadi attack on Mumbai in December 2008 did not provoke the same outrage. Where were the peace marches by world leaders in India when Lashkar-e-Toiba launched its attack by sea, brazenly from Pakistan: that faithful ally of America, Britain and France? Perhaps it is because with regards to India, France’s leading ‘expert’ is Christophe Jaffrelot. He is director of the Centre d’études et de recherches internationales (CERI) at Sciences Po and director of research at the Centre national de la recherche scientifique (CNRS), as well as being visiting professor at the India Institute, King’s College London and a Global Scholar the Princeton University.
He is the senior editor of the Sciences Po book series, Comparative Politics and International Relations published by C. Hurst & Co. He has been the editor-in-chief of Critique Internationale and serves on the editorial boards of Nations and Nationlism and International Political Sociology. He is also on the editorial board of The Online Encyclopaedia of Mass Violence.
Jaffrelot’s research is centred on South Asia, focusing on the aspects of nationalism and democracy, Hindu nationalism, caste mobilisation in politics and ethnic conflicts. With titles like The Hindu Nationalist Movement and Indian politics, it will be no surprise where his prejudices lie. For example, on 1 September 2010 he wrote this piece in The Caravan, an Indian publication dedicated to narrative journalism:
I’m prepared to admit that acts of Hindu nationalist terrorism have killed less people than those of Islamists—even though the list of Hindu nationalists attacks may be longer than the couple of cases mentioned above: Mecca Masjid and the Ajmer Dargah. But what is at stake here is the resilience of the rule of law.
Yet in the very next paragraph he then takes issue with these very facts:
It’s possible that the Indian state may be downplaying violent activities by Hindu nationalists. Already, many such perpetrators of violence in recent anti-Muslim riots, including those in Gujarat, have gotten away with it. If terrorist actions targeting the Muslim minority are not punished, India may give the impression that some citizens are above the law and can kill without fear of punishment, provided they target minorities. Such an evolution would result in an unofficial ethno-democracy (in contrast with a country like Israel which is an official one).
His stark warning?
This politics of denial—or worse, the legitimisation of Hindu nationalist violence is bound to be counterproductive. Inequality before the law will generate additional frustrations among Muslim youth, preparing the ground for the recruitment of new militants by Islamist organisations. Justice, on the contrary, can defuse resentment and the desire to take revenge.
Desire to take revenge? Frustration among Muslim youth? Perhaps he should look in his own back yard before preaching to others. Jaffrelot has every right to his opinion. But if this is the best France can produce out of its much vaunted intellectual climate, it is not even a very well manufactured copy of the very Anglosphere bias against India which remains mainstream media fodder.
The State is the Faith
The French education system and state authority impose a uniformity which mitigates against multiculturalism. People of all ethnic backgrounds should conform to the national stew and unity of the republic. France officially enforces integration in harmony with its republican ideas of citizenship, most notably by the taboo against counting ethnic minorities.
A strict and even fundamentalist form of secularism is enforced as immigrants are subject the national civilising mission (mission civilisatrice). Secularism is laïcité, the absence of religious involvement in government affairs based on the 1905 French law on the Separation of the Churches and the State.
For all its intellectualism and talk of integration, France has the largest ‘Far Right’ party in Europe, the Front National, which has never hidden its national socialist roots. Its flirtation and even espousal of crude racism and denial of the Holocaust has nevertheless allowed it to become a powerful political force.
Reality clashes violently with the republic’s ideal of conformity which clashed with de facto segregation in the banlieus, tower block suburbs of La Courneuve, Aubervilles and Saint-Denis outside Paris which in places of worship, food and colloquial French are very much a different world from republican values. These are racialised ghettos of poverty, havens for gangs, drugs and crime so serious that the police dare not enter parts of Paris. The banlieus are a visible and stark counter to the official rhetoric of assimilation, as epitomised in the classic cult film from 1995, La Haine (The Hate).
The government expects immigrants to integrate fully while rejecting any notion of multiculturalism as practised in Britain. Yet the minorities are often rejected by the white host community. Racism against non-whites, largely Maghrebis and blacks, has replaced the xenophobia once prevalent towards Poles, Italians and Portuguese. But the Europeans were able to integrate into wider French society because they were white.
Laws to tackle racism are difficult to enforce. Discrimination in jobs and by the police weighs heavily on French non-white minorities. Whites move out of housing or schools where Maghrebis and blacks congregate too much thus creating ghettoes in diametric opposite to France’s official policy of integration. Jonathan Fenby who has reported from France for The Economist, The Times, The Independent, The Guardian, The Observer, Libération, L’Express, Sud-Ouest and L’Évènement du Jeudi, in his 1998 book On the Brink, which looked at social deprivation in France:
The banlieus have a slang which can be virtually impenetrable and act as a wall in both directions….In a further twist away from the universal language spread across France by the centralisers of the nineteenth century, this new tongue can vary from estate to estate, from race to race. In Noisy-Le-Grand, outside Paris, Africans call white French people ‘babtou’ while Arabs call them ‘gaori’ or’gouère’ and gypsies call them ‘roum’; elsewhere the popular term is ‘from’ – from ‘fromage’
John Ardagh, formerly of The Times and the Observer, writes in his 1999 book France in the New Century Portrait of a Changing Society,
The State promotes an integration which the public then obstructs; the public stresses cultural differences which the State refuses to recognize. That, in a word, is the basic dilemma of immigration today in a France that officially does not accept multiculturalism or ethnic communities. On the one hand the State regards all citizens as equal, with the same full rights, and turns a blind eye to any distinctions between them of race or culture. But the French public, in its mass, does not regard immigrants as fully or equally French, and will constantly remind them of their otherness.
French of Maghrebi origin in France form the largest ethnic group after French of European origin. Algerians in the immediate postwar period were technically French. Nothing exemplified Algerians’ socio-economic status better than the shanty-towns (bidonvilles) that grew around Paris, Lyons and Marseilles in the 1950s, as depicted in Rachid Bouchareb’s film Hors La Loi (Outside the Law). While France reached greater prosperity in the 1960s the largely Maghrebi inhabitants of the bidonvilles were excluded. Even with their clearance in 1964 the resultant ghettoes continued to seal off any social mobility. Giscard d’Estaing began the racialisation of the immigrant issue, especially Maghrebis, during the 1970s.
Maghrebi immigrants suffered from a wave of racist violence in France during 1973. Unemployment had increased following the oil crisis that year leading to an upsurge in racism mainly directed against North African Arab immigrants, especially in the south such as Lyon.
Crime was however linked in the popular mind with immigrants and minorities and was exploited by right-wing politicians such as Jacques Chirac and especially the Front National of Jean-Marie Le Pen, with the latter calling for expulsion of all “immigrants”. By June 1991 Chirac was speaking of the “noise and smell” of immigrants annoying the average Frenchman.
Fellow Gaullist Giscard d’Estaing wrote an article in Le Figaro on 21 September 1991 entitled Immigration or Invasion?.
By the 1970s the North Africans raised in France were known as Generation Buer. A label not even recognised by the authorities. Andrew Hussey, dean of University’ of London’s Institute in Paris, in his 2014 book French Intifada:
This generation of Arab youth was both angry and optimistic. They were angry about what they perceived as a racist society bent on excluding them from the mainstream, but they also accepted the essential correctness of French left-wing values.
These young people were largely uncontaminated by radical Islam. They believed in the right to speak their own languages and have their own cultural practices. They also believed in the right to smoke dope, drink alcohol, chase girls of all ethnic extractions, and form rock bands. In other words, tradition and modernity could be friends on the same terms.
It was this which led Algerian musician Rachid Taha to move to Lyon. This generation fused traditional North African rhythms with French pop and British punk, and later hip-hop and other influences to modernise the Rai music from the Maghreb.
Taha was inspired by British punk band The Clash, and in 1981 gave them a copy of a demo tape by his band, Carte de Séjour (Residence Permit), an outfit from Lyons who combined Algerian raï with funk and punk rock. Taha believes that these early recordings helped to inspire The Clash’s Rock the Casbah. In France the punk subculture of the late 1970s morphed into skinheads who supported Front National and even more extreme fascist groups.
Neo-Nazi skinheads became targets for beatings by suburban black gangs and white anti-Nazi activists, while a racist underground youth culture developed; Rebelles Europeens of Brest became a major producer of racist skinhead music banned in Britain. The proliferation of skinhead violence and police apathy or complicity with it against minorities, led to anti-racist street activism by groups such as the Black Panthers, Redskins and Antifa.
Islamist Jacobin Club
Meanwhile sections of Maghrebi French youth growing up with this pervasive racism, turned to African-American rap culture, asserting an identity at diametric odds with the idea of an integration which had so obviously failed.
Reality of the situation was also ignored with the republic’s ideal of conformity which clashed with de facto segregation in the banlieus, tower block suburbs of La Courneuve, Aubervilles and Saint-Denis outside Paris which in places of worship, food and colloquial French are the inverse of republican values. Paul Belien, editor of the Brussels Journal and an adjunct fellow of the Hudson Institute, wrote ‘Sensitive urban areas’ for The Washington Times on January 16, 2008:
The ZUS exist not only because Muslims wish to live in their own areas according to their own culture and their own Shariah laws, but also because organized crime wants to operate without the judicial and fiscal interference of the French state. In France, Shariah law and mafia rule have become almost identical.
In November 2005 the then Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy said he planned to get rid of the racaille, a loaded word which means scum but reveals in its usage heavy racism against Arabs and blacks. Alienation from the hollowness of the French Revolution has produced a backlash from the ethnic minorities such as hip-hop artist Sniper. In 2004 he won a law case brought by the state for inciting hatred and violence for these lyrics:
France is a bitch and we’ve been betrayed
Screw France, we don’t care about the Republic and freedom of speech
We should change the laws so we can see Arabs and Blacks in power in the Elysée Palace
Things have to explode.
Even more rejectionist was Mr. R’s Politikment Incorrect album track FranSSe:
France is a bitch
Don’t forget to fuck her to exhaustion
You have to treat her like a whore, man!
My niggers and my Arabs, our playground is the street and with the most guns.
So it was that terrorist brothers Cherif and Said Kouachi, who grew up into a world of crime, drug dealing, and to be aspiring rap artists. Cherif himself as ‘an occasional Muslim’, he smoked cannabis, drank, dealt drugs, chased women and got a job as a pizza delivery man.
In an interview shortly after his arrest published by the Pittsburgh Tribune, his lawyer Vincent Ollivier said Kaouchi, then 22, was not particularly religious. “He drank, smoked pot, slept with his girlfriend and delivered pizzas for a living,” the newspaper reported.
It was a pattern seen before. Khalid Kelkal was born in 1971 in Algeria, but moved to a banlieu of Lyon with his family when he was an infant. As the only Arab in class he felt rejected in his lyceé, and more comfortable with neighbourhood criminals. Sentenced to four years in prison, he was recruited for jihad by his cell mate.
After his release, Kelkal regularly attended the Bilal Mosque in Vaulx-en-Velin; the mosque was headed by imam Mohamed Minta, a sympathiser of the Foi et Pratique (“Faith and practice”) fundamentalist organisation. In 1993, Kelkal went to Mostaganem, in Algeria, to visit his family, and recruited to the violent Groupe Islamique Armé (GIA, Armed Islamic Group). He was shot by French gendarmes in 1995 near Lyon.
Abd Samad Moussaoui is a teacher in a French technical school. His surname should be eerily familiar, because Abd Samad is the brother of Zacarias Moussaoui imprisoned for his part in the 9/11 hijacking. In his 2002 book The Making of a Terrorist, he describes the effect of growing up as a French teenager of Moroccan descent once the Front National made political breakthrough:
Up until that time, there had been little or no idea that so much racism existed, along with a spirit of exclusion. But when certain people, in certain French towns and cities, started announcing that they loathed foreigners, the fact was that the terms of reference had changed. ‘Liberté, Égalité, Fraternité’ no longer meant anything. We realized that there was double-speak: there was the language of official speeches, and the language of reality. And for us this had serious consequences. It wasn’t a hunch any more, it was a certainty: we weren’t French ‘like the others’. Or, worse still, we weren’t French at all.
The Moussaoui brothers suffered daily racism, and police indifference or even hostility when faced with racist attacks from whites, including fellow students and even teachers. After leaving school they faced the discrimination of a job market that was less than receptive to ‘Arabs’, no matter how qualified. Yet at the same time they did not feel themselves to be Moroccan, and their link to Islam was tenuous.
In his book Abd Samad explains how Maghrebi youth in France, fractured by this identity crisis, were fertile ground for Wahhabi extremism, and lamented the brainwashing of his brother at the hands of these preachers. This explains the radicalisation of Said and Cherif Kouachi. In 2005 the latter appeared on French television as an aspiring hip-hop star. But in the same year he also began attending Dawa mosque where he fell under the influence of a radical preacher, Farid Benyettou. From then onwards, his lifestyle changed to conform to the strictest interpretations of Islam. Benyettou organised a network to send volunteers to fight in Iraq.
From October to December 1983, inspired by Gandhi and Martin Luther King, the “Marche des Beurs” asserted the rights and identity of French born Maghrebis, and was received in Paris by Mitterand himself. In 1983 SOS-Racisme was formed by Harlem Désir, Julien Dray and Didier François to tackle racism and police harassment. But by 1989 there was disenchantment with pioneer organisations such as SOS-Racisme, whose spectacular initiatives had made scant impact on society.
This was fertile ground for radical Islam, where demagogues picked up the slack left when anti-racist organisations had lost their former prestige. Islamists became the new spokesmen of the young French urban poor, and began exerting influence on local politics. These outward displays of religious symbolism and brazen religious demands clashed with the core values of the republic itself.
The French-born generation looked disparagingly upon the generational hierarchy as well as the folk culture of their parents. Giles Kepel, director of research at CNRS Paris, and professor at the Institute of Political Studies in Paris, from his 2002 book Jihad:
In this unstable context, where traditional points of reference seemed obsolete and the host society seemed impenetrably hostile, a new Islamic identity began to develop. People who had gambled on the unknown were now trying to get their bearings, especially the fragile, ill-educated, unemployed segment of the immigrant population. From the outset this group attracted the attention of the more pietist Islamic movements, which were accustomed to providing order and structure in the daily lives of the faithful through strictly codified practices. …The Tabligh had particular success in the French North African mileu, where they had never before won a foothold. For many West Africans, the strong support systems of the Mouride and Tijan brotherhoods has insulted their talibes (disciples) from the destabilizing effects of migrations – at the price of a ghetto-style home life.
But is there something in the genetics of the French state itself that causes this? Is it deeper than just racism? After all the West Indian, Vietnamese and Roma minorities suffer racism and social marginalisation and are visibly not of the designated ‘master race’. In 2004 France passed a law banning religious symbols in schools. This included turbans and Muslim headscarves. In January 2012 elderly Sikh resident Ranjit Singh gained the support of the UN Human Rights Committee on his right to wear his turban, having found the French policy disrespectful and unnecessary. But why did this not lead to a murderous rampage through Paris by Sikhs? John Gray in his 2007 book Black Mass:
Islamist movements think of violence as a means of creating a new world, and in this they belong not in the medieval past but the modern West. Talk of ‘Islamo-fascism’ obscures the larger debts of Islamism to western thought. It is not only the fascists who have believed that violence can give birth to a new society.
So did Lenin and Bakunin, and radical Islam could with equal accuracy be called Islamo-Leninism or Islamo-anarchism. However the closest affinity is with the illiberal theory of popular sovereignty expounded by Rousseau and applied by Robespierre in the French Terror, and radical Islam may be best described as Islamo-Jacobinism.
John Gray again, in his 2003 book, Al Qaeda and What It Means to Be Modern discussing one of the major the fathers of radical Islam, Egypt’s Sayyid Qutb:
Qutb’s writings are filled with horror of the West, but he borrowed many of his writings from western sources. He was especially indebted to European anarchism. The idea of a revolutionary vanguard dedicated to bringing into being a world without rulers or rules has no precedence in Islamic thought. It is a clear borrowing from European radical ideology.
Gray echoes what Robert Worth wrote in the New York Times on 13 October 2001, with ‘The Deep Intellectual Roots of Islamic Terror’:
As Fathi Yakan, one of Qutb’s disciples, wrote in the 1960′s: ”The groundwork for the French Revolution was laid by Rousseau, Voltaire and Montesquieu; the Communist Revolution realized plans set by Marx, Engels and Lenin. . . . The same holds true for us as well.”
Secular Wahhabism
The Revolution of 1789 repudiated France’s role as eldest daughter of the Catholic Church and her purely Christian identity. The Jacobins attacked the Church and instead looked to the Republic of Rome as their ideal. Rousseau became the prophet of a civic secular religion in which the new republic usurped the Church’s control over life cycles such as rituals surrounding birth, marriage and death.
In November 1793, the goddess Liberty was paraded at the Festival of Reason held in Notre Dame Cathedral. The historian Jules Michelet (1789-1874) saw French interests at one with the rest of humanity and said that France itself was a religion, intermingling various peoples and civilisations. Going to war in 1792 France claimed it was liberating oppressed neighbours.
Yet in reality fraternity was imperialist in scope, as French armies conquered more of Europe than anyone since Charlemagne. British conservative Edmund Burke had foreseen right at the outset how submission to Rousseau’s amorphous “general will” would lead to unimaginable horrors.
Inspired by Rousseau’s divination of the people, Robespierre divided the masses into two binary opposites: people and enemies. The latter were to be exterminated and indeed 50,000 people died in the Terror. This Terror was integral for social engineering to build a new society. Defying Rousseau’s general will, the dogmas of “civil religion” and the powerful “god-state” which embodies the collective sovereignty of the community leads to ostracism and indeed eventual extermination.
Far from bringing fraternity, the French Revolution easily mutated into espousal of a distinctive volk, and ideas of a master Aryan race. It was in France that Arthur de Gobineau wrote Essay on the Inequality of Human Races in 1855, asserting that whites or Aryans were the master race. Of these Germans were the purest example among whom Gobineau’s views not surprisingly found fertile soil. By the late nineteenth century, Charles Maurras, Maurice Barrès, and Edouard Drumont were standard bearers of a menacing new organic nationalism, created by the Revolution and yet opposing core republican values. Dreyfus was to be their sacrificial lamb in a French nationalism that was anti-Semitic to the core.
The effects of 1789 were felt at the very periphery of Europe as the rump of the former Ottoman Empire sought a basis for national existence as the new state of Turkey. Mustafa Kemal was known as the Great Reformer, or Inkilâpçi later to be changed to Devrimci or Reformer, as well as Ataturk (Father of the Turks). The French Revolution was his model and he was a product of the Enlightenment.
A few hours before declaring a republic and abolishing the Khilafat on 29 October 1923, Mustafa Kemal had told French writer Maurice Pernot that France had inspired the struggle for freedom throughout the world and that one needed to turn to the West in the quest for civilisation. In the same way that the Jacobin Revolutionaries had a created a French nation with enforced French language and culture, Turkish nationalists hoped to do the same in their country.
From 1880 France had rigorously suppressed regional languages and dialects through enforcement of standardised French: as opposed to Breton in the north-east, German in Alsace, Langue d’Oc in Provence, and Arabic in Algeria. This explains the savage repression of Kurdish separatism in 1925 and the denial that the Kurds, as well as Laz or Circassians even existed in a nation where there could only be Turks.
Beginning in 1923, a series of laws progressively limited the wearing of selected items of traditional clothing. Mustafa Kemal first made the hat compulsory to the civil servants. In 1934 a law was passed banning religion-based clothing, such as the veil and turban, while actively promoting western-style attire. In 1925 institutions of religious covenants and dervish lodges were declared illegal.
The reformers imagined that the elimination of the orthodox and Sufi religious establishments, along with traditional religious education, and their replacement with a system in which the original sources were available to all in the vernacular language, would pave the way for a new vision of Islam open to progress and modernity and usher in a society guided by modernity.
As well as persecuting the various Sufi brotherhoods such as the Naqshbandiyah, Kemalist Turkey closely monitored education so that only an acceptable version of Islam would be inculcated.
From the 1950s state schools for imams and preachers trained clerics to disseminate the view that Islam and secularism were compatible, but that rural traditional Islam was archaic and the diametric opposite to the values of the Turkish republic. Ironically this was to supply the basis for new Islamist politicians such as Necmettin Erbakan.
Could it be that Turkey, the Muslim majority country which espouses secularism, where Ataturk forged a new nation through the Swiss legal code and civic ideas of the French Revolution, actually finds itself in an unholy ideological parallel with that most intolerant and puritanical strain of Islam introduced by Ibn Wahhab? For both the secular reformists of Turkey and the Wahhabi Reformation of Islam, the Sufi orders and traditional Islam represented something backward, superstitious and an impediment to their respective ideas of the modern state.
This is often overlooked when trying to understand the success of political Islam in this secular state of Turkey. Radical Islam is after all in conflict with the governments of Muslim states more than the West. Indeed Salafism has more conflict and odium against local Islamic cultures such as Sufism. In all its varieties, radical Islam is intrinsically modern, western and part of the Enlightenment as much as the French Revolution. The most active recruits such as those for ISIS in Iraq and Syria and the massacre in Paris which marked the ominous beginning of 2015, are from deracinated Muslims raised in western countries like France. There are eerie parallels between the Grand Ayatollah of Iran and the ‘Legislator’, a shadowy figure from Rousseau’s thought who guides the masses from behind the scenes.
Ali Shariati came from a strict Shia family in Iran. He studied in Paris where he was influenced by exiled Algerian nationalists, and influenced by the writings of Guevara, Sartre and Fanon. Shariati introduced a revolutionary element into Shia militancy attacking the ‘reactionary’ clergy as much as the Shah. His ideas of the oppressed mostafadine were later adopted by Khomeini, but owe their origins to Shariati’s sojourn in Paris. Iran is therefore a manifestation of Rousseau’s vision with Islamic trappings.
These are important points because the French Revolution is the fons et origo of the Left and the “revolutionary tradition’. Rather than rebuilding the medieval caliphate, ISIS is actually trying to build a very modern and post-Enlightenment state. It uses this wealth to expand its popular base, providing public services and repairing damaged infrastructure in the areas it controls. Its use of social media is highly professional. Its use of terror is neither random nor impulsive. On 11 July 2014, John Gray wrote this for the BBC News online magazine:
Though al-Baghdadi constantly invokes the early history of Islam, the society he envisions has no precedent in history. …. The French Jacobins and Lenin’s Bolsheviks, the Khmer Rouge and the Red Guards all used terror as a way of cleansing humanity of what they regarded as moral corruption.
Jihadists present themselves as true to their religion, while their parents, so they argue, are mired in tradition or “culture” which is deemed backward, decadent, and superstitious. When he made his speech in July at Mosul’s Great Mosque, declaring the creation of an Islamic State with himself as its caliph, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi quoted at length from the Pakistani thinker and founder of the Jamaat-i-Islam, Abul Ala Maududi.
Central to his thought is his understanding of the French Revolution, which he believed offered the promise of a “state founded on a set of principles” as opposed to one based upon a nation or a people. The Islamic state he envisioned would create its citizens just as the Jacobins attempted with their republic. Kevin McDonald, professor of sociology and head of the department of criminology and sociology at Middlesex University, wrote this in the Guardian of 9 September 2014:
Don’t look to the Qur’an to understand this – look to the French revolution and ultimately to the secularisation of an idea that finds its origins in European Christianity: extra ecclesiam nulla salus (outside the church there is no salvation), an idea that became transformed with the birth of modern European states into extra stato nulla persona (outside the state there is no legal personhood). This idea still demonstrates extraordinary power today: it is the source of what it means to be a refugee.
If Isis’s state is profoundly modern, so too is its violence. Isis fighters do not simply kill; they seek to humiliate, as we saw last week as they herded Syrian reservists wearing only their underpants to their death. And they seek to dishonour the bodies of their victims, in particular through postmortem manipulations.
French thinker Georges Sorel (1847-1922) wrote the influential Reflexions on Violence in 1906. Beginning as a Marxist, he initiated syndicalism which is seen as the bridge between socialism and fascism. Sorel rejected inevitable and evolutionary change, emphasizing instead the importance of ‘will’ and ‘direct action’. These approaches included general strikes, boycotts, and constant disruption of capitalism with the goal being to achieve worker control over the means of production. But it is his belief in the need for a deliberately conceived “myth” that is most important It is a hypothesis which we do not judge by its closeness to a “truth”, but by the practical consequences which stem from it. Thus, whether a political myth is of some importance or not must be decided, in Sorel’s view, on the basis of its capacity to mobilize human beings into political action. In other words by its effects. Will Christ return? Irrelevant as long as it motivates the masses into action. Same with pondering if Marxism will bring about a proletarian paradise. ISIS therefore has its own core Sorellian myth to motivate. And it works.
Assisting the Jihad
Even before the Revolution the French were assisting Hyder Ali Khan and his son Tipu in India: who used French arms and military assistance to unleash terror and forcible conversion upon Hindus and others. Psychologically there had been a build up to this. Comte Henri de Boulainvilliers (1658-1722) used the doctrines of Islam to attack the Church, lauding it as a simple faith which required no need for priests, miracles or mysteries. In his tragedy Le Fanatisme ou Mahomet, Voltaire described Muhammad as an “impostor”, a “false prophet”, a “fanatic” and a “hypocrite”.
As a Deist he was against monotheism religion in general. It is Voltaire who serves as the bridge between clerical and secular anti-Semitism. But as a deist, this French Enlightenment high priest also found Islam a useful tool with which to attack the established Catholic Church. “Écrasez l’Infâme” or “Down with the Accursed One [the Church]” was an expression he often used in his private letters. In Islam, Voltaire again saw a simple doctrine. In his 1756 Essaie sur les Moeurs (Essay on the Moors) and his entry in Dictionnaire Philosophique, he found Islam to be more in line with his deist beliefs, as well as a useful tool to attack Christianity, and Catholicism in particular.
In 1789, Napoleon invaded Egypt to undermine British commerce and link up with Tipu Sultan in India to thwart British power on that subcontinent. On 1 July, aboard the ship L’Orient en route to Egypt, he wrote the following proclamation to the Muslim inhabitants of Alexandria:
People of Egypt, they have told you that I come to destroy your religion, but do not believe it; [tell them] in reply [that] I come to restore your rights, punish the usurpers and that I respect God, his prophet and the Quran more than the Mamluks.
Tell them that all men are equal before God; wisdom, talents, virtues are the only things to make one man different from another… Is there a more beautiful land? It belongs to the Mamluks. If Egypt is their farm, then they should show the lease that God gave them for it… Cadis, cheiks, imans, tchorbadjis, and notables of the nation [I ask you to] tell the people that we are true friends of Muslims. Wasn’t it us who destroyed the Knights of Malta? Wasn’t it us who destroyed the Pope who used to say that he had a duty to make war on Muslims? Wasn’t it us who have at all times been friends to the Great Lord and enemies to his enemies?
During celebrations of the birthday of the Prophet Muhammad, Bonaparte himself directed the military parades for the occasion, preparing for this festival in the cheik’s house wearing oriental dress and a turban. It was on this occasion that the divan granted him the title Ali-Bonaparte after the Corsican-born leader proclaimed himself “a worthy son of the Prophet” and “favourite of Allah”. Around the same time he took stern measures to protect pilgrim caravans from Egypt to Mecca, writing a letter himself to the governor of Mecca.
Tipu Sultan was instructed in military tactics by French officers in the employment of his father, Sultan Hyder Ali Khan of Mysore. Tipu sought support from the French, who had been his traditional allies, aimed at driving his main rivals, the British East India Company, out of India. In February 1798, Napoleon wrote a letter to Tipu Sultan appreciating his efforts of resisting the British annexation and plans, but this letter never reached Tipu and was seized by a British spy in Muscat. Tipu and his father used their French trained army against the Marathas, Sira, and Hindu rulers of Malabar, Kodagu, Bednore, Carnatic, and Travancore.
In 1794, with the support of French Republican officers, Tipu helped found the Jacobin Club of Mysore for ‘framing laws comfortable with the laws of the Republic’ He planted a Liberty Tree and declared himself Citizen Tipoo.The British regarded the link up of Revolutionary Jacobin forces and Islamic resistance as an extremely dangerous development. It was also dangerous for the indigenous culture of India. Thousands of Kodava Hindus were seized and held captive at Seringapatam, where they were forcibly converted to Islam. The young men were all forcibly circumcised and incorporated into the Ahmedy Corps.
French-born journalist Francois Gautier wrote further on this subject in India’s Outlook magazine, with his The Tyrant Diaries dated 15 April 2013. In the late eighteenth century Francois Ripaud from north-west France had joined the French navy and eventually settled in Mauritius. In 1797 he sailed to India where he met Tipu and offered his military assistance. Napoleon had ordered the governor of Mauritius to collaborate and Ripaud was able to sail to Mangalore with a shipload of French soldiers who were like heroes. In his diary entry of January 14, 1799, he writes:
“I’m disturbed by Tipu Sultan’s treatment of these most gentle souls, the Hindus. During the siege of Mangalore, Tipu’s soldiers daily exposed the heads of many innocent Brahmins within sight from the fort for the Zamorin and his Hindu followers to see.”
In another diary entry he is appalled at what he witnessed in Calicut (Kozhikode):
“Most of the Hindu men and women were hanged…first mothers were hanged with their children tied to their necks. That barbarian Tipu Sultan tied the naked Christians and Hindus to the legs of elephants and made the elephants move around till the bodies of the helpless victims were torn to pieces. Temples and churches were ordered to be burned down, desecrated and destroyed. Christian and Hindu women were forced to marry Mohammedans, and similarly, their men (after conversion to Islam) were forced to marry Mohammedan women. Christians who refused to be honoured with Islam were ordered to be killed by hanging immediately.”
Ripaud’s account has been corroborated by Father Bartholomew, a famous Portuguese traveller, in his memoir, Voyage to East Indies In an incredible twist of fate, both Tipu Sultan and Emperor Napoleon Bonaparte were defeated by that very same person: Sir Arthur Wellesley, who several years after defeating Tipu became the Duke of Wellington.A group of French officers numbering 124, under the Command of Michel Raymond, was also leading an army of 14,000 for Nizam Ali Khan Asaf Jah II, but they were successfully countered by British diplomatic intervention. Raymond was the French-born general in command of the Muslim ruler’s forces, and an extremely close confidant of the Nizam, affectionately known as Musa Rahim.
It was not just India. When Napoleon was defeated by the Ottoman Empire helped with England at the Siege of Acre in 1799, and at the Battle of Abukir in 1801, he did not relent. Soon however, from 1803, Napoleon went to great lengths to try to convince the Ottoman Empire to fight against Russia in the Balkans and join his anti-Russian coalition. Napoleon sent General Horace Sebastiani as envoy extraordinary, promising to help the Ottoman Empire recover lost territories.
Napoleon was of course forced out of Egypt. But the French were to have more success in Algeria, a prelude to the conquest of much of the Maghreb and Sahel region of Africa. Hussey in The French Intifada:
As France colonized the Arab world, the French government began describing itself as ‘une puissance musulmane’ (a Muslim power). As well as signalling that France would look after the interests of Catholics in Muslim countries, this meant that in the first instance that France saw itself as the protector in the Middle East of Catholics in Muslim countries, and Muslims against the encroaching Protestants of the British Empire (it was on these grounds that France extended its powers in Syria and Lebanon in the 1920s). More recently the term ‘une puissance musulmane’ has been evoked by a succession of French foreign ministers to buy goodwill in the Arab world by hinting at a shared mistrust of the United States and Israel (the French have never been afraid to invoke the spectre of anti-Semitism in their dealings with Arab states).
In the French protectorate of Tunisia in the 1920s, Tahar Haddad published Our Women in Sharia Law and in Society to argue that Islam supported the emancipation of women. As a result the ulema expelled from the University of Zitana, and the French authorities barred him from becoming a judge. It was only after independence in 1956 that Haddad was rehabilitated by that most progressive and secular of Arab leaders, Bourguiba.
Indeed he based Tunisia’s Code of Personal Status on Haddad’s very ideas. Yet France, secular France, the France that pioneered laicité, would back ‘reactionary’ Islamic clerics?
Both Catholic and Protestant churches were vociferous in their support for colonialism especially because it allowed escape from secularisation in France itself and an vast potential to convert the heathens of inferior races. For the colonial enterprise even supposedly sacrosanct republican virtues of secularism were severely compromised.
Anti-clerical politicians were in fact far from hostile to Catholic missionary organisations because they recognised the important role they played in spreading and maintaining French imperial power. No surprise then that the Algerian Revolt was launched on All Saints’ Day in 1954, when the staunchly Catholic white settler pieds noirs or colons would be celebrating their Christian martyrs.
Paradoxically when elements of anti-clericalism surfaced, they tended to help the spread of Islam by local holy men known as marabouts, and inhibit Christianity, while destroying indigenous African beliefs. Jean-Louis Triaud is a French historian, a professor emeritus of the University of Provence (Aix-Marseille I), specialist in the history of Islam and Muslim societies in Saharan and sub-Saharan. He was stationed at the universities of Abidjan (Ivory Coast) and Niamey (Niger) and Paris VII Diderot. He is a member of the Centre for the Study of African worlds. In 2000 he contributed the piece “Islam Under French Colonial Rule’ to The History of Islam in Africa. (Levtzion & Pouwels (eds.). Athens. Ohio University Press):
The colonial period played a decisive role in the history of Islam in French speaking Africa: it was the period of the greatest expansion of the Muslim presence in Africa….To the “social Darwinism” of the age, on the scale of civilizations, Islam, because it had a written culture, was considered midway between barbarism and progress. In the context of the Maghrib, what was emphasized and denounced above all was the perception that Islam blocked progress. Islam was the vector and the sign of backwardness, as compared with the industrial societies. In the context of Black Africa, the place it occupied was different and more complex. Islamic culture was judged, on the one hand, to lag behind Western civilization; but on the other, it was seen to be in advance of sub-Saharan societies designated as “fetishistic.”
He quotes Louis Faidherbe who became governor of Senegal in 1854:
The Muslim propaganda is a step toward civilization in West Africa, and it is universally recognized that, with respect to social organization, the Muslim peoples of these regions are superior to the populations that have remained fetishistic.
During his time, a Muslim court, Franco-Arab schools, and a unit of Senegalese tirailleurs (professional soldiers) were created, following the Algerian model. Faidherbe implanted the Arab tradition of the burnus in Senegal, where previously it was unknown. This hooded cloak was given to native chiefs as a sign of investiture and the power to govern. New mosques were also built. But the French policy was also marked by a fear of an Islamic menace:
The benevolent attitude toward Islam by Faidherbe and others was thus accompanied by a clear demarcation, following the Algerian model, between “good” and the “bad” brotherhoods. This favorable predisposition, selective as it was, and determined partly by vested interests, never commanded the support of all the agents of French colonialism. In particular, it was not shared by some members of the army, hostile to a policy favoring the Muslims, in the Sudan at that time. However, the support given by the notables of Saint-Louis and by Shaykh Sidiyya Baba and Shaykh Saad Buh in the conquest north of the Senegal River lent weight to this pro-Islamic orientation. Coppolani (1902-5) conducted a systematic policy in Mauritania of using religious figures as a network of domination. Here, however, as in Senegal, and in contrast to Algeria, the Qadiriyya and the Tijaniyya were cast in reverse roles. In contrast to Algeria, it was the Tijaniyya who were known for their intolerance and the Qadiriyya were seen as decked out in all the virtues.
The growth of colonial towns such as Dakar, forced labour, military conscription, cash crop economies, rail and road links, and associated social dislocation helped not only to spread Islam but ‘modernise’ it through standardisation against local practices in line with