News
Point
“The situation is really bad — today Chirac
announced that the French are pulling out of France.”
Jay Leno
Is France Burning ?
The American media’s points of view
Introduction
The
links between France and America are strong. Since more than two centuries,
these two nations have been watching each other attentively. Alternatively, one
of them takes its inspiration from the other.
In the
last two months, both France and the USA have experienced disorders which have required drastic political measures.
Flooding in New Orleans and its consequences surprised the French, whereas the
French riots recalled their recent problems to the Americans with, on the one
hand, their underclass and, on the other hand, the Muslim extremism against
which they have been at war since 9/
11.
So, through the reading of different
newspaper articles originating from some of
the main quality newspapers (New York Times, Washington Post, CNN,
Newsweek, U.S. News and World Report), we have tried to offer a faithful
panorama of the reactions raised by this crisis. These articles show at one and
the same time the present anguish and the realities of these two modern
countries.
New
York times
Summary : a short analysis which
attempts to give us a clear indication that the French riots and the New
Orleans riots have only a few points in common. The economic and political
problems France is encountering are recent, when America hasn’t been successful
in the solution the serious difficulties of its underclass .
France Has an Underclass, but Its Roots Are Still Shallow
Published: November 6, 2005
PARIS
— Just two months ago, the French watched in horrified fascination at the
anarchy of New Orleans, where members of America's underclass were seen looting
stores and defying the police in the wake of Hurricane Katrina.
The wreckage after unrest last week in the Paris suburb
Clichy-sous-Bois
Jacques Brinon/Associated Press
.
Last week, as rioters torched cars and trashed
businesses in the immigrant-concentrated suburbs of Paris, the images of wild
gangs of young men silhouetted against the yellow flames of burning cars came
as an unwelcome reminder for France that it has its own growing underclass.
The
coincidence of timing can be revealing - and deceptive.
The
corrosive gap between America's whites and its racial minorities, especially
African-Americans, is the product of centuries: slavery, followed by cycles of
poverty and racial exclusion that denied generation after generation the best
the United States could offer. France, on the other hand, is
only beginning to struggle with a much newer variant of the same problem: the
fury of Muslims of North African descent who have found themselves caught for
three generations in a trap of ethnic and religious discrimination.
Even
so, France is still low on the curve toward developing an entrenched,
structural underclass - one that could breed extremism and lasting social
problems.
So
far, while hundreds of cars and buses have been burned and dozens of businesses
destroyed in violence that has spread to a dozen towns, most rioters appear to
be teenage boys bent more on making the news than making a coherent political
statement.
"It's
a game of cowboys and Indians," said Olivier Roy, a French scholar of
European Islam. He is usually keen to warn Europeans of the potential danger
posed by Islamists living among them. But in this case, he said, the danger is
a long-range one. So far, he said, the attacks on the police and the torching
of cars has less the character of a religious war than of "a local sport,
a rite of passage."
The
violence, on the other hand, reflects something that any American who lived
through the urban upheavals of the 1960's, or the 1992 riots in Los Angeles,
might recognize: a dangerous degree of isolation felt by a growing segment of
its population, especially its young.
Although
many Americans feel that their country still has a lot of work to do to close
the gap between blacks and whites, the social protests and urban upheavals of
the 1960's produced a stream of measures intended to increase political and
economic opportunities rapidly for members of minority groups, and to stress
the value of diversity to a democracy. By contrast, the French model has so far
relied largely on expensive measures to keep poor Muslims fed, housed and
educated, but has not effectively addressed the social or political isolation
they feel from job and housing discrimination, and has actually limited their
ability to define themselves as a political interest group. Affirmative action,
a cornerstone of the American approach, has been a taboo here.
Manuel
Valls, a member of Parliament and mayor of Évry, a troubled suburb south of
Paris that has seen its share of violence in the past few days, put it this
way: "We've combined the failure of our integration model with the worst
effects of ghettoization, without a social ladder for people to climb."
"In
the U.S. and Britain, the communities help create opportunities for
advancement," he continued. But in France "the state and the
politicians have left the playing field open for a political-religious response
- that's undeniable."
Still,
because France's difficulties are relatively recent, it may have a chance to
escape the depth of the American problems.
For
one thing, the physical conditions in these neighborhoods have not begun to
rival poor urban areas in the United States. Even in the worst government
housing developments, green lawns and neat flower beds break the monotony of
the gray concrete.
There
are more than 700 such neighborhoods in the country, housing nearly five
million people or about 8 percent of the population.
The
despair in these housing projects (called cités here) has been mitigated by
better schools than those that serve poor, minority districts in the United
States (education is financed nationally in France, rather than through local
tax rolls) and by extensive welfare programs. Even when employed, a family of
four living in a government-subsidized apartment typically pays only a few
hundred dollars a month in rent and can receive more than $1,200 a month in
various subsidies. The unemployed receive more. For all, health care and
education are free. There is crime, but not nearly at the level of random
violence feared in poor neighborhoods in American cities. Guns are tightly
controlled and are still relatively rare. When a teenager was killed in a
drive-by shooting in a Paris suburb this year, it made national headlines. The
family unit among immigrants is still strong, as are ties to their homelands.
Washington Post
Summary : answering
to readers’ questions, an editor compares the French riots to some others riots
in the US. According to him, the LA Riots in 1992 were rather similar to the
French riots.
Jefferson
Morley: [...] The
DC riot of 1991 started in a neighborhood called Mt. Pleasant which is where I
live. It spread up and down the main street of the neighborhood and into an
adjoining neighborhood called Adams Morgan. Windows were broken, there was
looting and some violence over the course of a couple of days[1].
That was it.
The
French rioting, by comparison, is vast, involving the burning of thousands of
cars and the trashing of public buildings. D.C. did not experience anything
like that.The French experience is more comparable to the riots that swept DC
after the assassination of Martin Luther King in 1968[2].
_______________________
Jefferson
Morley: I think the
LA riots are a better comparison with the French riots. Like the French
violence, the LA riot was rooted in a widespread sense of grievance against law
enforcement, fed by unemployment and alienation.
A
key difference, as you note, is the lethality and rage. French newspapers were
shocked when the rioting claimed its first victim. The LA riot was vastly more
deadly, mainly because of the widespread availability of guns in the U.S.
Rage
too is a key difference. In LA, black rioters often turned their rage on white
passersby. The French rioters, by contrast, have directed their violence at
property, not people for the most part.
Most
of America's major cities have poverty-stricken neighborhoods. They don't
explode because most of the people who live in them are law-abiding people who
have an interest in leading peaceful lives.
CNN
Summary
: Paris isn’t burning. This point of view was at least a mistake. This crisis,
now reaching its end, was exaggerated by some American media. There’s no possible
comparison with the New Orleans riots. And the French government came up to
scratch.
|
CNN Got It Wrong by David Ng |
|
|
On Monday,
two French colleagues and I were talking at a chi-chi café in Paris when we saw
a group of police officers in battle regalia boarding a bus just outside our
window. "I think we can guess where they're going," one of my friends
remarked. Sharp inhalations all around, followed by raised eyebrows.
Our awkward
and nervous reaction to those policemen initially struck me as somewhat
pitiful—a stinging example of the French bourgeoisie's intellectual
detachment from the riots in
the city suburbs. Why were we sitting in this café? Why didn't we march to
Clichy-Sous-Bois, or La Courneuve, or Aulnay-Sous-Bois, where some of the most
violent protests were taking place?
But now, with
the riots finally winding down, the café culture's reluctance to engage the
riots—its choice of distance (or what the French call recul) seems the
right response to the events of the past two weeks. As the cars stop burning
and some semblance of order returns to the most troubled areas (albeit with the
help of draconian curfew measures), now is as good a time as any to ask: Just
what the hell happened? (And how did the American media paint such a distorted
picture?)
To answer
these questions, we have to first figure out what didn't happen. Contrary to
the breathless dispatches from the American press, Paris was most certainly not burning. Those of us ensconced in the central part of the
city could hardly tell anything was going on. ("This is not exactly the
second French Revolution," another journalist colleague told me.) American
media hyperbole served to heighten the distancing effect. Expounding on French
social inequalities from their suites at the George V, the dashing
reporters of CNN et al., their infographics a-blazin', created a
sensationalized image of an entire country under siege.
Another thing
the French riots were not: New Orleans on the Seine. It'd be easy to draw parallels between our
countries' race-related woes (and indeed there are many), but to do so would
belittle both tragedies. The New Orleans death toll was close to 1,000; the
French riots produced fewer than ten. New Orleans was a localized event; the
French riots touched many major metropolitan areas, including the suburbs of
Nice, Lille, Toulouse, Lyon, and Rennes, in addition to spreading to Belgium and Germany.
Ultimately,
New Orleans took the U.S. government by surprise; the French riots, meanwhile,
were the not-totally-unexpected culmination of a contentious year between
banlieue residents and hard-line right-wing Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy,
who called project youths "scum" (racaille) just days before
the riots began.
There is also
the question of the French government's response to the rioting, which, unlike
Bush's response to New Orleans, doesn't qualify as totally incompetent.
"The government can't totally crack down on the rioters because it would
be accused of being too harsh," a friend told me. "At the same time,
it can't be too lenient. It has to show that it's doing something but it can't
go too far either way." Give credit where it's due: The French government
has minimized casualties and bloodshed. It has also restored state subsidies to
impoverished neighborhoods and has lowered the apprenticeship age to 14 to help combat unemployment (which stands at almost
30 percent in certain cites).
On the other
hand, France has resurrected long-dead military measures (like the curfew,
which had its origins in the Algerian war for independence) and has stepped up
arrests (close to 1,000 so far). Most recently, Sarkozy has promised to deport
any non-citizen convicted of riot-related crimes, even if the person is in France
legally
.
To say that
all of the French suburbs are hotbeds of radicalized passion (which TV images
imply) is also an overstatement. In fact, reaction from banlieue residents to
the riots ranges from angry to cynical to oddly hopeful. As one youth said on France 2 television, "The
curfews are just a political maneuver. In reality, it's not going to keep kids
at home." Another youth called the curfews "overdramatized"
while another described them as "warlike and hostile."
Sorting out
the details of the past two weeks is a crucial step in figuring out what went
wrong in France. Herewith, a timeline of events starting with the death of two
youths in the Clichy-Sous-Bois suburb of Paris that catalyzed the riots.
Newsweek
Summary : Successive immigrations’ waves
have had as main consequence that France is now in the eye of a hurricane. This
leading article considers the future situation in Europe. The demographic facts
have made immigration a necessity. But migrants come to a territory whose population
doesn’t easily accept such radical changes. Migrants have to face racism. They
have huge difficulties in being integrated. Political initiatives, like
affirmative action, have to be taken in order to avoid a grave explosion.
Europe's Time Bomb
By Christopher Dickey
Newsweek International
Nov.
21, 2005 issue - The car-body count dropped dramatically in France toward the
end of last week. So vast was the orgy of auto incineration—more than 1,000
vehicles burned night after night as gangs ambushed firefighters and police,
raging against French government and society—that when "only" 15 cars
were torched one night in the administrative department of Seine-St-Denis,
where the violence began, the head of the National Police said that things
there had returned to "normal."
Statistically true, perhaps. But "normal"? In hundreds of
French housing projects and ghettoes populated by mostly Muslim Arab and
African immigrants and their French children and grandchildren,
"normal" has been for years a sort of chronic intifada, even
if it was invisible to most of France and the rest of the world. According to
research conducted by the government's domestic intelligence network, the
Renseignements Generaux, French police would not venture without major
reinforcements into some 150 "no-go zones" around the country—and
that was before the recent wave of riots began on Oct. 27. In France's
"immigrant" neighborhoods, to borrow a phrase from the American
military, "situation normal, all f—-ed up."
Belatedly,
French Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin invoked a law left over from the
French fight to hold onto Algeria 50 years ago that allows local governments to
declare curfews. No-go zones would not be allowed, he said. Interior Minister
Nicolas Sarkozy vowed to deport foreigners convicted of participating in the
violence, which sounded much tougher than it was, since at least 92 percent of
those arrested were French citizens. Chillier weather, marches calling for
peace and the fact that no rioters or cops were killed in confrontations also
helped reduce the scope of the violence last week. But a new turn for the worse
was feared as police intercepted telephone text messages encouraging riots in
the largely untouched center of Paris last weekend, and there was a brief
stone-throwing, trash-can-burning skirmish in the heart of Lyon.
The
shock of the conflagrations has raised questions not only about France but
about the shaky status quo in cities throughout Europe. If most were spared for
the moment (there were only minor incidents in Berlin, Brussels and Athens),
few governments could rest easy. In Italy, opposition leader Romano Prodi told
reporters, "We have the worst suburbs in Europe. I don't think things are
so different from Paris. It's only a matter of time." Similar refrains
were echoed by social workers in Spain and Ireland, the Netherlands and
Germany.
The
core of the time bomb is demography, and the detonator is racism. The native
populations of Europe—let's say it, the white populations—are reproducing
slowly and aging fast. Without continued immigration, according to the European
Union and United Nations statistics, by 2050 the number of Germans will have
shrunk from 83 million to 63 million, Italians will go from 57 million to 44
million. In the same period, among the North African and Middle Eastern
countries surrounding Europe, the population will double.
Already
on the southern fringes of the European Union, would-be laborers sometimes
storm the gates. In September and early October, Africans who had walked for
weeks through the Sahara charged hundreds at a time toward the double rows of
chain-link and razor-wire fences around the Spanish enclaves of Ceuta and
Melilla on the Moroccan coast. About a third succeeded, but at least 14 were
killed and thousands of others expelled by Moroccan security forces. Aid
workers in the area have no doubt they'll be back. "The deaths of their
comrades are still fresh in their minds," says Carlos Ugarte of Doctors
Without Borders. "People are going to wait two or three months for the situation
to cool down, then try again." Many more would-be immigrants brave the
Mediterranean in fragile wooden boats or rusty scows. In the first three days
of this month, the Spanish Coast Guard intercepted more than 400 in six
separate attempted crossings.
Those
who make it often do find work. Europe's demographic deficit demands them: for
Spain alone to keep its economy growing at the robust rate it has seen for the
past decade, it has to have 1 million new immigrant workers per year.
And despite some right-wing backlash by locals who feel threatened, or
overwhelmed, first-generation immigrants cause relatively few problems in
countries such as Spain, Ireland and Italy, which just a couple of decades ago
saw far more emigration than immigration. "These people still have in mind
the situations in which they lived in their home countries," says Ugarte.
"It is too early for our immigrants to feel the kind of resentments that
have sparked the riots in France. But if we make the same mistakes as in
France, it will happen."
The
problem is, precisely, with the second and third and even fourth generations.
The great waves of immigration to France, Germany and Britain came more than 30
years ago. Their descendants have grown up thinking they should have exactly
the same rights and opportunities as everyone else, only to discover that their
religion, their culture, their color or their surname still walled them out of
the European dream. Not until five years ago did Germany ease naturalization
for people who weren't of German blood. Since then, almost a third of its 2.6
million Turks have taken citizenship. The British favor multiculturalism,
encouraging citizens with roots in former colonies to maintain their ethnic and
social identities. The French insist that citizenship requires complete
linguistic and cultural assimilation. Yet all have created large underclasses
of profoundly disaffected minorities. "We are in the eye of a
hurricane," says Azouz Begag, the minister of Equal Opportunity who is one
of only two members of the current French cabinet whose forebears were Arabs.
"French people who descend from elsewhere suffer because of their face,
their name, the religious beliefs that are assigned to them," Begag told
NEWSWEEK. As he talked about Martin Luther King and the U.S. civil-rights
movement in the 1960s, Begag raised his voice. "No one here can say, 'I
have a dream!' "
Strong
economic growth that creates jobs, plus an open business environment that makes
room for small-time entrepreneurs, can ease tensions. (France is notably weak
on both fronts.) But addressing the problem of racism itself is more complex.
Europe may have seen many waves of immigrants in the past and found ways to
assimilate them. But no European nation sees itself as a nation of immigrants. European
nationalisms are deeply connected to families, histories and faiths that are
attached to specific places where people feel they belong—and they may often
feel that others do not. Added to that is a colonial heritage that, even today,
many Europeans romanticize. During the last years that France occupied
Algeria—about the same time its emergency law was passed—the Paris daily Le
Monde noted that "the majority of Europeans" living there
"recall with nostalgia the massacres of old, happily citing the North
American conduct toward the Indians." Only 10 years after the end of the
Holocaust, these European colonists "do not recognize genocide as a
crime," said Le Monde. Indeed, France is still coming to terms with the
extent to which French troops used torture in the war that ended with Algerian
independence in 1962. Yet just this year, a bill was pushed through the French
National Assembly (which has no members from mainland France with African or
Arab backgrounds) decreeing that the education system should play up "the
positive role of France overseas, and notably in North Africa."
Interior
Minister Nicolas Sarkozy has proposed what he calls "positive
discrimination." (Americans would say "affirmative action.")
Trouble is, that flies in the face of the French republic's egalitarian
ideology. Jack Lang, one of the leaders of the opposition Socialist Party, said
last week that he was firmly opposed to quotas but admitted that even in his
left-wing party there were few rising stars with immigrant backgrounds. (When
he mentioned two, he referred to each as a brilliant or impressive
"boy.") Richard Descoings, director of the prestigious Institut
d'Etudes Politiques (Sciences Po), decided in 2001 that he would take the
initiative to recruit kids from Seine-St-Denis and other problem areas. Today
200 of the school's 6,500 students come from the same background, essentially,
as the rioters. "We have to get away from the grand French theories,"
says Descoings. "It
is important to give examples of success."
Simply
acknowledging that fact is a big step. "Everywhere, smugness about the
state of race relations is being punctured," writes Trevor Phillips,
chairman of Britain's Commission for Racial Equality. "This is no longer
the patronizing 'be kind to blacks' territory with which politicians and
minority leaders of the past may have felt safe." Yet as Europe tries
fitfully to address—and redress—the racism of the past, fresh sources of
confrontation arise. Already, for example, white immigrants from Eastern Europe
are arriving to compete with people from African and Asian backgrounds who
thought they'd found their niches in the job market. Meanwhile, warns Phillips,
Britain is "sleepwalking... to segregation" as its different ethnic
groups become more insulated within their own communities. To acknowledge that
problem may not be to solve it—but to ignore it is to court disaster. In
France, where the state claims to be colorblind, society still is not. As
successive governments refused to look squarely at the issue of racism, ghettos
became no-see zones, then no-go zones, where anger and violence that came to
seem "normal" led straight to the nights of rage that have shaken a
continent.
With
Eric Pape in Clichy-sous-Bois, Tracy McNicoll in Paris, Stefan Theil in Berlin,
Stryker McGuire and Katarzyna Gruszkowska in London, Barbie Nadeau in Rome,
Jacopo Barigazzi in Milan, Mike Elkin and Jenny Barchfield in Madrid
U.S. News and World Report
Summary
: Can Islam adapt itself to liberal societies ? If the
answer is “Yes”, then Education has a major role in this process. The
secularism in countries like France has to be attenuated, giving leaders to
Muslims. Such a hierarchical system would be the best antidote to extremism.
French riots are the opportunity to become aware of this challenge and to take
it up.
An Education in Muslim
integration
Posted 11/16/05
By Jay Tolson
LONDON--The riots that spread beyond
the densely Muslim suburbs of Paris into other French cities and even into
neighboring countries have confirmed many people's worst fears about growing
alienation and extremism among the rising generation of Europe's roughly 14
million-member minority place not in the Arab world but in Europe. At the very
least, the riots raise questions about the compatibility of liberal societies
and Islam, challenging both the rigid secularism of many European liberals and
the dogmatism of many European Muslims. And a number of those questions are
being brought to a head in the arena of education, with debates raging about
whether Islamic education is part of the problem of Muslim integration into
European nations--or whether it might become part of the solution.
To
Abdullah Trevathan, head teacher of north London's Islamia Primary School, a
state-funded school that offers religious instruction and the study of Arabic
along with the standard national curriculum, the answer is clear. Trevathan
believes that schools such as Islamia--one of the first five Muslim faith
schools to receive state funding in Britain--can play a vital role in hammering
out a new Muslim. To date, at least, those riots say far more about the
difficulties France and other European nations have had in integrating a
largely Muslim underclass than they do about the rise of militant Islam in the
West.
But
beyond their obvious connection with race and social justice, the violent
outbursts give pause to those who share French political scientist Gilles
Kepel's view that the crucial struggle for Muslim minds is taking identity, one
that combines being a good Muslim with being a good citizen in a pluralist
society.
Extremism.
That identity is
clearly at odds with the one being pushed by Islamic extremists throughout
Europe, often in innocent-seeming sports clubs or after-school Koran classes
taught by Saudi-trained imams. Their vision of Islam appeals to many of the
second- or third-generation children of Pakistani, Turkish, or North African
immigrants who crowd the ghettolike neighborhoods of Europe's industrial cities
and suburbs. Often raised in households where religion is a loose cultural
matter, they are easily seduced by the austere Wahhabi-Salafist vision of a
global community of the faithful living under strict Islamic law. Attracted by
the moral absolutism, some are even drawn to the violent ways of the jihadists.
But how
do Muslim schools provide an antidote to all of this? They do so, Trevathan and
others argue, by exposing students to the classical Islamic traditions, whose
richness was derived partly from their openness to changing cultural
conditions. In addition, argues Asmat Ali, head of the girls' upper-school
division of Islamia, Muslim schools give students confidence in their own
Muslim identity, a confidence that makes them more at ease with their
Britishness. And having a strong ethical and spiritual core arguably contributes
to the academic success that Islamia and other faith schools enjoy. With over
97 percent of its upper-school graduates going on to enroll in a university,
Islamia itself is, Trevathan says, "the most oversubscribed school in the
U.K." Despite the performance and promise of Muslim schools like Islamia,
they are still the object of loud controversy in Britain. Possessing an
established church, Britain has long provided government support for religious
schools, and not just for Anglican ones. Today, out of a total of 22,000 state
schools, some 7,000 are religious, all but 45 of which are associated with
major Christian denominations. Yet the existence of five state-funded Muslim
schools--with four more approved for support--has generated a seemingly disproportionate
critical reaction. Several months before the July 7 subway bombing in London,
England's chief school inspector criticized the curricula of Muslim schools and
voiced concerns about their effect on national cohesion. Jonathan Romain, rabbi
of a Reform synagogue in Maidenhead, England, and an outspoken critic of the
entire principle of faith schools, echoes those concerns. "Whereas most
clergy see faith schools as reinforcing values," he says, "I see them
as dividing different communities." Romain is quick to add that he is not
opposed to teaching about different faith traditions in religious education
classes in normal state schools. But to create more faith schools is, he
argues, "surely to see a problem arise in 30 years' time."
The
uneasiness that many Britons feel about Muslim schools may stem from confusion
about what these schools actually are. According to the Association of Muslim
Schools in U.K. and Eire, there are about 120 Islamic schools throughout
Britain. But that figure includes everything from small Koranic academies to
schools offering a full state curriculum and Islamic subjects. Fauzia Ahmad, a
professor of sociology at the University of Bristol, says that this lack of
differentiation "gives the impression that there are thousands of schools
out there creating radicals."
While
British citizenship is heavily emphasized at schools like Islamia, there is
legitimate concern about what goes on in some of the others. Tariq Ramadan, a
Swiss-born Muslim scholar who serves on a British task force on religious
extremism, says that he approves faith schools "in principle" but is
disturbed by schools--mainly those created explicitly for Muslim girls--whose
real intention is to isolate the students from the rest of society. "I
think we still have to assess every single school on what its project is."
Which, of
course, is one good argument for bringing even more Muslim schools into the
state-supported arrangement. Not only does that guarantee that the school will
offer a state-approved curriculum, but it also ensures some government
oversight of the content of the religion classes. Yet some see such oversight
as a potential problem. "There is a perception of Britain trying to shape
a 'British Muslim,' which suggests a control aspect," says Ahmad,
"and Muslims would not take kindly to that."
Ultimately,
though, the dilemma facing not just Britain but also Germany, the Netherlands,
Spain, France, and Italy is broadly similar: If the European educational system
does not play a constructive role in the religious education of devout European
Muslims, then where will that education come from, and how will it be shaped?
Part of Europe's difficulties today stems from the fact that most European
imams and many of the Muslim leaders in prominent national organizations tend
to be either religious conservatives or reactionaries--or simply out of touch
with the rising generation of European Muslims. How can a new and visionary
cadre of European Muslim leaders be created unless instruction in responsible
and broad-minded Islam receives government support or at least government
encouragement?
"What
we have is a lack of leadership," says Mohammed Mamdani, a 22-year-old
Sheffield-born Briton who founded the Muslim Youth Helpline to assist Muslim
youths with personal and social problems. The members of the Muslim Council of
Britain are, in his view, a typical graybeard lot, isolated from the larger
British society and clueless about how Islam can play a positive role in
helping young people to live in liberal, pluralistic societies. For his own
relatively smooth adjustment to life as a young British Muslim, Mamdani gives
considerable credit to the few years he spent in another north London Muslim
school, Al-Sadiq. The school's approach to reconciling a strong Muslim ethos
with the realities of living in a modern, liberal society is a model that he
believes the British government should actively promote in other Muslim
schools.
If
Britain is moving at least quietly in that direction, so too are countries like
the Netherlands, which has about 40 Muslim schools catering to about 3 percent
of the nation's some 30,000 school-age Muslims. Those schools came under fierce
criticism after a Muslim militant killed the controversial filmmaker Theo van
Gogh. The Dutch government continues to support them, but, says Martine
Soethout, member of a Ministry of Education task force on social cohesion:
"Citizenship has been bolstered in all of them."
In
Germany, home to some 3.5 million Muslims, many of the federal states have long
left Islamic education in the hands of Turkish teachers, who instruct in
Turkish and often follow curricula designed by Turkish diplomatic missions. But
in recent years, one state has made Islamic studies a public school subject
available to Muslim students, a development that led the University of Munster
to adopt the subject as one of its teacher-training courses. Even in France,
the citadel of strict church-state separation, the government provides money
under a contractual arrangement for about 10 Muslim schools. And before the
riots, the now much vilified French interior minister, Nicolas Sarkozy, was
himself questioning his nation's rigid secularism as an obstacle to the ideal
of an "Islam from France," not just an "Islam in France"
--an ideal that includes a government-supported school for the training of
imams.
The riots
might even have given a boost to that kind of thinking, says Brandeis
University scholar Jytte Klausen, author of a new book, The Challenge of
Islam. About recent conversations with several European officials, she
says, "Strangely, the riots are having the effect of convincing them that
all the burden for integrating shouldn't rest on the shoulders of the Muslim
immigrants." Maybe there is reason to think that a long overdue Islamic
reformation can still take off in Europe.
Personal
Statement
CNN’s
article seems out of tune with its optimistic sentences and conclusion. In my
opinion it is less a leading article than a literary dissertation[3].
It reflects what the French call the“
until now, all goes well”, expression repeated on each floor by a man falling
down a building, until he crashes to the ground.
The
other articles are attentive to social aspects of the French riots. But that is
rather normal : The New York Times, The Washington Post and Newsweek are
liberal newspapers. Newsweek offers its readers a leading article with one
central question : Is Europe going to burn ? The article from U.S. News and
World Report, a conservative weekly newspaper, is, with Newsweek, the most
interested in immigration. But they forget in their reasoning the 2005
Birmingham riots between British Black and British Asian communities which
proved the failure, or at least, the serious imperfections of the multicultural model.
Tristan Casabianca, LAP/0506