Nice School Expulsions Highlight France’s Debate on Islam in Public Spaces

Accused of having carried out a supposed "Muslim prayer and a minute of silence in memory of the prophet Mohammad", three middle school students were definitively expelled from their establishment in Nice after a disciplinary council. "In Nice, we realized quite quickly in this case that it was a fictitious prayer. It was not the act of practicing Muslims, if I may say so. By reacting in this way, Christian Estrosi (mayor of Nice) is speaking to a very right-wing electorate. Pap Ndiaye (Minister of National Education at the time of the events), much more measured in my opinion, found himself forced to react because he was under pressure and was evolving in a government that is not very clear on the issue of the secular principle. Fundamentally, it is another manifestation of a hypersensitivity to the visibility of Islam in the French public space," commented Haoues Seniguer in an interview with Bondy Blog.

To support his remarks, he cites structural, historical and more contemporary reasons. "First, there is a secularization movement that some thought was irreversible in France. We can define secularization as the loss of social evidence of the religious: in the public space, you no longer see signs of the visibility of religion. This phenomenon has been countered by the emergence of the veil and what we have called the ’Creil headscarf affair’ in 1989," explains the sociologist, adding that there is the idea that the visibility of religion refers to a hegemonic attempt on temporal power. "France was the eldest daughter of the Church, then in the 16th century, the religious wars followed one another. In some people’s minds, if religion becomes visible again, there is danger in the house. There are also much more contemporary reasons related to terrorist attacks," he further explained.

In the interview, Haoues Seniguer also commented on the wearing of abayas in schools. "Wearing the abaya can be a way for these teenagers to obey two constraints. Instead of seeing an attempt at compromise, successful or not, between attachment to a religious norm and the constraints of the 2004 law, some have seen an attempt to subvert the school and secular order. Moreover, this remains an ultra-minority phenomenon. [...] Anything related to Islam leads to forms of inconsistencies in discourse and above all testifies to a lack of knowledge of the Muslim fact," he commented. And to point out: "Since the late 1980s, there has been an obsession with the visibility of Islam in the public space. When there is visibility or manifestation, more or less related to Islam, there is a raising of shields by people who can claim secularism."