Attacks in France are about more than just cartoons
After the tragic events in Paris this week, many will ask the same questions that were asked after the Danish cartoon controversy of 2005, the Salman Rushdie affair and similar events. They will ask fairly silly questions such as, Why can’t Muslims laugh at themselves? or why are Muslims so easily offended? or why the “Muslim world” often reacts violently to attacks on individuals and spaces it considers sacred? But, there is always more to the story, a story that is still being pieced together by journalists and law enforcement officials alike.
Tragedies like this often have a way of flattening out context — the context of Muslims in France, immigration and integration, feelings of alienation, mental illness, homegrown radicalization to violence and the ways in which all of these factors often work together.
Consider the case of 23-year-old Mohamed Merah not too long ago. Merah, an Algerian Muslim from a single-parent household, suffered from psychiatric problems and was a juvenile delinquent. In 2007, he was arrested for bomb making in Kandahar, but escaped from prison in 2008 along with 400 Taliban insurgents. In March 2012, he went on a horrific shooting spree in Montauban and Toulouse, killing seven people, including three children — all in the name of Al Qaeda and as an act of revenge for French military involvement in Muslim lands. He was eventually killed in a hail of bullets after a week-long manhunt in Toulouse.
As initial reports seem to confirm, it is likely that Said and Cherif Kouachi, the attackers of the Charlie Hebdo offices this week, are not altogether different from Merah. Their upbringing, their experiences of immigration, their struggle to integrate into French society, as well as the broader push and pull factors leading to their criminal radicalization are likely similar.
Muslims in France number around four million, with the vast majority arriving from Algeria, the ethnic background of Merah as well as the Kouachi brothers. Along with many other immigrants in France, Muslims struggle with high unemployment as well as housing and ghettoization issues. Persons of Muslim origin also constitute a majority of the French prison population, especially when it comes to 18-24 year olds.
There is also the broader context of French nationalism. To “be French” is to be unified with other French people — to be fully assimilated. The only identity that is important in France is the national one and other identities, particularly religious ones, which may interfere with that are seen as problematic. Indeed, freedom from religion — or what Ahmet Kuru has termed “assertive secularism” — was one of the founding principles of the Republic that the French hold in such high regard.
In this context, young French Muslims often feel that they must question their national identity because of the strong attachment they feel to ethnic and religious identities. “All foreigners are nowhere at home,” said one Moroccan-born Muslim man in his 30s. “When we arrive in Morocco, they say ‘the immigrants are here, ah the immigrants,’ and when we arrive in France, they say ‘ah the immigrants are here.’ We are always treated like immigrants, so we do not have a place that is our home.”
Many of these youth feel increasingly alienated from French society as well as the ethnic and cultural heritage of their parents. They are nowhere at home. The only identity that they feel they can have an unnegotiated connection with is their religious one. If they cannot be a French or Algerian Muslim, they will simply be Muslim.
While simplistic connections cannot be drawn here, it should be noted that this is precisely the same narrative marshalled by jihadist movements such as Al Qaeda or the Islamic State — that one’s identity as a Muslim is primary, and that Islamic identity becomes increasingly impure the more it is coloured by ethnic and cultural trappings. The narrative of the global jihadist movement, as a transnational brotherhood, has acceptance and belonging built right into it.
We can choose, then, to understand the events in Paris this week, and future events to be sure, as the actions of crazy Muslims who can’t take a joke. Or we can choose to look deeper and understand the ways in which Muslim youth in France, and indeed Europe, are struggling with issues of integration and belonging and simultaneously trying to find their footing within the “old” ethnocultural demands of their parents, the “new” civic and national demands of French society and the ever-shifting religious dynamics and political reality of the global Muslim community. In other words, it’s about more than just cartoons.