skygiants

OMFG I LOVE LOVE LOVE THAT BOOK. Especially because I went into it thinking it'd be another laïcité-etc.-etc.-you-guys-the-French-were-really-traumatized-by-earlier-religious-conflicts book, and it wasn't that at all. Bowen did a lot to focus on French Muslim women and not relegate them to an Other or poor oppressed minority or whatever in the context of the French system.

I'd point out, though, that as much as the French like to say the word "secular" and "public space" it's just not true that religion is completely absent from the public sphere. Nativity displays that would be unconstitutional in the United States are common practice in France; training for Catholic clergy is provided by public institutions (and there's been a lot of friction between the French government and the Muslim institutions in France that there hasn't been success in arranging a similar program for imams). One thing I've found pretty consistently is that when the word "secular" is used, they really mean "Christian," because Christianity already has cultural and identity connections to French national identity, whereas Islam especially (there are other minorities - Antisemitism has been the target of a lot of anti-racist legislation in France because that's how racism has been characterized in France, not that it's necessarily been all that successful; and one of my favorite lines in the book was "We have Sikhs?" - Islam is still the most numerous and tends to be the most strongly associated with poverty and crime) is not connected with that identity.

The hardest thing for me to get my head around in the French model, then, wasn't so much the idea that there was a "public space," because frankly, I do think what they really mean is a "French space" - and anything that isn't considered "French" yet isn't permitted. The public school system is a central and highly important part of that space, much more so than we can imagine in the United States. But what was hard for me to remember was that, in France, it's not about separation of Church and State. The Church has to stay out of the State - but the State has a responsibility to regulate the Church. And in the U.S., that would obviously seem to impede on religious freedom. It really did take a lot of thought and going back to the religious conflicts of the past in France for me to get my head around that.


... and now that I've blabbed over your journal, uh. I LOVE THAT BOOK. Yeah.