As a non-French national and a non-Catholic, I personally wish that France will remain France as it has been historically. Born-Muslims and converts to Islam often claim that conversion is a personal matter, but given the current world-wide Islamic resurgence, it is very difficult for non-Muslims like me to believe that it is purely a personal issue. Rather, it is considered as a social issue, to say the least. (Lily)
1. WorldWide Religious News （http://wwrn.org）
More in France Are Turning to Islam, Challenging a Nation’s Idea of Itself, 3 February 2013
by Maïa de la Baume ("The New York Times," February 3, 2013)
Créteil, France — The spacious and elegant modern building, in the heart of this middle-class suburb of Paris, is known as “the mosque of the converts.”
Every year about 150 Muslim conversion ceremonies are performed in the snow-white structure of the Sahaba mosque in Créteil, with its intricate mosaics and a stunning 81-foot minaret, built in 2008 and a symbol of Islam’s growing presence in France. Among those who come here for Friday Prayer are numerous young former Roman Catholics, wearing the traditional Muslim prayer cap and long robe.
While the number of converts remains relatively small in France, yearly conversions to Islam have doubled in the past 25 years, experts say, presenting a growing challenge for France, where government and public attitudes toward Islam are awkward and sometimes hostile.
French antiterrorism officials have been warning for years that converts represent a critical element of the terrorist threat in Europe, because they have Western passports and do not stand out.
In October, the French police conducted a series of antiterrorism raids across France, resulting in the arrests of 12 people, including at least three French citizens who had recently converted to Islam. Converts “often need to overdo it if they want to be accepted” as Muslims, and so veer into extremism more frequently than others, said Didier Leschi, who was in charge of religious issues at the Interior Ministry under former President Nicolas Sarkozy.
There are persistent concerns that French prisons are fertile ground for conversions and for Islamic radicalism; observant Muslims are thought to make up a least a third of the inmate population, according to French news reports.
Many Muslims counter that they regularly face prejudice, and consider a 2010 law banning the full-face veil from public spaces and the growing concern with conversions as reflections of French intolerance.
Whatever the impact, there is little doubt that conversions are growing more commonplace. “The conversion phenomenon is significant and impressive, particularly since 2000,” said Bernard Godard, who is in charge of religious issues at the Interior Ministry.
Of an estimated six million Muslims in France, about 100,000 are thought to be converts, compared with about 50,000 in 1986, according to Mr. Godard. Muslim associations say the number is as high as 200,000. But France, which has a population of about 65 million, defines itself as secular and has no official statistics broken down by race or creed.
For Mr. Godard, a former intelligence officer, it is the “nature” of conversions that has changed.
Conversions to marry have long been common enough in France, but a growing number of young people are now seen as converting to be better socially integrated in neighborhoods where Islam is dominant.
“In poor districts, it has become a reverse integration,” said Gilles Kepel, an expert on Islam and the banlieues, the poor, predominantly Muslim neighborhoods that ring Paris and other major cities.
Many converts are men younger than 40, experts say, often born in France’s former African colonies or overseas territories.
Charlie-Loup, 21, a student from nearby St.-Maur-des-Fossés, converted to Islam at 19, after a troubled adolescence and strained relations with his mother. He grew up Roman Catholic but had many Muslim friends at school. “Conversions have become a social phenomenon here,” he said, asking that his surname not be used because he considered his conversion a private initiative and did not want to draw attention to himself. Some convert simply “out of curiosity,” he said.
In some predominantly Muslim areas, even non-Muslims observe Ramadan, the Muslim holy month that requires fasting during the day, because they like “the group effect, the festive side of it,” said Samir Amghar, a sociologist and an expert on radical Islam in Europe.
In many banlieues, Islam has come to represent not only a sort of social norm but also a refuge, an alternative to the ambient misery, researchers and converts say.
For Mr. Amghar, Islam provides more structure and discipline than other religions. It is a way to “refuse modernism,” get back to a society with more family values and a clearer distinction between men and women. “Islam has a peaceful effect on the converts,” Mr. Amghar said. “The world looks clearer after they’ve converted.”
In Marseille, on the southern coast, “conversions have increased at an incredible pace in the last three years,” said Abderrahmane Ghoul, the imam of the major mosque of Marseille and the president of the local branch of the French Council of the Muslim Faith. Mr. Ghoul signed about 130 conversion certificates in 2012.
Hassen Chalghoumi, the moderate imam of Drancy, another suburb near Paris, says he thinks conversions have also been propelled by France’s official secularism, which he says breeds spiritual emptiness.
“Secularism has become antireligious,” Mr. Chalghoumi said. “Therefore, it has created an opposite phenomenon. It has allowed people to discover Islam.”
Many experts note the influence of celebrity converts, particularly soccer players. Nicolas Anelka, who played on the French national team and whose parents came from Martinique, changed his name to Abdul-Salam Bilal Anelka when he converted to Islam in 2004. Franck Ribéry, a popular player from northern France, converted to Islam in 2006 to marry a Muslim woman, Wahiba, and took the name Bilal Yusuf Mohammed.
But there is rising anxiety here about the influence of Islam, especially conservative Salafist Islam, particularly among those on the center-right. Islam is regularly at the center of heated debates about the nature and future of France and its culture, and politicians can win attention and support by criticizing the expansion of Muslim customs into the wider public sphere: for example, the rise of women-only sessions in public swimming pools or the increasing availability of halal food.
In 2009, a photograph from the magazine Paris Match showing Diam, a popular female rapper, wearing a hijab, or head covering, on a Paris street set off a flood of angry comments from officials and commentators. Fadela Amara, a former secretary of state for urban affairs and founder of a feminist group, Neither Whores Nor Submissives, said that the hijab sent out a “negative image of women” and described it as “a real danger for young women in poor districts.”
But Diam’s dismissed her critics, saying that having her hijab did not make her a radical Muslim, and that her conversion was a personal choice that had helped her with depression.
Recent arrests of radical Muslim converts have also increased concern among public officials and Muslim leaders, though radical Islam is by no means the norm among converts.
Rafaello Sillitti, the owner of the bookstore Averroès, which occupies a small space in the Créteil mosque, is convinced that converts like him can be the best advocates of Islam. He sells carpets equipped with compasses to help users orient themselves toward Mecca and a wide range of books written by Muslim scholars, with titles like “Be Master of Your Physical Desire” and “How to Use a Cellphone According to Islamic Law.”
“We must get rid of an imaginary Islamic culture,” Mr. Sillitti said, referring to the clichés and misapprehensions connected to Islam in France. “We must show that French culture and Islam can live together in peace.”
・Disclaimer: WWRN does not endorse or adhere to views or opinions expressed in the articles posted. This is purely an information site, to inform interested parties of religious trends.
2. Common Ground News（http://www.commongroundnews.org）
French polls regarding Islam miss reality, 5 February 2013
by Derek Kane O'Leary
Brussels – A recent IPSOS poll published and commented in Le Monde, a premier French daily, cites the marked distrust of French citizens vis-à-vis Islam. Notably, some 74% of those queried found Islam either "intolerant" or "not tolerant at all”. These results suggest that a dire intractable situation between Muslims and non-Muslims exists in France, however reality regularly escapes the confines of polls.
France stands out from its European neighbours both in the size of its Muslim population, which estimates put at between 4 and 10 million, and the volume of the national debate on Islam. France has seen a turbulent national discussion on Islam's place in the country over the past two decades, punctuated by controversy over the Muslim headscarf and niqab(face veil), disenfranchisement in the public housing complexes in French suburbs with large Muslim populations, and a complicated historical relationship with Muslim-majority countries in the Southern Mediterranean rim.
France’s cultural identity idealises both the citizen’s fidelity to state before other identifications and the state’s strong role in uniting and guiding its citizens, and fears exist that Muslim values may not mesh.
However, as people interact, fears that faith and French nationality are mutually exclusive can be reduced. The prominent debate on national identity remains: is Islam compatible with France’s state secularism?
But the search for any definitive answer among such monolithic proclamations is not the path to social concord in France or any other nation.
The term French Muslim captures such a diverse array of cultural, national, linguistic, and religious heritages that it quickly loses value. To assign one collective character to such a sundry and divided group can only mislead and distract from the very real and personal efforts of individuals to define their place in a complex social landscape.
Children of different religious faiths play on the same soccer team. My Muslim baker perfectly crafts generations-old French morning marvels. In bars and streets throughout the country, religion and race recede.
This issue in France is thus at heart neither a matter of religion nor ideology, but part of a larger story of difference playing out in a society with a strong, old and destabilised, yet transitioning sense of itself.
The French school system sheds light on this trend. Holding a powerfully important place in the nation’s history, it has long reflected greater national trends and served as a cauldron for national identity. The teacher holds an especially elevated position as transmitter of this identity and crafter of citizens.
One teacher from a small public school in a French suburb explained to me how unimportant ethnic and religious identity can become among colleagues. "I have Muslim colleagues I get along with great! They're cheerful, warm, kind, helpful... But I don't care about their religion; we never talk about our background or religion. They're like my other colleagues (more or less).”
But such comments are often hard to hear amid the noise of newspaper headlines and abstraction of poll results.
It seems that a peaceful future for Muslims in France can emerge from bonds knit between individuals within communities, learning to understand and accept each other despite the allure of the categorical thinking of surveys and polls.
There is an abiding anxiousness to find a solution to this challenge in France. It is perhaps a natural reflex, especially in such a strongly centralised state. But difference cannot be solved, nor integration be debated into resolution. It must be lived out—if slowly and awkwardly—in classrooms, the workplace, relationships and individual lives.
It is easy to forget France’s long history of absorbing numerous waves of immigrants from around the world. France has survived these waves and been enriched by them. And though it is difficult to envision, a new cycle is possible, one of greater knowledge and trust engendering further integration of Muslim populations, and it begins with real human relationships beyond categories.
・Derek Kane O'Leary is a graduate of Tufts University's Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy where he specialised in Security Studies and Pacific Asia. He currently works in the Cabinet of the Secretary-General of the European Parliament. This article was written for the Common Ground News Service (CGNews).
・Source: Common Ground News Service (CGNews), 5 February 2013,
・Copyright permission is granted for publication.
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