Secularism, Islam and public intellectuals in contemporary France

Nadia Kiwan

• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781526127662
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: French History
• Index: History

This book focuses on how Muslim intellectuals in contemporary France contribute to our understanding of the relationship between Islam, secularism and French society. Whilst most books about Islam in France tend to examine polemicized issues such as the veil or Islamist violence, this book's focus on secular Muslim intellectuals challenges polarizing accounts of Islam and Muslims. Secularism, Islam and public intellectuals in contemporary France thus departs from the 'clash of civilisations' approach and, more broadly challenges divisive claims that European 'multiculturalism' must be abandoned in order to uphold democratic principles and values. The book entails a contextualised analysis of the published works and public interventions of Abdennour Bidar, Malek Chebel, Leïla Babès, Abdelwahab Meddeb and Dounia Bouzar - intellectuals who have all received little, if any scholarly attention despite being well-known figures in France.

1

Abdelwahab Meddeb: post-foundational Islam

This chapter examines the published works of Abdelwahab Meddeb.¹ Of specific significance is Meddeb’s foregrounding of a language of Islamic secularism, which I argue can be interpreted as an attempt to transform perceptions of Islam and thus to intervene into the symbolic power relations between the Republican state and France’s Muslim citizens. This chapter also poses questions about the consequences of deploying certain forms of discursive agency for secular Muslim intellectuals. What are the outcomes of their interventions in the public arena? What are the possible effets pervers (unintended consequences) of their interventions, if any? It is arguable that the work of Abdelwahab Meddeb embodies most explicitly some of the tensions or paradoxes which can emerge when intellectuals speak for and on behalf of a ‘minority community’ or, if we do not want to adopt that problematic term due to its suggestion of a hermetic and homogenous group, on behalf of a religious–cultural minority population.

Language, Orientalism and symbolic power

Pierre Bourdieu’s research on language and symbolic power, as discussed in the Introduction, is, I argue, pertinent to an analysis of the work of Meddeb as a Muslim public intellectual, in particular the problems associated with speaking on behalf of others, which Bourdieu (1991) examines as particularly relevant. Bourdieu is suspicious of claims to democratic representation through the language of the spokesperson. He sees representation as a process of substitution where ultimately the spokesperson manipulates the group s/he is supposedly meant to represent. In addition to the so-called oracle effect (Bourdieu 1991: p. 211), a further risk associated with the representation of groups via a spokesperson who speaks on their behalf is that it is the existence of ‘the spokesperson who creates the group’ (Bourdieu 1991: p. 204). According to Bourdieu, this creates symbolic violence because of the ‘limiting form of performativity’ (Bourdieu 1991: p. 212), which means that the ‘oracle’ limits the agency of the members of the group, particularly during periods of crisis (Bourdieu 1991: p. 213).

It would seem that Meddeb appointed himself as a sort of spokesperson for Muslims, and indeed he writes in his introduction to La Maladie de l’islam that ‘je tiens, comme on dit, à commencer par balayer devant ma porte’ (Meddeb 2002: p. 10) (I am keen, as they say, to start by sweeping up in front of my own door). However, in writing about his own religious and cultural experiences as a secular, or even atheist Muslim, it is arguable that Meddeb’s oeuvre generates symbolic violence which affects Muslims in general, and practising (i.e. non-secular/non-atheist) Muslims in particular. Furthermore, Bourdieu’s three key concepts of habitus, field and capital are useful when thinking about Meddeb’s ideas and interventions in the public arena as an intellectual. Meddeb’s self-proclaimed habitus as a writer who has a responsibility to expose the causes of Islamic fundamentalism that are internal to it (Meddeb 2002: p. 10) is certainly illustrative of his symbolic capital in a field made up of the mainstream and high-brow media and the French political class. At the start of his 2002 essay, La Maladie de l’islam, Meddeb opines: ‘Il est du rôle de l’écrivain de pointer la dérive des siens et d’aider à leur ouvrir les yeux sur ce qui les aveugle’ (Meddeb 2002: p. 10) (It is the role of the writer to highlight the downward spiral of his own people and to help them to open their eyes to what is blinding them).

It is curious that Meddeb’s work does not appear to be directed at the academic field as such, but rather at French society more generally, and in this sense he conformed to a certain definition of the public intellectual as someone with a scholarly background, employed by or associated with a higher education institution but who is not necessarily an academic in the traditional sense of the term. Bourdieu’s work on intellectual language and authority is particularly useful here. With regard to social science, Bourdieu writes that ‘social science must include in its theory of the social world a theory of the theory effect which, by helping to impose a more or less authorised way of seeing the social world, helps to construct the reality of that world’ (Bourdieu 1991: p. 106). Whilst Meddeb was not a social scientist, but rather a literary scholar, Bourdieu’s ‘theory effect’ could also be referred to as the ‘knowledge effect’ since the construction and dissemination of public knowledge about Muslims arguably creates the parameters of the debates about Islam and affects how Muslims engage in and with the public sphere. Indeed, as discussed in the Introduction, Ruth Mas argues that secular Muslim groups in contemporary France should be understood in light of Judith Butler’s reading of Michel Foucault (Mas 2006). If we accept Mas’s assessment of secular Muslims and the context of discursive violence in which they are supposed to have emerged, then it is possible to argue that by extension there comes a point when discursive violence can be turned against the self. This discursive violence can result from the symbolic power and symbolic violence of specific utterances and ideas which are disseminated by, amongst others, public intellectuals such as Meddeb. As Bourdieu states, symbolic power is

a power of constituting the given through utterances, of making people see and believe, of conforming or transforming the vision of the world, and thereby, action on the world and thus the world itself, an almost magical power which enables one to obtain the equivalent of what is obtained through force (whether physical or economic). (Bourdieu 1991: p. 170)

When applied to the field of intellectual discourse, it is possible to argue that the interventions of a public intellectual such as Meddeb may be intended to transform representations of Islam for the better but, as we shall see below, this process of transformation may not always be so positive for Muslims – certainly not for those who do not conform to the secular, cultural or even atheist Islam laid out by Meddeb.

The relationship between knowledge and power in the context of Orientalist intellectual discourse is also fundamental to the exploration of Meddeb’s work that follows, in so far as the public scholar is endowed with a cultural, intellectual and moral authority or power over the ‘community’ of ordinary Muslims which s/he has decided to describe and, to a certain extent, represent. Representation is only partial since the detached secular Muslim scholar is keen to distance him/herself from what are constructed as problematic beliefs and cultural practices. This desire to detach oneself from the population that one’s work is about seems to arise in a broader context of what Said calls ‘cultural domination’ (Said 1978: p. 25). The extraordinary prevalence of that cultural domination is such that postcolonial subjects risk ‘employing this structure upon themselves or upon others’ (Said 1978: p. 25). What Said describes here is suggestive of the process of self-orientalisation – a concept which I develop throughout the book as a whole (see the Introduction). We see this in Meddeb’s work, especially in his tendency to associate the Islamic Orient with ‘sensuality, its tendency to despotism, its aberrant mentality…’ (Said 1978: p. 205). Yet what is paradoxical about Meddeb and hence why we may argue that his stance is one of self-orientalisation is that he makes it his mission to explain the maladie de l’islam to his intended French readership (the ‘superaddressee’ in the Bakhtinian sense) and thus posits himself as a sort of essential or incontournable cultural translator or intermediary, in a similar manner to Abdennour Bidar who perpetuates this type of project (see Chapter 5).² Once again, this resonates with Said’s description of the modern Orientalist: ‘without his mediating, interpretative role the place [the Middle East] would not be understood, partly because what little there is to understand is fairly peculiar, and partly because only the Orientalist can interpret the Orient, the Orient being radically incapable of interpreting itself’ (Said 1978: p. 289). We shall see below how Meddeb’s writings in the post-2001 period appear to be principally motivated by a desire to educate his French readership about Islam in addition to enlightening the Muslim masses about the richness of a cultural history of which, according to Meddeb, the vast majority of them are unaware.

Meddeb, who died in November 2014 after a short illness, was a French-Tunisian writer, essayist and poet who taught comparative literature at the Paris Nanterre University (and previously at Yale and Geneva universities). He was the director of the international literary journal Dédale, commissioning editor at Éditions Sindbad between 1974 and 1987, which brought the work of a range of Sufi thinkers to the French public’s attention, and the host of the Radio France Culture programme Cultures d’islam. Meddeb was born in Tunis in 1946 and came to Paris to study History of Art, followed by a Masters in Lettres at the Sorbonne in 1967. Via a corpus of about thirty published works (novels, poetry, essays and monographs)³ Meddeb claimed to be motivated by a dual concern:

lever, d’une part, la méconnaissance des occidentaux qui souvent assimilent l’islam à l’islamisme; afin de réparer, d’autre part, l’oubli des musulmans de la densité et de la complexité de leur legs culturel; oubli qui les prédisposent à accueillir le message islamiste qui propose une vision réductrice de l’islam, devenu une idéologie des pulsions où le principe de mort terrasse le principe de vie. ⁴

(to remove Western ignorance which often associates Islam with Islamism; and on the other hand in order to rectify Muslim amnesia about the richness and complexity of their cultural legacy; amnesia which makes them more likely to accept the Islamist message which offers a reductive vision of Islam, and which has become an impulsive ideology whereby the principle of death overrides the principle of life.)

In particular, one of the main ideas developed by Meddeb since 2001 is the notion that Islam is an ailing religion and that its ‘cure’ can be achieved via a process of historicising Quranic scripture in order to move away from essentialist interpretations and towards a post-theological engagement with regard to Islam. Meddeb consistently presented himself in his media interventions and publications as a secular or even atheist Muslim and regularly appeared in the French media as the adversary of Tariq Ramadan, who is widely regarded in France as embodying a radical stance on Islam which is incompatible with a secular French state (see, for example, Fourest 2004 and Zemouri 2005). Meddeb and Ramadan famously had a pointed debate on Frédéric Tadeï’s current affairs television programme, Ce soir ou jamais, on France 3 in January 2008.⁵ The texts to be discussed in this chapter were all published in the aftermath of the September 11 terrorist attacks in 2001 and include La Maladie de l’islam (2002), Face à l’islam (2004), Contre-prêches (2006), Sortir de la malédiction: l’islam entre civilisation et barbarie (2008), Pari de civilisation (2009), Printemps de Tunis: métamorphose de l’Histoire (2011) and Le Temps des inconciliables: contre-prêches 2 (2017).

Pathologising Islam

In La Maladie de l’islam, published in 2002, Meddeb argues that islamisme, i.e. fundamentalism of the Wahhabi–Saudi Arabian variety in particular (Meddeb 2002: p. 12), is the maladie of Islam. He argues that the maladie comes from within and therefore decides to focus on the internal reasons which explain such an ‘affliction’. In his attempt to draw up a genealogy of fundamentalism that created the conditions that produced the 9/11 attacks, Meddeb argues that one of the main internal reasons that explains the fundamentalism affecting Islam stems from a situation whereby too many people with limited cultural or educational capital have been given the opportunity to interpret the Quran:

avec les effets de la démographie et de la démocratisation, les semi-lettrés ont proliféré et les candidats qui s’autorisent à toucher à la lettre sont devenus plus nombreux; et le nombre renforce leur férocité. La lettre coranique, soumise à une lecture littérale, peut résonner dans l’espace balisé par le projet intégriste. (Meddeb 2002: pp. 12–13)

(due to demography and democratisation, the semi-literate have proliferated and those who believe they have the authority to interpret the scripture have become more numerous; and their increasing number reinforces their zeal. The Quranic text, when subjected to a literal reading, can reverberate around the space circumscribed by the fundamentalist project.)

The term semi-lettré frequently arises in Meddeb’s writing and is regarded as a consequence of processes of democratisation devoid of democracy, processes which have particularly affected postcolonial Muslim societies. However, this could arguably be seen as Meddeb asserting an element of symbolic power through his status and adopted language of an erudite homme de lettres. Indeed, the essay gives a historical account of how certain Islamic leaders have promoted literal Quranic interpretations and fundamentalist forms of Islam, and his analysis discusses the influence of the eighth century Ibn Hanbal, the medieval Syrian theologian Ibn Taymiyya and the eighteenth century Saudi Arabian Ibn Abd al-Wahhab, from whose name derives the currently dominant form of Islam in Saudi Arabia (Wahhabi Islam). Meddeb is highly critical of Wahhabi Islam (Meddeb 2002: p. 71), arguing that it is this form of Islam which has led to the emergence of violence in the name of Islam because of literalist interpretations of Quranic scripture regarding combat and jihad. In his interview with essayist and journalist Philippe Petit, published as the book-length Face à l’islam in 2004, Meddeb disqualifies the very notion of jihad, arguing that ‘les deux notions de jihâd et de shahîd (martyr), qui sont au fondement de l’idéologie intégriste, ne disposent d’aucune légitimité scripturaire; leur construction est post-coranique’ (Meddeb 2004: p. 147) (the two notions of jihad and shahid [martyr] which are the basis of the fundamentalist ideology, do not have any scriptural legitimacy; their construction is post-Quranic).

Clearly, the title of ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Notes on the text
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 Abdelwahab Meddeb: post-foundational Islam
• 2 Malek Chebel: Enlightenment Islam
• 3 Leïla Babès: spirituality, affect and women
• 4 Dounia Bouzar: public intellectuals as policy experts in times of crisis
• 5 Abdennour Bidar: existentialist Islam as intercultural translation
• Conclusion
• Bibliography
• Index