The 9/11 Wars (41 page)

Finally, and more fundamentally, describing the revolt as ‘Muslim’ or by Muslims was misleading because it reduced the nature of religious identity to a ‘one size fits all’ that took no account of the range of what it meant to be ‘Muslim’ in France – or elsewhere for that matter – in the autumn 2005. This went beyond a simple challenge of describing the vast diversity of the Muslim community – Arab, non-Arab, black African, practising, non-practising, ‘cultural Muslims’, ‘street Muslims’, theological Muslims, political Muslims and so on – and to the heart of a difficult problem of terminology that caused grave problems for all discussions of the issue at the time. Identity is not only multiple – age, educational background, marital status, gender, life course, ethnic or geographic origin, interests, profession, aspirations, tastes – all furnishing a potential identity or elements of an identity but profoundly dynamic as well. ‘I am French one day, of “Algerian origin” the next, a Muslim the third,’ one demonstrator protesting the lack of public recognition of the deaths of scores of Algerians in Paris at the hands of French police in the 1960s told the author in late 2005. ‘It depends who I am talking to.’
⁶⁶
The particular element that is dominant at any one time depends on the situation and, crucially, the interlocutor. Identity is thus a conversation, a dialectic and never static. Defining the
émeutes
as ‘Muslim revolts’ was not only factually misleading and counterproductive but hindered a balanced, more nuanced and more accurate analysis. This is not to say that religion does not play a role in the
banlieues
– often a troubled one – and is not sometimes deeply important to young men like those who rioted in France in November 2005, but it was not the reason that they went out and threw stones and petrol bombs at policemen. So what were the reasons?

The
cités
where the rioters lived and where the riots took place were – if not true ghettos – a ‘ghetto phenomenon’ with a rare combination of severe social and economic problems.
⁶⁷
Many were extremely physically isolated, built on the edges of cities with little public transport where the heavy industry that had once required their presence was long gone. Around Paris, the
cités
were separated from the twenty arrondissements of the city itself by a strong symbolic and administrative frontier that ran along the line once traced by the nineteenth-century city defences that was now the route of the six-lane orbital highway known as
le périphérique
.
⁶⁸
The physical environment of the
cités
was often severely degraded. In the famous Neuf Trois – the département of Seine et Saint-Denis – over a third of the population were foreign-born and 18 per cent lived below the poverty line.
⁶⁹
Nearly 20 per cent had no hot water, and a quarter of housing units had no indoor shower or bathroom.
⁷⁰
Then there was unemployment – rising through the 1990s to reach levels of over 40 per cent for young unqualified men nationally.
⁷¹
Jobs that were available were often of extremely low quality, partly due to some genuine discrimination based on colour, name or religion, but also partly due to the strong negative image associated with the
banlieusard
, an image which the subject consciously or unconsciously reinforced through immediately recognizable speech patterns, clothing and so on. Often the perceived deficiencies in social skills, language competence and so forth were real. Schools were under-funded and staffed by often young teachers ill equipped to deal with the range of social problems with which they were confronted.
⁷²
Two in five male pupils from north African backgrounds left school without any qualification at all.
⁷³

Though such areas were far from being zones of ‘
non-droit
’ or ‘no-go areas’, as so often claimed, they were places where the presence and authority of the République Française was undoubtedly contested and weak. A report by domestic intelligence services a year before the
émeutes
spoke of hundreds of ‘sensitive neighbourhoods’ where ‘populations conserve cultural traditions and ways of life and parallel institutions for social regulation and conflict’.
⁷⁴
Political representation was almost non-existent. There were no Muslim members of parliament, very few of first-generation immigrant origin and a minimal representation in mainstream parties. The Communist Party’s hold on the working-class population of towns in the north, the east or the Paris region had disappeared along with the heavy industry, and the weak French Socialists, whose senior and middle ranks showed even less ethnic and religious diversity than their right-wing opponents, had no real support among a largely depoliticized immigrant population. The main presence of the state in the
cités
was a police force whose philosophy of law enforcement has always favoured the coercive over the consensual and was heavily resistant to ideas of community or neighbourhood policing.
⁷⁵
Policing of the
cités
was thus extremely confrontational, with almost exclusively white officers in riot gear patrolling or mounting raids from heavily protected individual bases. None of the local police were from the places they patrolled, and banter with local youth was limited and often abusive.
⁷⁶

Along with the political and the physical exclusion went cultural exclusion. The vision of France promoted by the elite internally and largely accepted externally is of a country of fine wine, good cheeses,
saucisson
, stunning mountains, the beaches of St Tropez, an immensely rich literary and intellectual heritage, fashion, elegance and history. Little of any of this is to be found in the
cités
. Faiza Guène, a young and popular author from a
cité
on the northern rim of Paris, explained how the France in which she had grown up was very different. Her mother, born in Morocco, had only ever seen the Eiffel Tower once and would not normally have been able to afford her own daughter’s highly successful, ironic book on life in the
banlieues
, she said. The French Republic – one, indivisible and secular according to the constitution – accepted new arrivals often with a singular generosity but on its own terms. One reason for the success of Guène’s book,
Kiffe Kiffe Demain
, was an ending in which republican France triumphed, largely resolving the problems faced by the characters in the
cité
as they accepted its values, myths and institutions.
⁷⁷
Anis Bouabsa, a baker in Paris’ twentieth arrondissement appointed to supply the daily bread for the president’s table, was also seen as an example of successful integration. But Bouabsa, whose parents had been born in Tunisia, had earned the contract by being more classically French than any Frenchman, winning an award for Paris’ finest baguette.
⁷⁸
Chefs of Moroccan cuisine, though their dishes were enormously popular, did not win any of the myriad prizes for
gastronomie
awarded every year. One problem was the very high goals the French Republic set for itself. More often than sometimes thought overseas, the system did assure a measure of
liberté
, some
égalité
and, to a lesser extent,
fraternité
. But not in Aulnay, Clichy, Sevran, La Courneuve and so on.
⁷⁹
The
émeutes
saw non-sectarian political violence involving a ritualized and low-casualty confrontation with the forces of order which was in fact one of the few quintessentially French activities, generally accepted and approved of, in which the young men who comprised the rioters could actually participate.
⁸⁰
The riots were a demand for more integration, not a rejection of integration.

Within weeks of the riots, the profile of the
émeutier
was thus fairly clear. He was a minority of a minority of a minority. Aged between twelve and twenty-five, a first- or second-generation immigrant, interested more in Air Max and ‘le polo Lacoste’ or mobile phones than religion or politics, bored, alienated, resentful, full of complex identity issues, desperate to ‘get on TV’ to get some attention, however fleeting. If asked, he might have called himself a Muslim, though not in the sense meant either by conservative commentators or by Abu Musab al-Suri. Within days of the end of the violence, the people who had rioted could be seen again, either in their neighbourhoods or in specific favoured zones within Paris such as the shopping mall at the Gare du Nord or Les Halles, chatting up girls, comparing phones, arguing with the police. Such young men were a problem certainly, potentially a very serious one. But they were not part of a global radical Islamic militant network. If European Muslims were on the brink of an uprising, it had still to come.

THE CARTOONS

Hardly had the French
émeutes
died away, however, when a new confrontation blew up, international rather than local this time, which again, not least through the striking images it generated, forced all the same issues raised by the rioting back on to the front pages of the world’s newspapers and into the lead of global television bulletins.

Its origin lay in the publication by a little-known Danish newspaper,
Jyllands-Posten
, of some not particularly amusing cartoons of the Prophet Mohammed. One showed him with a bomb tucked in a fold of his turban; in another he was greeting suicide bombers in heaven, saying, ‘Stop, Stop! We have run out of virgins!’ An accompanying text, written by the newspaper’s forty-six-year-old culture editor, Flemming Rose, shortly before the crucial pages went to press explained: ‘Some Muslims reject modern, secular society. They demand a special position, insisting on special consideration of their own religious feelings. It is incompatible with secular democracy and freedom of expression, where one has to be ready to put up with scorn, mockery and ridicule.’ The cartoons were published on September 30, 2005. The ‘crisis’ they caused occurred almost five months later. The intervening months had been filled by the concerted efforts of individual clerics seeking personal advancement and of states to manufacture a confrontation.

The cartoons crisis had its origin in a story reported in Denmark about the difficulties faced by an author who wanted to find an illustrator for his children’s book on the life of the Prophet Mohammed which had struck editors at
Jyllands-Posten
. The author concerned had found that potential illustrators systematically refused the commission, and the only one who accepted insisted on anonymity. The story tied in with a series of other incidents in Denmark, Sweden and elsewhere in Europe which appeared to reveal a widespread trend of artists, museum directors or creators avoiding controversial subjects or withdrawing works from exhibition to pre-empt any threat of violence from Muslim extremists. Searching for a way to follow up the story with empirical evidence that such self-censorship was widespread, the
Jyllands-Posten
editors hit upon the idea of asking several dozen Danish cartoonists to send in images depicting the Prophet ‘as they saw him’ for publication to see how many would accept. A dozen did so, and their work was published. Several of the images mocked the
Jyllands-Posten
itself. These, however, were ignored in the controversy that was to follow, and it was the three depicting Mohammed negatively that were to receive all the attention. ‘It never occurred to me that there could be a problem. We were not focused on Muslim reaction but on the problem of self-censorship within the artistic community in Denmark,’ Rose recalled.
⁸¹
Two of the cartoons’ authors were to receive anonymous death threats within a fortnight.

The initial public reaction to the publication of the cartoons had been muted, though editors at the
Jyllands-Posten
were aware that they had created a stir. On the day the cartoons came out, Rose received a telephone call from an irate vendor in Copenhagen who said he would never sell the newspaper again. But there was little anger expressed publicly, and journalists of the
Jyllands-Posten
were forced eventually to contact a number of local clerics for their response to the cartoons to get a follow-up story.
⁸²
Among them was a former mechanical engineer turned cleric called Ahmad Abu Laban, who had come to Denmark in 1984 after being expelled from Egypt and the United Arab Emirates. He had already become something of a ‘rent-a-quote’ for Danish journalists, having called bin Laden a ‘businessman and freedom fighter’. Once alerted to the cartoons’ publication, Laban saw a clear opportunity to boost his profile and garner support, donations and influence. Hitherto, the group of Islamists he led had numbered only a few thousand despite inflated claims of a much greater strength.
⁸³
Abu Laban and other Muslim religious leaders in Denmark therefore called loudly for the
Jyllands-Posten
to make an apology and, when none was forthcoming, organized a demonstration in Copenhagen that was attended by between 3,000 and 5,000 people. There was some further local anger when the Danish government refused to intervene.
⁸⁴
Then the affair appeared to die away. Even when the cartoons were reprinted in an Egyptian newspaper alongside an incendiary editorial, no one took to the streets either in the Middle East or in Europe. There the matter might have rested.