More than 1,200 years after Charles Martel drove Islamic invaders out of France, Muslim immigrants are putting down roots all over Europe. France has more of them than any other country – at least 8 million – and they are the fastest-growing segment of its population. But at a time of growing social tension, immigrants often are unwelcome. In mayoralty elections last week, the far-right National Front rode an anti-immigrant bandwagon to victory in Toulon and two other southern cities, its strongest showing ever. The party’s leader, Jean-Marie Le Pen, claimed that the riot in Noisy-le-Grand proved France was embroiled in a “larval civil war.”
Muslim and non-Muslim citizens have sharply different images of Islam. In a poll last year, non-Muslims were given a list of terms and asked to choose the ones that most closely matched their idea of Islam. “Fanaticism” won by a landslide; then came “submission” and “rejection of Western values.” Such views may have been reinforced last week when French police arrested more than 100 immigrants on suspicion of supporting Islamic extremism in North Africa. But few French Muslims have anything to do with revolution or terrorism. In the same poll, the words most often picked by French Muslims to describe their own values were “democracy,” “justice” and “liberty.”
The new wave of Muslim immigration was sparked by a demand for cheap labor. But now young immigrants in the housing projects face a 85 percent unemployment rate and risk becoming alienated from their own families and society at large. As a matter of policy, the French government has always insisted on the total assimilation of immigrants, but Muslims don’t take that as a welcoming gesture. Sheik Abdelbaki Sahraoui, 82, who preaches at a mosque in Paris, claims the government wants to turn Muslims into “little Frenchmen.” He charges that “Muslims have to leave behind everything they are, including Islam. You have to drink wine, or you cannot become French.” Unlike Christianity, Islam is growing in France, and Sahraoui says the faith needs “real Muslims who can set an example.” The question is whether their non-Islamic neighbors will ever regard “real Muslims” as real Frenchmen, too.
