International dispute around the Samuel Paty murder in France

Turkish President Tayyip Erdoğan is taking the current uproar in France over the murder of a teacher by a Muslim zealot to posture as a champion of the Islamic faith (Muslim world condemns Macron, France over treatment of Islam 10/26/2020):

The backlash over French President Emmanuel Macron’s critique of Islam has intensified after Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdogan questioned his counterpart’s mental health, while Muslims in several countries are demanding a boycott of France.

Marking his second sharp criticism against Macron in two days, Erdogan said on Sunday that the French president had “lost his mind”, prompting France’s foreign minister to recall the country’s ambassador in Ankara.

The controversy has to do with a sensational case of a 47-year-old teacher, Samuel Paty, who "was beheaded after he reportedly showed cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad during a civics lesson." (Rachel Treisman, After Brutal Beheading, Rallies Erupt Across France To Honor Slain Teacher NPR 10/18/2020)

Deutsche Welle English reports on the ensuing discussion in France (Elizabeth Bryant, As France mourns slain teacher Samuel Paty, some question secular values 10/24/2020):

The same mocking cartoons which inspired the Charlie Hebdo attacks — and last month's stabbing of two people in Paris — are again testing the limits of France's vaunted secularism, or laïcité. Clashing views of faith and free speech are on the line. Feeding the tensions, some experts say, is a broader sense of stigmatization and disenfranchisement felt by many French Muslims, who represent Western Europe's largest Islamic community.

Now, as President Emmanuel Macron and his centrist government have vowed an all-out war against radical Islam, critics have said the strong defense of secularism is only exacerbating the problem. Instead of providing a neutral space for the country's melting pot of beliefs, as it's intended, secularism - enshrined in a 1905 law separating church and state - has become a flashpoint.

"There's a political culture that has problems with Islam," said Farhad Khosrokhavar, a prominent sociologist and expert on radical Islam. "And this political culture, laïcité, is a problem."

If one wants to have a real grasp of the real issues involved with violent Islamic fundamentalist groups, secularism and its relation to the democratic values of freedom of religion, social integration of immigrants from Muslim countries, women's rights, Islamophobic demagogy, and the problem of so-called "parallel communities". Elizabeth Bryant discusses the French version of the latter:

Authorities insist there is no disharmony between moderate Islam and French values. They instead fault communitarianism, a term used in France to suggest an inward-looking view of society that is often, although not exclusively, linked to conservative Islam. More recently, Macron has replaced communitarianism with separatism in his lexicon.

Some observers have said that same inward view helped fuel Paty's murder, with authorities citing an online hate campaign launched by a disgruntled parent of a student in Paty's class. That campaign, they say, motivated 18-year-old Chechen refugee Abdoullakh Anzorov to kill Paty.

In its fight against communitarianism over the years, the French government has introduced bans on religious symbols in public schools and offices and outlawed full-body Islamic swimsuits, or burkinis, in public swimming pools and beaches, the latter cast as a hygienic measure.

In September some lawmakers, including from Macron's own party, recently walked out of a session of the National Assembly during a speech by a veiled student leader — although she had broken no laws with her hijab. [my emphasis]

The French conflicts around Islam and Muslim extremism often gets framed in the press as a conflict between secularism values/laïcité and Islamic fundamentalism. In terms of classical liberal-secularist values, people are free to practice the religion they want, or no religion at all, and are free to talk and write about their religion without being put in jail for it. At the same time, they are free to criticize other people's religion or lack thereof without being jailed or murdered for it. In that framework, Samuel Paty's murder seems like a classic case of a hate crime motivated by his exercise of legitimate speech as a teacher.

But Islamophobia is also a key element of the ideology of non-Muslim far-right parties and sects and is often promoted by people who are also anti-democratic and racist and are using Islamophobia to promote a political program that has nothing to do with respecting women's rights or freedom of religion.

So keeping in mind the need to walk and chew gum at the same time is important in looking at larger controversies like the one that is currently associated with the murder of Samuel Paty.

The notion that Muslim form "parallel societies" in Europe, or "separatism" in Macron's usage, is always worth scrutinizing closely when it's used by politicians or the popular press. In France, for instance, the status of Muslims in society is heavily influenced by the specifics of French colonialism, and in particular the experience of Algeria being held as a French colony since 1830 and then becoming independence in the Algerian War of 1954-1962, which was particularly traumatic for French and Algerian politics.

But the notion of "parallel society" easily serves as one more iteration of the idea of Those People Who We In The Majority Society Don't Like as "not being like us," i.e., "The Jews keep to themselves", "Black people don't want their schools integrated with white schools," and on and on. Obviously, if immigrants or other minorities are really completely isolated from the society in which they live to such an extent that they really cannot participate in daily life and work as normal members of society, that is clearly a problem. And one that responsible governments would need to address in a practical and decent way.

But on the other hand, immigrants are more likely to hang out with other immigrants or previous immigrants from their national group because that's a key part of integrating into a new society. And terms like "parallel society" or "separatism" is mainly a means of Other-ing a targeted group. The US and European countries, for instance, have compulsory public education laws that guarantee most children growing up there will develop basic social ties outside their immediate family group. And it's not as though France or Germany or Italy are peppered with independent republics of Muslims or Algerians where the authority of the national government does not reach, like the Russian-controlled enclaves in Ukraine or Georgia, for instance.

And what we call civil society could also be described as an overlapping series of "parallel societies." The Catholic Church is itself a type of "parallel society" - as Catholic-haters have pointed out for centuries! - that has its own rituals, its own membership rules, its own institutions of authority, its own publishing houses, and even its own version of sharia, i.e., Catholic canon law. Obviously, this doesn't mean that Catholics are allowed to organize their own deaths squads and go behead some Protestant teacher they don't like. But it does mean that buzzwords like "separatism" and "parallel society" used for other-ing people should be treated with appropriate caution.

The same goes for headscarf debates.