France goes on a (secularist) jihad against ... "Islamo-leftism" (?!?)

Emmanuel Macron's version of "European values" is looking grimmer all the time. I must admit I don't recall hearing the term "Islamo-leftism" before although this article says it's been around since the 1960s. You might think "Islamo-leftism" would be some Islam-inspired set of political values that included secular government and protection of equal rights of women, the same values European Muslim-haters claim to be defending against those scary, scary Muslims. But apparently it's just another synonym for "we hate Muslims and fancy perfessers".

French Assembly passes bill aiming to curb Islamism Reuters 02/17/2021:

Norimitsu Onishi and Constant Méheut (Heating Up Culture Wars, France to Scour Universities for Ideas That ‘Corrupt Society’ New York Times 02/18/2021):

[T]he French government announced this week that it would launch an investigation into academic research that it says feeds “Islamo-leftist’’ tendencies that “corrupt society.’’

News of the investigation immediately caused a fierce backlash among university presidents and scholars, deepening fears of a crackdown on academic freedom — especially on studies of race, gender, post-colonial studies and other fields that the French government says have been imported from American universities and contribute to undermining French society. [my emphasis]

You have to give Macron's political consultants some credit though. They have managed to frame this latest anti-Muslim schtick as anti-Americanism, too!

There's a real irony here, as there often is with these kinds of goofy theories: "In recent years, a new, more diverse generation of social science scholars has ... clashed with an older generation of intellectuals who regard these social science theories as American imports — though many of the thinkers behind race, gender and post-colonialism are French or of other nationalities." (my emphasis)

I guess the good thing about terms like "Islamofascism", "political Islam", and this "Islamo-leftism", is that you can use them without having to know anything about Islam or politics or political theory to use them. Because they all are various forms of "we hate them thar Muslims.

But an actual "Islamo-leftism" that included secular government, women's rights and other things like reducing poverty and providing good public services really would be a good thing. There are a lot of Muslims in the world in a lot of very different countries, so elements of those ideas can surely be found in various forms, though this French propaganda campaign has nothing to do with that. Since many of those countries were colonies of Western powers, anti-imperialism has been a element in various strains of "Islamic" politics, something which corresponds with left politics. And the obligation for individuals believers to contribute to supporting the poor is one of the Five Pillars of Islam.

But much of what we know today as "Islamism" or "Islamic fundamentalism" was also consciously promoted by the US and other Western powers as a conservative alternative to Soviet ideology and "Arab socialism". Robert Dreyfuss describes that history in Devil's Game: How the United States Helped Unleash Fundamentalist Islam (2005). The US support for the mujahideen in Afghanistan's war against the USSR - the mujahideen who were celebrated by US conservatives and most liberals alike as heroic freedom fighters - created a distinctive form of "jihadism" of which we have become more familiar than most of us would have wanted to. Even though the theological trends incorporated into the ideologies of groups like Al-Qaida and the Islamic State have much longer historical roots. (See, e.g.: Myra MacDonald, From "Freedom-Fighters" to the Islamic State: The Mutation of Jihad War on the Rocks 03/09/2015)

One of the favorite Islamophobic political tropes is to say, look, them Muslims are against women's rights and are anti-Semitic, and I hate Muslims, so I'm for women's rights and against anti-Semitism. It's cynical to the point of caricature.

But pretending you believe transparently ridiculous stuff is part of the far-right culture, in Europe like in America. Of course, not everyone of that persuasion has to *pretend* they believe transparently ridiculous stuff, because they really do believe it.

For a long time, I thought a classic-liberal-type position would make sense as a counter-argument, i.e., a secular government should enforce equal rights and freedom of religion. And illegal religious coercion should be dealt with legally. Protection against domestic violence and psychological abuse should be available to everyone, along with medical and social help for victims. Handling religious diversity is always a challenge in education for children and teenagers, of course. But it's far from being a new problem.

Yet even though all of that is sensible from a liberal or left position, those arguments don't really address the actual Islamophobic rhetoric. One, because Islamophobic fear-mongering is actually about "Othering" Muslims and foreigners. And, two, in my limited experience, e.g., people complaining about Muslim women and girls wearing "headscarves" (hijabs) don't give a flying flip about Muslim women's rights. (Nor are they particularly concerned with the rights of non-Muslim women.)

The headscarf gripe is mainly used to stigmatize Muslim women and girls, not as any show of actual sympathy. This is very much in line with the identitarian/xenophobic/racist conspiracy theory that Muslim women and girls are the biggest danger to "The West" because they supposedly breed more little Muslim babies, as part of a plot enshrined in the Qur’an to conquer infidels by more prolific sex, or whatever.

I can say specifically for Austria that Austrian-born Muslim children on the average produce as many children as other Austrian-born Austrians, not more. Although I expect most if not all EU countries see something similar.

If the Islamophobes were serious about "integration" of Muslims in egalitarian, democratic cultural practices, something like a "left" version of Islam is exactly what would be needed to produce that. That's especially true for de-radicalization efforts aimed at countering actual Islamist religious-political propaganda. Young people who are attracted to that scene need to hear and see Muslim men and women who can talk about the Islamic faith and social values stemming from it. They aren't going to listen to some Christian preacher or rightwing politician saying that Islam is Satanic or that the existence of Muslim women and girls are the greatest threat to "European values".

Given that Macron's latest xenophobic posturing is focused on complaining about fancy-pants college perfessers and their weird ideas that ain't gone teach nobody how to repair a car, this just seems like another exercise in rightwing populism to me.

A final consideration. Predominantly Muslim Algeria was formally a département of France from 1848 to 1962, not a separate colony like France's other colonial possessions. So if France's supposedly superior European culture hasn't yet found a way to "integrate" Muslim citizens - maybe it's not Muslim culture that is the only problem.. If France hasn’t found a solution to the Muslim “problem” by now – maybe Muslim culture isn’t the main problem.