True, they were granted “freedom of religion”. But this came with definite strings attached. In France particularly — which rapidly came to host the largest Muslim population in Europe — they reached back a very long way. In 1791, when the revolutionary state granted citizenship to Jews, it had done so on the understanding that they abandon any sense of themselves as a people set apart. No recognition or protection had been offered to the Mosaic law.
The identity of Jews as a distinct community was tolerated only to the degree that it did not interfere with the shared civic identity of all Frenchmen and women. “They must form neither a political body nor an order in the state, they must be citizens individually.” Today, in France, Muslims are expected to subscribe to a very similar orthodoxy. Islam as it was classically understood — a framework for regulating every aspect of human existence – could have no place in a country proud of its secularism: its laïcité.
Muslims, if they were not to disrupt the very fabric of the French Republic, needed to render their beliefs and convictions compatible with those of the society in which they were now living. They had to accept that laws authored by humans might trump those authored by God; that Muhammad’s mission had been religious rather than political; that the relationship of worshippers to their faith was, in its essentials, something private and personal. They had to accept, in short, an Islam that was secularised.
But not just secularised. The roots of the Western concept of the secular — as Napoleon’s reaction to the Qur’an suggested — reached back much further than the Enlightenment. “Not just religious; it is civil and political. The Bible only preaches morals.” Napoleon’s appreciation of the fundamental differences between Christian and Islamic scripture was one that Muslim scholars — those few who could be bothered to read the New Testament — had been struck by too.
Ibn Khaldun, the great medieval historian, noted with surprise that the Gospels consisted largely of sermons and stories, “and have an almost complete lack of laws”. It was this lack, in the opinion of medieval Muslim jurists, that served to condemn Christianity as an inadequate and superceded revelation. Unlike the Jews, who at least had a written law from God, Christians were forever changing their minds, devising new law codes, revising the ones they already had. How were such people possibly to be taken seriously?
The charge is the same that prominent Islamic radicals today level against the secular order of the West, and against those Muslim states that ape it: that they are taking earthly legislators as their lords rather than God. More clearly than many in the West itself, they have recognised the Enlightenment, not as an emancipation from Christianity, but as a mutation of it. That there is a distinction between twin dimensions called “religion” and the “secular”; that humans enjoy universal rights; that the laws by which earthly states are governed should be authored by mortals, not by God: all of these were assumptions rooted, not in the Enlightenment, but in the deep seedbed of Christian history and theology.
Between Louis IX, the canonised king of France who had led the Seventh Crusade to Egypt, and Napoleon, the general of the French Republic, the differences can, perhaps, seem less profound than the similarities. Both believed themselves the agents of universal truths; both believed themselves summoned to bring light into darkness; both believed themselves bound to banish superstition at the point of a sword. There was a time when the French themselves could see this more clearly than they tend to do now.
“A political revolution that operated as a religious revolution does,” wrote Tocqueville about the founding of the French Republic, “and took in some way the shape of a religious revolution.” When, in 1842, the word laïcité first appeared in French, it was imbued with precisely this ambivalence: for the laicus had originally been none other than the people of God.
Perhaps it is no surprise, then, that Islamist radicals, when they look at the history of France, should see in it a sinister continuum. In 2015, when the Islamic State issued a statement claiming responsibility for the murderous attacks on the Bataclan and a range of other atrocities, it readily conflated the era of Louis IX with the vices of a more recent and godless materialism. Paris was condemned both as “the carrier of the Banner of the Cross in Europe”, and as “the capital of prostitution and obscenity”.
The horrors of the past fortnight have repeated this tendency on the part of Islamists opposed to the traditions and obligations of laïcité to make little distinction between secular and Catholic France. A teacher beheaded near his school; three worshippers hacked to death in a basilica. The nightmareish quality of these attacks should not obscure the fact that they have followed a certain twisted logic. The Islamic State, when they identified France as the capital of everything that it most hated, were not so far wrong. Eldest Daughter of the Church and the home of revolution, the land of saints and philosophes, Catholic and laique, it is her fate — and perhaps her privilege — to serve, more than any other country, as the very embodiment of the West.
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