If you take a walk around Paris today you cannot miss seeing the angry blue eyes behind a niqab of a Muslim woman remonstrating with a French policewoman. The poster, with the headline “This Inconsiderate Islam", advertises the latest issue of Le Point, one of France's leading weekly news magazines. The expression used in French is “Sans-gêne", it means inconsiderate, bad mannered, disrespectful; it suggests people who do not obey the rules, who are disruptive and cause problems. “This Objectionable Islam" would be closer in meaning to the literal translation I have used. A month ago, you could have seen a similar poster advertising L'Express, Le Point's leading competitor, with a similar image; this time not a woman but of two men, facing up to a wall of riot police, with the headline “The Fear of Islam". And if you search in the archives of these two respectable news weeklies you will find other examples of covers on Islam which always bear the same hallmark: a face-off between radicalized Muslims and the secular West. Usually the Muslims are represented by a woman in a burqa, despite the fact that in a country with more than five million Muslims only a few hundred women wear it, and the headline speaks of a threat. If you spend a little cash and buy the picture of the woman with the beautiful blue eyes, you will be able to read the magazine and what it says is not so sensational. Le Point argues that it wants to move the debate on Muslims in France out of the political firing range and into an intelligent social discussion. They also point out that the vast majority of Muslims in France are well integrated and pose no problem to anyone; their cover is about a tiny minority, but the fact that it is a minority does not make it irrelevant they say. The headline is not “Inconsiderate Islam" but “This Inconsiderate Islam", the “this" pointing the finger to the visible and not irrelevant minority that speaks for the silent and irrelevant majority. What are the problems that these inconsiderate, objectionable Muslims cause? The cover page gives us a few clues, the words “hospitals, canteens, swimming pools, skirts, school programs" appear beneath the headline. What they point to is the refusal of some Muslims to accept that in France secularity trumps religion. You have the right to practice your religion as you wish, so long as you respect that “la laicité" is a fundamental value of the French republic. So in state schools, it is unacceptable for Muslim children to ask to be treated in a way that differentiates them from other children, hence girls wearing a hijab, children asking to eat halal, or other practices which seem perfectly natural to us start to cause problems because it means that two children sitting side by side in school are no longer the same but wear a religious label and the French believe very strongly that religion should be kept out of school. If you do not know who is Muslim and who is Christian, you cannot discriminate against them. This not separating people into “us" and “them" is something that I applaud whole-heartedly, the only problem is that it doesn't quite work this way. But let us for a moment forget the debate about secularism and focus on the picture. Millions will see the image of the woman in the burqa but only a few thousand will read the article that accompanies it. The image is deliberately manipulative. It was taken at a demonstration in Lille on September 22, back when that anti-Muslim film was releasing a chorus of anger. There were less than a dozen women present but because the picture is a close-up, you cannot get this sense of scale. Ditto for the picture used by L'Express last month. Again it was taken at a demonstration against the film, but this time in Paris. Only a couple of hundred people showed up, but the photo focuses on two demonstrators. We see the faces of the demonstrators and the backs of the police. You could be forgiven for thinking that there had been a mass demonstration and a clash between protesters and police. It's sensationalist and frankly unnecessary. So does it sell newspapers? Christophe Barbier, the editor of L'Express, tells us no. The edition with “The Fear of Islam" - and here again I have been kind in my translation as the French “La Peur de l'Islam" is closer in meaning to “The Threat of Islam'"- did not sell particularly well. So why all this fear-mongering? The fear it seems is real. In a recent poll published in Le Figaro, 43 percent of respondents thought that Islam was a “threat". To illustrate the trend and how it translates into concrete consequences, back in 1989, 33 percent were favorable to the construction of mosques, the figure has now gone down to 18 percent. As Muslims move from being an invisible minority to a more sizable part of the French population, fear grows about how this demographic change will influence France's secular tradition. And as radicalized Islam grows in the Muslim world, the fear is that there will be some kind of contagion and that Muslims in France will become increasingly radicalized. This argument is not without merit, the only problem is that attention-grabbing front pages like this serve to fuel Muslim anger and perpetuate the image of Muslims as threatening. It's irresponsible and wrong. — Imane Kurdi is a Saudi writer on European affairs. She can be reached at [email protected]
