FRANCE-RELIGION: Fundamentalism Seen as Threat to Society’s Core

By IPS Correspondents Reprint | | Print |

Barbara Borst

PARIS, Dec 17 1994 (IPS) - The French, who battled for centuries to overcome the power of the Catholic church and establish a secular state, now respond to Muslim fundamentalism as a threat to the very core of their society.

From the combative interior minister, Charles Pasqua, whose police have arrested and deported dozens of suspected fundamentalist sympathisers, to major magazines and left-wing philosophers, the anti-fundamentalist rhetoric is strident.

Respected intellectuals such as Andre Glucksman and Bernard- Henri Levy have sounded the alarm against Islamic fundamentalism in France, where there are some four million Muslims, in Algeria, Bangladesh and around the world.

Levy, in his recently published book ‘Dangerous Purity,’ says ours is an age of extremisms that seek to eradicate all who differ ethnically, religiously or ideologically. One must fight to defeat this ‘evil,’ he argues, but acknowledge that it can never be eliminated from the world.

He sees a common mentality behind the violent purges in Algeria, Rwanda, Russia and elsewhere and calls for those who believe in democracy to defend its principles. He says that the fundamentalists of Bosnia are not the Muslims in Sarajevo but the Serbs directing assaults on that multicultural, tolerant city.

“When the enemy has the face of fundamentalism or its populist caricature, one cannot but hate him with all one’s soul,” Levy writes. “Algeria, and behind Algeria, all countries threatened or overtaken by Islamism, are ill with purity.”

The clearest example, he contends, is the assassination of hundreds of Algerian professors, playwrights, journalists and musicians.

Pasqua, at the opening of the first major mosque in Lyon in September, warned Muslim citizens and resident aliens of France to adapt their religion to the society where they now live.

Education Minister Francois Bayrou in September announced a directive excluding girls who veil their heads and necks in the Muslim manner from France’s public schools.

He banned that attire along with other ‘ostentacious’ signs of religion, a move that provoked solidarity demonstrations at a number of high schools and has left many girls to pursue their studies at home. No Muslim schools have yet been established.