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AUDIENCE MEMBER: I was wondering if
either of you, whether you could compare the French attitude towards Muslim immigrants
with the attitude in the US? Because it seems like US distrust
of Muslim communities here is fueled more by fears of terrorism than anything, in that
the religious aspects are more a side
effect of, like-- it's not a direct assault on, like, the veil or something like that.
And so I was wondering why that might be. Is it because
the US is generally a more religious country and so is less inclined to distrust religious practices
just because they are religious practices? Or is there a certain different organization of
Muslim communities here that makes them
more willing to integrate, I suppose, into American communal life? GORSKI: I mean I think,
you know, Ates
kind of outlined the
usual and also, I think, correct answer to that question, which is,
it has to do with the very different political
histories, and therefore very different political cultures,
of France and the United States. In particular, that
the dominance, the predominance,
of particular-- what I would call radical or secularist republicanism,
you know, with its origins in the French Revolution.
THe US also has been
deeply influenced by republicanism, but it was a different kind of republicanism--
a more deistic republicanism which never took the kind of radically
anti-clericalist bent
that the French Revolution did, and
there has always-- there--
it--
there is, you know, certainly from kind of the early republic on, increasingly
a kind of laissez-faire liberalism which emerges, which
basically understands religion as a form of self--
as a-- as, you know, a right,
sort of falling into the rights of conscience, and as a form of self-expression.
And that's been reinforced historically, of course, through the arrival and absorption-- and
emergence of more and more-- more and more religious groups.
To answer the other question, though, about-- and I don't know, maybe Ates is going
to disagree with me about this-- I don't think that you can pull apart the headscarf
debate and--
and 9/11 and other-- other
encounters like that. So, for example, one of my students last year wrote a thesis
on British and French discourse around the headscarf debate, and
there is a
remarkable shift
within Britain, after
9/11,
away from multiculturalism and towards something, actually, that increasingly looks like
French republicanism, and a similar
shift can be seen
in the Netherlands. So there, the kind of-- the catalyst for that is the Theo Van Gogh
***.
But, you know, a similar kind of backlash.