Panel 3 Freedom of Speech and Religion in the Public Domain
Myriam Francois –Cerrah
I am going to come at this as a journalist and also with my political scientist hat which is my other life
in academia. I personally am always a little wary of the eulogising of so called ‘founding documents’
which I think are typically reimagined to accommodate modern sensibilities and thus designed in so
doing to ignore the deep inequalities, some of which Shami mentioned, which were often less a sort
of afterthought a little error in there and more actually part and parcel of the very constitution of
who represents a true human being or in contemporary modern political language who is a true
citizen. I am wary because it allow us to think of ourselves as arrived rather than working towards
the very ideals which we claim to be celebrating, and it also means that those exempt from its
application are often ignored and assumed to be undeserving of those rights and that somehow the
removal of those rights is assumed to be because of this premise of this conception of ourselves as
having necessarily integrated these values as somehow undeserving or justifiably removed from
their application. So I am genuinely more interested in those who are seemingly excluded from these
rights, the hundred thousands of immigrants left to drown in our seas, terrorism suspects extradited
for torture, I did say ‘terrorism ‘suspects’, citizens that are stripped of their nationality both in this
country and in France for given crimes, as if somehow there is something you could do that could
deprive you of those rights that you were not constitutive of them in the first place. And that
reminds me that perhaps we should view such documents as less an achievement and an indication
of our presumed greatness and more a mile stone on an ongoing journey. To come to today’s
discussion I thought I would speak to each question in a few lines mainly to deconstruct what I
perceive as quite a problematic underpinning to a few of the questions.
I will start off with this idea of the secular settlements of Europe which to me speaks to the
increasingly popular idea of Europe under siege from scary Muslims, and unsurprisingly perhaps I
have a bit of an issue with that. The truth is and I am going to quote Professor Olivier Roy, who I had
the honour quite recently of interviewing, who argues that laïcité in France has shifted from a critical
judicial principle designed for the management of diversity, to what he calls an exclusionary ideology
and I am going to quote professor Roy specifically on what he understands by that and he says, I
quote “we demand that the believer disappear as a citizen that his or her beliefs not be known, a
demand of cultural normative ethical homogenisation by the state, that is what I call an ideology, an
ideology is when a system of values is not just considered dominant, but normative and official and
we are no longer in a democracy when we impose a normative system of beliefs on people.” I think
this leaves a particular issue for French Muslims and one he talks about in the interview that I did
with him in terms of what we call a double bind that is that French Muslim citizens in particular, but
people of faith more broadly are called to hide all aspects of their faith and we will talk a little bit
about the extent to which that has become ever more intrusive, but they are once called to hide all
aspects of their faith but then when terrorist attacks happen they are called to speak as
representatives of that faith so at once you are unable to speak as a person of faith in your day to
day as you go about doing normal good things within your society as a citizen, but when a terrorist
attack happens you are demanded by the state, by society to speak from within that essentialised
conception of your identity. So that is one of the issues I think that is very problematic, and I think it
inherently problematizes the idea of French Muslims constructing them as the polar opposite of
French culture, they are this sort of intractable minority that can never be fully integrated, hence the
obsession in French national debates, you cannot switch the TV on in France without having another
debate about Islam and integration in France. So there is a sense of Muslims being this
inherent challenge to French culture, when in truth French Muslims have been part and parcel of
French culture, part and parcel of constructing French culture for generations now and maybe it is
about time we stopped asking them to justify that.
Do religions have a legitimate right to be exempted from special treatment?
I do not actually think that is the issue, rather than exemption I think maybe an inclusive conception
of society might be more beneficial. I think more often than not we assume that religious folk want
differential treatment when actually what they want is to have the same treatment and not be the
victims of prejudice. Take the Rushdie affair, which people always refer to as the landmark issue in
Europe, the protest that happened in England during the Rushdie affair were calls for the application
of the same blasphemy laws which existed in this country until 2008 I believe to all citizens, including
Muslim citizens. So they were the calls to the application of the same rights for all citizens, they were
not calls for an exemption or for some sort of special treatment, in fact it might be nice not to have
special treatment for a lot of people of faith, because it is not that special most of the time.
Freedom of expression and the protection of religious feelings
There are huge national differences on the conceptions of freedom of expression, I often come into
discussions on this and if people are not familiar with the French setting its worth pointing out that
there are pretty significant restrictions on free speech in France already, some of which might shock
an Anglo-Saxon audience. I am not convinced that religions are the issue that pose the greatest
threat to the freedom of speech in France or here in the UK for that matter. Just last year a French
court fined a blogger and ordered her to change her headline to reduce its prominence on google for
a negative review of a restaurant, it is also worth pointing out that Charb did face threats from
Muslim extremists but do you know what he also faced? Threats of criminal prosecution, for some of
the things he said. So I think free speech is certainly an issue I am just not convinced that it’s the big
bad Muslims that are the problem. I would rather ask whether the ideology that Professor Roy refers
to, and specifically the political instrumentalisation of the concept of laïcité is not being used to
overrule the civil rights of religious citizens, when a Jewish man in a Kippah come to a polling station
and is turned away under the guise of laïcité, you need to question whether the civil rights are being
applied to all citizens equally. Similarly now we have French citizens who are excluded from public
spaces, from schools, from universities, from hospitals, from using public transport, I call that a civil
liberties issue, and essentially to me the real civil rights issue is the profound racism that exists in
France today, where there are huge inequalities when it comes to access to housing, to access to
power even access to funding religious organisations it is worth pointing out there is still a Christian
bias in that sense, a Christian citizens is two and a half times more likely to get a job interview in
France than an equally qualified Muslim citizen according to a study by Stanford University not that
long ago. I think there are numerous indications from human rights organisations including Amnesty
International that have pointed to a climate of what I would call pervasive discrimination against
Muslin citizens in particular. To come back specifically to the issue that everyone wants to talk about
and this is the attacks on Charlie Hebdo, I would make a lot more about the fact that, this discussion
is usually framed as Muslims being offended by cartoons. Actually a lot of Muslims were offended by
images but a lot of Muslims did not rock up to the offices and to a Kosher store and shoot people. I
will end that by saying that actually and I think on this one the philosopher Slavoj Zizek has it right
when he says that the Muslim crowds did not react to Mohammed caricatures as such, they reacted
to the complex figure or image of the West that was perceived as the attitude behind the
caricatures.
Thank you for your time.