The NPA
in France
and the fight against islamophobia
Last week, 12 activists in the New Anti-Capitalist Party,
including Ilham Moussaid - whose candidacy for the regional elections
caused
controversy both within and without the party on the basis that she
wears a
hijab – resigned from the NPA. Socialist Alternative spoke
with John
Mullen, a member of the NPA in the Paris
region, about the issue of Islamophobia in France, and the debates
within the
NPA that led to these resignations.
First
of all, John, could you elaborate on what caused these members to
resign and
the contours of the debates within the NPA about the rights of its
Muslim
membership?
Ilham
was chosen as one of a list of candidates in the regional elections
last year.
This decision was made in the region - the NPA is very much a federal
organization. The NPA was attacked from all sides for giving in to
Islamicists,
fundamentalists and for abandoning secularism. The national
spokesperson
Olivier Besancenot defended Ilham’s right to be a candidate, but a
vocal
minority inside the NPA is hostile to having members with a hijab. For
the
upcoming conference, this minority has put forward a motion that hijab
wearers
can’t be candidates for the party. A counter-motion defends equal
rights for
all members to apply to be a candidate, and a third motion suggests a
dreadful
compromise (that hijab wearers can be candidates if approved by special
commissions).
The
group of comrades of which Ilham is part, near Avignon, have been
running
dynamic local campaigns on different issues, including the question of
Islamophobia.
A campaign against them inside the party has worn them out and rather
than
fight at the conference, they have chosen to continue their activism
outside
the party - it’s very sad. The very real, and slowly growing support
they have
had from a minority of comrades around the country has not been enough
to keep
them in our party.
One
of the things Moussaid stated on her resignation was, "We need to
concentrate on what unites us, on the fight for equality between men
and women,
and not to say we should all dress the same way, that you can't wear a
headscarf because otherwise you're not a feminist.” What do you
say to
the argument so often employed in these debates, that wearing the hijab
is, ‘an
assault on feminism’?
The
majority of the Left in France believe that the hijab is an assault on
women’s
rights, and this position quickly moves into the prejudice that Muslim
women in
France are more oppressed than non-Muslim women, that the experience of
women
in –say- Saudi Arabia is merely an extreme case of an oppression which
is
inherent in Islam, and other such ideas. Muslim and Arab men are then
presented
as the major source of women’s oppression and contrasted with the
progressive
white values of Republican France. So opposition to religious practices
on the
basis of progressive values can esily turn into a thinly disguised form
of
racism – and often does. In fact, if Muslim women in France suffer
oppression,
get mostly low-paid jobs and bad housing, this is not usually because
of their
husbands and big brothers, but because capitalism wants cheap labour,
and
treating ethnic minorities badly is good for profits.
Pieces
of clothing have symbolic meanings in all cultures. In many cultures,
women
must cover their breasts, men must not wear dresses. In Sikh culture
men must
not cut their hair. And in many Muslim cultures women must cover their
hair.
When French women cover their hair to please their God, they are not
saying
“treat me as an inferior”.
There is
another point : in France, where anti-Arab and anti-muslim
racism is at a high level (which has a lot to fo with France’s imperial
past
and neo-colonial present), wearing the hijab is about showing you are
proud to
be a Muslim, (and often proud to be an Arab) in a fairly hostile
situation.
Tragically the opinion of the women who wear the hijab, or the niqab,
is
practically never asked. “Enlightened” left antisexists speak for them
and tell
them how they should dress. It’s an old colonial tradition, telling
oppressed
groups what is good for them.
The
right-wing Sarkozy Government, with the support of the Socialist Party,
recently banned the wearing of the hijab in state schools and the
public
service, and the full veil is now illegal in the streets. How is this
issue
exploited by France’s politicians and how prevalent is racist abuse of
Muslims
in France today?
A
few months ago, researchers sent out to French companies applications
for jobs
accompanied by CVs. They wanted to compare how a young black Catholic
woman fared
in comparison with a young Black muslim woman. The CVs were identical
except
for first names and a mention of their religion (one said she was
active with a
Catholic organization, the other with a Muslim one). The “Catholic”
black woman
got asked to an interview 21% of the time. The “Muslim” Black woman got
asked
to an interview 8% of the time. That’s how bad it is. The mainstream
press
covered this story, the Left press almost totally ignored it. That’s
how bad it
is.
Meanwhile
racist grafitti on mosques, and desecration of Muslim
graves are becoming more common – there have been at least twenty cases
of
vandalizing Muslim graves this year. A mosque and a halal butchers were
shot at
earlier this year – 32 bullet holes were left in the
mosque walls. And a number of veiled women
have been attacked in the streets.
The recent
law to ban women who wear the “full veil” from leaving
their homes was initially a proposal of a Communist MP! And the law in
2004,
banning high school students from wearing a hijab was initiated by a
campaign
against two young Muslim women in which trotskyist teachers were very
active! Two
months ago, when the Senate was debating the law against the “full
veil”, a
group of Muslims and left wing supporters organized a rally outside. We
got
sixty activists there : not many, but in the French context quite an
achievement. Almost all of the left
organizations ignored it. The NPA leadership decided to “support” the
rally …
seven hours before it was due to start, although it had been planned
for weeks.
Internal division paralyzes the NPA and many other organizations on
anything to
do with Islamophobia.
We understand
the issue of the hijab will be debated at the NPA’s
upcoming conference. How do you think socialists should respond to
Islamophobia
in society?
The radical Left should launch an active and dynamic campaign
against Islamophobia, and not just “debate “ the issue. This means
allying
itself with muslim organizations. This is a very obvious point, but
highly
controversial on the French Left. In
Britain, the biggest Trade Union confederation, the TUC, has run a
joint
campaign against Islamophobia along with Muslim organizations.
Islamophobia is
tremendously useful to Sarkozy to divide us, to point the finger at the
Muslims
as a threat to “our culture” in order to divert our attention from the
real
enemy.
Islamophobia is a gigantic blind spot of the French Left. The NPA
is better than the other organizations of the radical Left, (which is
not
hard). The upcoming “Conference against the Islamic domination” in
December,
run by groups which came from the Left but have ended up on the far
right, will
see sections of the NPA mobilizing against it. And at the party
conference we
have a good chance of winning the demand for equal rights for Muslim
party
members.
But tragically, the conference will debate almost exclusively
about the rights of Muslim members of the NPA. Only a few isolated
voices are
calling for an active NPA campaign against Islamophobia. This is a
tragedy. In
the mass strike campaign to defend pensions, these last few months in
France,
NPA activists everywhere played an excellent role, in the forefront of
building
the strikes and building unity between different sections of the
working class
and different generations. It is a party with tremendous positive
potential.
But old French traditions of left wingers mocking or hating those who
believe
in God, and more recent trends towards demonizing Muslims since 9/11
and the
wars in Iraq and Afghanistan seem to be blinding comrades and they are
falling
for old divide and rule tactics. Progress is slow, but this question
will have to
be faced. We have to actively fight Islamophobia both because of how
hard it
makes life for many of our Muslim sisters and brother, but also because
working
class rebellion is made harder every time workers believe that “Muslim
threats
to our culture” are what we need to be fighting, not the capitalists.
This interview was first published by Socialist Alternative in December
2010