French democracy and French Muslims in the face of civil war and upheaval in the Arab and Muslim worlds (1979-2019)

Jalila Sbaï seminar, co-hosted by Prof. Henry Laurens and sponsored by the Chair of Contemporary History of the Arab World.

The emergence in the Muslim world in the mid-1970s of two similar but competing ideological currents, whose ambition is the unification of Dar al Islam, one through Shiite Islam, advocated by Imam Khomeini, the other - in reaction to and following the success of the Iranian Islamic Revolution - through the Sunni Islam of Arab political leaders. These two currents are presented within and beyond their natural religious boundaries, as a political solution to the ideological, political, moral, economic and military Western stranglehold on the Muslim world that has resulted from the Cold War between the USA and the USSR, and the failure of the non-aligned movement, which is by definition secular. The first re-Islamizations-radicalizations observed in France in the early 1980s were the result of this situation.

Young people, particularly women of Algerian immigrant descent, were targeted by Shiite preachers of Arab origin, notably from Lebanon. However, it was the anti-racist and anti-Maghrebin mobilizations - the Beur and Touch pas à mon pote movements - of young people from North African migrant families that attracted the attention of politicians and the media during the 1980s. This interest was quickly transformed into an interest in the reorganization of Islam in France and the revival of practices used to manage Islam and Muslim populations in colonial Algeria, from the start of the Algerian civil war (1988) and the mobilization in France, by the Algerian army, of young Franco-Algerians of fighting or military service age, to go and fight the FIS in Algeria.

This Algerian civil war between a radical Islamist movement (nebula) and the socialist state born of independence, prefigured - even if all other things were not equal - the Iraqi civil war and the advent of Daesh, and the Syrian civil war, barely two decades later. These three civil wars in the space of thirty years, at the origin or provider of radicalized populations, have engaged French Muslims in these overseas civil wars, either on the side of states, or on the side of radicalized movements, or on the side of civil society. The aim of this seminar is to examine the current situation of French Jihadists trapped in Iraq and Syria, in order to grasp in its entirety and comprehensiveness what is at stake in France - in the different registers: political, institutional, social, legal, humanitarian - on a national, European and international level. This first question should enable us to take the current French situation as a starting point for a new reading of the present in the history of each of the three states concerned (Algeria, Iraq, Syria), and in that of international relations, based on :

The way in which the re-Islamization and radicalization of a fringe of the French Muslim population has been articulated around its multiple mobilities: in the Schengen area, in the West (USA) and East (Saudi Arabia), in North Africa.
How does the de facto diasporic French Muslim population and its re-Islamized, radicalized crumbling, move in multiple, multilingual, multi-faith and multi-ethnic spaces, interact - in a quasi-simultaneous temporality - with local Eastern and North African societies, influence them, are influenced by them; and how, in return, are these interdependencies articulated in France and act on Eastern and North African societies.
How national and international legal issues raised by the repatriation of French jihadist prisoners and their families, and the legitimacy of jurisdiction over their trial and prosecution, focus on or call into question the universal model of the democratic state, in France and in the East.

Paris, 17/11/2019

Jalila Sbaï