The French model, grounded in Enlightenment anticlericalism, claims a fierce exclusion of religious affiliation of any kind from its concept of belonging. This does not concern Islam alone, but was made clear more than a century ago in the Republic's response to the Syllabus of Errors: a law was passed preventing priests from mentioning the papal document from the pulpits. Thus was a process established whereby secularity could win important victories over freedom of speech.
[n10: Which has more recently surfaced in the form of censorship of Muslim literature, including, since 1994, the pamphlets of Ahmad Deedat.]
And Catholicism, though the victim of a deep anticlericalism, was at least seen as indigenous. In the republic's more recent travails with Islam, a empathy with Maronites, the dirty war in Algeria and a general official disdain for religion have made the exclusion of Muslimness in the name of Republican laicity particularly natural and emphatic, and Jim Wolfreys' book Republic of Islamophobia offers an impeccable and troubling study of this ideology.
[n11: Jim Wolfreys, Republic of Islamophobia: The Rise of Respectable Racism in France (London, 2018).]
Hence the constant susurration of French media rage against Muslim difference, and the broad-based consensus among liberals that women who wear the niqāb, or Parisian Muslims caught praying together in public places, should be detained by the police.
-Abdal Hakim Murad, "Can liberalism tolerate Islam?" in Traveling Home: Essays on Islam in Europe (Cambridge: The Quilliam Press, 2020), 22-23.
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