University Diaries » “[The French left has] refused to get into any questions of security, immigration or Islam. Every time those topics come up, they say, ‘Those are right-wing topics.’ So people say to themselves, ‘OK, then I’m on the right.’”

‘Everyone was citing a survey from 2020 which suggested that 57 percent of young Muslims believed that the law of God was superior to the law of the French Republic.‘

Results like these are kinda funny, if you ask ol’ UD. I mean, at the gathering of French Muslim intellectuals and secular French intellectuals described in this NYT essay (the essay is about the increasingly popular French political right), somebody cites this numerical result, and quite a few Muslim attendees get all huffy. One of them walks out.

Yet how big a deal, really, is the result? After you draw a shocked breath, do you pause to ask how this belief is liable, in most cases, to play out in actual civic life? A lot of religious people, if you asked them pointblank, would probably say they feel like this – that divine trumps secular law. Why do you assume this means that they would fail to obey secular law if they live in a secular state? How often are they compelled to choose between the two? To take an example I’ve talked to death on this blog – The French have with remarkable success, far as I can tell, imposed a burqa ban. Nobody seems too bent out of shape about it. Most even marginally rational people know that they will have to make some concessions when their religious enthusiasms hit hard against the rule of law in a non-theocracy.

************

I’ve drawn the comment in my headline from the same essay.

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Notes of a Neophyte

Stephen Karlson Says:
March 31st, 2022 at 8:54PM

Do you remember, years ago, when segregationists thought denouncing civil rights advocates as “communist” based on a potted understanding of proletarian internationalism backfired, with more than a few of those advocates coming out as communist and proud?

Same dynamic at work in France, but in the opposite direction.

The extension to Trumpianism is straightforward.

TAFKAU Says:
April 1st, 2022 at 3:54AM

I’m surprised it’s just 57%. I mean, if you’re religiously observant, how can you *not* believe that God’s law is superior to secular law? God is the creator and, presumably, can shut the whole project down if He has a mind to. The government can sentence you to prison; God can send you to Hell. I live in the South and I’m guessing that the same question, if asked down here (at least outside of the big cities), would elicit a far stronger margin for God over government. I don’t know a lot about France, but it seems to me that the 57% figure should, if anything, be regarded as great news for the secular state: fully 43% of Muslims regard French law as superior to Islamic law or don’t have an opinion on the subject. If you add that number to the sizable percentage who reflexively answer that God’s law is superior but don’t plan to do anything about it, it seems to me that you’re in a pretty good situation. It’s a shame that France’s political culture has grown so toxic that people are unable to understand this.

Margaret Soltan Says:
April 1st, 2022 at 7:51AM

TAFKAU: Yes, yes, and yes.

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