Riots in Paris: What’s religion got to do with it?

Somewhere, a fiddle is playing

When the sun sets, the violence begins. Burning cars, balaclava-clad youth battling police (sometimes with real bullets), and an increasing sense of hopelessness cover neighborhoods long afflicted with high unemployment. It could be the West Bank, but this time the unrest is happening in the French working-class neighborhoods that are home to immigrant populations who have been excluded (or have excluded themselves, as some critics charge) from the relative affluence of French life. “The deep problem is the sentiment of exclusion from the social and economic game,” explains Laurent Mucchielli, director of the Center for Sociological Research on Law and Penal Institutions near Paris. “The riots are of the same nature as in past years, which reminds us that the problems haven’t been solved.” While tensions in these areas have been simmering for years, the escalation into violence started when Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy visited the Clichy-sous-Bous region with media in tow, pledging a “war without mercy” on street crime (taking a page from the book of Ariel Sharon?). Local youths, who have long complained about being harassed by police, responded by pelting him with stones and bottles. Days later, when two immigrant youth fleeing a police identity check were electrocuted when hiding in a power relay station, the crowds grew more defiant. The next several days were followed by a series of escalations: police roundups, burnings of hundreds of cars, and the spreading of violence to other cities. Imams in the area had some success in calling for restraint among the Muslim population (urging, for example, that mothers keep their teenagers at home after sunset), but they lost control when a teargas grenade struck a mosque on Sunday. French politicians such as Interior Minister Dominque de Villepin appealed for calm (President Chirac didn’t commment until the fighting was nearly a week old), but even de Villepin’s valiant opposition of the Iraq war hasn’t been able to give his pleas for calm more weight among France’s restive Muslim populations. While right-wing politicians in France (most notably the Le Pen family and the National Front party) are using the riots to strengthen their anti-Muslim stances, the truth is that the reasons for the unrest are the same as those that caused riots in many Western cities over the past few decades. Poor or immigrant communities have not been successfully integrated into the larger society (and in this case, both French and immigrant societies share the blame), unemployment gives rise to crime that compounds the misery of the population, and mistrust between authorities and those in the ghettos snowballs into confrontation. While religious ideology may have a role in other types of violence (i.e, al-Qaida), in this case it just happens to be the faith of the disenfranchised population. Those seeking a solution to the problem would be more effective by looking deeper than that.

Paris Is Burning: Religion Has A Lot To Do With It – The Altmuslim discussion on the riots in France is challenging. I agree that the riots themselves have little to do with Islam, any more than the Watts riots had anything to do with Christianity. The resort to violence to express outrage over legitimate grievances, however, must be justified by the requirements of the just war theory, which exists in one form or another in all religions and, in my opinion, apply to both domestic and international violence. (Read more…)

Shahed Amanullah is editor-in-chief of altmuslim.com.