France

October 2, 2015

Studying the practice of prayer worldwide

During “Why Prayer?,” the NDSP capstone conference, grantees Fareen Parvez, Shira Gabriel, and Ebenezer Obadare had a chance to sit down and discuss their research in France, the United States, and Nigeria.

Fareen Parvez, Assistant Professor of Sociology at University of Massachusetts Amherst, discusses her research on Muslim women in France.

Shira Gabriel, Associate Professor of Psychology at State University of New York at Buffalo, talks about her work on prayer and cognition.

Ebenezer Obadare, Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of Kansas, describes what he means by the phrase “charismatic Islam.”

August 24, 2015

Salafi Muslim Women in France and "Je suis Charlie"

Recently, New Directions in the Study of Prayer grantee Fareen Parvez wrote for the Council for European Studies’ CritCom on the experience of Salafi Muslim women in France, particularly in the wake of the attacks on Charlie Hebdo in January 2015. Lyon, where Parvez did her fieldwork, has been a center for political satire since the early 1800s and the rise of the famous puppet character Guignol. Parvez draws a distinction between Guignol and other satirical works that targeted privileged classes (including Catholics) and more recent satire that has targeted underprivileged minorities, like French Muslims. She offers the example of Salafi Muslim women in Lyon, who are prevented from taking part in public life, due in large part to the discrimination they face since laws banning headscarves and burqas were passed over the last decade. With this historical context in mind, Parvez problematizes the popular expression of solidarity, “Je suis Charlie”:

[T]he implications of the slogan “je suis Charlie” are not as straightforward as they are made to appear. To say “je suis Charlie” is not only to denounce the killings and express one’s sympathy with the victims and their societies. It is not only to show one’s support for protected speech and the use of satire. Rather, it simultaneously has the effect of dismissing and invalidating the persistent reality of aggression, harassment, and political and economic exclusions that have been plaguing French Muslims, especially women among the unemployed working-class. Furthermore, it ignores the history of satire and perverts its logic by prodding and provoking those without social power—those who are excluded from public space and denied various dignities of citizenship.

You can read the full article here.

December 10, 2014

Reciting the Quran in the Urban Periphery

One of the practices I’ve regularly participated in during my ethnography of French, working-class, Salafist women is Quranic memorization and recitation. Quranic reading circles are common among women of many mosque communities. Recitation is linked to prayer because reciting chapters and verses from the Quran is part of the required daily prayers (salat) as well as to invocations, such as prayers for protection or healing. For women, reading and memorizing chapters of the Quran, as opposed to salat, is unrestricted: they may do it with or without the hijab, and they may do so regardless of menstruation. To some extent, these factors made our sessions more relaxed and intimate, despite the immense effort and work that reading and memorization demanded.

Beginning courses and study circles in my field site at the urban periphery of Lyon tend to focus on basic literacy. More advanced projects focus on the art of tajwīd, or recitatio­n that follows specific forms of articulation, pauses, and comportment, and is thought to emulate the Prophet’s own practices. Our mosque teacher had said that tajwīd is not obligatory, but it is obligatory to read the Quran correctly (i.e. with no mistakes in pronouncing the Arabic letters). Incorrect reading and recitation could significantly alter the meaning of the verses and in turn, the content of one’s prayers.

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March 24, 2014

French Business Bans Prayer Rooms in Bid to Uphold Secularism

French businessman Jean-Luc Petithuguenin employs more than 4000 staff, comprising 52 different nationalities, in his recycling business located in Seine-Saint Denis, the immigrant and Muslim heart of Paris.

The politically active CEO of Paprec, which counts 50 factories across France, has come up with a novel way of responding to rising political and religious extremism in France: a charter of secularism (laïcité) in his workplace. The charter, which was signed unanimously by staff and management, says it is the “duty of the employee to remain neutral when it comes to religion.” “Secularism at the company guarantees employees a common and shared reference, favoring cohesion of the company, respect for diversity and collective harmony…the wearing of all signs or clothing by which staff ostensibly manifest religious affiliation is not authorized,” the charter says.

In practice, that means banning visible signs of religious belief—such as the Muslim headscarf, known as the hijab—as well as prayer rooms.

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August 5, 2013

Street Prayer, Ramadan, and the Burqa: Secularism à la Française

France may have gone on holidays for the summer but public disquiet about laws banning street prayer by Muslims, and the full-face covering veil known as the niqab or burqa, has not abated.

On the eve of the traditional July vacation departure, far-right National Front leader Marine Le Pen received a burst of publicity as the European Union parliament voted to strip her legal immunity.

The decision paves the way for a long-awaited prosecution in France of the extremist politician, who is also a Member of the European Parliament, on charges of racial hatred.

In 2010 Le Pen notoriously compared Muslims praying in French streets—outlawed since 2011 under laws brought in by former president Nicolas Sarkozy—to the Nazi occupation.

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April 15, 2013

Supplications and Islamic Reformism

During my fieldwork in Lyon, France, and its working-class urban periphery, I heard a refrain among Muslims and non-Muslims alike about the “superficiality” of reformist (in this case, Salafist) concerns: among others, their concern over the details of prayer, from body positioning to length of time spent in prayer. I eventually lost track of how many times I heard this common sentiment, and over time, I learned the deep inaccuracy of this view. This isn’t particularly surprising, given the global (mis)perceptions of reformist movements as both troubling and homogenous. I use “reformism” here as employed by Osella and Osella as “…projects whose specific focus is the bringing into line of religious beliefs and practices with the core foundations of Islam, by avoiding and purging out innovation, accretion and the intrusion of ‘local custom’…”. 

A category of Islamic prayer whose centrality to the faith I began to understand while spending time with reformist women in Lyon’s periphery is duas, or supplications. These are distinct from the daily obligatory salat. According to the Prophet’s teachings, they constitute a form of worship and express one’s ultimate humility vis-à-vis her Creator. As I saw among my companions in the field, duas are crucial to questions of avoiding shirk (associating other powers or entities with God); having a direct, unmediated relationship to God; and perfecting one’s faith. These are central concerns among reformist women.

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March 19, 2013

Public Prayer in France, a Vexed Question in the Cradle of Revolution

Why can some believers pray in the street in France, the home of revolution and laïcité or strong state-enforced secularism, while others are forbidden?

As I wrote in my opinion column for Quartz, a new all-digital news platform published by Atlantic Media, publishers of The Atlantic Monthly, the principle of separation of church and state seems to apply differently depending on your religion.

If you are bowing down in the direction of Mecca, and uttering your daily prayers as a devout Muslim in a big assembly in a Paris street, you can risk arrest. 

But a radical group of breakaway Catholics is using prayer, and specifically prayers like the Rosary, to protest in the French street against moves to legalize gay marriage. They had legal permits to assemble in a public demonstration of opposition to attempts to give same-sex couples the right to marry. So far they have done so without any attempts by police or the executive arm of President Francois Hollande’s government to stop them. 

In contrast, Muslims lacking Mosques or perhaps in some cases wanting to challenge deep-seated public suspicion about France’s second religion after Catholicism have since 2011 had to adjust to a Nicolas Sarkozy-imposed edict pushing them off the streets.

Yet as one French law student argued in a Twitter response to my article, ‘‘there is a difference between praying one day for a cause and praying everyday in the street like it’s a mosque, don’t you think?’’

The line between acceptable public displays of religion, secularism, and illegality is not always a clear one in France. Prayer is a flash-point for deep-seated views about who has the right to express their devotion and difference in the public square.