International Journal on Criminology Volume 7, Number 2, Spring 2020 | Page 122

Underestimating the Political Dimension in Urban and Geopolitical Violence
sell any object indifferently, as is the case for many Moroccan convenience stores.
Furthermore, and this is my key counterargument, this kind of reductionism
is used to explain a lack of integration through the refusal to admit this “fact of
being a Muslim,” despite the fact that other work, such as that by Daniel Lefeuvre
(2006, 199; 2008, 155) clearly demonstrates for example that the rejection of the
Italians, Belgians, and Poles from the late nineteenth and to the mid-twentieth
centuries was far more virulent in style, and far more xenophobic than racist in
the sense that it was not a question of racial supremacy but of a refusal to see the
other take up space. However, Lefeuvre’s work fails to consider the specific nature
of immigrant motivations (their speciation), in particular, whether or not they
agree to alter some of their traditions—as in the case of the Christian and Jewish
traditions—in order to better integrate into another shared history, notably one
that is secular and Republican.
To that end, we will return to the work of Vincent Geisser, who reiterates
his reductionism of the “essence of Islam” in relation to the issue of the Muslim
veil. Here he lambasts the protests of certain “high-profile” individuals and uses the
concept of a“call to order” developed by Daniel Lindenberg to characterize a certain
type of recall to the values of the French Republic, which in Lindenberg’s view
constitutes a new reaction (Lindenberg 2002, 13–14). On the controversy over the
Muslim veil, which began in 1989, Geisser thus writes:
At the time, a number of intellectuals with a high media profile,
including Élisabeth Badinter, Régis Debray, Alain Finkielkraut,
Elisabeth de Fontenay, and Catherine Kintzler, had tried to call to
order the socialist government by playing on the fear of Islam and
drawing on all the orientalist clichés of the subjugation of the Muslim
woman ( ... ) (Geisser 2003, 18).
Notably, the author fails to specify that such a call, which he immediately
charges with Islamophobia, was based on an almost universally uncontested
report from the Stasi commission concluding that the overt demand to wear the
so-called Muslim veil in schools had a political, and not simply a religious impact.
And in any case, this latter aspect totally contradicts the secular (and not secularist)
spirit of the Republican school, which is essentially based, at least formally, on
an axiological neutrality that cannot be ignored in any evaluation.
It is also notable that the author again recognizes the “essence of Islam” in
the wearing of the veil, which is highly questionable—for one can be a Muslim
woman without wearing a veil—and systematically presents it as being impossible
to equate this symbol to “female submission” (Geisser 2003, 31). This would
be admissible without the author’s systematic use of the negative, which amounts
to ignoring the fact that in a certain number of cases, identified by the Stasi commission,
wearing the veil was equated to oppression by these members because it
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