No reasonable person would claim that the integration of Muslims into western societies is without problems. As the team of social scientists behind Why Muslim Integration Fails in Christian-Heritage Societies reports, 43 per cent of people interviewed in a poll for the newspaper Le Figaro in 2012 considered that the country’s Muslim community constituted a “menace to the identity of France”, while in a German survey conducted in 2013 51 per cent thought Islam posed a threat to their way of life. That year, of a thousand 18- to 24-year-olds in Britain interviewed by Radio 1, 27 per cent said they did not trust Muslims (compared with 16 per cent concerning Hindus or Sikhs, 15 per cent for Jews, 13 per cent for Buddhists and 12 per cent for Christians).
Disentangling the complex of attitudes behind such findings is the project of Claire Adida, David Laitin and Marie-Anne Valfort in this book — no easy task in the case of the French, among whom most of the research was undertaken. France’s culture of laïcité, a type of radical public secularism with roots in the absolutism of the ancien régime and the anticlerical campaigns that followed the revolution, means that the investigation of faith and religious practice poses methodological challenges far greater than would be met in a more explicitly pluralist society such as the US or even Britain, where ethnic backgrounds and public religiosity are better understood and celebrated. As the authors explain, French republican ideology has no interest in “knowing the ethnic past of any of its citizens”, an attitude that applies — a fortiori — to their religious beliefs or backgrounds.
The idea of “equality through invisibility” is partly a consequence of the shame at the treatment of Jews under the Vichy régime that “republicans do not let their nation forget”. A 1978 law that remains in force, with some amendments, prohibits the collection or processing of data that reveal a person’s racial or ethnic origins, while class actions, common in the US, are not recognised under the French law of torts. Halde (La Haute Autorité de lutte contre les discriminations et pour l’égalité), the state-funded anti-discrimination body that existed from 2005 to 2011, was unable to establish general trends regarding discrimination based on ethnicity due to lack of data, leaving its lawyers to deal with individual cases without supplying material pointing to general trends.