Recognizing the political consequences for Europe of Muslim immigration, and relying on a novel identification strategy, this paper investigates why Muslim assimilation into French cultural norms is incomplete, and provides experimental and survey evidence that reveals the low expected payoffs that Muslim immigrants in France receive for full assimilation. While the data show that rooted French people initially distrust Muslims (compared to a matched set of Christians)  in part due to their unwillingness to fully assimilate, the real source of Muslim reluctance to fully assimilate is their perception that in anonymous transactions (i.e., through French institutions) they will always be perceived as foreign and face discrimination.

Workshop paper is available to Stanford affiliates upon request by email to khaley@stanford.edu

David Laitin is the James T. Watkins IV and Elise V. Watkins Professor of Political Science at Stanford University. He received his B.A. in Political Science from Swarthmore College and his Ph.D. in Political Science from the University of California, Berkeley. His research interests include comparative politics, nation-state formation, ethnic conflict, and religion. Among his publications are Politics, Language and Thought: The Somali Experience (1977), Hegemony and Culture: Politics and Religious Change among the Yoruba (1986), Language Repertoires and State Construction in Africa (1992), Identity in Formation: The Russian-Speaking Populations in the Near Abroad (1998), and Nations, States and Violence (2007). Prof. Laitin has been a recipient of fellowships from the Howard Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation, the Guggenheim Foundation, and the Russell Sage Foundation. He is an elected member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the National Academy of Sciences.

Event Summary

Professor Laitin opens the seminar by providing background on the research project that motivated the paper. This examined: whether Muslim immigrants in France faced unique social and economic barriers; the source of the barriers; and whether French republicanism exacerbated or lessened the barriers. He provides a brief summary of studies examining the first and third points, but the focus of his talk was on the second point: if there are higher barriers for Muslims, who is building them?

Professor Laitin then describes the study his research team carried out on a Senegalese population in France for 15 years, drawing on equal-sized groups of Muslims and Christians from similar social and economic conditions. Through a series of games and surveys, the team observed that within Senegalese Muslims in France, certain groups assimilate more than others, and those that assimilate less are treated worse by French individuals and institutions. Many of the Muslims expected to be treated less generously by French individuals, and reported more experiences of discrimination from French institutions, which Professor Laitin's team found was more difficult to overcome than individual discrimination. This group also exhibited stronger financial ties (measured by investments and remittances sent to Senegal from France) and emotional ties (measured by desire to be buried in Senegal rather than France after death). The results of the study are used to provide a series of decision rules and reward matrixes for incoming Senegalese Muslims, including the likelihood of penalties and rewards for assimilation, such as giving children French names.

During a discussion period following the presentation, such questions were raised as: Do the results of the study have more to do with the respondents being Muslim, or simply not being French - or, do other ethnic or religious groups have the same problems assimilating into French Catholic society? Is the example of preferences for burial locations more about ties to Senegal than lack of ties to France? How much of the effect is due to being black rather than Muslim? Will the results of the study change as the Muslim population in France increases? What has been the reception in France to the prohibition of collecting ethnographic data? Why is "incomplete assimilation" framed as a "response" to the discrimination - is it a choice or is it just the way things are? Where does the fault lie in the discrimination reported in the survey?

Why in the last ten years an increasing number of ethnic Germans have converted to Islam in Salafi mosques or, after converting elsewhere, have chosen to attend these famously conservative houses of worship? Most scholars explain the spread of Salafism in Europe primarily as a social protest engaged in by second- and third-generation immigrant Muslims who feel marginalized from mainstream society. This article argues instead that Salafism can best be understood as a fundamentalist religious movement which satisfies individuals’ spiritual, psychological, and sociological needs. It is not so different from other fundamentalisms, particularly in the attraction it holds for converts. Among the most attractive aspects for newcomers is Salafism’s anti-culturalist and anti-traditionalist bent, which allows ethnic Germans to move past their racialized assumptions about Muslims and embrace Islam without necessarily embracing immigrant Muslims. Unlike the great majority of mosques in Germany, which function as ethnic and national community centers, Salafi mosques create unique settings where piety— rather than ethnicity— defines belonging.

Esra Özyürek, is Associate Professor of Anthropology at the University of California – San Diego. She received her Ph.D. from the University of Michigan. Her work focuses on how politics, religion, and social memory shape and transform each other in contemporary Turkey and Germany. Her earlier work, Nostalgia for the Modern: State Secularism and Everyday Politics in Turkey (Duke Univ. Press, 2006), focused on the transformation of state secularism as Turkey moved from from the top-down modernization project of the 1930s to market based modernization in the 1990s. Currently she is undertaking a comparative ethnographic study of conversion to religious minorities, namely converts to Islam in Germany and to Christianity in Turkey. 

Co-sponsored by The Abbasi Program in Islamic Studies.

Workshop papers are available to Stanford affiliates upon request by email to  abbasiprogram@stanford.edu.

Workshop papers are available to Stanford affiliates upon request by email to khaley@stanford.edu.

Abstract: This paper examines the contemporary Islamic revival in France, focusing on the emergence of a distinctive Muslim French identity and concomitant political imagination. Asserting their right to be piously and visibly Muslim in the public sphere, Muslim French revivalists reconfigure the relationship between Frenchness and Muslimness. In so doing, they imagine new ways of organizing the national polity, envisioning a novel relationship between minority ‘difference’ and citizenship that refuses to constrain Muslimness to the space of alterity.

Mayanthi Fernando is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at the University of California-Santa Cruz. She received her B.A. from Harvard University, and her M.A. and Ph.D. from the University of Chicago. Her research interests include anthropology of Islam, politics and secularism, modernity and difference, postcolonial Britain and France, anthropology of freedom, anthropology of Western Europe, and multiculturalism. She is currently working on a book manuscript tentatively titled On The Muslim Question: Anxieties of the Secular Republic, which analyzes the forms of subjectivity, religiosity, and political community constituted by Muslim French revivalists, the legal, political, and institutional practices that comprise laïcité, and the ways in which these practices constrain pious Muslims, who are often caught in the structural and discursive tensions endemic to laïcité. Among her publications are “Reconfiguring Freedom: Muslim Piety and the Limits of Secular Law and Public Discourse in France” (2010), “Exceptional Citizens: Secular Muslim Women and the Politics of Difference in France” (2009), and “The Republic’s ‘Second Religion’: Recognizing Islam in France” (2005).

Co-sponsored by the Abbasi Program in Islamic Studies

Joint Africa Table/CDDRL seminar

Andrew M. Mwenda is the founder,  Strategy and Editorial Director (SED) of The Independent Publications Limited, publishers of The Independent, East Africa’s leading current affairs newsmagazine. An admirer of Socrates and Frederick Von Hayek, he is an activist, a journalist, a columnist, a presenter of a prime time daily radio talk-show and a businessman.

Named by Foreign Policy among the Top 100 Global Thinkers in 2010, Mwenda was nominated by the World Economic Forum as a Young Global Leader in 2008 and by the Africa Study Institute as an Archbishop Tutu fellow, a program for “Africa’s future leaders”. He has also won the International Press Freedom Award from the Committee to Protect Journalists “in tribute to his commitment to a free press in Uganda and the whole world” and the Outstanding Alumni Award from the British Council.

The unprecedented rapid rate of scientific progress is creating new opportunities for transnational criminal and terrorist organizations to exploit advances in technology for unintended nefarious purposes. While much research has been dedicated on the common cyber security threats of today, little if any study has been devoted to next generation forms of technological crime and terrorism.

This discussion will provide an engaging and entertaining futurist perspective on the effects technological progress on crime, policing and national security. Specific topics to be covered include the criminal and terrorist implications of emerging technologies such as robotics, nanotechnology, artificial intelligence, synthetic biology, the human genome, virtual worlds, the social data revolution and ubiquitous computing.

Speaker Biography: Marc Goodman is a global thinker, writer and consultant focused on the disruptive impact of advancing technologies on security, business and international affairs.  Over the past twenty years, he has built his expertise in next generation security threats such as cyber crime and cyber terrorism working with organizations such as Interpol, the United Nations, NATO, the Los Angeles Police Department and the U.S. Government.  Marc provides a front seat view into the digital underground and insights into the emerging technological, geopolitical, and security trends shaping our common future.

Mr. Goodman frequently advises industry leaders, security executives and global policy makers on transnational cyber risk and intelligence and founded the Future Crimes Institute to inspire and educate others on the security implications of newly emerging technologies.  In addition, Mr. Goodman serves as the Chair for Policy, Law and Ethics at Silicon Valley’s Singularity University, a NASA and Google sponsored educational venture dedicated to using advanced science and technology to address humanity’s grand challenges. 

Joan Casanovas will provide an analysis of the evolution of the current Spanish economic crisis and the way this crisis is presented by the media. The focus will be on Spain's financial solvency and that of its financial institutions, as seen by someone who has been immersed in the situation from the outset.

A recent article about Spain's economic crisis can be found in the Oct. 20th NY Times article, "As Spain Faces a Possible Recession, Criticism of Its Central Bank is Growing"

The RSVP deadline has been extended to Monday, April 30th.