Forging a voice in ‘France’s high-rise hell’

Daniel Strieff Reporter • Profile • E-mail

CLICHY-SOUS-BOIS, France — In the United States, the word “suburb” may conjure up images of bedroom communities with neat, tree-lined streets and good schools — a haven from the hustle and flow of city life. Not so in France.

This Paris suburb (banlieue), a tinderbox of crime, sky-high youth unemployment and minority disaffection, spectacularly burst into flames last fall as riots gripped hundreds of ghettoes across France. Unrest, though less severe, again plagued Paris suburbs last week.

Among other issues, the fury in the streets among the mostly Muslim youth has underscored the lack of political representation for this growing segment of French society.

The National Intelligence Council estimates that Western Europe's Muslim population, which is now as high as 20 million, will more than double by 2025. Coupled with a graying indigenous population, that would mean the continent's largest population shift in centuries.

France has the largest Muslim population in Western Europe at 6 million (out of a population of around 60 million), although precise figures are hard to come by because the state officially does not tally ethnicity or religion. Yet, none of the 555 deputies in the French National Assembly is Muslim.

Making a difference
The stakes are high. The International Crisis Group, a Brussels-based think tank, warns that Islamic radicalism could exploit a power vacuum in the Muslim community.

“[I]t is the exhaustion of political Islamism, not its radicalization, that explains much of the violence, and it is the depoliticization of young Muslims ... that ought to be cause for worry,” the group wrote in a report this year.

“Muslim immigrant groups are not participating in French politics,” Robert Malley, the think tank’s Middle East and North African program director, said upon the report's release. “Political frustration is assuming a violent expression, taking the form of jihadi Salafism and riots, and is feeding off precarious social conditions, in terms of employment and housing, social discrimination and the stigmatization of Islam.”

Here in the bleak projects of Clichy-sous-Bois, ten miles from central Paris but a world apart from “the City of Lights,” young people are more likely to wear NBA and NFL jerseys than traditional Islamic garb.

And like other suburbs, only a fraction of the town's 28,000 residents is registered to vote — a fact that Samir Mihi, an Algerian-born youth sports instructor, wants to change.

David Friedman / MSNBC.com Samir Mihi is spearheading a grassroots effort to register voters in deprived areas in France.

In the wake of the riots, Mihi responded to residents’ queries about how to make a difference by establishing Association Collectif Liberte Egalite Fraternite Ensemble Unis, a nonreligious organization that is traveling to hardscrabble towns across the country to encourage voter registration.

“They said, ‘How can we come and register to vote?’ So the idea actually came from them, not from me,” Mihi, 28, said during an interview in the shadow of the town’s small, stately Hotel de Ville, just steps away from the housing projects that some media outlets have called “France’s high-rise hell.”

The movement was born out of desperation over the paucity of local services for residents of the suburbs. Clichy-sous-Bois, like many other suburbs, is poorly connected to France's otherwise excellent public transport system. The town has just one post office and no bank, Mihi said.

In just the first few weeks of action, Mihi’s efforts registered nearly 1,000 voters in Clichy-sous-Bois alone.

“This is a small community. That’s a lot!” he said.

The fatwa that backfired
Mihi's small successes contrast with the struggles of the country's largest Islamic organization.

As the riots raged last autumn, the Union des Organisations Islamiques de France declared the unrest incompatible with Islam and demanded any Muslims involved in the destruction to stop immediately.

The UOIF was assailed on all sides. The influential head of the Paris mosque — who had his car pelted with stones when he visited a riot-hit town to console residents — said the edict unfairly assumed the riots had a religious, rather than a socioeconomic, hue. The media pointed out the UOIF failed to mention that the riots were in violation of France's laws, never mind Islam's. And, by all accounts, the rioters ignored it.

The incident highlighted the difficulties as Muslims here try to balance religion, class and race to carve out a place for themselves in France's crowded political system.

The UOIF is the dominant voice in the French Council for the Muslim Faith, which was established in 2003 as an interlocutor between Muslims and the French government. The Council's head, however, is the more moderate Dalil Boubakeur, the director of the Algerian government-financed Paris Grand Mosque and an associate of President Jacques Chirac.

David Friedman / MSNBC.com Boubaker El Hadj Amor, the treasurer and a spokesman for the Union des Organisations Islamiques de France.

Ever since its founding, the Council has been plagued by internal rifts and power struggles, as well as charges that it does not reflect the interests of the vast majority of Muslims in France.

UOIF Treasurer Boubaker El Hadj Amor wants to put a moderate face on his organization, which has ties to the fundamentalist Muslim Brotherhood, a transnational group that calls for the Islamization of society from the grassroots upward.

“This is a fact: most Muslims are moderate and fully accept France,” he said during an interview on the sidelines of the UOIF’s annual conference last month in Le Bourget, outside Paris.

“The issue now is how to live as a Muslim in France without the problems that have come up. The problem is how to live together,” he said.

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