Download or read book Rise of French La cit written by Stephen M. Davis and published by Wipf and Stock Publishers. This book was released on 2020-08-07 with total page 241 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Americans are often baffled by France's general indifference to religion and laws forbidding religious symbols in public schools, full-face veils in public places, and even the interdiction of burkinis on French beaches. An understanding of laicite provides insight in beginning to understand France and its people. Laicite has been described as the complete secularization of institutions as a necessity to prevent a return to the Ancien Regime characterized by the union of church and state. To understand the concept of laicite, one must begin in the sixteenth century with the Protestant Reformation and freedom of conscience recognized by the Edict of Nantes in 1598. This has been called the period of incipient laicite in the toleration of Protestantism. The Revocation of the Edict of Nantes in 1685 reestablished the union of the throne and altar, which resulted in persecution of the Huguenots who fought for the principle of the freedom of conscience. French laicite presents a specificity in origin, definition, and evolution which led to the official separation of church and state in 1905. The question in the early twentieth century concerned the Roman Catholic Church's compatibility with democracy. That same question is being asked of Islam in the twenty-first century.
Download or read book Rise of French Laicite written by Stephen M. Davis and published by Wipf and Stock Publishers. This book was released on 2020-08-07 with total page 250 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Americans are often baffled by France’s general indifference to religion and laws forbidding religious symbols in public schools, full-face veils in public places, and even the interdiction of burkinis on French beaches. An understanding of laïcité provides insight in beginning to understand France and its people. Laïcité has been described as the complete secularization of institutions as a necessity to prevent a return to the Ancien Régime characterized by the union of church and state. To understand the concept of laïcité, one must begin in the sixteenth century with the Protestant Reformation and freedom of conscience recognized by the Edict of Nantes in 1598. This has been called the period of incipient laïcité in the toleration of Protestantism. The Revocation of the Edict of Nantes in 1685 reestablished the union of the throne and altar, which resulted in persecution of the Huguenots who fought for the principle of the freedom of conscience. French laïcité presents a specificity in origin, definition, and evolution which led to the official separation of church and state in 1905. The question in the early twentieth century concerned the Roman Catholic Church’s compatibility with democracy. That same question is being asked of Islam in the twenty-first century.
Download or read book Republic of Islamophobia written by James Wolfreys and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2018-05-01 with total page 286 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Why does Islamophobia dominate public debate in France? Islamophobia in France is rising, with Muslims subjected to unprecedented scrutiny of what they wear, eat and say. Championed by Marine Le Pen and drawing on the French colonial legacy, France's 'new secularism' gives racism a respectable veneer. Jim Wolfreys exposes the dynamic driving this intolerance: a society polarized by inequality, and the authoritarian neoliberalism of the French political mainstream. This officially sanctioned Islamophobia risks going unchallenged. It has divided the traditional anti-racist movement and undermined the left's opposition to bigotry. Wolfreys deftly unravels the problems facing those trying to confront today's rise in racism. Republic of Islamophobia illuminates both the uniqueness of France's anti-Muslim backlash and its broader implications for the West.
Download or read book The Republic Unsettled written by Mayanthi L. Fernando and published by Duke University Press. This book was released on 2014-09-19 with total page 513 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In 1989 three Muslim schoolgirls from a Paris suburb refused to remove their Islamic headscarves in class. The headscarf crisis signaled an Islamic revival among the children of North African immigrants; it also ignited an ongoing debate about the place of Muslims within the secular nation-state. Based on ten years of ethnographic research, The Republic Unsettled alternates between an analysis of Muslim French religiosity and the contradictions of French secularism that this emergent religiosity precipitated. Mayanthi L. Fernando explores how Muslim French draw on both Islamic and secular-republican traditions to create novel modes of ethical and political life, reconfiguring those traditions to imagine a new future for France. She also examines how the political discourses, institutions, and laws that constitute French secularism regulate Islam, transforming the Islamic tradition and what it means to be Muslim. Fernando traces how long-standing tensions within secularism and republican citizenship are displaced onto France's Muslims, who, as a result, are rendered illegitimate as political citizens and moral subjects. She argues, ultimately, that the Muslim question is as much about secularism as it is about Islam.
Download or read book Divided Houses written by Caroline C. Ford and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2005 with total page 314 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Divided Houses, Caroline Ford examines how the so-called feminization of religion in France from the French Revolution to the First World War contributed to the formation of a distinctive secular (laïc) republican political culture in France. She also reveals the effect of women's close association with religion on their civil and social status, which gave rise in France to heated debates about the limits of female agency, women's property rights, and women's role in the family and in society. She argues that religious women were often far more than the passive instruments of a male ecclesiastical hierarchy. In showing that these women could dispose of their bodies, souls, and properties in ways that were unimaginable to their secular counterparts, Ford's book obliges one to rethink the categories of tradition and modernity that have structured most thinking about this subject.Ford's book is centered on a set of microhistories and causes célèbres whose narratives are fascinating in and of themselves. They include conflicts within religious orders, the cults of some latter-day female saints, and riveting legal disputes involving women who converted to Catholicism. Perhaps most intriguingly, Ford brings current debates concerning pluralism and cultural difference in France into sharp historical focus. The fact that women have been portrayed as the quintessential carriers of religion ever since France embraced laïcité sheds light on problems faced by the secular French state today as it attempts to regulate religious expression--including emblems of Islam--in the public sphere.
Download or read book Secularism Confronts Islam written by Olivier Roy and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2007 with total page 152 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "The denunciation of fundamentalism in France, embodied in the law against the veil and the deportation of imams, has shifted into a systematic attack on all Muslims and Islam. This hostility is rooted in the belief that Islam cannot be integrated into French - and, consequently, secular and liberal - society. However, as Olivier Roy makes clear in this book, Muslim intellectuals have made it possible for Muslims to live concretely in a secularized world while maintaining their identities as "true believers." They have formulated a language that recognizes two spaces: that of religion and that of secular society." "Roy's rare portrait of the realities of immigrant Muslim life offers a necessary alternative to the popular specter of an "Islamic threat." Supporting his arguments with his extensive research on Islamic history, sociology, and politics, Roy demonstrates the limits of our understanding of contemporary Islamic religious practice in the West and the role of Islam as a
Download or read book Why the French Don t Like Headscarves written by John R. Bowen and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2008-08-24 with total page 303 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This text explains why the French government decided to ban religious clothing from public schools and why the 2004 law, which targeted Islamic headscarves, created such a fury.
Download or read book Critical Republicanism written by Cécile Laborde and published by OUP Oxford. This book was released on 2008-10-09 with total page 397 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The first comprehensive analysis of the philosophical issues raised by the hijab controversy in France, this book also conducts a dialogue between contemporary Anglo-American and French political theory and defends a progressive republican solution to so-called multicultural conflicts in contemporary societies. It critically assesses the official republican philosophy of laïcité which purported to justify the 2004 ban on religious signs in schools. Laïcité is shown to encompass a comprehensive theory of republican citizenship, centered on three ideals: equality (secular neutrality of the public sphere), liberty (individual autonomy and emancipation) and fraternity (civic loyalty to the community of citizens). Challenging official interpretations of laïcité, the book then puts forward a critical republicanism which does not support the hijab ban, yet upholds a revised interpretation of three central republican commitments: secularism, non-domination and civic solidarity. Thus, it articulates a version of secularism which squarely addresses the problem of status quo bias - the fact that Western societies are historically not neutral towards all religions. It also defends a vision of female emancipation which rejects the coercive paternalism inherent in the regulation of religious dress, yet does not leave individuals unaided in the face of religious and secular, patriarchal and ethnocentric domination. Finally, the book outlines a theory of immigrant integration which places the burden of civic integration on basic socio-political institutions, rather than on citizens themselves. Critical republicanism proposes an entirely new approach to the management of religious and cultural pluralism, centred on the pursuit of the progressive ideal of non-domination in existing, non-ideal societies. Oxford Political Theory presents the best new work in contemporary political theory. It is intended to be broad in scope, including original contributions to political philosophy, and also work in applied political theory. The series will contain works of outstanding quality with no restriction as to approach or subject matter. Series Editors: Will Kymlicka, David Miller, and Alan Ryan.
Download or read book Secularism and State Policies Toward Religion written by Ahmet T. Kuru and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2009-04-27 with total page 335 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Comparing policy in America, France, and Turkey, this book analyzes the impact of ideological struggles on public policies toward religion.
Download or read book French Muslims in Perspective written by Joseph Downing and published by Springer. This book was released on 2019-05-24 with total page 295 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: With the largest Muslim population in Western Europe, France has faced a number of critiques in its attempts to assimilate Muslims into an ostensibly secular (but predominantly Catholic) state and society. This book challenges traditional analyses that emphasise the conflict between Muslims and the French state and broader French society, by exploring the intersection of Muslim faith with other identities, as well as the central roles of Muslims in French civil society, politics and the media. The tensions created by attacks on French soil by Islamic State have contributed to growing acceptance of the Islamophobic discourse of Marine Le Pen and her far-right Front National party, and debates about issues such as headscarves and burkinis have garnered worldwide attention. Downing addresses these issues from a new angle, eschewing the traditional us-and-them narrative and offering a more nuanced account based on people’s actual lived experiences. French Muslims in Perspective will be of interest to students and scholars across sociology, politics, international relations, cultural studies, European Studies and French studies, as well as policy makers and practitioners involved in immigration, education, and media.
Download or read book The Politics of the Veil written by Joan Wallach Scott and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2010-08-22 with total page 224 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In 2004, the French government instituted a ban on the wearing of "conspicuous signs" of religious affiliation in public schools. Though the ban applies to everyone, it is aimed at Muslim girls wearing headscarves. Proponents of the law insist it upholds France's values of secular liberalism and regard the headscarf as symbolic of Islam's resistance to modernity. The Politics of the Veil is an explosive refutation of this view, one that bears important implications for us all. Joan Wallach Scott, the renowned pioneer of gender studies, argues that the law is symptomatic of France's failure to integrate its former colonial subjects as full citizens. She examines the long history of racism behind the law as well as the ideological barriers thrown up against Muslim assimilation. She emphasizes the conflicting approaches to sexuality that lie at the heart of the debate--how French supporters of the ban view sexual openness as the standard for normalcy, emancipation, and individuality, and the sexual modesty implicit in the headscarf as proof that Muslims can never become fully French. Scott maintains that the law, far from reconciling religious and ethnic differences, only exacerbates them. She shows how the insistence on homogeneity is no longer feasible for France--or the West in general--and how it creates the very "clash of civilizations" said to be at the root of these tensions. The Politics of the Veil calls for a new vision of community where common ground is found amid our differences, and where the embracing of diversity--not its suppression--is recognized as the best path to social harmony.
Download or read book Integrating Islam written by Jonathan Laurence and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2007-02-01 with total page 365 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Nearly five million Muslims call France home, the vast majority from former French colonies in North Africa. While France has successfully integrated waves of immigrants in the past, this new influx poses a new variety of challenges—much as it does in neighboring European countries. Alarmists view the growing role of Muslims in French society as a form of "reverse colonization"; they believe Muslim political and religious networks seek to undermine European rule of law or that fundamentalists are creating a society entirely separate from the mainstream. Integrating Islam portrays the more complex reality of integration's successes and failures in French politics and society. From intermarriage rates to economic indicators, the authors paint a comprehensive portrait of Muslims in France. Using original research, they devote special attention to the policies developed by successive French governments to encourage integration and discourage extremism. Because of the size of its Muslim population and its universalistic definition of citizenship, France is an especially good test case for the encounter of Islam and the West. Despite serious and sometimes spectacular problems, the authors see a "French Islam" slowly replacing "Islam in France"–in other words, the emergence of a religion and a culture that feels at home in, and is largely at peace with, its host society. Integrating Islam provides readers with a comprehensive view of the state of Muslim integration into French society that cannot be found anywhere else. It is essential reading for students of French politics and those studying the interaction of Islam and the West, as well as the general public.
Download or read book The Politics of Secularism in International Relations written by Elizabeth Shakman Hurd and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2009-01-10 with total page 261 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Conflicts involving religion have returned to the forefront of international relations. And yet political scientists and policymakers have continued to assume that religion has long been privatized in the West. This secularist assumption ignores the contestation surrounding the category of the "secular" in international politics. The Politics of Secularism in International Relations shows why this thinking is flawed, and provides a powerful alternative. Elizabeth Shakman Hurd argues that secularist divisions between religion and politics are not fixed, as commonly assumed, but socially and historically constructed. Examining the philosophical and historical legacy of the secularist traditions that shape European and American approaches to global politics, she shows why this matters for contemporary international relations, and in particular for two critical relationships: the United States and Iran, and the European Union and Turkey. The Politics of Secularism in International Relations develops a new approach to religion and international relations that challenges realist, liberal, and constructivist assumptions that religion has been excluded from politics in the West. The first book to consider secularism as a form of political authority in its own right, it describes two forms of secularism and their far-reaching global consequences.
Download or read book The Twilight Struggle written by Hal Brands and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2022-01-01 with total page 329 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A leading historian's guide to great-power competition, as told through America's successes and failures in the Cold War "There is an undeniable ease and fluidity to Mr. Brands's narrative, and his use of Cold War archives is impressive."--A. Wess Mitchell, Wall Street Journal "If you want to know how America can win today's rivalries with Russia and China, read this book about how it triumphed in another twilight struggle: the Cold War."--Stephen J. Hadley, national security adviser to President George W. Bush America is entering an era of long-term great power competition with China and Russia. In this innovative and illuminating book, Hal Brands, a leading historian and former Pentagon adviser, argues that America should look to the history of the Cold War for lessons on how to succeed in great-power rivalry today.
Download or read book Modern France written by Vanessa R. Schwartz and published by OUP USA. This book was released on 2011-10-10 with total page 153 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The French Revolution, politics and the modern nation -- French and the civilizing mission -- Paris and magnetic appeal -- France stirs up the melting pot -- France hurtles into the future.
Download or read book Persecution Toleration written by Noel D. Johnson and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2019-02-14 with total page 369 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this book, Noel D. Johnson and Mark Koyama tackle the question: how does religious liberty develop?
Download or read book A Secular Age written by Charles Taylor and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2018-09-17 with total page 889 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The place of religion in society has changed profoundly in the last few centuries, particularly in the West. In what will be a defining book for our time, Taylor takes up the question of what these changes mean, and what, precisely, happens when a society becomes one in which faith is only one human possibility among others.
