France and the Danger of the “Islamic Left”

For Macron, who appears to be heading straight ahead of next year’s presidential election, the challenge is broader and discursive. In a speech last October, he said that the alienation felt by some French citizens of Arab or African descent was partly a result of many seeing “their identity through post-colonial or anti-colonial discourse,” referring to the academic, social and cultural theories he claims. It is imported to France from the United States. These theories, he and some of his political allies argue, present visions of an “identity” of society that are alien and destructive to French secular, militant, and institutionalized society. And further, he announced an investigation into the “Islamic left” in French universities. “I think the Islamic left is eating away at our society as a whole, and universities are not immune and they are part of our society,” Vidal said last weekend on CNews, a popular TV channel on the right. United Academics “always view everything through the prism of their will to divide, fracture, and pinpoint the enemy precisely.” The backlash inside France was stinging. On Saturday, nearly 600 university professors called for Vidal to resign on charges of “defaming a profession” and engaging in more familiar rhetoric in countries experiencing declining democracies. A statement issued by an organization representing the presidents of French universities declared that “the Islamist left is not a correct concept but rather a false one. We shall try in vain to provide a hint even for a scientific definition. It should be left, if not only to CNews, and then more broadly to the extreme right that propagated it.” The French for Scientific Research, the public institution that Vidal commissioned to conduct the investigation, issued a statement condemning any “attempts to delegitimize various fields of research, such as post-colonial studies, cross-studies and research on race.” An editorial in Le Monde described the use of the “Islamic left” as “dangerous” and criticized Vidal for seeking distraction at a time of public health crisis. Perhaps Vidal is trying to “make people forget her silence about the terrible health crisis that is shaking universities and forcing students to queue in front of food banks,” noted the French daily, asking about “her ability to shoulder her responsibilities in facing the main issue of the time.” Macron’s office sought to distance itself from the controversy, with the speaker insisting midweek on “the absolute president’s commitment to the independence of academic researchers”. But Macron is still a key participant in a much larger struggle. “The seemingly esoteric conflict around social science theories – which has made the front page of at least three of the major French newspapers in recent days – points to a larger cultural war in France that has in the past year been punctuated by mass protests against racism, police violence, and competing visions of feminism, And the explosive discussions about Islam and Islam, “the New York Times noted last week. It is a culture war that reverberates in other parts of the world, too. Illiberal nationalist governments, from Hungary to Turkey to India, have targeted some academic institutions and, in some cases, imposed censorship regimes. In the United States, the political right has spent years grumbling about the cultured left. Anger at the “Islamist left” may be an overt French concern, but it can already be heard in the American conversation, as far-right commentators continue to raise concerns about incursions into open borders to refugees at the very moment they criticize against the supposed leftists “abolish the culture” in Elite universities and media institutions, and some critics likened the accusation of the “Islamic left” to “Judaism Bolshevik” a century ago. This anti-Semitic slander portrays the Jewish communities in Europe as a dangerous and destructive fifth column, foreshadowing the next horrific genocide. The current term highlights, at best, “the difficulty of the French state in thinking of itself as a state within a multicultural society, Sarah Mazouz, a sociologist at CNRS, to The Times.” She added that the invocation of the “Islamic left” was aimed at “delegitimizing” On new thinking about race, gender, and other topics, “so that there is no debate.” French scholars have criticized both the term’s chilling effect, as well as its gross mis-characterization of areas of academic research in sight. This was already evident in Fidel’s somewhat confused speech – In an interview, the minister appeared to link the presence of the Confederate flag waving a Trump supporter in the US Capitol to the prevalence of left-wing cultural studies in American universities. “We,” Audrey Celestine, a lecturer in political sociology and American studies at the University of Lille, told MediaPart journalist Lucy Delaporte, Dealing with a form of McCarthyism: “I’m all for an argument, but with people who read the books they talk about.”