The Specificity of Scandal: Halal, Handshakes and Sociability in France and the Netherlands.
John R Bowen, January 2018
Argument:
First, I want to trace the importance of categories of public space and peoplehood to French practices of policing religion and laïcité. I then look more closely at the State’s approach to one issue, namely that of producing halal food, meaning food that is permissible Muslims. This approach involves both top-down control and, from time to time,scandals involving the public presence of halal-only food shops.
Second, to better highlight the specificity of halal scandals in France I turn very briefly to the Netherlands, where scandals concern freedom—vrijheid—and not the strong spatial policing that we will have seen in the French case. Indeed, the Dutch demarcation of space would have welcomed the halal food shops.
[I] France: Public Space and the People
Look at any issue in France regarding pluralism and the notion of “public” will come up, in different shades. Controversies take on heightened tension when they regard the public school, with its near-unique position as universal socializing agent. State venues are also “public” in the sense of incarnating the People—even if they might be tightly closed off to the public. The broader sense of “in public”, whether meaning on the street or in a café, infuses sentiments and laws about what people should or should not do “in public” meaning civic publicness, a common life. The fluidity of meanings attached to “public” is an essential feature of its use in political and policy debates.
Indeed, one could say that all French political theory revolves around the tension between the principle of guaranteeing individual liberties—the legacy of the Revolution, the Rights of Man and of the Citizen—and the principle of safeguarding the public interest or public moral order. After all, the 1789 Declaration states that “No one shall be disturbed for his opinions, even religious ones, provided that their manifestation does not trouble public order (ordre public) as established by law” (article 10), and that “the law is the expression of the general will” (article 6).
The general will then might trump the individual’s opinions. And how do we know the general will? It is somehow public. But in its Old French meanings, ‘public’ pertains to the state or to the people, or it means ‘open to general observation’. The people is understood as a single unit, capable of manifesting a general will. Legally this is currently expressed by Article 1 of the 1958 French Constitution, which declares that “France is an indivisible, secular, democratic and social Republic. It shall ensure the equality of all citizens before the law, without distinction of origin, race or religion. It shall respect all beliefs.” Thus, the state does not recognize fractions of the French people, and group rights are anathema. But does the state stand for or act for the people? Should public matters—res publica—be visible? Should visibility be in the public interest? What is the political status of public space?
Public space and the people intersect at moments of national gatherings, such as when on January 11, 2015, the largest gathering since Liberation assembled at the Place de la République in Paris to stand for unity after the massacres at the offices of Charlie Hebdo and the kosher shop. Many experienced this as the public manifestation of the people. Those who did not attend or who expressed dissenting sentiments were seen as out of step; schoolchildren in the poor outer cities who declined to observe a moment of silence were seen as a sign of the danger posed by poorly-integrated Muslims, not as an instance of legitimate dissent, and several public figures vowed to double-down on the teaching of secularity (laïcité) in the schools to correct the problem. Some months later Nicolas Sarkozy condemned the practice of offering a substitute for pork in school cafeterias.
Now, other countries have ideas of public space and a people. In the United States, “We the People” established the Constitution. But they did not rely on a state to proclaim the people’s desires; they were the autonomous corrective to government overreach. The trope of people versus government has had a lively American history ever since. Public space is caught up in the tensions as well: should federal lands be returned to “the people” or at least to the states? [1]
Although most of the contemporary issues about pluralism have to do with immigration and religion, one should note that much of the controversy in France has been about regional demands for recognition, including Corsican claims to be a separate people and linguistic minorities in several regions demanding recognition for their languages. The indivisibility principle of the French Constitution is not so much about French territory, because overseas territories (and even Corsica) have been allowed juridical specificities—and of course colonial administration of Algeria depended on distinguishing between Muslims and Europeans—as it is about the indivisibility of the French people. (“Populations” however may be distinguished by where they live, or even by social characteristics.)[2]
(II) French Governance of Religion
Policing the boundaries of the religious is somewhat more specific. An old tradition of how to govern religions in France stems from the rather bloody king nonetheless called Phillipe le Bel (1268-1314), who asserted his political control over the physical Church (leaving doctrine to the Pope), and in particular his right to tax the churches. Despite the sharp changes that occurred thereafter—the Edict of Nantes (1598) allowing the practice of Protestantism, the Revolution of 1789, Napoleon’s Concordat system, and the succession of Empires and Republics—this Gallican model of state regulation of the Church has continued to shape French politics, down to President Nicolas Sarkozy’s top-down efforts to control Muslims by creating a single national representative body.
Across this long span of time and multiple religions, the governance structure has remained one in which les cultes, organized religions, are controlled, and in varying ways supported, by the state. But of course there was 1905, when, after a strong set of anti-Church policies, the government passed the `law of separation of state and religion’. Today this law is celebrated for enshrining laïcité or secularity, and for establishing the neutrality of the state with respect to religions, a kind of `establishment clause’. In fact, the law contains no general philosophies and has become a kind of Rorschach for every author’s normative fancy. Indeed, the word laïcité does not even appear in the law of 1905.
But the law did target the presence of religious references in public space. Although he took a relatively liberal position, the main architect of the law, Aristide Briand nonetheless denounced oppressive publicity. “The street and the public square belong to everyone. Why do you claim the right, you Catholics, under a regime of separation, to violate this religious neutrality by exhibiting, in full view of citizens who may not share your beliefs, objects that exalt your faith and symbolize your religion? Is your own conscience capable of being free only so long as it can oppress the conscience of others?”
Note how visibility is assumed to be oppressive because divisive. But the law is ambiguous: although Briand clearly had in mind oppression by municipal displays, the law as passed prohibits any “exhibiting” by anyone, and in 1905 this broad interdiction attracted the support of many strong anti-Catholics in Parliament. Today this wording continues to prevent a church, for example, from posting any notices about upcoming church events outside church grounds—although a concert in a church could be considered “in the local public interest” and thus be advertised anywhere, and so forth.
I have written elsewhere about other examples whereby the State regulates religion through the very careful delineation of religious spaces: in public cemeteries, where private religious concessions can be overtly religious as long as they do not extend to the public space between them, or in the anti-burka law, which allows fully covering the face in the home, in one’s automobile, and on any religious ground, even those of religions other than your own. Of interest as well is the Constitutional Council’s 2011 defense of the just-mentioned law, which claims that face-to-face sociability and reciprocity of greetings is so important to ordre public that the Parliament was within its rights to ban anything that would make impossible such communications. And when mosques regularly overflowed into the streets in Paris’s Gouttte d’Or neighborhood in 2011, fueling Marine Le Pen’s claims that Muslims were taking over French streets, representatives of the State and the city ordered the mosques closed and an alternative space used for subsequent Friday prayers.
(III) The French State and Halal control
If the State seeks to secure an undifferentiated public space for citizens, where distinctions by religion, race, or religion do not take on civic dimensions, things are quite different when the state sets out to control a religious institution. Let me turn to the relationships among the State, mosques, and the provision of halal foodstuffs. I will only speak of issues that arise regarding animals.
The ritual slaughter of animals for Muslims must follow several rules. The animals must be healthy, they must be conscious when killed (to hear the Muslim slaughterer declare that he takes the animal’s life in the name of God, and the blood must be entirely drained from the carcass. Only then is the food produced thereafter halal—as long as it is not contaminated by other meats.
Now, in a Muslim society, such as where I work in Indonesia, people simply kill animals for their needs. There have not in the past been boards that inspect and certify the process and the product as halal. But world-wide trade and migration to new lands led Muslims to arrive at new solutions.
In France and elsewhere in Europe, putting meat on the Muslim table is more difficult, because following the proper procedures is more complex than in Muslim-majority countries, and because it is more difficult to assure consumers that all the proper procedures were followed. In France, the result is a series of licenses and inspections. The requirements of maintaining halal purity create a demand for checking and licensing at three levels: licensing sacrificers, inspecting slaughterhouses, and certifying retailed products as halal. Indeed, European and French laws require that religion-based slaughtermen be licensed, because the way they work is contrary to regulations and requires a special exemption. European law requires that animals be stunned before they are killed, but allows states to grant exemptions for religious practices.[3] French law restates this rule, and specifies that if slaughtering animals in the manner required by religions violates the standard regulations, then it must be carried out by sacrificers licensed by the state. Moreover, the sacrifices themselves must take place in regulated slaughterhouses, and not on farms or in backyards.
Thus, the state intervenes in the halal food chain on two levels: by licensing sacrificers and by licensing slaughter houses. Controlling slaughter-houses falls mainly under the domain of public hygiene and is the responsibility of the prefect (the local representative of the state). The prefect also may authorize an individual to practice ritual sacrifice but these authorizations are temporary and in a sense ad hoc. In any case, within the logic of French secularism it is a bit odd for the state to judge whether or not an individual is capable of acting in accord with religious norms, and so prefects have tried to avoid taking this route.
Another solution existed. The state had already delegated the licensing of Jewish kosher butchers to the Consistory, the body created under Napoleon to represent Jewish interests before the state and vice-versa, and to its Beth Din. In the early 1990s, when the state sought a solution to the Islamic licensing problem that would be more consistent with its logic of governance, there was as yet no Islamic equivalent to the Jewish body, so the state turned to the mosques. In 1994 the Ministry of Agriculture authorized the Paris Mosque to issue licenses to sacrificers. The decree meant that the 587 Islamic sacrificers who had already been licensed by prefects would have to apply to the Paris Mosque, and pay a new fee.[4]Complaints about the monopoly granted to this mosque, controlled by Algeria, led the state in 1996 to empower the Lyon Mosque and the Mosque of Évry (the latter funded largely by Morocco) to issue licenses. The Paris Mosque also had come under suspicion of not actually inspecting. Given that suspicious consumers try to decide who they should trust, it is not surprising that that mosque would be so suspected
Left for private associations is the work of safeguarding the chain of purity from abattoir to butcher shop, with intermediate stops for carving the carcass and preparing packaged foods. One such association, AVS, has gained a good reputation, particularly in contrast to the Paris Mosque. (In my larger comparative project I am working with the HMC in Britain, which asked AVS to advise them on how to set up inspections.) AVS also has maintained good ties with Muslim groups, and are seen by many as reasonably trustworthy because reasonable pious. By contrast, the Paris Mosque has been at the center of scandals concerning corruption in its licensing, to the point that its director, Dhaou Boubakeur, admitted that the halal inspection service, used by his mosque, the SFCVH, could not be trusted! [5]
In addition, various offices of the State and of municipalities have, for many years, experimented with various public-private mixes to produce sufficient quantity of meat for the Feast of Sacrifice.
(IV) Scandals of Public Halal in France
This sounds very collaborative, but in recent years the same halal food shops and restaurants have come in for official abuse, . These are not marked religious spaces, nor do they receive state support. Nonetheless some officials are quick to see an illegitimate exclusion and discrimination exercised by Muslims merely by not stocking non-halal projects.
In 2010, the Quick fast-food chain dedicated eight of its restaurants in Roubaix, a city near Lille with a large Muslim population, to serve only halal hamburgers (and other food, but the “halal hamburger” became the symbol of the case). The mayor of the city accused Quick of “discrimination” and made a complaint to the courts. This was a difficult case for politicians, in that it was unclear what law or norm the shops were violating. Fadela Amara, then State Secretary for Urban Affairs, but also a crusader against “communalism”, defended Quick, saying that there was no state involvement and it was up to the consumer to make a decision to eat there or not.
But the mayor objected to the fact that halal was all that they offered. A group of seven deputies to the Parliament, all on the right end of the UMP, denounced Quick for “imposing on all clients halal food without the possibility of choice” which they added was “contrary to the laïcité of French society” and a “step toward the balkanization and ghettoization of our society”. Le Monde noted that there seemed to be large numbers of non-Muslims as well as Muslims (however they determined this fact) in the establishment.[6]
This was not an isolated experiment: Kentucky Fried Chicken and “Flash Burger” also had opened all-halal shops, and there are of course many food shops that had always been halal—most memorably the “McHalal” burger chain. It seemed to be media attention that polarized the matter and made it into an affaire—in 2009 the same mayor had applauded the plans to open a halal Quick—but of interest is that in the mainstream repertoire of slogans, the terms laïcité, ghettoization, and communalism were ready to hand for those wished, for whatever motivations, to do battle. These three terms and ideas all have to do with public space and its boundaries, or absence thereof. A halal shop, in this line of thinking, creates ghetto walls where they did not exist before, and by its specificity erects signs of religious difference in what had been religiously-unmarked space.
The matter was not entirely new. Eight years earlier, the same arguments grew out of the opening of a Franprix convenience store in a neighborhood of Evry. The shop sold no alcohol or pork products. The mayor, Manuel Valls, later to be Interior Minister and then Prime Minister, menaced the proprietor with police intervention (legally an empty threat) if he did not reconvert the shop to “normal functioning”, meaning stocking it with beer and sausages. Again, the argument was that a halal-only shop sent a signal that non-Muslims should leave the neighborhood, and would mean that “the neighborhood will become a ghetto”. [7]
Although some commentators noted that there was a Parisian Franprix that served only kosher food, and that had they stocked only organic food there would have been no scandal, and although the mayor’s efforts to close the shop were blocked by the courts, the brothers who had opened it soon threw in the towel. Ironically, later and on a different topic Valls said that “the State does not bother with dietary rules of the French”.[8]