In 2005, the chorus of the French rapper A.L.I.’s song ‘Tolérance zéro’ started like this: ‘je suis ni intégré, ni intégriste, je reste juste intègre’. With the evident loss of the play on words, this would translate as ‘I am neither integrated, nor am I a fundamentalist, I just remain myself’. A.L.I. stands for Afrique, Loi suprême, Islam (Africa, Supreme law, Islam). He is a practising Muslim – his beard and the salient prostration mark on his forehead make him a ‘visible’ one, at that. The lament contained in his verse is his and his French co-religionaries’ cross to bear: how to be a practising Muslim in France without having to justify oneself?
In his long-promised speech on the fight against separatism delivered on October 2, French President Emmanuel Macron left little room for interpretation; it is ‘Islamist separatism’ that he and his government intend to fight with a law to come, probably next year. At least, the 2004 law on the wearing of conspicuous religious signs in schools and that of 2011 banning the wearing of face covering from the entire public space, although they fooled no one, had the pretence of neutrality: the former would ban kippahs, large crosses and turbans just as much as it would the hijab; as for the latter it was, according to the official version, a matter of national security – one had to be identifiable at all times in public.
In the weeks and months that preceded Macron’s speech, members of his government and journalists had left no doubt about the meaning of separatism in France in 2020. For instance, in an interview for French radio on September 10, deputy Minister of the Interior Marlène Schiappa, taunted by a journalist asking her whether separatism referred to Corsicans or Islamists, exhorted her interviewer to leave the good people of Corsica alone. Yet in recent history, it is from this beautiful Mediterranean island that proven threats of separatism from the French Republic have come, and by that I mean the armed resistance against mainland France, including the killings of politicians and claims of independence.
