Citizenship for Muslim French Citizens: The ‘Long Decade’ 2005–2015

Abstract

Today, France is home to many French citizens of foreign descent, particularly from a Maghrebi background, due to the history of colonisation, trade, and cultural flows that it shares with a great part of North Africa. Given the Muslim culture of their country of origin and the increasing problematisation of Islam in the French public debate, these citizens form the great part of an indefinite, thought extensively discussed, group of Muslims in France. In fact, these Muslim French citizens (henceforth, MFCs) have been at the core of some drastic political developments that have increased their visibility in the public domain and in the policy agenda during the 10 years stretching from November 2005 to November 2015. These 10 years could be called the ‘long decade’ for MFCs: at the end of 2005, France was still relatively unconcerned about Islamist threats, at least in comparison with other European countries in which the issue had already sparked heated debates, even when said countries had not been directly hit by terror and bloodshed. Furthermore, a relatively pacific debate over two issues of high potential contention–over the remit of the newly constituted French Council of the Muslim Faith and the codification of the ban on ‘ostentatious religious symbols and dress’—had just reached its final development on the eve of the long decade, opening up a new era during which the debate over Islam would decline (Vanparys et al. 2013).