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Journal of Identity and Migration Studies
Volume 11, number 2, 2017
34
RESEARCH ARTICLES
“Being a Muslim” in France: The Case of Turkish Immigrants
Hasan GULER and Emrullah ATASEVEN
Abstract. In this article the “Muslim Question” of France in terms of Turkish immigrants,
who are the subjects of a relatively recent migration movement compared to other
immigrant groups in France, was examined. The findings that support the study are based
on a qualitative research conducted in Paris between 2014 and 2015. In the first chapter of
the study, the focal point was a critical interpretation of formation of the “Muslim
Question”. Whether this question is a fiction or based on solid facts was another subject
tackled in this chapter. In the second chapter, by focusing on the migration process of the
Turkish immigrants, the experiences of Turkish immigrants who are struggling to form a
hybrid identity by acting within a social structure without ignoring the origin country codes.
The basic argument of the article, however, is that the integration policies imposing
themselves as the absolute truth should be put aside and at the same time a common
culture should be created, also the Muslim origin immigrants should not ignore every
criticism as for being “Islamophobia” and they should revise their attitudes in this regard.
Keywords: France, Paris, Immigrant, Turkish, Islam, Muslim, Integration
Introduction
Since 1980s, we have been witnessing two different discourses with a clear
contradiction on migration and border issues in the US and the EU countries: On one
side globalization based on change of things, on the other side, security discourse.
While the first talks about the weakening of the borders, the other is based on
renewing the security functions and strengthening the borders to prevent the passing
of "unwanted" elements. Nowadays we can talk about an increase in favor of the latter
(Ceyhan, 1997:236). Despite the atmosphere surrounded by the security discourse,
some scholars give voice to alternative approaches instead of this separation. The first
results of the research that has been carried out since 2013 by the political scientist
François Gemeine, who has been a lecturer at the universities of Paris and Liege, give
“Being a Muslim” in France: The Case of Turkish Immigrants
JIMS - Volume 11, number 2, 2017
35
voice to an alternative opinion against those who emphasize "border". According to
Gemenne (2015), the mobilization of immigrants in the labor market does not have a
structure that will scare local (French) players. Those who migrate are employed either
in low-qualified fields (construction, restaurant etc.) or high-qualified fields (football
player, engineer etc. ) and there is in fact difficulty of finding people to work in these
sectors in France. In addition, there is a need for a dynamic population due to the
concentration of economic activity in services sector and entrepreneurship of migrants
increase new job fields. We are witnessing that the presence of borders does not
annihilate migration. It seems as a more rational policy to transfer the astronomical
sums of money spent on border security in Europe to other fields, for example the
finance of integration programs. Though a "borderless" Europe looks like a utopia in
terms of realpolitic, the opinions suggested by Gemenne can be read as the anti-thesis
of security understanding in imagining another Europe.
Considering the current immigration debates in Europe, in an atmosphere
where security is the principal discourse, it is shaped around two phenomena that are
in a relationship with each other. The first is the "refugees" reflected by the visual
media in a dehumanized way accompanied by images of mass immigration especially
during summer months; the second is the "Muslim immigrants" who have been on the
agenda for quite a while after the Paris attacks. Taking into account the geography
where the majority of refugees came from and their religious affiliation, we have been
witnessing that both phenomena are sometimes discussed by the public with a similar
rhetoric. The decisiveness of the language used when defining the issue also
determines the nature of the policies created on migration. Approaches produced
towards this case which are formulated with the titles "refugee question" and "Muslim
question" usually have acute qualities. As of its current image, Europe, which is
struggling to produce solutions from an atmosphere dominated by fears, is gliding
towards security policies. While saying this, we need to keep in mind that leaning
against the perception of a homogeneous Europe will prevent us from seeing the
diversity within Europe.
Within the limits of this article, we will be trying to examine the reflections of
"Muslim question" today over immigrants from Turkey who are the actors of a
migration movement to France that has taken place recently and has no colonial
history. We used a descriptive and immigration-oriented approach, based largely on
the situation of immigrants from Turkey in the host country, rather than comparison in
this article based on the results of a qualitative study. The work on which the article is
Hasan GULER and Emrullah ATASEVEN
JIMS - Volume 11, number 2, 2017
36
based on was carried out between 2014 and 2015 in the Evry region where immigrants
from Turkey live intensively within the borders of Paris. By living in the same place for
10 months in the same neighborhood as immigrants, some details that are hard to
obtain, such as unemployment, children's education, relationships with neighbors,
living in community, business organizations, worship activities, etc., have been found.
Apart from ethnographic observation, the other basic research technique of our study
was semi-structured in-depth interviews. With the help of a questionnaire consisting of
about 60 questions, we tried to get information about immigrants' immigration
process, working life, daily life activities, political participation, suburb life and identity
issues.
"The Muslim Question" of France
The "Muslim question", caused by settled Muslim immigrants born in
Europe or legalized as a result of immigration waves is loaded with today's traces as
well as traces from the past.1 Settled Muslims are described as "internal affairs" of
1Today, immigration worries Europe, especially France because of its Muslim population.
For a long time immigrants have been involved in the economic life of France as "migrant
workers" and "docile" actors. Post-1980 equality demands and anti-racism mobilizations (the
anti-racist march “Marche pour l’egalite et contre le racisme” that started in Marseilles in
1983 and ended in Paris), where the identity of the new generations was at the center, and the
increase of immigrants' visibility in the public arena have brought about debates. At the same
time, as the transformations that took place in the Islamic geography were shown in the
visual and written media, these discussions rapidly evolved into the mention of Muslim
immigrants with the word "problem". In this period (from the beginning of 1970 to the end
of the 1980s), which opened the way for Islam to be constructed in an imaginary way on
television that reinforced this image, we come across three events: First, the oil crisis and the
Islamic Revolution of Iran in 1979. After the crisis, immigrants turned into problems that had
to be resolved and "foreign" and "French" discrimination began on television. Seeing "Islam"
behind immigration and the media's handling with the view that this does not comply with
the French society. The second is the death fatwa against Salman Rusdie in 1989, and finally
the wishes of three girls to enter the school with hijabs in the same year. After these events,
the increasing frequency of Islam's presence in the television and media and its coming to the
centre of the French society have sparked debates that are identity-based and centered on
Muslim immigrants. The entry of Islam into the dining rooms in France happened due to the
frequent showing of the Islamic revolution of Iran in 1978-1979 on television. Amazing long
beards and black sheets accompanied the French dinners for many weeks. Audiences
encountered both unusual images and new words such as "molla", "veil", "shi", "sunni",
"sharia" when politicians and intellectuals started to participate in programs to explain this
situation. We see the themes of "Islam in France" and "suburban youth"come to the fore in
the 1990s. On the other hand, we can talk about the influence of political events such as the
debates on "Islam-West" controversy with the demolition of the Berlin wall and the First
“Being a Muslim” in France: The Case of Turkish Immigrants
JIMS - Volume 11, number 2, 2017
37
Europe in response to the immigration which crystallizes on the refugee issue and
describes the outside. The fact that most of the people actively involved in the Paris
attacks came from immigrant Muslim families and were European-born brought
together a series of questionings. The fact that, the "new" type of jihadists grew up
"inside the house" unlike previous experiences made the problem complicated. We
can say that the controversy on "Islam" within France is roughly proceeding on two
axes. The first axis is the thesis voiced by the culturalist camp that European values
and Islam are not possible to reconcile and that Islam's essence is an obstacle to
this. The second axis, on the other hand, centers on a critical thought and is shaped
by why the republican values (valeurs republicaines) cannot create a melting pot
and how the suburbs in which the practice of spatial exclusion is produced turn into
alternative identity spaces.
In the political arena, we can think of the rhetoric of the National Front,
which we are sure is represented by the first tendency, sometimes to the extent of
xenophobia.2 The second tendency is the views of the ruling socialist party, which
Gulf War and the Second Algerian War (1992-1997). The September 11 attacks on America
emerged as the most important event in the formation of the language of the 2000s
(Deltombe, 2005).
2 As an example of xenophobia discourse of the National Front, we can give Marine Le Pen's
resembling those, who performed salaats on the streets because mosques did not have
sufficient place, to the Nazi invaders in 2010: "Sorry, but some people like talking about the
occupation and the second world war. Let's talk about the occupation. There is an occupation
here yes, but not by tanks and troops; it is an occupation by people"(Liberation, 20.10.2015).
Le Pen is being prosecuted for hate crime because of this speech. At the same time, praying
on the streets is banned by a law issued in 2011. The immigration phenomenon, on the other
hand, has become one of the favorite themes of nationalism in the political arena. When we
look at French nationalism, the heritage it carries has bonapartism, anti-semitism (anti-
dreyfusisme), fascism, Vichy, petty bourgeois fascism (le poujadisme) and
bounlangism.(Boulangisme is an anti-parliamentary movement during the third Republican
era , by General Boulanger between 1886-1889. The reasons for the emergence of the
movement were the great economic crisis and the feeling of loss to the Germans in the
Alsace-Lorraine region problem.) We can say that today's nationalism is fed from these
sources. We can describe this new nationalism as "populist nationalism". It began to appear
in the political scene considerably due to the start of debates on the issue of immigrants by
the French public in the 1980s. Actually, their program is quite simple: to send the
immigrants from the country. Three important principles, to be taken in relation to the
immigration problem, presented by Bruno Megret (one of the influential figures of the
National Cephen in this period) on November 16, 1991 are as follows: The first is stopping
all new immigration. The second is organizing repatriations (cancellation of 10-year
residence permits, repatriation of unemployed persons, cancellation of bilateral repatriation
agreements) and, finally, preventing the secret or illegal entry of immigrants into the country
by taking serious security measures. (Gastaut, 2000: 121, 135).
Hasan GULER and Emrullah ATASEVEN
JIMS - Volume 11, number 2, 2017
38
we can consider in light of its historical mission. The right-wing rhetoric of some
administrators' in immigration policies after the attacks and the legal changes they
wish to impose (such as the termination of the citizenship of dual citizens born in
France involved in terrorist incidents) make us think that way. The socialist party is
criticized by other leftist structures for its policies sliding towards "right" and for
not being able to put into effect a structured and radical program to solve the
employment problem of "popular classes" (they are represented today by mostly
young people and the immigrant population in the suburbs), police violence in the
suburbs and the participation of non-French citizens in local elections. Besides,
former Prime Minister Valls' and former minister of economy Macron's views that
support neoliberal policies justify criticism. Remi Lefebvre (2015), political science
professor, emphasized that the Socialist Party has increasingly turned its view on
suburbs into an instrument of electoral tactics in an interview with La Monde
newspaper. According to Lefebvre, leftist thinking ignored democracy and the ones
related to its symbolic definition when approaching the suburbs by making a
hierarchical classification of problems and giving priority to economic and social
problems. The fact that Hollande was not able to fulfill his promise that non-French
citizens would be able to vote and local Muslim opinion leaders in the suburbs have
very little active presence within the party open the social distance between the
Socialist Party and the suburbs, even turn this distance into a political and cultural
abyss. In the 1960s, all the variations of the left wing embraced migrant workers on
the same side of the class war in terms of practicing internationalist principles,
which offered the possibility of an alternative integration model against the church
and the republic. However, the facts that the "socialist party", representing the
mainstream left, started to apply neo-liberal politics after a period which we can
call as its "surrender" to its "opponent", it was not able to solve the problem of
unemployment and started to defend some rightist policies about immigrants
(despite being party in opposition) ambiguated the difference between the right
and "mainstream" left.
Abdellali Hajjat and Marwan Mohammed (2013) stated in their
Islamophobie that "the elites" also made a great contribution to this issue.
According to the authors, the construction of Islam as a problematic structure in
the French public has come about through the influence of the French elites. When
describing the elite, they classified it as a heterogeneous group rather than a
homogeneous one. According to them, elites are high bureaucrats, politicians,
“Being a Muslim” in France: The Case of Turkish Immigrants
JIMS - Volume 11, number 2, 2017
39
media leaders and scientists, and they are the most prominent actors in the
production of the "Muslim question". Despite all the diversity between them and
the disagreement between the fractions, the interesting thing is that this is the
point where the elites unite (Hajjat and Mohammed, 2013: 103).3 The authors also
point out the existence of many works by sociologists and historians to shed light
on the immigrant problem, and do not link the origin of this problem to the
electoral victory of the Front National in the early 1980s. The "Population and
Immigration Directorate"(Direction de la population et des migrations), established
in 1966, the majority of which was constituted by the civil servants returning from
the Algerian war, pointed out that the new institutional culture created in order to
regulate the flow of migration is the primary place to examine for the immigrant
problem.
Nowadays when the debate on Islam in the public continues increasingly,
there are also scholars who approach to the issue more calmly. Apart from the
dominant paradigm, an alternative approach was expressed by French political
scientist and Islamic movement activist Olivier Roy and anthropologist Alain Bertho.
The views of the two experts complement each other in terms of understanding
the motivation behind the radicalization and those who are involved in the ISIS.
According to Roy (2015), culturalist and third-worldist approaches to understand
the issue that is covering the media scene are insufficient to grasp the true
dimensions of the problem. According to him, the situation of French young
people, of Muslim origins or later became Muslims, who became radicalized since
the 1990s is not the radicalization of Islam but the Islamization of radicalism. After
mentioning that this radicalism should not be interpreted as a sectarianism, Bertho
(2015) , stated that it is more correct to describe the issue by saying "Islamization
3 At this point the authors showed similarities in the attitudes of different social groups to
immigrant workers occupying a factory in Tolbot-Poissy in 1984. The fact that right-wing
trade union member workers who did not participate in the strike protested the strikers and
shouted "Arabs to the oven" (les arabes au four), "negros to the sea (Les noirs a la mer!), the
minister of the leftist government said "you will see twelve hours of torture", the boss wanted
to label the strikers as Islamist fundemantalists, the media spread the footage of praying
strikers and the socialist government perceived the issue in terms of religion rather than
showing class solidarity were all important in the construction of the Muslim problem.
Before closing the parentheses, we can say that one of the most effective instruments of the
governments, which are inadequate in solving economic and social problems of today, to
attract public attention to other subjects is the "immigrants". This approach, which aims to
prevent possible alliances, may work in the short term, but it will lead to the sharpening of
cultural camps in the long run and will create huge problems in managing the communities
that have been diversified through immigration.
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JIMS - Volume 11, number 2, 2017
40
of the radical rebellion" rather than the radicalization of Islam. Another example is
the work of Nilüfer Göle (2015). The definition of "ordinary Muslim"4 (musulmans
ordinaires) that Göle expressed starting from the daily routines in different cities of
Europe suggests a new formation in which the effort of European Muslims to
reconcile their modern lifestyles and beliefs was blended with Western civilization
and its cultural codes. Apart from the perception of "Islamist" in terrorist activities,
the Muslim profile, that is, "ordinary Muslim", who has no problem with the values
of the society they live in and expresses him/herself through a kind of
hybridization, provides a good framework for describing immigrants from Turkey.
Being a Muslim from Turkey in France
Turks' migration to Europe is relatively new compared to other immigrant
groups when they are considered together with the migrations of Asians and Black
Africans. When we look at the character of this migration, it has two distinguishing
properties. The first is that it is a recent wave of migration, and the second is that
there is no colonial relationship with France. The migration of Turks to France
gained massive character with the labor agreement signed in 1965. The population
in Turkey's inadequately industrialized areas mostly participated in immigration
activities. Within this framework, rural origins dominate the socio-economic
structure of the first generation of Turkish immigrants coming to France in the early
1970s. The main source of motivation of this migration based on single male profile
is economic:
"I came by train in 1973. The employer came here with us. He is a factory owner; a
hundred men work in his factory. The man took us from labor exchange
organization in Istanbul with ten people and caught the train and came here with
us. On the way, we ate cheese and bread...they built houses like dormitory. They
4 "Ordinary Muslims" have a pluralistic structure. The ethnic range of women and men,
between the ages of 19-45, whom we can include in this category is wide. This range
includes Pakistani, Turkish, Algerian etc and different professions. The adjective of
"ordinary" refers to actively participating in social life while performing religious practices
in everyday life rather than a passive subject in the social structure. They are aware of the
codes of the source country, but at the same time they do not abstain from being visible by
melting in the dominant social structure. They may even develop behaviors in accordance
with the cultural codes of the country they live in. While they are overly proud to be free in
the UK, they can be surlier in France. In addition, they do not object to owning the cultural
values of the dominant society with their "halal" way of life. Halal hi-pop, halal delicatessen,
non-alcoholic diploma ceremony, etc. "
“Being a Muslim” in France: The Case of Turkish Immigrants
JIMS - Volume 11, number 2, 2017
41
have kitchen. They have bathrooms, toilet. They have rooms, both single and
double. Near the factory. We first settled there. We don't know even one word of
French. The factory was not in Paris. 300 km outside Paris. After working there for
two years, I brought the kids. There were not enough workers then. While working
in construction sites, construction site chiefs were competing with each other to
transfer workers from each other. For example, the hourly wage here is 5-6 Francs.
Another says that it is 7 Francs... There is unemployment...At that time, for
example in Peugeot, 30 thousand people were working. 20-25 thousand people
were working in Citroen. 30 thousand people were working in Simka. Now, in these
factories, 3-4 thousand people are working..." (Male, 66).
Migrations continued until 1974, when formal employee recruitment was
stopped. After this date, there was an immigration practice that continued with
family reunions and illegal ways. With the addition of women to Turkish migrants,
the majority of whom were male, as a result of family reunification and the
involvement of children who were born in France to the families, immigrants from
Turkey began to appear more often in the public arena:
"I came in 2000. After leaving the school, I entered the coal factory. After that I
started peddling. There are suburban trains between Istanbul and Gebze; I was a
peddler in those trains. I used to sell chocolates, bagels, waffles ... Also I was a
waiter in a tiny restaurant. The last time I was a waiter was when I was coming
here. My father brought us through illegal ways. My father did not have the paper
when I came here. I came here and my father received the paper. My father
actually lived in France for a while from 1985-1990 for the first time. Then he
returned to Turkey. He stayed in Turkey for 3-4 years and then came back here. He
could not live there anymore so he came here again. I came here in 2000 and my
mother and brother came here a year later. One of my brothers was already
benefiting from family unification. I had a sister; she also came here from illegal
ways...When I first came here, there was no proper working environment. There
were times when I did not work for 2 years. Since we did not have any papers, we
were very little".(Male, 28)
As Turkish migrants became more visible within the society, academic
interest began to be directed towards them. The earliest study on Turkish
immigrants is based on interviews carried out by Riva Kastoryano(1986) with
Turkish families (“Etre Turc en France”- Being a Turk in France) and this work is a
descriptive work full of rich information from the family structure of the first-
comers to everyday life practices. Based on extensive data set on Algerian,
Portuguese, Moroccan, Hispanic, African, Asian and Turkish immigrants, the
Hasan GULER and Emrullah ATASEVEN
JIMS - Volume 11, number 2, 2017
42
quantitative studies of Michele Tribilat (1995,1996), who influenced the formation
of Turkish perception in France, are most famous. Based on the results of the
survey, she considered Turkish immigrants as an "exception". She defines the
Turkish immigrants as the least integrated immigrant community in French society,
based on the ability of Turkish immigrants to use the French language, their
marriage practices, the tendency to live in the same place, and so on. The
evaluation of Turkish immigrants as a closed "community", based only on
quantitative evidence, was criticized. Although we found some outcomes which
had similarities with Tribitlat's framework during our literature research; we can
easily say that this approach which treats Turkish immigrants as a homogeneous
population and does not include the source country accounts for only a part of the
truth. Although Turkish immigrants have characteristics that deserve to be defined
as a closed community through the cultural and social spheres, we can easily say
that they are integrated with local markets in the economic field. Even if we look at
it from the perspective of our subject, we can say that Muslim identity and
European values led to some hybridization.
"There are a lot of problems in France ... but it is also different to look at the world
from Paris. For example, there are serious differences between my old and current
religious views. I used to read anti- Christian or anti-Jewish verses from the Quran
when I was a political Islamist in my childhood years in Turkey; then I needed to
question those verses two or three years ago. When I questioned, there were
changes in my ideas. No one here can cut off anyone's throat in the name of
Allah... According to my findings, there are two types of Muslim: European type
and Eastern type ... To give an example, I would never cut a man's head in the
name of Allah. We have no intention to change this world by force, we need to
learn how to live together. I did not have an aim to make people Muslim here. But
when I go to Turkey, my friends ask me about how many of foreigners I have made
Muslim. I don't care about people's religions. This is asked directly. This question
does not come from only a person. If I lived there, maybe I would ask the same
question to someone coming from the West. But this question is not asked among
people who try to live Islam here ... I witnessed the courtesy I had not seen in
Muslims in Turkey on the first day I came here. You get shocked when you get
health care in a hospital. Despite everything we criticize, in my opinion the cultural
values of Europe are at the top of the world . "(Male, 40)
The definition of "European Type of Islam", uttered by an imam in addition
to the above statements, is very strongly parallel with Göle's "ordinary Muslims".
We can talk about a Turkish immigrant profile that does not forget about their
“Being a Muslim” in France: The Case of Turkish Immigrants
JIMS - Volume 11, number 2, 2017
43
cultural and religious baggage but accepts the values of the place they live by
transforming those values. Especially in terms of the potential for creating an
alternative identity against established culture, the relationship between strong
Muslim values and young people does not go beyond the symbolic level at some
points (Kaya, 2006). A study on 285 young people in France showed that young
people's perception of "fasting" is complicated: the feeling that they get out of
debt by fasting on the first and last days of the month of Ramadan is prevalent in
half of the young people who practice fasting. Non-political Islam has a more
moderate place among the young Turkish people in the daily life, without denying
their cultural significance (IRTIS-DABBAGH, 2001: 318-19). In the recent studies on
young people who live in the urban fringes in France and radicalize, it is stated that
the number of Turkish "immigrant" children is low in this group. The fact that
family control dynamics are tight, the multitude of the fellow citizens who live in
the same region, and the presence of Turkish entrepreneurs who can move freely
in the labor market are underlined as the obstacles to the radicalization of the
young people of Turkey. These features we have mentioned led to their being
marked as a society resistant to integration until twenty years ago, but now they
have become the indicators of a more positive image. However, the fact that the
young Turks have remained between the two cultures, like their peers, constitute
the other side of the truth:
The young Turkish people express themselves as Muslims. The future of those who
do this is brighter. Things get worse for those who cannot do this. "If milk rots, it
becomes cheese; if meat rots, it becomes poison". I do not have a problem with
the French people. The French have the rules of good manner. However, the
people from our country cannot behave like them. When you are separated from
your own culture, everything is upside down. There arises a type that even the
French cannot accept. Most of the families are not aware of this danger. The elders
make their children insatiable saying "I did not have anything when I was a child." I
did not have that, but my child should have it. I did not wear it, but my child should
wear it... There are many problems ... (Male, 40)
The Halal lifestyle gives the immigrants flexibility in everyday life in
softening the rigidity preached by religion. The Halal lifestyle and the organization
of economy according to it is a "European" initiative looking for the possibilities of
living together without denying the identity for some of the Turkish immigrants.
The "halal business" has been liberated from the orbit of a conservative political
ideology, and has become widespread in France, with economic interests and
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JIMS - Volume 11, number 2, 2017
44
home country nostalgia (Tapia, 2005: 99). Halal is, in fact, a matter of central
importance, from neighborhood relations to eating and drinking habits outside. As
Göle points out, "halal" can be read as a kind of acceptance of established cultural
values. Almost all of the immigrants we talked to stated that despite the fact that
they have non-Muslim colleagues in business life, their relationship between them
is limited to business only. In Gilles Kepel's work in the 1980s, the answer given to
the question "Would you accept if your non-Muslim neighbor invites you for a
dinner?" by a Turkish immigrant to the question is quite influential in terms of
reflecting the mindsets of the Turkish immigrants:
"You asked such a question that it is beyond my depth. In fact we would not go.
But it would be wrong to perceive this as fanaticism. The reason why we would not
go is that our food would not be cut according to Islamic conditions. We eat meat
after it is cut according to the Islamic conditions. They are certainly not dirty. They
are clean and obey the rules of their religion. But they eat the meat that is
prohibited by our religion. On the other side, they drink wine with their meal ...
you can definitely say that drinking is not compulsory. I probably would not want
to upset my friend who invites me, but I do not want to eat the food that is not
prepared according to the conditions of my own religion. It is best not to go rather
than upset my friend "(Kepel, 1987: 35-36).
It is one of the characteristics of the Turkish immigrants to search for ways
to live side by side with other people without forgetting their origins and excluding
other cultures. The administrator of an association in Paris emphasizes the
importance of the "Democratic-integration" model in creating a common public
space:
"You need to be an individual here. The new person created by democratic
integration is important to us. Just like the Bretons defend democratic values in
France without denying their identity, we can do the same. Dissolving the values of
the country you came to with your own values ... In our view, democratic-
integration is a model of creating a common culture together by respecting
cultural values. It is a process that continues by opening out rather than closing
inside. It is the building of a joint equal life" (Male, 48).
Conclusion
Although Turkish immigrants are "reluctant" to enter French social and
public life, there is a need for more comprehensive frameworks to explain this,
“Being a Muslim” in France: The Case of Turkish Immigrants
JIMS - Volume 11, number 2, 2017
45
rather than essential reasons. The experiences of the Turkish immigrants in France,
which were tried to be explained by concepts such as "staying within the
community", "resistance to integration" and "Turkish exception" especially in the
early migration literature, cover a period of approximately fifty years. Both the
length of the process and the heterogeneous nature of the arriving migrants
necessitate a more dynamic look.
In the suburbs where religious-referenced radicalization accompanied by a
sense of ethnic and cultural exclusion is common among young people, in an
atmosphere where unemployment figures are high, anxiety about the future
increases and the length of attendance to school decreases, the greatest risk is the
hierarchical integration policies that impose itself as the absolute truth from
outside. One of the most important consequences of our research is the necessity
of subjecting the politics which tend to see a single color when looking at the
suburbs to a critical reading. We can say that it does not comply with the suburban
reality to regard all of the "Muslims", who develop a "performance" -based
relationship with Islam in a more secular dimension apart from the forms known,
as radicals.
We also think that it must be underlined that Muslims, who are the subject
of the immigrant debate over Islam, have responsibilities in creating a common
public culture as well as their neighbors. Slurring over any criticism brought on by
the Europeans by keeping the argument of the Islamophobia and the negative
memory of the colonial past alive limits the possibility of criticizing within the
neighborhood. We believe that there is a need for a perspective that takes into
account the new reality apart from the arguments saying that terrorism and Islam
cannot be brought together or Islam is essentially a religion of peace that were
voiced by the Islamic sections especially after the attacks in November 2015. It is
clear that a dialogue that is not imposed and a language for understanding and
learning is one of the most important instruments in the creation of an alternative
publicity in Europe, which has fallen into awe of the "refugee" issue and has
introduced fear-based and democracy-abusive practices after the attacks.
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