Dr. Gilles Kepel

(DRAFT:  Not to be cited without the consent of the speaker. This draft transcription has yet to be approved by the speaker.)

Thank you very much Shireen. Thank you also Eugene Rogan for allowing a stinking cheese-eating weasel to cross the channel for this speech in his broken English. It's a great pleasure, of course, to be here in Oxford in enemy territory. I would like to start with a tale, because it's the difficult time when people are after lunch feeling dizzy, if not sleepy, so I'll try to tell a sort of fairy tale to put you to sleep in earnest. An Easter tale actually, which took place last week in the stinking cheese-eating weasel's land where I'm from. While the Catholic world was celebrating the resurrection of our lord Jesus Christ, France was mourning, it was our ashura, if you wish, was mourning the anniversary of Lionel Jospin's defeat one year before when he came third at the French presidential election first round after Chirac and Jean-Marie Le Pen. And on this Easter weekend, we had two political events. One has already been mentioned by Valerie Amiraux this morning, the meeting of one of the Islamic organisations in France, I'll go back to it in a little while, and the other one was the annual convention of the Front National and celebrating their victory in the presidential elections, though they did not manage to gain any seats in the parliamentary elections that followed, and where we saw Le Pen choosing one of his daughters as his heiress. Young, Marie Le Pen, blond, divorced, a lawyer, three kids, rather attractive on television and was maybe to epitomise the future of France, the next Marianne would be this Marie…. And so, you know, some sort of women were the issue for this part of the French public that feels victimised, that feels that there are small taxpayers who believe that they're caught between the hammer of globalisation and the anvil of Muslimness in the banlieu of Islam. And they're working to make their voices heard. The other convention was the one that Valerie mentioned earlier on this morning and then it was also an issue, of future Marianne, but this one was not going to be blond, she was going to be veiled. So we had the Minister of Interior, Nicolas Sarkozy, addressing a crowd of militants of the Union des Organisations Islamiques de France, the union of Islamic organisations in France were linked to the Muslim brotherhood to a large extent and who came either first, says La le vie or second say the Minister of Interior, but he's our ex-minister of interior, at this French Muslim religious consultation, or whatever it's called, that took place before. And one thing which was very striking was that some years back, this convention of the union was seen as something extremist and a former Prime Minister of Algeria, who has spoken at this convention, was then expelled from France and had to go to Leicester to take shelter in the Islamic foundation counters of novelty square, Ibn Taymiyyah building outside Hasan Al-Bana road. Now this time we had the Minister of Interior himself who comes and addresses the convention. Valerie already mentioned that after he was applauded, he was booed because he had mentioned that everyone has to be photographed on his ID card without anything on his or her head. And this is definitely a big change, it's a sea change, because then we see that the Minister of Interior comes and gives some sort of recognition to an Islamic organisation whose leanings towards Islamist movements are very well known, even though their operatives are not saying so themselves. What does that mean? That means, at first probably, that nowadays those young people who were represented there are perceived as citizens, as part of the electoral constituency of any government or of any politician that wants to get the votes to be elected in the future. And that their concerns, whatever they are, and whatever may be organisation that pretends it mediates the votes of those people, their concerns are going to be taken in consideration for electoral reasons. And this I guess is interesting litmus test for the change that occurred between the two Gulf wars as far as the position of Muslim populations in Europe vis-à-vis their governments and vis-à-vis the conflict are concerned.

In 1991 there was at the time of Operation Desert Storm, at the time of the first Gulf war, European governments that were deeply engaged in the coalition to free Kuwait, worried about the reaction of their immigrant populations who came from the Muslim world. In the end, not much happened, even though Saddam Hussein had a much more positive image in those days than he had before this war. To be sure this dictator who wanted to be the Saladin or Salah Al-Din of the modern world and who made a grab for the Kuwaiti treasure chest was seen in benighted suburbs and public housing projects like some sort of audacious kid who rips off a pair of trainers at a shopping centre, while President Bus pere came across as the supermarket's hated security guard. But this latent sympathy never really translated into political mobilisation. The war ended quickly, and the imams in mosques from Bradford to Lyons were too divided (between those finance by Saudi Arabia who condemned Saddam Hussein and those who tried to make Saddam Hussein the champion of Islam against the West) for religion to transform the social malaise of young immigrant Muslims into real political opposition.

12 years later, the situation has changed a lot. First of all, the youths of that era have grown up, and I would say, they are now the first mature generation of Muslims born on European soil. And many have been integrated socially and politically, they have become British, French, Belgian and even German citizens. They have a job, they have a family and they express their political feelings in classic democratic ways rather than through religious exaltation. Most are opposed to this war, but in that they find themselves alongside the majority of non-Muslim Europeans, so there's no space for them to claim this as a clash of civilisations or as a clash between Islamic identity and the values of European countries. A few Islamist militants have even gone over to the anti-globalisation movement, and there have been some sort of strange melts, melting between them, risking their religious credentials, I believe, in the process.

More generally, I would say that many Muslims in Europe wonder if the solidarity they may feel on the Iraq question can take precedence over their being citizens of prosperous countries and remember when French President, and then we go again to one of the topics that Shireen just mentioned, when French President Jacques Chirac visited Algeria at the beginning of March he was welcomed and he was applauded by crowds flashing out French flags in a country that had fought for eight years not to be French anymore, where people wait in line day and night in front of the consulate and try to re-integrated into French citizenship, and people chanted "Iraq, Chirac!", because you know it rhymes, and also because they saw those images on CNN and on the bumper stickers, "Deep down in the bible belt, after Iraq, Chirac!" and this was just to amuse the crowd, because the real issue that after they had said "Iraq, Chirac!" they chanted "Visa! Visa!" and what they really wanted was to get a visa to go to France to be reintegrated into French citizenship for some, because they had a great-uncle who had fought for France, sometime or whatever. So immigration to the west is tremendously attractive to young people in Muslim world which has plunged into recession, which is growing poorer despite considerable oil wealth, because that oil wealth is siphoned off by the regimes in power. And in this context, before the war, at least before the first week of the war, when Saddam was seen again the hero in the cafes of Tunis, Damascus and Casablanca, Saddam Hussein was then before the war perceived as nothing more than one of those corrupt dictators who govern the region, embezzling its resources and blamed by the young for its misery and despair.

Yet alongside these structural evolutions, some disturbing phenomena have shown up over the last few years, and in a crisis of the sort, a long murderous war in Iraq could provoke, they may be the spark that ignites the immigrant suburbs, the 'inner cities' and the 'projects' of Europe's big cities, as well as schools and high schools where students of Muslim origin are sometimes a majority.

First of all, as the many arrests in Germany, in France, in Spain, in Great Britain and in Belgium have show, Jihadist networks, and we mentioned that this morning, linked to Osama Bin Laden have found recruits in Europe from "Londonistan" , as well call the British capital (there is a new book which is going to be out in our dialect, in French next week called "Londonistan", the 'voice of Jihad', which is from one of my former students and so it's a very good book…. And least from its inspiration, as far as the results I'm not responsible….), so from Londonistan to your place, as we call the British capital that harbours the most radical groups and the most extreme internet websites, to Hamburg, where the operational cell responsible for 9/11 was pulled together, and passing through various and sundry charitable organisations, the list is long of militant networks that worry the European police, whom we heard this morning. They fear that little groups of "sleepers", even though they have no popular following, may carry out terrorist acts in reprisal for the attack on Iraq, for any sort of action that may be linked to western presence in Iraq, sowing panic in European cities and pitting Muslims against non-Muslims in a sort of doomsday scenario of religious and social wars.

But even if we don't go to such extremes, one has to admit that among educated young Muslims in Europe, the reaction to the attacks on New York and Washington, as 9/11, after at first rejecting terrorism that affected, after all, western cities like those in which the young themselves live, this has sometimes translated into a sort of, how should I say, an exacerbation of religious identity, as if to proclaim that Islam itself will not be put in the dock. Thus the Salafist movements, which advocates a rigorous doctrine and an extreme dress code inspired by the Saudi Wahabi model, while rejecting violence, have seen their influence growing and this influence, at least in my own country, has heightened tension in some schools where the style of life they advocate and the dress code is advocate, is live, is viewed by the teachers as a permanent challenge to the values of the European educational system. More worrisome, in the working-class neighbourhoods in the north of Paris, where Sephardic Jews, i.e. Jews coming from North Africa, and North African Muslims live, and have lived, side by side over the last 30 years, the growing number of incidents of vandalism of synagogues, of attacks on young Jews, as well as, more recently, attacks against some mosques, have shown that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict was translated into detestable acts in the daily life of some young people who, deluged with television images, express their social impotence by violent acts that gave them the feeling of participating in a school courtyard or neighbourhood street, participating in a globalise jihad in which Gaza suddenly is transposed to Marseilles or to Tower Hamlets.

Thus Europe, unlike the United States which looks on the Middle East and on the Muslim world from afar, must take into account that million and millions of its Muslim citizens, who make sure that the old continent is, in a way, a participant in the evolution of contemporary Islam. Many are betting that the new and unique democratic experience that Muslims know in Europe may serve as an example and a model for the rest of the world of Islam, brining an evolution of mentalities that will allow the evils of authoritarianism and corruption to dissipate at last. Others fear that the war against Iraq and its sequels will bring on provocations and terrorism that obliterates this process. But I believe that such is the political dilemma that European governments face, and which has led them to give domestic considerations a much great weight than the United States when they take a position toward the war on Iraq. Thank you.