The damaging effects of “misrepresentation” or “nonrepresentation” of identity (Weedon 2004:29) for second-generation Muslim Heritage (MH) respondents from Europe (and other parts of the world) bore a strong resemblance to those of their second-generation Non-Muslim Heritage (NMH) African-Caribbean counterparts. One of the reasons for this appears to be that MH respondents from other countries—for example, France—were not as established and integrated as those from Britain, mainly because unlike the British, their migration which generally occurred later (post-Algerian War of Independence of 1954-1962) (Zempi and Awan 2019:266), and they were not “given rights of citizenship and political participation as soon as they arrived” (Zebiri 2008:20). This denial of “cultural citizenship” despite efforts to fit in ‘visibly’ (Moors 2012, cited in Zempi and Awan 2019:267) was a major issue in the adequate socialisation of my French respondents, as expressed by Amal:
In France, if you’re an immigrant you always feel discriminated against. You feel the discrimination when you go to school and college. It is something well known in France that they claim immigrants are not integrating, but the truth is they don’t let them integrate.
However, what MH respondents from France did have in common with second-generation MH and NMH respondents from Britain was the fact that the French educational system failed to provide the necessary moratoria for the sorts of participation and exploration usually characteristic of Western cultures that help youth lay “the foundations for more lasting identity-defining commitments” (Kroger 2000:67). This was the case for all three French MH respondents, for whom sources of social exclusion were manifold, and especially prevalent in the institutional racism they faced at school—for example, the push to pursue vocational courses instead of academic qualifications, for which respondents were deemed better ‘suited’. Moreover, they explained that as second-generation ‘beurs’, it did not matter how hard they tried to assimilate themselves into the secular culture of France—either because of their appearance or the colour of their skin, they would always be discriminated against. Ultimately, the foreign origin of their names would always be the biggest giveaway, and a strong example of how “disadvantage extends to the second (non-migrant) generation and not just the first (migrant generation)” (Heath and Mustafa in Islamophobia report 2017:26)[1]:
If you’re British here, you are relatively integrated into society. If you’re not white there, we are made to feel different, that we’re not French. Even if you’re light-skinned, they still know you’re foreign, especially because of your name. Because we haven’t been raised in our parents’ culture either we are lost. So, as teenagers we went back to our roots and started thinking about who we are. (Saba)
In his paper ‘The Problem of Generations’, Karl Mannheim (1927) “long ago stressed the importance of understanding how shared formative experiences forge in a collection of individuals particular worldviews that they carry with them for the rest of their lives” (Roberts and Yamane 2016:112). For Saba, this included being failed in an important institutional context when her request to wear the hijāb at school was met with disdain. In a situation reminiscent of the 1989 l’affair du foulard (headscarf affair),[2] Saba subsequently resorted to removing her hijāb once she reached the school gates, where she was forced to suffice by wearing a turtleneck sweater and a bandana:
Because of the foulard affair my school banned me from wearing my hijāb when I made the decision to wear it. I was only allowed to cover my hair, not my neck … This is when I realised the hypocrisy of people because the students began looking at me in a bad way and stopped talking to me. Teachers who were previously nice to me now had angry faces.
Clearly, the racism and exclusion Saba endured counts as firsthand experience of the effects of laïcité (secularism),traditionally used in French society “to restrain the power of the Catholic Church” and now being wielded as “a weapon with which to control the problem population of Maghrebi immigrants” (Zempi and Awan 2019:266). In France, the draconian measures that dictate Muslim women’s dress codes in schools and more recently public places has only exacerbated these women’s alienation. This confirms not only how “Islam in France has increasingly become an identity shelter for members of younger generations who are less familiar with the categorised ‘ethnic’ countries of their parents or grandparents and their associated language”, but also how in the “context of social exclusion, Muslim women are among the most socio-economically marginalised in France” (Zempi and Awan 2019:266).
[1] ‘Poverty and the labour market, by Anthony Heath and Asma Mustafa’, in Runnymede’s 2017 report Islamophobia Still a challenge for Us All, accessed 14th July 2020.
[2] “The concept has been used to justify the ban on wearing visible religious symbols since the 1989 incident known as l’affaire du foulard (the headscarf affair) in which three schoolgirls were expelled from their lycée (middle school) after they refused to remove their headscarves when instructed to do so (Bloul 1994)” (Zempi and Awan 2016:266).
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