By contrast, themes emerging from the conversion narratives of the three French Muslim heritage (MH) respondents, who migrated to Birmingham from France in the 2000s, bore some similarities to those of the British South Asians who grew up in Britain. The French respondents were of the same generation: their migrant parents emigrated at the end of French colonial rule in Tunisia, Morocco and Algeria during the 1950s and 1960s and responded to the shortage of unskilled labour in France after the Second World War (Pauly 2004:35). The influx of Maghrebian people, triggered by the decolonisation of North Africa and a lack of jobs in their own countries, prompted a third wave of immigration to France and contributed to “vigorous French industrial growth in the 1960s” (Pauly 2004:36).
The settlement patterns of French MH respondents also resembled those of their British African-Caribbean and British South Asian counterparts—after an initial period as Muslim guest workers, “the chain migration of workers and family reunification programs”, they too ended up living in impoverished urban neighbourhoods known as ‘banlieues’ or quartiers de désespoir (“suburbs of despair”) (Zempi and Awan 2019:266), places typically “associated with Muslims who live in abject poverty and are perceived as threatening by the mainstream” (Pauly 2004:36-38). The banlieues would also become notorious sites of rising urban violence, where confrontations with the local police were a product of “the bitterness young beurs [felt] towards the French government” (Pauly 2004:36-49).
However, religious belief and the practice of Islam for second-generation French MH respondents prior to converting to Salafism appeared far less pronounced than for their British South Asian counterparts. This is illustrated in the narratives of Rabia and Saba, both of Moroccan or Algerian heritage and in their thirties, who grew up in the banlieues. They attested to knowing hardly anything of their religious heritage except that eating pork was ‘harām’ and observing hijāb was a personal choice to be made much later in life, findings concurrent with Pauly’s (2004) research showing a marked drop in second-generation French Muslims identifying with Islam or its practice compared with their parents (Pauly 2004:44). The reason for this is difficult to ascertain, except that religious cultivation may have been hindered by the inherent laïcité (French secularism) culture of France, which did not afford migrants the opportunity to establish themselves as religio-ethnic minorities in the same way those in Britain were able to; Davie (2007) notes that the French would have viewed this as “a threat to [their Enlightenment notions of] freedom” (Davie 2007:162,163).
Based upon the harsh effects of such social exclusion, it is possible to see how and why young French Muslims would welcome cultivating a Salafi identity—which Pauly (2004) predicted would be a “hybrid-Franco-Islamic identity” (Pauly 2004:44)—to resolve an identity crisis.
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