Following the episodes of street violence and civil unrest which surfaced in the suburbs of Paris in late 2005, recent events in French society have conjured up a new political image – the immigrant populations in the suburbs have rebelled against the model of French citizenship, declaring that they remain completely unassimilated on either the economic, social or political level. Typical of the French, you might think. Indeed, they seem to have adopted the old accepted 1968 convention of disagreement within French society: bricks and Molotov cocktails.

On both sides, there has been an experience of alienation between “native” French citizens and predominantly Muslim immigrants. The alienation that Muslims feel in France is akin to the alienation felt by British Muslim individuals and groups; so much so that in the literary world, when the ‘French Rushdie’, Michel Houellebecq, wrote critically of Muslims and Islam, he too found himself threatened en masse by Islamic groups. However, what is transparent is this: Europe has lived through many epochs troubled by religious radicals – this era is no different. As such, the continued freedom of expression over religious matters remains a crucial matter for novelists such as Houellebecq. Just as the republication of the “offensive” cartoons of the debauched Prophet initiated in the Danish newspaper, Morgenavisen Jyllands-Posten must be allowed to persist in the French newspapers, so must Houellebecq’s disturbing characterisations of Islam.

The Houellebecq affair

Michel Houellebecq (born 1958) has written several novels and collections of obscure poetry, a good sample of which have caused some controversy. Though at home with the intellectual left, his novels were considered dramatically conservative (and hi-jacked by the French right). It brought him little esteem within many ranks of French society. In his novels, Islam is purported to be an over-subscribed sect, fit only for suicidal drunkards. On other occasions, it is written of as a generally degenerate pathway which mankind seems destined to follow or as a doctrine designed for terrorist activity… Sure, this is becoming old hat. But, in the immediate aftermath of the 11 September attacks in the United States, French Muslims experienced Houellebecq’s writings as something of an attack on Islam and its religious and cultural practices.

After the publication of a novel in 1999, Plateforme (Platform), Houellebecq offered to take an interview with the respected literary magazine, Lire. It was in this interview that he denounced Islam as the “stupidest religion”. His precise words were: “La religion le plus con, c’est quand même l’Islam.” Following this remark, in addition to the anti-Muslim sentiment and comments in his novels, four of the key Muslim councils – the mosques of Paris and Lyon, the National Federation of French Muslims, and the World Muslim League – decided on an attempt to prosecute Houellebecq in the French courts. The “liberal” political organisations, namely the Human Rights League, deplored his comments.

The charge at court was for inciting religious hatred and making religious insults. The four Muslim groups hoped to sue Houellebecq and the magazine, Lire, for the offending statements. They claimed damages at the cost of over £28,000. Perhaps this is small cheese but they took him to the courts nonetheless. Although the novels gave considerable weight to the court trial, the prosecution against the author came only after the interview with Lire.

In the centre of this literary storm, it is worth considering precisely what the Islamic faith perceived in the author’s novel and interview as “offensive”? How did the author ever come to represent such a colossal insult to Islam? It is important to engage with these questions, since they offer an insight into the often impossible predicament Islam imposes upon authors and artists who seek to express themselves freely on issues associated with Muslims and Islam.

It is clear that Houellebecq had not been brought before the court directly on account of his writing – unlike Salman Rushdie and Oriana Fallaci – but on account of an interview. However, the expressions in his novels still provided the literary ballast for the offended Muslim groups to prove that there had been a significant enough insult for them to proceed with the case.

Houellebecq’s Les particules élementaires (Atomised), published in 1998, expresses his views on Islam through several character narratives. Beyond the pairing of neo-Nazis and Muslims, he consistently proposes a narrative in his novels which mirror his later radio-transmitted insults: “I know that Islam – by far the most stupid, false and obscure of all religions – seems to be gaining ground; but it’s a transitory phenomenon: in the long term, Islam is doomed just as surely as Christianity.” A work published in 2000, Lanzarote, also begins with similar character narratives such as “Arab countries might well be worth the effort after all, if we could just liberate them from their absurd religion” and more clearly “It’s not Arab countries I don’t like, it’s Muslim countries.” Clearly, no religion fairs well in Houellebecq’s grave and isolated vision of the world.

As with the Theo van Gogh affair – the anti-Islamic film-director butchered and slain in Holland – several parts in his novelistic critique narrate the appalling track record Islam has with regards to the treatment of women. Houellebecq is clear as crystal in portraying this. His later novel, Platform, oozes with depictions of anti-Muslim sentiments. One character, Aicha, the sister of a murdering Islamic fundamentalist, apologises for the Islamic influence in her brother’s character. Talking of her brothers, Aicha argues to the central character, Michel: “They get blind drunk on pastis and all the while they strut around like the guardians of the one true faith, and they treat me like a slut because I prefer to go out and work rather than marry some stupid bastard like them.” Michel responds: “It’s true, Muslims on the whole aren’t up to much.” It is all charmingly ironic, since Houellebecq is also at the forefront of this new literary controversy precisely because of his own aloof misogynistic views.

Houellebecq’s views, in Platform, are frequently littered with attempts to degrade Muslims sui generis, from thoughts on the attractiveness of Muslim vaginas, through to descriptions of Muslims as clots in the blood vessels of Europe. In this sense, he bares no relation to his English counterpart, Rushdie. Yet, in similarity to the Rushdie case, it was a literary work that had not caused a “singular” offence to Muslims: for Houellebecq, his deeply misogynistic portrayal of female character’s as an assembly of orifice’s and breasts, in conjunction with his eviction from the literary left – Les Perpendiculaires, an intellectual leftist club, that had once held him as one of their own – had already instigated a significant literary controversy in the bookish quarters of French society.

The controversial novelist’s closest literary parallel in Britain is Rushdie. In fact, Rushdie has given Houellebecq due recognition in the press and even gone as far as to defend freedom of expression above all other principles. The French courts had already rejected, in 2002, the popular Islamic group bid to bring to trial an Italian author, Oriana Fallaci, in reaction to the publication of the text, The Rage and the Pride, which expressed strong and direct anti-Muslim sentiments. Following Rushdie’s case, Houellebecq’s lawyers in France were careful to portray their cases as almost identical – they warned of a fatwa and possible attempts at his life. Alas, Houellebecq is not the first author to travel this well-beaten literary path.

Later in the October of 2002, Houellebecq and Lire were acquitted of those charges. His defence in court was that he did not despise Muslims themselves but had contempt for Islam. The essential issue here is that he did not wish harm upon the physical being of any person. He had simply held in contempt a body of ideas, understood as a religious faith. Accordingly, the judges ruled that the verbal attack had been made on Islam and not Muslims themselves. As might have been expected, the immediate Muslim reaction to the acquittal was that the precedent was now set for all authors to freely insult Islam.

It is often proposed by Islamic groups that their claims are not only rejected but that the final rulings pour scorn on the diversity of faiths existing in a multicultural society. Thus, they are perceived to be “racist” or “prejudiced.” In this respect, to accept the court ruling is to accept that the law of this culture can no longer support a multicultural society able to incorporate Muslims.

There are four to six million Muslims located in France, making it the country’s “largest and most rapidly expanding minority group.” The lower economic status of many Muslims, exacerbated by the consequences of their increasing social alienation, has led many to suppress the freedom of expression on Houellebecq’s criticisms of Islam.

Why free expression?

Western societies can find themselves in difficulties if their response to a politically contentious literary controversy is to restrict freedom of expression, and France should know this better than others. A “literary controversy” that almost split French society in two during the nineteenth century occurred after the publication of Emile Zola’s publication of J’accuse! This expressive article detailed the fraudulent conduct of the state in relation to freedom of opinion in the Dreyfus affair. The Dreyfus affair revolved around the wrongful life-imprisonment of a noble French Jewish soldier, falsely accused by military officials of espionage on behalf of the German government in 1894. Evidence was found just two years later that it was not Dreyfus – but, Walsin Esterhazy – that had committed the crime. However, the military chose to cover up the affair. This affair is important because just when the entire event was thought to be over, Emile Zola published an article, detailing the corruption of an army cover-up against the Jewish soldier. This infamous publication caused a significant disturbance in French society, particularly amongst the political right and supporters of the Catholic church. The French courts attempted to jail Zola for a year, after he claimed that Esterhazy was to blame and not Zola, and that the military had concealed the truth. Immediately after the court hearing, Zola was fortunate enough to flee to London for a year. When Zola returned, public opinion had swung in favour of Dreyfus, and Zola was thereby acquitted. Finally, in 1906, when the government took over the case from the military, it eventually acquitted and pardoned Dreyfus. By this time, the government and military were placed in dire opposition its citizens. In France, as in most liberal polities of Western Europe, states pay dearly for their interference in cases of free expression.

In modern European political thought, it has been widely understood that one of the most fundamental defences of free expression on religious ideas derives not from a French source but from one of Britain’s great philosopher’s, John Stuart Mill. In the doctrine of John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty, published in 1859, the most fundamental principle of a free-functioning liberal society is the right to the “freedom of opinion”, excepting cases in which severe harm was imposed onto another. According to this liberal ethic, intervention in literary controversies is no longer a possibility for the modern European government.

The Houellebecq controversy illustrated that the right to the author’s freedom of expression was held as more fundamental than the opposing (and relatively weak) Muslim claims that such free expression had boldly incited religious hatred. To French Muslims, the obscenities within the Lire interview and the novels were deemed insulting and offensive. The very criterion upon which the legal case was decided seemed to depend on whether deliberate harm was intended towards the physical being of any person, and not offence towards that person’s ideology or religious view. Houellebecq stood in court to clearly defend that he had not wished harm upon the physical being of any person (i.e. Muslims, in particular) but had obviously held contempt for a body of ideas – Islam – understood as a religious faith. Since Houellebecq had only critiqued a body of ideas and not a group or individual’s physical being, there could be no reasonable or legal intervention.

French society is more than conscious of its doctrinal rights against state intervention. French law embodies the 1789 Declaration of the Rights of Man: “Free communication of ideas and opinions is one of the most precious of the rights of man. Consequently, every citizen may speak, write and print freely; yet, he may have to answer for the abuse of that liberty in the cases determined by law.” The Act of 29 July 1881, and its subsequent reform in 1 July 1972, the Preamble to the 1946 French constitution and the reformed constitution of 1958 all allow for the freedom to publish in all its different guises. This embodied the 1789 Declaration, providing the law with a real practical effect which it enjoys to this day.

There are some exceptions to this rule of thumb. A proviso of the 1881 law was to “make illegal public incitement to discriminate, at least where the discrimination is perpetrated against a person or a group of persons because of their origin or their membership or non-membership of a particular ethic group, nation, race or religion.” Free expression could be capped only when it led to public incitement of racial or religious discrimination. Under French law, the author offered no such threat to the physical being of Muslims, merely to Islam as a body of ideas. Therefore, he was rightfully acquitted. Given that there were no grounds for deliberate physical harm, his acquittal was imminent.

Since the only true reason for which Western states can rightfully exercise power over any person freely expressing themselves on Islam is to prevent harm to others, there was very little chance of Muslim groups proving any “significant” harm had been done to them. Given that Western states have ruled on those cases of free expression only by enabling free expression and only by intervening at the point at which there is some risk of extreme physical harm being done to another person, it seems obvious that the right to express oneself on religious matters – as critically as one chooses – is amongst the most fundamental freedoms of a modern European society.

The Houellebecq affair also demonstrates the importance of citizenship in deciding how a Western state should consider the grounds for free expression in a multicultural society. Houellebecq’s case seems to aid the quest for providing a reasonable justification for free expression on the Islamic faith. It does so by showing that where a pre-existing basis for citizenship (and social inclusion) exists, the case for grounding free expression in diverse religious cultures is strengthened. This is certainly true of Houellebecq’s acquittal in France, since the majority of Muslims – in time – “accepted” the verdict.

Compare this complacency with the general apathy of British Muslims over the Rushdie affair almost fifteen years ago. One explanation of this is that French Muslims, as citizens and Muslims, accepted that they were to be judged before a popular democratic law, regardless of their win or lose situation. Some might say that French Muslims felt themselves authors of the fundamental law that protected both their freedom to protest and the freedom of expression. Compare this with persistent complaints and general apathy in British Muslims following the Rushdie affair, many years after the author’s acquittal. It seems crucial to observe this situation since the Rushdie case in England illustrates a peculiar case in which any sort of citizenship was (and still is) generally degraded. Therefore, the toleration between disengaged communities is a little thin.

Again, compare the Houellebecq affair with the status of disengaged communities under Dutch liberalism, particularly for Muslim groups, which may have been partly responsible for the murder of controversial film-director, Theo van Gogh, in early November 2004.

If free expression can be achieved without the marginalization of religious and cultural communities, then it is possible to avoid the social alienation and separatism still inherent to modern multicultural communities. Of course, it seems sensible to recommend a programme of citizenship as one of the key conditions in supporting free expression in relation to Islam, but only in so far as citizenship does not, in turn, impinge upon the freedom of individuals – as both John Stuart Mill and his French counterpart, Alexis de Tocqueville, once warned.