Islamic Presence and Mosque Establishment in France: Colonialism, Arrangements for Guestworkers and Citizenship

This article reconstructs the ways in which Islamic presence and mosque establishment have been represented in French public discourse. During colonial times, the French colonial state aligned itself with selected religious leaders and paid the salaries of imams and the maintenance of mosques in the overseas territories. In Europe, Islamic symbols such as mosques were displayed at colonial expositions and a monumental mosque was built in the centre of Paris between 1922 and 1926. The French state was also supportive of Muslim religious practice when Muslims sojourned in France as colonial workers and later as transient migrant workers. In the 1960s and 1970s, Islamic practice in France was largely hidden from view because it was practised in prayer rooms located in the cellars of apartment blocks where most of the migrant workers lived. During the period of citizenship the visible presence of Islam in French society became a deeply controversial issue. In the late 1980s the idea emerged to establish central ‘Cathedral Mosques’ in major French cities, which would stand as symbols of an ‘Islam of France’. At the beginning of the twenty-first century, public authorities began to see the multiplicity of smaller and medium-sized mosques in French cities as illustrative of the emergence of a so-called ‘neighbourhood Islam’, and as an inevitable result of the diversity and independence of Muslim communities in France.