Tragedy and Paradox of French-Arab Relations

WE need another Charles Martel to save the soul of France". The frequent online chatroom references to the Frankish warrior who defeated the armies of Ummayed Spain at the battle of Poitiers thirteen centuries ago and checked the Islamic advance into Europe horrified me. Did educated, rational Frenchmen really need to invoke the spirit of the ancient religious wars against Islam as a solution to the rioting in the immigrant ghettoes of the country?

France's modern encounter with the Islamic world began the moment the armies of Napoleon Bonaparte landed in the Nile Delta in 1798 and sought to recast Mamluk Egypt in its own image with the revolutionary message of liberte, egalite and fraternite. Like George Bush two centuries later, Napoleon's experiment in social engineering in the Middle East did not resonate all too well with the natives, even though his secret weapon for promoting democracy in the Islamic world was an Arabic printing press, not Karen Hughes, Fox News and the First Infantry Division.

France's ties to the Arab world go back to its 130 year old "mission civilisatrice" in Algeria. Algeria's loss in "the savage war of peace" between 1954-1962 was a cataclysmic baptism of fire for modern France. Algerie Francaise ended in a bloodbath, after almost a million Arab and Berber deaths, the expulsion of the pied-noirs (French settlers who included Albert Camus and the colonels who tried to assassinate Charles De Gaulle), was a traumatic geopolitical defeat for France on the same scale as Waterloo and Dien Bien Phu.

France's colonial adventures in the Maghreb were, of course, the genesis for the demographic time bomb whose fuse was lit last week in the banlieus of France. After all, five million Muslims live in France, the biggest Islamic community in Western Europe, often living lives of impoverished desperation and unmitigated discrimination.

The violence that swept across France's ghettoes seemed to vindicate the "rivers of blood" prophecies of racist demagogues like Jean-Marie Le Pen and Enoch Powell. In the post 9/11 world, the dominant model of Euro-Arab relations is not relaxed cosmopolitanism as once existed in Holland but a pandemic of fear, suspicion and anti-Muslim violence. As Le Figaro warned, France faces a "contagion" and the Molotov cocktail and the suicide bomber, petrol bombs in mosques and synagogues, now symbolize the new clash of civilizations in the heart of Europe.

I find it particularly ironic that the current riots flared up in Clichy-sous-Bois and Bobigny, the epicentre of another revolt that once took me to Paris several times in the early 1990's. After all, these drab suburbs were the Ground Zero of the musical revolt that was rai, the Algerian musical genre that was born in the casbahs of Oran but became a global phenomenon after Cheb Khalid and Cheb Mami moved to Paris. Strange, the resistance in Algeria viewed rai as degenerate and slaughtered several singers in the Kebayle to prove their point. Fundamentalist terror has claimed thousands of innocent Muslim lives for every Theo Van Gogh and Daniel Pearl it slaughtered.

There are few more secular Muslim populations in Europe than the Algerian, Moroccan and Tunisian immigrants who moved to France in the post-colonial exodus from the Maghreb. Their anguish is not over headscarves and Al Andalus but jobs, housing and dignity for Frantz Fanon's 'wretched of the earth'. France pandered to the Arab street in its foreign relations after the Six Day War but the Arab street is now in Paris and its rage has nothing to do with Bush, Iraq and Palestine.

The Paris riots have dealt a serious blow to the Chirac Doctrine, France's quixotic and independent foreign policy in the Arab world. No world leader has done more to court the Arab palace and the Arab street than Jacques Chirac. He was the only Western President who attended the funeral of Hafez Assad in Damascus. He risked the wrath of the White House to oppose Bush's invasion of Iraq to the bitter end. He kept a death vigil as Yasser Arafat flew to France and declared that, while the PLO chairman lay dying, Paris was the capital of Palestine. French arms merchants, oilmen, spooks and bankers are ubiquitous everywhere from Morocco to the Arabian Gulf sheikhdoms.

French intelligence has excellent relationships with the leadership of Hezbollah, Islamic Jihad and Hamas. Chirac counted the late Rafik Hariri, Sheikh Zayed and kings Fahd and Hassan among his close friends. He tried to groom Syrian President Dr. Bashar Assad as his protégé. He hosted the famous 2002 conference that engineered an international consortium to bail out Lebanon and prevented the first sovereign default in the Arab world. He midwifed Algeria's democratic transition and the Syrian pullout from Lebanon. Yet not even Chirac's legendary charm and the diplomatic jugglers of the Quai d' Orsay can disguise the hard, tragic fact that France has now become the Western world's most visceral anti-Arab and anti-Muslim society.

The Arab presence in France is kaleidoscopic. From Lebanese bankers in La Defense to vacationing Saudi princes at the Hotel Crillion to the Maghrebi proletariat in the Place Clichy, Paris must rank as among the world's most diverse and vibrant Arab metropolis. So it is not just tragic but downright dangerous to see the ghost of Charles Martel invoked by French people who view the riots as some sort of homegrown intifada, an apocalyptic East-West jihad.

There are five million Muslims in France and demagogues who seek to invoke the subliminal, anti-Islamic passions of Christian Europe are playing with fire and the fate of European civilization. As Chirac enters his twilight as a statesman, Nicholas Sarkozy and Dominique de Villepin will win or lose the Elysee Palace based on their respective responses to the inner city conflagrations that have convulsed France. Not all the Legion Etrangere battalions, Mirage warplanes and Exocet missiles in creation can protect French interests in the Arab world if the French elite cannot design imaginative solutions to the social cul de sac in the immigrant urban ghettos. To paraphrase Sarkozy, the potential next President of the Republic, even scum vote in a democracy.