The uplift ideology of French Muslim leaders directly impacts the ways in which they respond to stigmatization. In the wake of rising Islamophobia, leaders of the UOIF encourage their coreligionists to react politely to stigma, stressing the value of nonconfrontational responses. For them, the destigmatization of Islam is best achieved through strict policing of Muslims’ conduct and constant attention to self-discipline. This anti-racist repertoire is aligned with color-blind republicanism, in a society where the social reality of Islamophobia is regularly denied and which regards group-based claims-making with suspicion. Correspondingly, UOIF leaders tend to distance themselves from contentious means of action, such as legal action or direct protest, and chastise what they consider a victim mentality. Once again, their approach is primarily guided by pious considerations. Practicing the Prophetic model of patience and perseverance (ṣabr) is part of their effort to fashion pious subjectivities. However, this approach remains costly. Constant self-regulation exacts a psychological toll on individuals while the promotion of behavioral exemplariness tends to obscure power structures, teaching worshippers to police their behavior rather than question postcolonial hierarchies.

Community leaders attempt to deflect the stigma of the “angry” and “disorderly” Muslim by participating in local politics. In the wake of urban unrest affecting disadvantaged neighborhoods in France, Muslim leaders of the UOIF have leveraged their community influence to facilitate the integration of migrant-origin populations and keep these neighborhoods quiet. This chapter sheds light on their politics during episodes of social turmoil, such as the 2001 unrest in Lille and the 2005 riots throughout France. Beyond times of crisis, their role as social troubleshooters is reflected in the dissemination of an ethos of responsibility. Through various activities, including charitable assistance, professional insertion, and campaigns against drugs, these Muslim leaders partially converge with public authorities about the need to preserve order in “sensitive neighborhoods.” In ways reminiscent of Black middle-class reformers in the early twentieth-century US, UOIF leaders promote the uplift ideology that values self-reliance, discipline, and hard work. They seek to transform young urban worshippers into moral subjects, committed to avoiding the dishonorable pitfalls of idleness and incivility. However, positioning themselves as social troubleshooters is costly as these leaders unwittingly reproduce the dominant representations of migrants’ neighborhoods as problematic and, consequently, tend to divert attention from the structural causes of marginalization.

The ethos of responsibility promoted by Muslim leaders of the UOIF assumes a particular flavor in the context of tight secular constraints. In France, the renewal of public discussions on laïcité since the 1990s has resulted in the consolidation of a hard, exclusivist understanding of secularism. Against the backdrop of such constraints and aligned with the revivalist tradition of contextually adapted Islamic rulings, Muslim leaders emphasize the importance of low-profile, unobtrusive forms of religiosity over more public forms. They exhort their coreligionists to practice discretion and self-restraint, whether in their sartorial practices, in the architecture of their mosques, or during the celebration of Ramadan. This requirement for discretion goes hand in hand with the celebration of an “intelligent” reading of the Scriptures. This class-layered exercise goes against the “ignorant” interpretations of migrant workers and Salafi followers while being aligned with the Islamic tradition of moderation (wasaṭiyya). The chapter concludes by delving into the case of Tareq Oubrou, a renowned Muslim scholar in Bordeaux, who advocates for a “theology of acculturation” in harmony with French republicanism. Oubrou’s theological endeavors further exemplify the reflective, intellectualized approach to religion promoted by UOIF leaders, as well as their middle-class sensibilities.

Muslim leaders of the UOIF further cement their claim to respectability through an elite project of community-building. This project consists of forming a respectable class of Muslims who embody the petit bourgeois values of hard work, politeness, and individual responsibility. This is concretely enacted through various institutions, starting with private Muslim schools, and implemented through a range of regular activities, such as reading groups, diploma ceremonies, and self-development workshops. This chapter draws on comparisons made with Black elites in the US and upper-class Jews in nineteenth-century Europe to show that French Muslim leaders’ uplift ideology is also scripted into bodies. Physical exercise, hygienic practices, and appropriate outfits comprise the primary medium of perfectionist politics seeking dignity. These politics are articulated using the language of Islamic virtues – the centrality of education is predicated upon the Quranic injunction iqrāʾ (“read”), the search for professional accomplishment is understood as a duty of iḥsān (excellence), and the importance of behavioral exemplarity is reasoned in reference to ādāb (good manners) and akhlāq (ethical conduct). These moral principles, however, are also consistent with neoliberal definitions of social worth and rely on the continuous erection of boundaries against lower-class, “undeserving” coreligionists.

The final chapter of this book teases out the empirical and theoretical threads of respectability politics in the French Muslim context. It stresses the ways in which this form of politics operates as a reactive, embodied, gendered, racialized, and class-layered tactic of community advancement, resulting in both conservative and emancipatory outcomes for minority citizens. It further reflects on the relative failure of respectability politics, which falls short of its promise to French Muslims to fully exercise their citizenship. This argument goes beyond the French case; although the problematic relationship between religion and citizenship is often deemed “typically French,” respectability politics seems to be pervasive in Muslim-minority contexts and accompanies the reconfiguration of Islamic traditions into ethical projects of self-fashioning. The chapter concludes with a discussion on the importance of breaking away from the insularity of Islamic scholarship and opening up a transatlantic conversation about the role of ethics and religion in minority politics. The ambition of this chapter, then, is to look beyond the Muslim case and draw parallels with other minority citizens, such as Black elites in the US and European Jews. It examines how these groups have resorted to inconspicuous religiosity and social upliftment to advance their conditions, as well as how such stories reflect the intricate workings of power in situations of subjection.

The second chapter traces the trajectories of Muslim leaders of the UOIF, leading them from North African middle-class families to the uneasy condition of Arab foreigners in France. Despite obtaining French citizenship, their status remains vulnerable, with state authorities and political elites regularly questioning their national loyalty. Owing to the intense scrutiny and suspicion, French Muslim leaders tend to engage in various practices of “Frenchification.” These practices consist of distancing themselves from homeland politics, providing evidence of cultural (notably linguistic) integration, and promoting a form of “pure Islam” that is detached from their homeland traditions. The chapter demonstrates that proving Frenchness is irreducible to legal status and implies nourishing a specific set of emotions, such as national pride, feelings of belonging, and a “love” of France. These expressions of emotional attachment can be understood in light of the emotionalization of citizenship that now characterizes the politics of belonging in Western Europe. However, such credentials of membership are not socially neutral; rather, they are layered with class considerations and can, in some cases, feed into anti-migrant sentiments against less privileged coreligionists, whom they regard as insufficiently French.

Obtaining French citizenship is not enough to secure social acceptance, and terror attacks committed in the name of Islam have critically impaired Muslims’ claims to national membership. Beginning with a discussion of how the construction of Muslims as a “suspect community” has impacted their daily lives, the chapter explores Muslim leaders’ efforts to display exemplary conduct to reassure majority members and circumvent the terrorist stigma. Their actions, such as organizing guided tours and open days in mosques, are emblematic of this endeavor, as well as of the asymmetrical burden of mutual understanding that characterizes postcolonial European societies. Moreover, embodying exemplariness involves cultivating Islamically justified dispositions for approachability and gentleness in daily interactions. Efforts to allay suspicions can also lead Muslim leaders of the UOIF to establish taboo forms of cooperation with intelligence officers, which highlights the ways in which the securitization of Islam relies partly on the involvement of certain community members. Overall, through their practice of disidentification from “Salafi,” “literalist,” and other “extremist” worshippers, French Muslim leaders tend to reinforce the distinction made by state authorities between “good Muslims” and “bad Muslims,” thereby deflecting the fundamentalist stigma onto some coreligionists.

French Muslim leaders regularly engage in praxis of self-restraint, politeness, and social upliftment in the context of strong assimilationist pressures. Their everyday acts of piety indicate the crafting of a discreet Islam, geared toward appeasing tensions around Muslim presence in France and encouraging justice and respect for minority citizens. These self-limiting forms of political claims – which have gone hitherto unexplored – should be understood as their politics of respectability. This concept, borrowed from Black studies in the US, is used to shed light on the multifaceted dimensions of discreet Islam, whether its incorporation through morals and manners, its grounding in middle-class attributes, or its political ambivalence, resulting in both conservative and emancipatory outcomes for minority citizens. Moreover, studying the respectability politics of French Muslim leaders allows for important epistemological acts, such as moving beyond the images of in-your-face Muslim politics that saturate public discussions, taking the religious commitment of minority citizens seriously, and opening a transatlantic conversation on class and morals in minority politics. To do so, the book builds on an ethnographic inquiry with one of France’s most influential Muslim organizations, the Union des organisations islamiques de France (UOIF, the Union of Islamic Organizations of France), in the context of a tense France following the 2015 terror attacks.