The racialization of Muslims in France and the United States: Some insights from white converts to Islam

White converts to Islam as ‘anomalous’ research subjects

Conversions to Islam have a long history in Europe and the US (Garcia-Arenal, 1999), but they constitute a more visible phenomenon today, for both numerical and political reasons. In this article, I explore the intricacies of race and religion in the US and France by focusing on the experiences of white converts to Islam, i.e., those converts who identify as white Americans of Anglo or European descent in the US and those who identify as white French natives in France. ¹ To be sure, these individuals represent a tiny minority in both countries. According to recent mosque surveys in the US, white Americans make up only 22% of converts to Islam ² (Bagby, 2012: 13) and represent only 1.6% of all American Muslims (CAIR, 2001). The Religion Office of the French Home Ministry estimates that Muslim converts represent at most 100,000 individuals today (Pew Research Center, 2009). Information about the racial background of these Muslim converts is missing, however. It is not because of their statistical significance that white converts are of interest to us. Instead, I propose that they are an interesting sociological subject because they break the association between Islam and ‘foreignness’. As Victoria’s case demonstrates, white converts disrupt the racial features of the stereotypical Muslim figure and appear as racially discordant. In that sense, they open fruitful avenues for inquiry. By ‘breaching’ (Garfinkel, 1967) the norms of religious and racial identification, converts actually reveal their enduring and normative character in further depth.

Muslim converts have rarely been studied in terms of their racialized experiences. Most of the literature on conversion to Islam focuses on the reasons for conversion or the religious learning process (Köse, 1996; Allievi, 1998; Winchester, 2008). Very little has been written on how conversion might affect racial identity. A few recent articles can be found, but they focus on Australia (Alam, 2012), the United Kingdom (Franks, 2000; Moosavi, 2015), Denmark (Jensen, 2008), the Netherlands (Van Nieuwkerk, 2004), and Germany (Özyürek, 2014). In the US, the possibility of using conversion as a lens through which to examine the intricacies between race and religion has never been explored. In France, this type of investigation has only recently begun to emerge (Brun, 2014).

Comparing race and religion in France and the United States

My second strategy is to analyze the intertwining of race and religion through a comparative analysis. I apply the same research protocol to two countries that have historically been characterized by different – and at times competing – understandings of race and religion: France and the US.

Race is at the forefront of any analysis of American society (Omi and Winant, 1994: 61). By contrast, the discussion around race is much less developed in France. While racial categories are almost self-evident in America, they remain suspect in France, where a strong color-blind rhetoric prevails (Safi, 2008; Simon, 2008). The structure of racial relations also differs on the two sides of the Atlantic. The American racial stratification system has long been characterized by a Black/White divide, although some scholars argue that it is now becoming more complex, with Hispanic, Asian and Arab Americans occupying intermediary positions (Bonilla-Silva, 2004). By contrast, the ethno-racial predicament in France is located in post-colonial immigration, particularly from North Africa. Wacquant (2014: 8) notes that while ‘ethnic division [is] rooted in the “Black/white” opposition in the US, [it is] centered on the “national/post-colonial foreigner” schism in France’. In her work comparing racist attitudes among French and American working men, Lamont (2003) also found that the American ‘them’ are Blacks, while the French ‘them’ are Arabs.

France and the US also entertain contrasted relationships to religion. The sociology of American religion proffers a substantial body of research (Ebaugh and Chafetz, 2000; Chen, 2008; Lichterman, 2008) demonstrating that it is through religion that Americans and immigrants find a sense of membership and belonging. Kurien (1998), for example, wrote that Indian immigrants ‘become American by becoming Hindu’ since religion allows them to find their place in American life. By contrast, religion is not a factor of cultural membership in the French nation. ³ As Foner and Alba (2008: 368) put it, ‘an article entitled “Becoming French by Being Muslim” would be unthinkable’. In fact, the crux of the conflict between the French Republic and its Muslim citizens is the issue of secularism, as French Muslims are deemed too conspicuous in their religious practices (Roy, 2005; Amiraux, 2006; Bowen, 2006).

Thus, France and the US appear antipodal as far as race and religion are concerned. The current demographic composition of the French and American Muslim minorities is also interesting to compare. Muslims make up 0.6% of the American population (Pew Research Center, 2007) and they ‘are the most racially diverse religious group in the United States’ (Gallup Coexist Foundation, 2009: 10). The American Muslim Council estimates that 42% are Black Americans, 29% are Indo-Pakistanis, and 12 to 15% are Arabs, while the remaining 14 to 17% represent various races and ethnicities, including white and Hispanic Americans (cited in Jackson, 2005: 23). By contrast, the Trajectoires et Origines (TeO) survey recently estimated that there are around 4.1 million Muslims in France (Simon and Tiberj, 2010: 6) who make up approximately 6% of the French population. Rough estimates indicate that 78% of Muslims residing in France are of North African descent (including 1 to 1.6 million from Algeria), 12% come from the Middle East (including Turkey) and 10% are from Africa or the Indian Ocean (Dargent, 2003). Contrary to the American Muslim minority, therefore, French Muslims are much more homogeneous ethnically.

Because of these similarities and differences, France and the US ‘offer especially fruitful cases for sociological comparison’ (Lamont and Thévenot, 2000: 3). The literature comparing France and the US has flourished in recent years, especially with regard to Islam, which occupies center stage in the public debates of both countries. But scholars have overwhelmingly focused on state-driven policies, institutional frameworks, and legal decisions (Fetzer and Soper, 2005; Césari, 2006; Bowen, 2011). We know much less about how the categories of ‘race’ and ‘religion’ operate in the lives of ordinary French and American Muslims and what a comparative analysis of these issues would reveal. Studies offering a comparative perspective on conversion to Islam are also rare (Daynes, 1999; Mossière, 2014). The purpose of this article is to fill this gap by providing a comparative analysis of how race operates in the lives of Muslim converts on both sides of the Atlantic. I first show that French and American converts share similar racialized experiences, before demonstrating that this racialization is nevertheless endowed with different meanings on either side of the Atlantic.

Choosing faith and facing race

The people in my sample come from different religious backgrounds (agnostics, staunch atheists, Catholics, Pentecostals, Hindus, etc.). They ended up embracing Islam for a variety of reasons, which would be too long to enumerate. What stands out from interviews, however, is that most respondents were drawn to Islam for spiritual reasons. According to some, the strict monotheism of Islam offered a powerful alternative to the complexities of the Christian trinity. Others saw Islam as the next logical step after Judaism and Christianity (the Qur’an emphasizes the continuity with these two traditions). Some felt a special connection to God after hearing the adhaan (call to prayer) or performing the Muslim prayer. After going through dramatic life events, others seized on Islam as their last chance of spiritual healing. A clergy-less religion that emphasizes a strict monotheism and a direct connection to the divine, Islam appears to meet contemporary demands for a more individualized faith. Finally, some followed their spouses and converted to Islam to ensure the religious homogeneity of their household. In many cases, various motives were intertwined. In sum, my informants embraced Islam as a religion. In the US, where changing religious affiliations is relatively common ⁶ , several of my interviewees interpreted their religious transformation as a mundane event, as expressed by Jenna, a 35-year-old white woman from Chicago who embraced Islam after meeting a Muslim man: ‘It wasn’t that big of a deal for me to convert to Islam. It was a big deal to everybody else. I underestimated how much of an impact it would have on other people’. To this day, Jenna’s brother does not talk to her. She also lost her position in a prominent law company, which she attributes to Islamophobia on the part of her partners in the firm. Having decided to embrace Islam as a faith, Jenna underestimated the racialized implications of her conversion.

The world of the ‘other’: Experiencing racial discrimination

My research demonstrates that embracing Islam has an impact on converts’ perceived racial status. In some instances, racializing experiences proved traumatic. Victoria, who wears a headscarf, painfully recalled being badly insulted in the street: ‘I have had the nasty comments. I have been called … This has been really bad but “Sand nigger ⁷ ”. Yeah. Someone yelled it out of the car window’. As a white person, Victoria had never been exposed to such a racial slur in the past. She was embarrassed to even pronounce the word. Marta, a 30-year-old Latina wearing the hijab, also remembered the fear she once sparked in a mall in Chicago:

I remember walking around one time in a mall and there was this lady with her kids … And I saw her look. The first moment that she saw me, her reaction was grabbing her kids and pulling them to her side. And it was almost like an instinctive protective reaction from a mother. And I just, I felt so sad … I never wished to have that reaction on others.

Because of her hijab, Marta’s presence was interpreted as a threat. In France, Melissa, a 27-year-old white woman born and raised in Burgundy, was also exposed to verbal attacks:

… last week, I was on the street talking to a friend. We were just chit-chatting on the sidewalk. At some point, a woman passed by us. And without making any eye contact with me, she yelled, ‘Go back to your country, you bitch!’ Well, given that I am from Burgundy, it won’t make a big difference …

In her interview study with female converts in the Parisian region, Brun (2014) shows that her respondents wearing the hijab were exposed to similar comments. Many were called ‘sale bougnoule’ (dirty Arab) on the street. Others were asked whether they were about to plant a bomb in the subway. Larisse (2013), who interviewed Muslim converts of Caribbean descent in the Paris region, recorded similar testimonies and showed that Islam was a source of further stigma for Black individuals. The testimonies of Victoria, Marta, and Melissa demonstrate that the headscarf is a particularly efficient (gendered) marker of racialization. In choosing to make their Muslim spirituality visible, converts discover the world of racial discrimination: people make racial slurs or ostensibly fear them. ⁸ In fact, blogger Olivia Kompier gives this warning to converts to Islam: ‘welcome to a world you may have never experienced before, the world of “the other”’ (Kompier, 2013). The figure of the ‘Muslim terrorist’ ⁹ is particularly prominent in the racialization of converts. In the context of the ‘War on Terror’, conversion to Islam is increasingly studied through the lens of homeland security in both France and the US. This transatlantic convergence stems from recent geopolitical developments. But these shared post-9/11 tropes should not hide the deeper historical genealogies that produced clear national specificities in the racial stigma attached to Islam, to which I now turn.

American converts and the bi-racial figure of ‘the Muslim’

Muslim Americans are divided into two main groups: African-American Muslims and immigrant Muslims from the Middle East or South Asia. The racial politics and racialization trajectories of these two groups are in dramatic contrast, which in turn results in different consequences for the white converts who embrace Islam through them.

In the 20th century, Islam was appropriated by African-American religious entrepreneurs, who engaged its discursive frameworks to promote Black pride. In 1913, the Moorish Science Temple established by Noble Drew Ali stated that the origins of Black people could be traced to Morocco, which meant that Islam was their natural religion (Gomez, 2005: 203–225). In 1930, the Nation of Islam explained the atrocities Black people had to endure on US soil by the doctrine of ‘the white man as a devil’. Its leader, Elijah Muhammad, invited his followers to reject the devil’s creed, Christianity, and embrace Islam as ‘the true religion of the Black man’ (Gomez, 2005: 301–319). The Nation, through its spokesperson Malcolm X, contributed to the image of indigenous American Islam as a religion strongly tied to Blackness and fiercely opposed to white supremacy. Today, the Nation has split and many former members have gravitated towards a more orthodox version of Sunni Islam, but its political legacy remains. The white converts in my sample who embraced an African-American expression of Islam can be divided into two ideal-types. The first type comprises individuals who came from marginalized sections of society, such as Hasan, 35 years old, who grew up in an impoverished neighborhood of Louisville and embraced Islam after a prolonged stay in prison for drug-dealing. When I asked Hasan about his experience as a ‘white’ Muslim, he explained:

On the East Coast, [the Muslim community] is mostly Black. But I never experienced any problem from any brother. In general, they accepted me and obviously I don’t care. And we accepted each other because we are indigenous Americans, you know. We come from the same culture, from the hip-hop culture, from skate-boarding, you know, street culture.

The significance of race in Hasan’s daily life is minimal: because he shares a social status with most of his Black coreligionists, he emphasizes a commonality of experience across the racial divide. The second type of convert consists of individuals politically committed to the anti-racist struggle, such as Abdullah, 39 years old, who grew up in an upper-middle-class suburban household and decided to convert after reading the autobiography of Malcolm X. Abdullah describes how, as a teenager, he was ‘wearing X hats’ and ‘identifying [him]self with Africa’, and how he ‘took an African name for [him]self’. As a high school student, he also became the youngest, and only white, member of the local National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). ¹⁰ For Abdullah, embracing Islam was part of a conscious anti-racist strategy to repudiate his white privilege and become a ‘race traitor’ (Ignatiev and Garvey, 1996). He said: ‘my response [to white privilege] was to run away from being white and try not to be white’. Thus, the white converts to African-American Islam embody a very particular type of racialized experience that strives to transcend whiteness.

Apart from including African-American indigenous Muslims, American Islam also has a significant post-1965 immigrant component. It must be noted that American Muslim immigrants belong mostly to the middle and upper middle class (Pew Research Center, 2007). Better-off than most immigrants, they have become known as the ‘model minority’ (Joshi, 2006; Naber, 2012) and have tended to craft an image of a friendly American Islam, wishful of integration and respectful of mainstream American values (Bilici, 2012; Grewal, 2013: 151–156). ¹¹ The white converts in my sample who entered Islam through their immigrant or second-generation friends are sociologically very different from those previously described. They are mostly college students who became acquainted with Islam through Muslim Student Associations (MSAs) on large university campuses. These converts’ racialized experiences are different from those who converted through African-American Islam. While they certainly suffer from an assignation to the figure of the ‘Muslim terrorist’, their encounter with race can also have positive overtones. For instance, Lisa explained that her racialization as an Arab proved beneficial in the school context. She jokingly recalled how her teachers’ attitude evolved as she became associated with the educational achievements of America’s ‘model minority’:

My grades improved! And I kept track. I have a theory about this. I mean, nothing major, but they assume you are smarter. There is this stereotype that all Muslims are doctors, engineers, and lawyers.

Because Lisa, sporting her hijab, looked like other successful second-generation Muslims, her status improved in the eyes of her teachers. This would not be likely to happen in France, where Islam is associated with the lower strata of society.

French converts: Dealing with race and class in a post-colonial society

As stated in the introduction, most first- and second-generation Muslims in France hail from North Africa. They still have to bear the uncomfortable legacy of French colonialism. The war of Independence with Algeria (1954–1962) left deep wounds in the national memory of both countries, some of which have not yet healed. This violent colonial history still has an impact on converts today, who can easily be perceived as traitors to the nation, especially when some of their family members were involved in the Algerian war. Ludovic, a 27-year-old school teacher in Marseille, whose father is a pied noir ¹² , painfully recalls their discussion when he confessed to having embraced Islam: ‘I never saw my father in such a state of anger … Because of Algeria, [he] has his own way of looking at things concerning Muslims’. The perception of Islam (and, as a result, of converts) seems very much tied to colonial history in France, which is not the case at all in the US.

Intersecting with this colonial legacy, the other significant dimension for French converts’ racialization is class. The 1950s and 1960s saw a massive influx to mainland France of North African immigrants, who swelled the ranks of the French working class. Relegated to the outskirts of large cities (banlieues), these Muslim immigrants and their children have since been socially and spatially marginalized. Thus, the racial figure of the ‘Muslim’ in France has distinct Arab features. It is also associated with poverty, crime, delinquency, and social exclusion. This is another clear difference from the US. African-American scholar Sherman Jackson (2005: 16–17) reflects on this issue:

As a British convert once remarked to me ‘you in America attracted the Muslim aristocrats, while we in Europe got the plebeians’ … From the perspective of an American convert for whom ‘immigrant Muslim’ translated invariably into ‘educated’ or ‘professional’, this was simply shocking.

In France, by contrast, the representation of ‘immigrant Muslims’ is often associated with social hardship. A French convert would probably not gain better school recognition upon wearing a hijab, as Lisa did in Chicago. Quite the contrary: conversion to Islam can be perceived as a drop in social status. Sophie, for instance, explained to me that she got into trouble with one of her friends, who associated the religion of Islam with social relegation and lack of education:

I have a male friend whose sister is also a convert. And I am under the impression that he transferred the anger related to his sister’s conversion to me. He made very harsh remarks about Islam, with a lot of stereotypes, like ‘she is going to be hanging out only with Arabs; it is not going to help her think; the intellectual level is too low’, etc. For him, it is only people from the hood who are Muslim.

Surprisingly, Sophie also heard derogatory comments about Muslims’ low social status during an Islamic class. The teacher, a Muslim himself, told the group of converts attending the class: ‘The fact that you have converted to Islam does not mean that you should start messing around. You should continue to be on time. You should not start claiming welfare. You should pursue your education’. Thus, the racial stigma associated with Islam in France has strong class overtones, which are also projected onto converts, sometimes by other Muslims themselves.