In a context where Islam is regularly presented as a challenge to national cohesion, the Grande Mosque of Paris publishes a guide, Muslims in the West. Immutable religious practice, adapted presenceintended to “adapt” the Muslim presence to the French framework. Its interpretation of terms, such as separatism, jihad, secularism, or Islamophobia, shifts the understanding of what Islam is – and is not. For example, the guide reinscribes secularism in an Islamic genealogy, or considers “separatism” as a phenomenon external to the doctrine.
The Grande Mosque of Paris, through the so-called “religious” commission responsible for drafting the guide, offers an interpretation of certain central terms of the debate on Islam in France through its guide Muslims in the West. Immutable religious practice, adapted presence. Heir to a history of institutionalization closely linked to the State, the Grand Mosque occupies an interface position: it presents itself as a partner of the public authorities to supervise an Islam compatible with the secular and republican framework.
At the same time, it finds itself in tension, or in competition, with other poles of representation (federations, currents, successive national authorities), which relativizes its capacity to speak in the name of “the Islam of France”. His redefinition project is particularly interesting regarding certain controversial terms such as separatism, jihad, secularism or Islamophobia.
Separatism
When the word “separatism” is used in public debate, it refers to the idea of an Islamist counter-society threatening national cohesion. In the Mureaux speech of October 2, 2020, Emmanuel Macron designates a politico-religious project aimed at removing certain groups from common law and weakening republican unity. The term functions as an encompassing category: it links radicalization, foreign influences, community withdrawal and security threat in the same interpretative matrix.
The Grand Mosque contests neither the existence of withdrawal phenomena nor the legitimacy of the State to intervene. But she maintains that the notion, as it is mobilized by political leaders and the media, does not have a doctrinal equivalent in the classical Islamic tradition. Medieval categories sometimes used to suggest an intrinsic logic of separation, such as dÄ r al-islÄ m et dÄ r al-ḥarbare placed in their historical and geopolitical context.
By mobilizing legal principles of adaptation, such as darūra (the necessity) or the search for the maṣlaḥa (the common interest), as well as scriptural references, notably verse 14 of sura 49 valuing the plurality of peoples, the guide defends a clear thesis: the separatist withdrawal does not come from any religious obligation.
The move is decisive. Where the political discourse tends to place “separatism” in a structural issue affecting Islamism and, more broadly, the organization of religion, the guide makes it a contingent phenomenon, external to the doctrine. Without denying the term, he circumscribes it and makes it a social or political problem, through the concept of “Muslim citizenship” (muwÄ á¹ana), understood as the affirmation of the compatibility between religious practice and adherence to democratic values, while depriving it of theological foundation. In doing so, the Grand Mosque does not directly oppose public action, it redefines its religious implications.
JihÄ d
A comparable mechanism appears in connection with “jihā d”, another word that has become central in security representations.
In the media space, it is widely equated with armed violence. The guide offers a reading based on classic textual and legal usages: it first recalls the etymology (“effort, struggle”) and foregrounds the internal fight against one’s own weaknesses, often referred to in tradition as “major jihad”. The Koran once describes the jihÄ d of “great” (Q 25:52). The armed dimension, described as “minor jihad”, is not denied, but strictly regulated: defense against aggression, protection of the oppressed, respect for precise limits prohibiting all indiscriminate violence (Q 2:190). This approach does not erase the history of violent uses of the term, it challenges its doctrinal centrality. In other words, what structures public perception, violence, becomes a secondary and conditional dimension, while moral effort is presented as the normative heart of the concept.
From this perspective, war is not designated by jihÄ d in the Koranic text, which rather uses continent (« combat armé »), voire à ḥarbto designate war in the strict sense. Conflict, however, never appears as an autonomous horizon: it is thought of in a normative tension with the notions of peace and reconciliation… á¹£ulḥ, á¹£alÄ á¸¥ or iá¹£lÄ á¸¥ – which aim to restore order in the face of fasÄd (« désordre, corruption »).
On the other hand, jihÄ d has been the subject, throughout the history of Islamic thought, of sustained interpretive investment, to the point of becoming a site of controversy and a ground for conflicts of interpretation.
Laïcité
The guide uses the reference legal definition of secularism – freedom of conscience, neutrality of the state, law of 1905 – but it puts it in parallel with Koranic verses and with the Charter of Medina (622), presented as a historical precedent of coexistence between religious communities under a common authority. This rapprochement is not only intended to demonstrate formal compatibility. It tends to reinscribe secularism in an Islamic genealogy, suggesting that pluralism also stems from resources internal to tradition.
Through this shift, the editors of the glossary reconfigure the evaluation framework. Secularism no longer functions solely as an external norm to which Islam should conform, but as a principle that can be mapped to categories internal to tradition. The implicit relationship of asymmetry is transformed: Islam is no longer only required to prove its compatibility, it is presented as already having the resources to think about coexistence within a common political framework.
Islamophobia
The entry “Islamophobia” reveals another facet of this enterprise. The term is defined there as a form of discrimination targeting people because of their real or supposed affiliation with Islam, anchored in the law of the fight against discrimination. However, public authorities often favor the expression “anti-Muslim acts”, believing that “Islamophobia” can blur the distinction between criticism of a religion, protected by freedom of expression, and hatred towards individuals. This reservation contrasts with the recognition of the term in certain international bodies, as illustrated by the establishment by the United Nations of an international day to combat Islamophobia.
In this context, the guide does not develop this controversy at length, but it integrates it in its own way by including in the glossary the neologism “Muslimophobia”, presented as a less controversial alternative, because it focuses on people rather than religion. This choice reveals the overall approach. Aware of the resistance that the term arouses, the editors favor an alternative word which preserves the discriminatory reality while defusing the semantic debate, thus illustrating, on the scale of a single word, the very logic of the tooÄ«f (“Adaptability”).
Adaptabilité ou islam de France ?
These redefinitions obey an overall logic, the key to understanding which is the notion of “adaptability”. The guide guides the formula through the concept of tooÄ«fwhich he presents as a capacity to adjust the application of standards to the context and concrete situations, and makes it the second entry in the glossary. Adjustment to context is presented not as a concession to Western modernity, but as a requirement specific to the Islamic legal tradition. Islam does not appear as a frozen block in confrontation with the Republic, but as a tradition endowed with a capacity for internal interpretation and adjustment.
Le choix de placer l’« adaptabilityé » (tooÄ«f) at the heart of the approach is not insignificant in the face of the notion of “Islam of France”, central in recent political discourse. The two notions cover distinct logics.
L’« Islam de France» supposing a normative reformulation, où c’est l’islam lui-meême who is called to redefine itself structurally and to internalize external norms to its tradition. L’« adaptabilityé » (tooÄ«f) proceeds from a completely different approach: adjusting the modalities of presence to the French context by drawing on the resources specific to the Islamic tradition. In the first case, the impulse comes from outside, in the second it is claimed to be internal.
Change the terms of the debate?
The guide to the Grand Mosque of Paris will certainly not put an end to disagreements. However, he makes an important gesture by refusing that the categories forged in the political arena alone define the meaning of the terms which structure the public debate on Islam. This intervention occurs at a time when Islam is being captured in the public space through an inflation of denominations which are not limited to isolated words, but which often take the form of recurring phrases – radical Islam, moderate Islam, religious Islam, political Islam – gradually constituting a terminological micro-system which organizes this debate. In this dynamic, each new category acts as an act of nomination: it selects certain traits, excludes others and contributes to establishing a particular representation of Islam in French society. The debate therefore does not only concern social realities, but the discursive operations by which these realities are constituted as public problems.
In a political context where these nomination operations tend to multiply, the question of the very address of this glossary also arises. In many respects, its implicit addressee does not seem to be the Muslims of France so much as the public actors with whom the very terms of the debate are negotiated. The gesture of redefining these words thus appears less as a simple internal clarification than as an attempt to intervene, through language, in the way in which Islam is qualified and governed.
