穆斯林融入西方社会有多难 Why Muslim Integration Fails in Christian Heritage Societies

No reasonable person would claim that the integration of Muslims into western societies is without problems. As the team of social scientists behind Why Muslim Integration Fails in Christian-Heritage Societies reports, 43 per cent of people interviewed in a poll for the newspaper Le Figaro in 2012 considered that the country’s Muslim community constituted a “menace to the identity of France”, while in a German survey conducted in 2013 51 per cent thought Islam posed a threat to their way of life. That year, of a thousand 18- to 24-year-olds in Britain interviewed by Radio 1, 27 per cent said they did not trust Muslims (compared with 16 per cent concerning Hindus or Sikhs, 15 per cent for Jews, 13 per cent for Buddhists and 12 per cent for Christians).

合理的人不会断言穆斯林在融入西方社会方面没有问题。撰写《为什么传统基督教社会的穆斯林融合会失败》(Why Muslim Integration Fails in Christian-Heritage Societies)一书的社会学家团队写道：在法国《费加罗报》(Le Figaro) 2012年所做的一项调查中，43%的受访者认为该国的穆斯林群体构成“对法国国家认同的威胁”，而2013年德国的一项调查显示，51%的受访者认为伊斯兰教对他们的生活方式构成威胁。同年，在BBC广播一台(BBC Radio 1)对1000名英国18至24岁的青年进行的调查中，27%的受访者称自己不信任穆斯林（相比之下，不信任印度教徒或锡克教徒的比例为16%，不信任犹太人的比例为15％，不信任佛教徒的比例为13%，不信任基督徒的比例为12%）。

Disentangling the complex of attitudes behind such findings is the project of Claire Adida, David Laitin and Marie-Anne Valfort in this book — no easy task in the case of the French, among whom most of the research was undertaken. France’s culture of laïcité, a type of radical public secularism with roots in the absolutism of the ancien régime and the anticlerical campaigns that followed the revolution, means that the investigation of faith and religious practice poses methodological challenges far greater than would be met in a more explicitly pluralist society such as the US or even Britain, where ethnic backgrounds and public religiosity are better understood and celebrated. As the authors explain, French republican ideology has no interest in “knowing the ethnic past of any of its citizens”, an attitude that applies — a fortiori — to their religious beliefs or backgrounds.

解读此类调查结果背后的复杂态度是克莱尔•阿迪达(Claire Adida)、大卫•莱廷(David Laitin)及玛丽-安妮•瓦尔福特(Marie-Anne Valfort)在本书中的课题，但要在这方面分析法国人（本书的多数研究是在法国人中进行的）绝非易事。相对于美国、甚至英国等更加明显多元化的社会（这里的种族背景和公共宗教得到更好的理解和赞美），法国的政教分离文化（一种激进的公共世俗主义，源自旧制度的绝对主义及大革命后的反教权运动）意味着，对法国信仰和宗教活动的调查会遭遇更大的方法论方面的挑战。正如三位作者解释的，法国的共和主义意识形态对“了解任何公民的种族过往”毫无兴趣，这种态度更加适用于他们的宗教信仰或背景。

The idea of “equality through invisibility” is partly a consequence of the shame at the treatment of Jews under the Vichy régime that “republicans do not let their nation forget”. A 1978 law that remains in force, with some amendments, prohibits the collection or processing of data that reveal a person’s racial or ethnic origins, while class actions, common in the US, are not recognised under the French law of torts. Halde (La Haute Autorité de lutte contre les discriminations et pour l’égalité), the state-funded anti-discrimination body that existed from 2005 to 2011, was unable to establish general trends regarding discrimination based on ethnicity due to lack of data, leaving its lawyers to deal with individual cases without supplying material pointing to general trends.

“通过无形实现平等”的理念在一定程度上是对维希政权治下犹太人的遭遇感到耻辱的后果，“共和主义者不让他们的国家忘记”这一点。尽管做了部分修正，但1978年颁布的一项法律仍然有效，该法禁止收集或处理任何表明个人种族或民族本源的数据，而法国的侵权法不承认在美国很常见的集体诉讼。由于缺乏数据，国家资助的打击歧视维护平等高级监督机构Halde（2005年至2011年间存在）无法掌握族裔歧视的总体趋势，使该机构的律师只能处理个案，而不能提供指明总体趋势的材料。

These caveats, dealt with somewhat oddly in an extended appendix, help to explain the scrupulous way the researchers approached their task of isolating attitudes concerning religion, while discounting issues such as racial stereotyping or prejudices arising from France’s colonial history. For example, the researchers measured differences of response between two groups of Senegalese participants, one Christian and one Muslim, vis-à-vis a sample of “rooted” (or third-generation) French people chosen randomly in the affluent 19th arrondissement of Paris. The two Senegalese groups, belonging to communities that became established in France in the 1970s, were alike in every respect save their religion, enabling researchers to tease out attitudes that could be attributed to religion exclusive of race or ethnicity.

这些注意事项（有些奇怪地放在长篇附录中说明）有助于解释几位研究者所采用的细致方式——一方面隔离有关宗教的各种态度，另一方面考虑法国殖民历史带来的种族成见或偏见。例如，研究者衡量了两个人群的回复差异：一个人群由两组塞内加尔移民（一组基督徒和一组穆斯林）组成，另一个人群是在巴黎富裕的19区随机选取的“土生土长”（或第三代）法国人。两组塞内加尔移民都属于上世纪70年代在法国落户的社区，除了宗教信仰不同，他们在其他方面都很相像，这使研究人员能够甄别哪些态度可以归因于宗教，而非受到种族或民族的影响。

The results, while hardly surprising, are disturbing, to say the least. Their research, say the authors, “confirms that Muslims qua Muslims are discriminated against” in France. In responses to job applications, for example, one comparison revealed a 13-percentage-point difference in callback rates, suggesting that despite official laïcité, French employers “rely on signals about the religious heritage of applicants and systematically discriminate against those — in this case Muslims — who are from a different religious heritage from that of the majority”.

结果至少可以说令人不安（尽管算不上出人意料）。三位作者表示，他们的研究“证实了穆斯林在法国受到歧视”。以对求职申请的回应为例，一项对比数据显示回复率方面有13个百分点的差距，这似乎表明，尽管官方实行政教分离，但法国雇主还是“依靠有关求职者的宗教传统的信号，并对那些在宗教传统方面有别于主流的的人（在这项研究中是穆斯林）进行系统化的歧视”。

Part of the prejudice, the authors argue, may be “rational” to the degree that the HR personnel perceive a threat to their company’s productivity or esprit de corps in Muslim religious practices. But “non-rational” Islamophobia, based on “grotesquely exaggerated” feelings about Muslims, is just as important, indicating that “even if French recruiters considered Muslim candidates as strictly identical to Christian candidates in terms of productive characteristic, they would still discriminate against Muslims, out of pure distaste”. As a consequence, Muslim families in France are “significantly less endowed with income than matched Christians”. The status quo is thus a “discriminatory equilibrium”, defined by the authors as “a vicious circle in which both [“rooted” French] and Muslims in France are acting negatively toward one another in ways that are mutually reinforcing”.

三位作者主张，这种偏见在某种程度上——人事部门认为穆斯林的宗教习俗会对公司的生产率或团队精神构成威胁——是“理性的”。但是，基于对穆斯林“严重夸大”的看法的“非理性”伊斯兰恐惧症也同样重要，这说明“即便法国招聘人员认为穆斯林求职者在能力方面与基督徒求职者完全相同，他们仍会纯粹出于反感而歧视穆斯林”。其后果之一是，法国的穆斯林家庭“收入显著低于同等条件的基督徒家庭”。所以，目前现状是一种“歧视性均衡”，三位作者将之定义为“一种恶性循环，即“土生土长的”法国人与穆斯林以相互强化的负面态度对待彼此”。

While some of this book’s description of workplace issues affecting Muslims are clearly relevant beyond France’s borders, the title seriously oversells its thesis. The religious cultures and church-state relations of countries in Europe and North America vary too greatly to be captured by the all-embracing category of “Christian-heritage societies”. For example, while the authors make the case that Arab-Americans who are Muslims may face more prejudice than their Christian counterparts, they make no reference to Muslims of mainly South Asian origin who — along with Sikhs and Hindus — enjoy among the highest household incomes of any immigrant group in the US. Canada, a “Christian-heritage society” where the Muslim South Asian minority expelled from Uganda in the 1970s has been highly successful, does not even rate a mention in this book.

虽然本书描写的一些影响穆斯林的工作场所问题在法国之外也明显具有参考意义，但书名过分吹嘘了其命题。欧洲、北美各国之间的宗教文化及政教关系差异太大，以至于“传统基督教社会”这种宽泛归类无法捕捉到其中的不同。例如，三位作者举例称，穆斯林阿拉伯裔美国人遭遇的偏见可能比基督徒阿拉伯裔美国人更多，但他们并未提及南亚裔穆斯林，后者（同锡克教徒、印度教徒一道）是美国移民中家庭收入最高的群体之一。在“传统基督教社会”加拿大，上世纪70年代被乌干达驱逐出境的南亚裔穆斯林少数族裔取得了巨大成功，但本书只字未提加拿大。

Nevertheless, the authors propose remedies that make obvious sense in France itself, such as improving educational prospects for Muslims through affirmative action programmes. Whether such initiatives can be considered a realistic prospect in the wake of last year’s jihadi atrocities is another question; right now, the political climate is far from auspicious.

然而，三位作者提出的补救措施对法国本身显然很有道理，例如通过平权计划提升穆斯林受教育的前景。这些倡议在去年的恐怖暴行发生后是否还有可能实现是另一个问题；当前的政治气氛对此显然不利。