Islamophobia, class, and colonial blindness: A critical review of France, You Love It But You Leave It

As the saying goes: "Most harm is done with good intentions". The book France, You Love It But You Leave It, by Olivier Esteves, Alice Picard, and Julien Talpin, is quite an example. Indeed, it is an ambitious project that, as its title suggests, aims to capture "the silent flight of French Muslims".

Yet, despite this promising premise, the book stumbles and falls into major pits of its lack of rigour. What could have been a thoughtful study ends up feeling rushed, simplified, and strangely overconfident.

The foundation of France, You Love It But You Leave It, rests on a survey circulated through activist and anti-racism networks, notably the now-dissolved CCIF.

Respondents were already predisposed to view Islamophobia as a major issue, which makes it a textbook case of self-selection bias. From the very start, the book's "data" comes from a narrow, highly specific pool, hardly representative of all 'French Muslims'.

As Olivier Esteves notes to The New Arab: "The typology of individuals who leave France isn't something I'm fully comfortable with, because it sums up realities that are far more complex. There are, for instance, the adventurers: young women, who may or may not wear the hijab, who leave France to experience something new. Then there are businessmen, with solid credentials, who may or may not have faced discrimination, who go abroad to boost their CVs. For all of them, the labels 'exile' or 'expat' simply don't work."

The author acknowledges the shortcomings of his sampling, yet one cannot help but wonder: why publish a book that is already standing on one foot?

The author states that what surprised them most was how, by merely crossing the French border, sometimes just next door to Belgium, "traces of Muslimness and traces of Arabness tend to disappear."

This claim rests on a fundamental conceptual confusion. What is implicitly described as "Muslimness" or "Arabness" is never defined with precision.

Instead, religious and ethnic identity appear to be conflated with a set of visible social markers that are, in reality, far more accurately described as socioeconomic indicators associated with marginalisation in a very specific national context.

Context matters

In France, most Muslims are of North African origin, but North Africans themselves constitute an ethnically, culturally, and phenotypically diverse group.

There is no singular physical marker of "Arabness," let alone of "Muslimness." What persists are stereotypes: historically produced, socially reinforced, and politically charged, not empirically stable traits.

What disappears when individuals switch to English is therefore not their religion or ethnicity, but markers of social class, mediated through language.

Speaking a third language, especially English, temporarily suspends the classed and racialised cues embedded in French accents, registers, and codes.

To interpret this shift as the erasure of religious or ethnic identity is a major logical fallacy because it mistakes the contextual invisibility of class markers for the disappearance of identity itself.

The author further argues that even if your name is Mohammed, you are labelled as French in London, Toronto, or Dublin; and if you speak French in French-speaking environments such as Quebec, Brussels, or Geneva, your French accent leads to you being identified as French.

The author claims that all stigmatising parameters disappear once these individuals leave France. This assertion is simply untenable. Stigmatisation does not disappear; rather, individuals may temporarily cease to belong to the primary target group of racism, xenophobia, or Islamophobia in a given national context.

However, even if one were to accept the premise as true for the sake of argument, the example still fails analytically.

Canada, whether Quebec or Toronto, along with cities like London and Dublin, is either a settler society or a global city structurally built on immigration. Their demographic histories, institutional frameworks, and narratives of national belonging differ profoundly from those of France.

Crucially, these contexts do not share France's specific colonial relationship with North Africa, nor the same legacy of domination, racial hierarchy, and unresolved postcolonial trauma that structures Franco-Algerian relations, for instance.

The author treats "being labelled as French" as a neutral phenomenon, detached from history, power, and empire, when in fact labelling operates within deeply unequal symbolic fields. What appears as benign categorisation abroad cannot be analytically equated with racialised othering at home.

It is as methodologically sound as comparing their experience in France to their hypothetical experience in Japan. The contexts bear no meaningful similarity in history, structure, or social formation.

In short, the argument ignores the historical depth of colonial domination, the specificity of French racial formation, and the structural conditions under which identity is read, negotiated, and imposed. The result is an analogy that is, at best, an intellectual shortcut.

Esteves cites the testimony of an engineer employed by a major aircraft company in Austria, who reportedly emphasised that he lives in Vienna rather than in "some backward village in Tyrol," paraphrasing Esteves's words during his interview with The New Arab. Any minimally trained sociologist would immediately identify the problem here.

This is not a comparison between France and Austria. It is a comparison between a small town and a global city. The parameters are not remotely equivalent. Moving from a peripheral or semi-rural environment to a large metropolitan centre fundamentally alters social exposure, anonymity, class composition, and everyday interactions. There is therefore no analytical basis for drawing national-level conclusions from this example.

The anecdote becomes even more fragile when the author reports that the engineer's Austrian colleagues "do not even know where Algeria is on the map." This ignorance is presented as evidence of a more tolerant or less racialised environment.

Yet a far more plausible explanation exists: unlike France, Austria did not colonise Algeria. The absence of historical knowledge here reflects a lack of colonial entanglement, not the absence of racism.

More importantly, empirical data directly contradict the book's implicit conclusion. According to figures reported by Anadolu Agency, Austria recorded over 1,300 anti-Muslim attacks in 2022 alone. To extrapolate from one protected professional environment to a general claim that Muslims "have it better" outside France is not just methodologically unsound; it is demonstrably false.

Laïcité misunderstood

What the book repeatedly fails to acknowledge is the role of class position and professional status.

The engineer in question is a highly skilled worker employed by a major multinational company, who operates in a multicultural corporate environment that may shield him from broader social hostilities. This does not indicate the absence of Islamophobia in Austrian society; it indicates the existence of insulated professional bubbles.

Wherever he goes, France, Austria, or elsewhere, his experience is shaped less by national virtue than by his position as a highly trained, economically valuable foreign worker. To mistake this insulation for societal tolerance is once again a fundamental analytical error.

The book states that many of its interviewees have internalised the necessity to keep a low profile and to remain silent about their Muslimness while in France. This claim raises again a fundamental analytical problem: what exactly does "keeping silent about one's Muslimness" mean?

If Muslimness refers to religious practice, the concept quickly collapses under scrutiny. A practising Muslim cannot simply "remain silent" in all situations without entering into absurdity. Does silence mean eating pork when offered? Drinking alcohol? Abandoning prayer? Avoiding fasting during Ramadan? Or does it refer to something else entirely: dress, name, accent, perceived origins?

The term "Muslimness" is used here as a catch-all signifier, but it remains analytically empty. This vagueness allows the authors to suggest a form of self-censorship without specifying what is censored, how, or at what social cost.

Comparative sociology requires structural equivalence, historical grounding, and methodological caution. None of these conditions is met here.

Another interviewee that Esteves mentions is an engineer who, during a tour of a power plant in North Yorkshire (Drax), was shown a prayer room upon starting his job. As an anecdote, the story is unremarkable. As a sociological argument, it fails again.

France's legal and institutional framework of laïcité does not prohibit religious practice in private spaces, nor does it mandate the provision of religious facilities in workplaces.

The absence of prayer rooms in French companies is not a form of exclusion targeted at Muslims, but a structural consequence of a secular model that does not organise the workplace around religious belonging for any faith.

If the implicit normative benchmark is the systematic provision of prayer spaces, then the comparison would require, at a minimum, evidence that similar facilities exist for other religious groups in France, which is not the case.

Lessons from Spivak and Bourdieu

In response to criticism, Olivier Esteves suggests that their findings are consistent with existing sociological literature, notably the work of Amélie Le Renard.

Yet this reference is used as an appeal to authority rather than as a demonstrated theoretical alignment. Le Renard's work, particularly on urban spaces and everyday negotiations of visibility, emphasises situated practices, gendered experiences, and context-specific forms of belonging.

To invoke her research while simultaneously flattening experiences into generalised narratives of repression and liberation is, at best, selective reading.

If anything, Le Renard's insistence on the microsociology of everyday life underscores precisely what this book lacks: attention to variability, contradiction, and the irreducibility of individual trajectories to a single explanatory frame.

France, You Love It But You Leave It is, in fact, a loose assemblage of impressions held together by moral certainty.

It is at this point in the interview that the book's analytical framework collapses entirely. The author asserts that French Muslims enjoy more religious freedom in cities such as London or Toronto than in Dubai, Casablanca, and other Muslim-majority contexts, which he describes as spaces where one must "perform Westernness."

The claim is striking not only for its empirical fragility but also for its blatant racism.

Pressed to define "Westernness," the author oscillates between vague culturalist references. He said "Westerness" is "lifestyle, alcohol consumption," and a cherry on top "liberal democracies." This slippage is not incidental.

It exemplifies what Edward Said identified as Orientalism's most enduring feature: not overt hostility, but the reduction of complex, historically situated societies into moralised contrasts between a rational, liberating "West" and a coercive, culturally stagnant "elsewhere" (Said, Orientalism, 1978).

When the Western gaze fails to locate the Orient it anticipates, it simply rebrands the subject as performing "Westernness."

I was stunned by the audacity of my interviewee. I warned him explicitly against reproducing orientalist paradigms. He dismissed the warning with thinly veiled condescension: "I am familiar with Said's work." He then went further, suggesting, without irony, that I, an Arab Muslim journalist, should read Covering Islam by Edward Said. Faced with my reaction, Esteves doubled down: "You might be familiar with it."

What he failed to grasp is that I am not merely familiar with Said's work — as an Arab Muslim intellectual, I am entitled to engage with it critically. I can mobilise it, dismantle it, revise it, or, if necessary, set it aside altogether.

To frame contemporary Muslim-majority societies as failed imitations of Western political modernity is not sociology; it is essentialism. Unfortunately for the authors of this book and their subjects, the “good native” exists only in their limited frameworks.

What is at work here is not comparative analysis, but what Rogers Brubaker terms groupism: the tendency to treat "Muslims" as a bounded, homogeneous entity whose social experiences can be abstracted from history, class, colonial trajectories, and national context (Brubaker, Ethnicity Without Groups, 2004).

France, the United Kingdom, Canada, Morocco, Tunisia, and the Gulf states are not interchangeable containers within which a single transhistorical "Muslim condition" unfolds. To compare them as such is to evacuate sociology of its most basic requirement: contextualization.

This flattening is compounded by an unexamined assumption of interpretive authority. By declaring that French Muslims "do not find the Islam they are looking for" in Muslim-majority societies, the author speaks not only about Muslims but for them, assigning coherence to desires, disappointments, and expectations that are neither empirically demonstrated nor theoretically grounded.

Representation does not disappear when it claims to be benevolent. On the contrary, it often becomes more coercive (Spivak, Can the Subaltern Speak?, 1988). The problem is not that Muslims are being discussed, but that their social worlds are being ventriloquized through categories they did not produce.

Symbolic violence operates precisely through such moments. When domination is not exercised through exclusion, it happens through the imposition of legitimate ways of seeing and naming the world (Bourdieu, Masculine Domination, 2001).

Here, the sociologist's categories: "Westernness," "Islam," "freedom" are treated as self-evident, while the lived histories and internal debates of Muslim societies are rendered irrelevant.

The result is a paradoxical posture: a discourse that claims to expose racism while reproducing the epistemic hierarchies through which racialization operates. The dominated subject is too often forced to exist only through the gaze of others, even, or especially, when that gaze claims solidarity (Sayad, The Suffering of the Immigrant, 2004).

Islam cannot be understood as a fixed cultural substance detachable from history and power relations; it is a discursive tradition, internally diverse and continually reconstituted (Asad, The Idea of an Anthropology of Islam, 1986). To speak of "Islam" as something that can be more authentically encountered in London than in Casablanca is to abandon anthropology in favour of fantasy.

What emerges, then, is not an analysis of racism, but a circular performance of it: Muslims are defended as a group only to be frozen into an externally defined identity; and sociology is mobilised as a moral alibi.

In attempting to humanise, the discourse dehumanises and reproduces domination.

This book belongs in the recycling bin of failed social science. This kind of sociological malpractice cannot be forgiven for the sake of good intentions. Sociology has been wrestled, fought over, and sharpened by those who had to survive its misuses.

Chaima Gharsallaoui is a journalist and filmmaker from Paris

Follow her on Instagram: @chaimagharsallaoui