The challenges of incorporating Muslims into the life of French society constitute a civic crisis—the inability of French citizens as a whole to envision the common good and act toward common goals. So argues distinguished French political philosopher Pierre Manent, maintaining that the current French situation stems not solely from the global transformation of Islam but also from the crisis of the French and European collective self-understanding. The latter, Manent writes, is a result of several processes: the post-1960s equalization of all historical narratives and levels of discourse; the delegitimization of the nation as the political framework of life; the weakening of the state and its role in the articulation and institutionalization of the common good; and the crushed hope that transnational Europe could become a new model of political community. We do not know what to do regarding “the Muslim question” (102), Manent thus declares, “because we do not know what to think” (8).

It is tempting to read Manent's essay as yet another narrative about the decline of the West, in which the forms of collective authority are sacrificed on the altar of individual rights. It is also possible to think of Manent's book as a version of the clash-of-civilizations thesis: he writes about “different ways” in which the West and Muslims form social life (13); juxtaposes a crisis of collective belonging in France and Europe with the communal attachments engendered by the Muslim way of life; speaks of “the disagreement between the average Western and the average Muslim views” (13); promotes the articulation of defensive politics in the encounter between “us” and “them.” But while binary categories or propositions can sometimes carry analytic and normative insights, it is Manent's binary perspective that requires a critical assessment. This is a task to which I turn below; first, I want to look at the constructive charge of his project, which reflects Manent's desire to move beyond the paralyzing disarray (9) he identifies in today's France and Europe.

There are two obstacles to effectively addressing the Muslim question in France, Manent writes. The first is secularism, which some French celebrate and want to have taught in schools but whose most radical articulation, in Manent's view, is foreign to the French experience—it seeks to remove Islam and religion from the public arena, despite the fact that French social life has remained “of a Christian mark” (19) and is stamped by Catholicism as well as Protestantism and Judaism. In a departure from many recent considerations of the French model of secularism, Manent suggests that its more militant articulation is not potent but powerless: it is unable to bind French citizens together because it runs counter to their historical experience and it is “too weak” to face the collective force of Islam (55).

The second reason for the impasse in addressing the Muslim question in France and Europe, Manent proposes, is the dominant European understanding of religion as privatized and individualized. This view, which attempts to dispose of the social and integrative role of religion, is both imposed as a political norm and central to the European understanding of modernity as the inevitable march of secularization. This take on modernity and religion, according to Manent, constitutes a twofold problem. First, it does not allow for the approach to Islam as a community-oriented tradition and a moral force in political life. Second, the purportedly progressive view of modernity as religion free prevents the French and Europeans from engaging—identifying, retrieving, and reviving—the spiritual foundations “proper to” European political life (111), which imply governing “oneself in a certain relation to the Christian proposition” (63). On this reading, the chief European political contribution is not the principle of church-state separation but the “intimate union” (65) between political and religious projects, which links the pride of a citizen to the humility of a Christian (64).

Manent's essay is a call to Europeans and the French to “come to terms with Islam” (69) and increase their acceptance of the Muslim way of life by taking the social meanings of all religions seriously. This reconceptualizing of religion and rethinking of the legacy of secularism, says Manent, would have two effects. First, it would compel Europeans to recover their “ancient constitution” (50) so that Christianity can again invigorate political life; second, it would enable Muslims to “find their place… in a country of a Christian mark” (100) and contribute to public life while openly affirming, rather than hiding, their religious commitments (92). The “community of citizens,” Manent underscores, is neither Muslim, nor Jewish, nor Christian (95), but he also adds: the public character of religious identities does not disrupt but revives the republican project's main intentions, which are civic friendship and the envisioning of the common good.

It is difficult not to agree with Manent's argument that all citizens ought to have a responsibility and capacity to contribute to the ideals of a nation's common good. It is also easy to concur with his appeal that the Europeans engage the collective significance of religion. Doing otherwise, Manent correctly points out, would affirm the grand European narratives of modernization and secularization which are a condescending attempt to articulate a single, distinctively European trajectory of modernity as a norm for all societies (47). Manent's critique echoes important scholarship in religious studies and social sciences that establishes religion as pivotal for understanding the multiplicity of political and cultural projects of modernity. But the uncompromising character of Manent's critique of the universal theories of modernization also makes it quite perplexing that his remedy for the challenges of contemporary pluralism is another grand narrative—this one about the European history as a productive union of Western Christianity and political institutions. This is a problematic proposition for historical and theological reasons, and particularly within Manent's own argument that posits nations as the main framework of political life in Europe. Following Manent's point means concentrating on the history of religion, secularism, and secularity in individual European nation-states, an endeavor that would only underscore that the French experience can hardly be conflated with the history of Christianity, nationhood, and secularism in Poland or Ireland. Manent's own insistence on the centrality of the nation, in other words, would require the decentering of Europe and the destabilizing of the very notions of European history and Western Christianity.

Manent's point about Christianity, as positively marking European political institutions, also ought to be problematized in relation to his interest in the consistency rather than the lived experiences of Islam and Christianity. Thus, while he mentions contestations, even wars, within Islam, he focuses on “Islam as such,” as a “meaningful whole” that has “community-forming power” (38–39). While he furthermore acknowledges Western Christianity's links to imperial politics and conquests, he highlights the Christian Church's claim to be the only “human association… produced by a purely spiritual act” (65) and the implications this assertion had for the history of European political institutions. Put simply, while Manent does say that he is not after the essence of religious traditions, his discussion ends up essentializing both Islam and Christianity.

The search for consistencies in the historical instantiations of religious traditions, the use of the categories “us” and “them,” the claim that some traditions are internal (Catholicism, Protestantism, and Judaism) and others (Islam) external to French history—these aspects of Manent's essay reveal the author's overemphasis on historical patterns at the expense of change and especially the lack of his deeper engagement with the French colonial past and all its legacies. Yet only by attending to changes and patterns, to power and powerlessness as they constitute conflicts and civic friendships among groups, can one recognize that shaping one's collective self-understanding and understanding of the other have always involved many, often contested, narratives. Only such an approach opens the door for a reflexive deliberation—one that allows for a retrieval and a critique of the narratives that make a nation's ideas of the common good, and one concerned with what a nation wants to remember but also with what it wants to forget.