The generosity of my fellow reviewers, Professors Jamal and Sinno, does not answer my critique of Adida, Laitin, and Valfort’s collective claim to methodological rigor, and Adida, Laitin, and Valfort offer none of their own. There is no defense of their substitution of one set of Muslims (Senegalese) for another (predominately Maghrebi), a strategy that ignores the time and duration of immigration, and the colonial and postcolonial historical context in which the immigrants and the receiving population operate, and effects the erasure of Maghrebi Jews. Nor do the authors answer the objection that their category “rooted French” is employed inconsistently. Many Muslims have been in France for generations and satisfy the authors’ criteria for rootedness, yet “rooted” is employed as if synonymous not only with “non-Muslim” but with “Christian heritage.” The authors also hold to an indefensibly linear model of integration: assimilation is not—and never has been—a one way street. Immigration alters the receiving as well as the arriving, populations.

My contention that the structuring of the book is in line with the “work of the LePens and other anti-Semites” is not a personal attack; it is a political one. There are at least four ways in which this is the case. 1) The use of the term “Christian heritage society” for the République Française is a significant concession to a long campaign directed at Jews as well as those of Arab descent. 2) Adida, Laitin, and Valfort accept the language of host and guest that reads the state as a domestic space belonging to the host, over which the host has authority and into which entry may be justly given or denied to the guest. This misleadingly implies prior arrival, as well as presenting a normatively suspect criterion for a legitimate claim to inclusion. 3) The authors refuse to consider the history of French colonial and postcolonial domination in the Maghreb as relevant to the question of Muslim integration. 4) The model of “discriminatory equilibrium” that Adida, Laitin, and Valfort employ is both methodologically and normatively troubling. Their reductive binary casts “Muslims” against “French”: a construction that denies that Muslims are or ever could be French. France itself has been, at its best, more accepting.

I have not dressed this up with protestations of regard or by drawing attention to moments of agreement. These exist, to be sure, but these issues are too important to give time to that, and in any case, I was educated at Chicago.