The Republic Unsettled: Muslim French and the Contradictions of Secularism The Republic Unsettled: Muslim French and the Contradictions of Secularism . By M ayanthi L. F ernando . Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014. xi + 313 pp.

In this landmark book, Mayanthi L. Fernando challenges dominant popular and academic ways of thinking about the French Republic, laïcité, and France's Muslim population. She does so by examining an understudied group whom she terms ‘Muslim French’. This neologism describes ‘women and men committed to practicing Islam as French citizens and to practicing French citizenship as pious Muslims' (p. 13). Fernando's Muslim French interviewees were located through her ethnographic fieldwork in schools, associations (such as the Jeunes Musulmans de France, the Union des organisations islamiques de France, and the Muslim women's organization al-Houda), and cultural institutions. They are a relatively small percentage of the often quoted but ill-defined figure of 5 million Muslims living in France. Indeed, Fernando emphatically rejects any idea that Muslim French represent France's Muslim population more broadly. Rather, her interviewees are individual citizens and civil society activists representing a specific political ethic of publicly engaged religiosity, in which being Muslim is not just compatible with being French; rather, being Muslim is French. Like many academics, Fernando critiques the dominant repressive, homogenizing republican narrative that denounces publicly pious Muslims as demonstrating a lack of integration, precluding them from being properly French and republican. Unlike many academics, she also takes a distinct position from that of ‘inclusivist republicans’ who assert Muslims’ right to difference — and thus, she argues, continue to see Muslims as ‘the Other’ (p. 75). Furthermore, Fernando argues, by viewing the Islamic religious revival in France as the result of politically and socioeconomically excluded groups seeking a sense of belonging through culture, ‘inclusivist republicans’ reduce religiosity to a means to an end and sideline the significant legal, social, and political practices of the French state since the colonial period to include Muslims — in order to better discipline them. Instead, Muslim French, the author asserts, ‘seek to publicly inhabit their non-normative identities’ while at the same time they ‘do not want their difference recognized as such’ — they seek ‘a right to indifference … on terms that do not require assimilation into majority religious, cultural, and racial norms’ (p. 79). By demanding a right to equal citizenship on such terms, Muslim French thrust into the spotlight the inherent contradictions, instability, and disunity of the secular republic by foregrounding the intertwining of authority, discipline, and freedom, by revealing laïcité to be as much a project of governmentality as neutrality, by testing the limits of respect, and by questioning whether the imperative of tolerance should fall on the individual or the state. By taking the debate away from the well-worn lines of whether or not ‘Muslims’ can be or are ‘integrated’ (in other words, whether or not Muslims are an unsettling presence or not in the republic), and by instead underlining how the republic itself is inherently ‘unsettled’, this book will no doubt rile many French secular republicans and become a key point of reference in future studies of the French Republic, laïcité, and ‘non-normative’ identities.