The City's ‘Nod of Approval’ for the Mantes-la-Jolie Mosque Project: Mistaken Traces of Recognition

Mantes-la-Jolie is France's first city to officially recognise the practice of Islam by undertaking the construction of a mosque. This role of pioneering city as regards the political outreach to Islam gives Mantes a specific value in understanding the public sector's handling of the presence of Islam in France. This article is a sociological analysis of the Mantes mosque project's genesis and implementation, focusing on the keys to success of the project. Particular attention is given to the two main actors involved, the city's mayor at the time, and the president of the Islamic association backing the project. Both claimed ‘ownership’ of the project and the relationship between them was tense but ultimately cooperative. The paper also pays due attention to the history of Muslim immigration into the industrial area in the lower Seine Valley, where automobile workers were much in demand in the early postwar decades, and to the social geography of housing development and immigrant settlement in the Val Fourré district. The eventual choice of location for the mosque, on a parcel of rural land out on the city's periphery, isolated from the main urban area, is symptomatic of the marginalisation of Islam and the city's industrial immigrant workforce.