An Anti-Riot Fatwa

Abstract

A French fatwa condemning the 2005 riots in Islamic terms gave rise to a controversy around the legitimacy of this particular Muslim technology in a secular polity. To seize the significance of the text one must place it in the tradition of the Salafiyya, where Islamic forms of reasoning acquired a distinctively public dimension, and map out the recent—and contested—discursive shifts in French laïcité.