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FREN 3800
FRANCE AND THE MUSLIM WORLD
Summer 2025 - Term B
ONLINE
Professor Brian Valente-Quinn

Recent years have seen a sharp rise in often heated public debates and discussions regarding the place and status of Muslim citizens in France, which contains the largest Muslim population in Western Europe. Does Islam really pose a threat to the longstanding French traditions of secularism and free speech? Has France failed to integrate fully the offspring of earlier immigrant populations of Arab descent? Is the French nation still paying for its colonial past in regions like North Africa and throughout today's Francophone world?

In this course, we will explore the histories and mythologies of conquest and confrontation at the heart of such debates. We will focus on major historical points of tension between France and a Muslim world repeatedly depicted as other. The course will explore questions of representation, debates surrounding French colonialism, and the challenges faced by a diverse and dynamic French Muslim population as it seeks out a place within the French national narrative and identity.

This course fulfills the Global Perspective component of the diversity requirement of the Gen Ed system. All readings and discussions are in English and there are no prerequisites. No previous knowledge is required either of the course topic or the French language. .