Tareq Oubrou's Concept of Islamic Identity in a Secular Society

Abstract

The migration and the problem of preserving national identity remain the central issues of the political agenda and public debate in many modern countries. The article discusses the views of the French imam Tareq Oubrou – the author of the concept of "sharia of the minority" – on the issues of Muslim identity, as well as the integration of migrants in France. T. Oubrou symbolizes a figure at the junction of two civilizations: a kind of theorist and mediator for the reorganization of Islam in France. The research was based on monographs, individual articles, and texts of speeches of the French imam over the past twenty years. The work involved the methods of cognitive and conceptual text analysis, which made it possible to reconstruct the structure of the political message and its individual components. The research results suggest that T. Oubrou refocuses Islamic identity to its inner dimension by revising its defining markers. Minimizing Islamic identity is designed to preserve and maintain the Muslim presence in the West. At the same time, he nationalizes Islamic identity, subordinating it to the civil and political norms of France. Despite the fact that the proposed identification model evokes ambiguous emotions in the Muslim environment and great doubts in the host society, some of its provisions are in demand at the state level.