Radical Islamism in Schools of France and Germany

Abstract

The article compares the tendencies of Islamism in school education in France and Germany. Despite the different approaches to the role of religion in schools in these countries with large Muslim communities, there is a growing process of the penetration of Islamism into schools. The external manifestations of this phenomenon coincide ‒ the segregation of schoolchildren in relation to religion. At the same time, the social factor clearly fades away. The author explores the cultural causes of Islamism, which are based on the gap between the secular culture of France and Germany and the worldview of Muslim youth. At the turn of the 1980s in France and Germany the assimilation policy of integration exhausted its possibilities, primarily due to the massive influx of migrants from Muslim countries who created their own territorial enclaves ("parallel societies"), in which the power of the state was minimized. There was a paradigm shift at the turn of the 1980s‒1990s, when Western countries began to implement a policy of multiculturalism, which also suffered a failure. The article examines how the value of a person's religious affiliation as opposed to civic value, the priority of group rights in relation to the rights of an individual became the reason for the strengthening of Islamism in schools in France and Germany. That was a direct consequence of both the mass migration of the 1980s and 1990s, which took the form of superficial naturalization, with the goal of obtaining social benefits without becoming introduced to the culture of Western countries, and the failed policy of multiculturalism. If these problems are not tackled, the success in curbing the Islamist wave in European schools is unlikely.