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Muslims in the Prisons of Britain and France

England and Wales, the largest and most southerly of the four component parts of the United Kingdom, is only 30 km away from France. Innumerable and ancient ties of politics, ethnicity and language connect the two countries. They both belong to the European Union; and they have both become countries of large-scale immigration from less economically developed regions of the world since the 1950s. On the other hand, their religious history and complexion have gone in radically different directions since the sixteenth century CE; their political and legal systems are strikingly different; and the place of religion in their public life displays sharp contrasts. This paper reports some of the preliminary findings of a 3-year, cross-national research project that aims to understand how this pattern of similarities and differences between Britain and France has affected the treatment of Muslims in prison. The main objective was to compare Britain and France in terms of their responses to the growth of their Muslim populations. The project was an extension of an earlier investigation that I had conducted with Sophie Gilliat into the role of the Church of England in facilitating the provision of religious and pastoral services for minority faith communities in prisons, hospitals and civic settings in Britain. We chose to focus on the treatment of Muslims in prison in order to examine the forces that condition the public response to the growth of religious and ethnic diversity. In particular, we wanted to test the hypothesis that Muslims might receive better treatment in a country such as France where, as a consequence of the separation of religion and state, no Christian or other religious bodies can exercise much influence in the public sphere than in Britain where the Church of England is established in law and sometimes influential in public life. The alternative hypothesis was that the involvement of the national Church in Britain’s public sphere may have paradoxically opened up more opportunities for minority faith communities to share favourable treatment in public institutions—such as prisons—than in France where the state’s ideology of laı̈cité or secular republicanism tends to marginalise or exclude them.