Jonathan Laurence, Justin Vaisse, Integrating Islam - Political and Religious Challenges in Contemporary France, Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press, 2006 (342 pages)

Echos dans la presse et la blogosphère

• Roger Hardy, "The F-Word", The New Statesman (pdf), January 22, 2007: "This is one of the few books in English that set out, clearly, dispassionately and in detail, what the headscarf affair was all about, what the main French Muslim organisations are (and their affiliations with the wider Muslim world), what the role of influential but controversial figures such as Tariq Ramadan and Yusuf al-Qaradawi has been, and how successive French governments have sought, with great difficulty, to create a national body to serve as a Muslim interlocutor. There are lessons here for Europe as a whole, and it would be salutary to think that a book with a primarily American purpose might teach Europeans a thing or two as well."
• Stanley Hoffmann, Foreign Affairs, November / December 2006: "Laurence, a young American political scientist, and Vaísse, a young French historian, have written a well-documented, nuanced, and ultimately optimistic study of French Muslims -- a convincing refutation of American clichés about the rise of Islamism in France, the effects of Muslims on French foreign policy, European anti-Semitism, and the incompatibility of Islam and the traditional French model of integration."
• Matthew Kaminski, The Wall Street Journal, 26 octobre 2006: "These statistics [from the Pew Center] came to light after "Integrating Islam" went to print, but they confirm the book's cautious optimism. Messrs. Laurence and Vaisse argue that French Muslims are a diverse and fast-changing group, in many respects moderate. France, for example, saw virtually no public protests against the Muhammad cartoons, in contrast with other European countries."
• Mark Leon Goldberg, "Tapped" (The American Prospect), "Buy this book". "In any case, I couldn't recommend it more highly for those wishing to understand the dynamics of Islam and migrant integration in Europe today."
• Timothy Garton Ash, "Islam in Europe", New York Review of Books, Vol. 53, N°15, 5 octobre 2006: "As the authors of an excellent new study of Islam in France point out, most French Muslims are relatively well integrated into French society."
• John Thornhill, "The reality of Islam and the Republic", Financial Times, 24 septembre 2006: "The great virtue of Integrating Islam is that it demonstrates how distorted and offensive many of these views are. After examining the everyday reality of the Muslim population in France, the two authors, an American political scientist and a French historian, reach a more complex and optimistic conclusion challenging the “gloomy and alarmist view of France's (and Europe's) inevitable ‘Islamisation'.”