A Female Imam in Paris: Islam, gender, and secular normativity

This article discusses Kahina Bahloul’s political and religious engagement and her project to create the liberal ‘Fatima Mosque’, founded in 2019 in Paris. Bahloul is a complex figure, and her political and religious project touches on several dimensions: she was inspired by Sufi doctrines (Ibn ʿArabi and the ʿAlāwiyya) and Islamic modernist philosophy (Mohammed Arkoun). Furthermore, she advocates for a liberal and secular Islam, proposing radical reform and implying the compliance with secular constraints, the merging of social sciences with Islamic sciences, and the polarisation between liberal Muslims and ‘fundamentalist’ Muslims. This article will show that 1) Sufism is mainly used to justify an individualistic approach to Islam; 2) Bahloul’s epistemological hybridity, based on Islam and social sciences, implies a strong tension between her role as a scholar and as a religious authority; and 3) Bahloul’s reform of Islam is not new or radical. The peculiarity of her political and religious project is her compliance with the whimsical French debate on Islam and laïcité, which implies accepting new bans, the privatisation of Islam, and the polarisation between ‘good Muslims’ and ‘bad Muslims’.