On May 9, a high-level meeting held in Florence scrutinised the “state of the European Union”. Ministers, commissioners and prominent political figures took part in a series of open discussions. Two days before the meeting, two French cabinet ministers withdrew because I was to be present. Under no circumstances could they confer legitimacy on my dangerous and “retrograde” views. Many of those present were bemused: Why was France so intent on demonising me? “Are they afraid of you?” asked a former member of the Italian cabinet. “You must be truly powerful to be able to frighten away two at once,” joked a British politician. To have become the French political class’s “favourite devil,” to quote the Parisian daily Le Monde, a “dangerous Muslim (pseudo) intellectual” (1), points to issues that go far beyond my person, and that seriously perturb French politicians to intellectuals and journalists. I have become the equivalent, in France’s intellectual landscape, of a minaret in the Swiss urban landscape.

What truly plagues France’s political elite is the presence and the newfound visibility of Muslims — a proof that French Muslims have indeed made the country their home and have deep roots. Above and beyond me, this is the reality that the two ministers and the overwhelming majority of France’s political class are attempting to flee. As politicians, they are increasingly unaware of the direction in which society is evolving; they find it more and more difficult to comprehend the uncertainties, the hopes and dreams of their fellow citizens. France has changed and it will not stop transforming itself, becoming richer and more complex with every passing year as it emerges fully into the social, cultural and religious pluralism that are now its hallmarks, and of the multiple identities of citizens that it embodies. To speak to the people, in the name of the people and for the people in the course of an occasional visit to the inner city of the urban periphery (even for someone who is or was a mayor) does not mean knowing who lives there, or understanding their intelligence and empathising with them. And when, in a democratic society, the people’s elected representatives no longer know — deeply, and at close proximity — those who have elected them, support for populism — or populist themes — comes as no surprise. Incapable of appealing to intelligence with political conviction, they are reduced to mobilising the masses at gut level, appealing to fears or spreading innuendos. Secularism (‘la laiciti’) is no longer the inclusive principle by which all should be able to live together in equality and freedom of conscience. It has become, instead, an emblem, a flag, a slogan, a form of belonging intended to justify a policy of discrimination and segregation by making the “other,” the “Muslim,” the “foreign citizen” as the focus of all legitimate fears. These same representatives speak of the unity of a republic they no longer recognise. Secularism has been transformed into a series of talking points, totally devoid of substance that speak to the darkest fears of people who have begun to have doubts. We must protect ourselves, they say, while curtailing “their” freedom. For in the final analysis, “their” freedom is “our” imprisonment and “their” visible presence “our” certain disappearance. It is their double-think that is dangerous, populist and deceitful.

Their populism and their duplicity mask a yawning ideological void, an absence of thought and political vision capable of convincing the citizens. The over-simplified themes of the populists and of the extreme right-wing parties have become the norm — thanks to the negligence of women and men who have no concept of how power is to be used, but are obsessed with holding power. The people of France, like so many around the world, know it and have lost confidence in their representatives. For want of something better, the citizens entrust their fate to those who speak in clear, simple language, those who “tell it like it is” but end up endorsing the nastiest and most dangerous racist and xenophobic political concepts. As the crisis spreads and people lose confidence, over-simplification of problems will be used to sway popular emotions, not the wisdom and dignity of solutions.

What remains is to identify our real problems and stop stalling for time. The French are suffering from a deep-rooted identity crisis: The majority of intellectuals speak of France’s Enlightenment even as they propound cloudy notions of what France is and what it must remain. Many evoke broad horizons of thought from an increasingly closed-minded and strictly and narrowly French vantage point. French nostalgia celebrates its past even as it blinds itself to its present-day reality: It would seem that, in the eyes of its politicians and intellectuals, it would prefer to remain that which it has already ceased to be! Some would like to see France as the centre of Europe, as the heart, the principle reference, even as the soul by virtue of its history, and its intellectual and cultural heritage. Meanwhile, France itself has no idea of what defines its core, its soul and its singularity, no idea of what makes it exceptional.

The fundamental questions remain unanswered: The deepening economic crisis, unemployment, a three-tiered educational system, injustice and social marginalisation. However, what new and audacious policies are on offer today? What is the difference between the socialists and the right-wing parties? Apart from words, and the spectacle that accompanies them, nothing seems to have changed. The lack of educational, social and urban policies, thoughtless rhetoric on immigration (which everyone knows the country will eventually need), constant surveillance, chartered flights to deport illegal immigrants, the ill-treatment and stigmatisation of Gypsies (Roma), the hyping of the danger of Islam (alongside the system of alliances with countries like Morocco, Algeria, Saudi Arabia and Qatar): Nothing has changed, it is impossible to tell the erstwhile adversaries apart. In fact, what stand out most are their similarities: The love of power for its own sake and the remarkable absence of political courage.

That is why the ministers fled Florence. They were simply not equipped to face real questions with courage and with an open mind. Islam has become one of the French political class’s favourite alibis, precisely the kind of strategic distraction that the incompetent and the hyper-sensitive rely upon to justify their lack of vision and political direction and, more often than not, to disguise their own intellectual indigence. How much easier to dismiss speech that rankles as “double-speak” than face up to one’s own blindness, to one’s own hearing difficulties, to one’s own incapacity to deal with the world as it is. This while they shower praise on one another for their progressive ideas, their openness, their critical spirit ... But always among themselves, in those closed environments where they wax eloquent about “openness” and universalism with just a touch of arrogance and a fine dusting of self-congratulation. Today’s “progressive” minds hardly loom large as models of contagious gregariousness: And now the moment has come for these new specimens among the French intelligentsia (and elsewhere in like manner), the “populist progressives”. They are quite capable of invoking the grandeur of their intellectual heritage, their rights and freedoms, but display no courage in the process; they excel, however, in slandering others, their exotic cultures and their retrograde religions, with neither sophistication nor dignity. In an era of public opinion polls, they are fashion-driven, consensual, popular and most definitely populist. France’s new black, Arab, Muslim or Gypsy citizens and residents are not the reason that France no longer looks like it once did; the reason is majority of contemporary intellectuals that make up its “elite”. France has every reason to be concerned by groupthink as practised in the salons of Paris, while ignoring the diversity of identities and the pluralism that flourish in its streets.

The state itself, its agencies and the media, by side-stepping essential questions and multiplying diversionary polemics, must accept primary responsibility for the rapid growth of sectarian populism, of everyday, structural racism, of normalised islamophobia.

And yet France has all it needs to achieve great things: Its history, the richness of its memories, its competence and its pluralism. But, at the same time, it suffers from the sickness of the century: Like so many nations, it fears what it may become, dreads that it can no longer reconcile its future with what it once was. It is difficult to face crises of historical transition. For herein lies the paradox: It may well be that it is exactly those who are today scorned, the “foreigners,” the “Gypsies,” the “Muslims” and the excluded of every description that will make it possible for France to reconcile itself with its values, with the luminous periods of its past, while squarely facing its future. Meanwhile, those who are today scorned must reject the status of victim, as well as the marginalisation and invisibility imposed on them, and assume responsibility for their fate as French citizens by committing themselves to defend their dignity and their rights (alongside those of all human beings). Time has come for them to develop an ethics of presence and of citizenship, to refuse to play the otherness game. To those who imagine that France could exist without them, they proclaim and demonstrate in full serenity that they too are France. They are proud of their origins, they stand for the dignity of their values, for the visibility of their commitment and the critical loyalty of their identification with France. Against the crude populism that stigmatises, they will be the agents of reconciliation and of peace. France, which today imagines that it is remote from them, will certainly not be able to exist without them.

In France today, a Muslim thinker who does not think like “us” does not, by definition, think. He “preaches” for only the truly French intellectual — thus not truly Muslim.

Tariq Ramadan is professor of Contemporary Islamic Studies in the Faculty of Oriental Studies at Oxford University and a visiting professor at the Faculty of Islamic Studies in Qatar. He is the author of Islam and the Arab Awakening.