Francois Burgat is a French orientalist and political scientist born in 1948 in Eastern France. He specialized in studying Islamic currents in the Arab and Muslim world. He managed research centers such as the French Institute for the Near East and the National Institute for Scientific Research.
He chaired several research programs, most notably the "When Despotism Fails in the Arab World" program at the European Research Council. He is one of the few Western academic voices that have had the courage to criticize the West and its colonialist and supremacist view of the Muslim world.
Burgat holds the Western world responsible for breeding extremism and radicalization through its policies and support for political despotism. Analysts consider him an extension of great French researchers like Maxime Rodinson and Jacques Berque.
Birth and Upbringing
Francois Burgat was born on April 2, 1948, in the city of Chambéry in the Savoie region of eastern France.
Education and Formation
He completed his Bachelor's and Master's degrees in law at Grenoble University, the third-largest university in France. In 1981, he earned a doctorate degree in law and political science with a thesis entitled "The Socialist Villages of the Algerian Agricultural Revolution: The Place of Law in Social Change".
Jobs and Responsibilities
- Early in his career, he worked as an assistant professor and taught law at the University of Constantine in Algeria between 1973 and 1980.
- After obtaining his doctorate, he was appointed as a researcher at the National Center for Scientific Research in 1983 in the city of Aix-en-Provence in southeastern France.
- In 1989, he moved to Egypt to work at the French Center for Economic, Legal, and Documentary Studies in Cairo until 1993.
- In 1997, he settled in Yemen as the director of the French Institute for Social Sciences and Archaeology in Sanaa and remained there until 2003.
- Between 2008 and 2013, he managed the French Institute for the Near East, overseeing its branches in Jordan, Syria, Lebanon, Iraq, and Palestine.
- Voluntarily since 2018, he has chaired the scientific and administrative council of the Arab Center for Research and Policy Studies/France branch.
- He led the collective research program "When Authoritarianism Fails in the Arab World" funded by the European Research Council, and he is a member of the European Council on Foreign Relations.
- Honorary Director at the National Center for Scientific Research in France.
- A retired researcher at the Research Institute for the Arab and Muslim World Studies.
Experience and Career Path
Burgat's experience teaching law at the University of Constantine in Algeria in 1973 was not the beginning of his exposure to the Arab and Muslim world. He had already encountered it at the age of 16 when he accompanied his aunt on a pilgrimage for French Christians to Jerusalem.
There, in Jericho, he met a Palestinian child who said to him, "The Jews took my land from me," an event that shook everything he had been told about Palestine, not knowing that Palestinians had been dispossessed of their land.
This new perspective stayed with him and later formed an element in his interpretation and analysis of the emergence of Islamic movements, referred to by some researchers as "political Islam". His travels and stays in several Arab countries further solidified his professional and research trajectory.
Francois Burgat believed that the ideal Muslim immigrant for France is one who abandons his religion (Al Jazeera)
Starting from Egypt as a researcher since 1989 at the French Center for Economic, Legal, and Documentary Studies in Cairo, and in Yemen as director of the French Institute for Social Sciences and Archaeology in Sanaa, and as director of the branches of the French Institute for the Near East in Jordan, Syria, Lebanon, Iraq, and Palestine, as well as his travels to various Arab countries such as Tunisia and Sudan, he discovered what he considers "the stereotypical Western view" of the East and Muslims in general.
His study of the Arabic language in Tunisia and Egypt helped him to expand his knowledge of Arab and Islamic culture, and his field research and dialogue with leaders of the Islamic movement, including Hassan al-Turabi, whom he described as the founder of "political Islam" in Sudan.
Burgat recounts that al-Turabi told him, "People in the village ask us: Can we pray in trousers? The Sufis reject that, but we used to say that these are mere formalities". With this example, the French researcher emphasizes that the effectiveness and popularity of Islamic movements since the 1980s and 1990s are due to their responsiveness and openness to modernity, as opposed to traditional religious movements.
His 23-year residence in the Arab world and managing research programs funded by the European Research Council, such as the "From the Gulf to the Ocean: Between Violence and Counter-Violence" (2007-2010), and the "When Authoritarianism Fails in the Arab World" (2013-2017) program, allowed him to encounter numerous realities in the Arab and Islamic region, and about Islamic movements and their internal dynamics that contradict what the West has promoted for decades through its media and a number of its researchers.
Contrary to French thinker Olivier Roy, French researcher Gilles Kepel, Jean-Pierre and Alain Gresh, who interpreted "religious extremism" and the emergence of Islamic movements in general and the "radical" and "violent" ones in particular, by returning to Quranic and prophetic texts and the history of Islamic schools of thought, seeing the problem as in the texts, not in who deals with them, their intellectual and scientific level, their economic and social conditions, etc., which led to the phenomenon of "Islamophobia" according to Burgat.
Contrary to all this, Burgat refused to demonize Islamic movements outright and distinguished between Muslims and "terrorists". He did not lump all Islamic movements into one basket and considered that colonialism, hegemony, and political despotism all played a significant role in the emergence of religious extremism and radicalization. He also noted that the dual standards of the West, particularly regarding freedom of expression, exacerbated problems, whether with regard to attacking Islamic symbols, burning the holy Quran, or infringing upon the land, as with the occupation of Palestine.
Burgat described Western duplicity, saying, "They assault the holy Quran, yet they would never demonstrate to condemn homosexuals or Israelis, which shows the double standards". He adds, "If you speak 1% of free speech towards the Torah or against a Jew, you are immediately criminalized, and you are immediately banned from making statements to the official media".
Confrontation with French Secularism
Francois Burgat was known for his frankness and clarity when speaking about his country and the West in general. He told the French Parliament that "a good Muslim in the eyes of the West is one who has left Islam". He believed that official French policy was the cause of the rise of religious extremism and the far-right in France after its failure to integrate Muslim immigrants.
He added that the state sponsors "Islamophobia, which does not distinguish between moderate and radical Muslims, lumping everyone together, exploiting ignorance and fear. The secular elite in the Republic fed vile drawings in Charlie Hebdo magazine that belittled Muslims and mocked their symbols and creed, under the guise of freedom of expression, meanwhile, it works to ban (the assembly against Islamophobia in France), and selectively defends secularism against Muslims but not against Catholics or Jews".
Burgat argued that the struggle in France, in the face of rising hostility from extreme secularism against Muslims, was between the descendants of the colonized and those of the colonizers who refuse to allow the children of the colonized to claim their rights. He explained this by saying, "A cleaning lady in France can wear the hijab without any problem, but if a woman wants to wear the hijab and become a university professor or a lawyer, then the voices defending secularism rise".
Francois Burgat was influenced by a sentence spoken by a Palestinian child, "The Jews took my land from me", during his pilgrimage to Palestine (Getty)
Burgat does not differentiate in double standards between France's right or left, accusing the latter of being against religion, and not having programs to address Islamophobia. He sees major French media and television news channels as pouring oil on the fire, contributing to spreading hate speech and Islamophobia.
Burgat summarizes France's problem in dealing with Muslims, whether in their countries or within, as adopting the understanding and views of Arab regimes about the Islamic movement and political and social mobilization in the Arab and Islamic world. It does not respect the slogans and "French values" it preaches and acts like the entire West, not taking responsibility and blaming the culture and religion of the other. It has desecrated the Quran and Islam as the religion of "the other foreigner" and rejected the burning of the Bible or the Torah.
The French media periodically attacks him because he contradicts the prevailing narrative about the Islamic current and the causes of religious extremism, and because he holds the West responsible for not supporting democracy in the Arab and Islamic world and for defending despotism because, in his view, honest democratic elections would bring about Islamists stemming from a moderate school that Burgat describes as secular, democratic, and open to modern values.
Accusation of Anti-Semitism
The French media, in turn, regard Burgat as a friend and defender of the Muslim Brotherhood, accusing him in 2014 of anti-Semitism for demanding the separation of the Representative Council of French Jewish Institutions from the state and for the independence of French television channels from Israeli influence. The accusation was repeated in 2018 and early 2019 based on what Burgat described as lies and twisting of his tweets beyond recognition.
The media attacks on him were renewed in 2020 after his support for Swiss thinker Tariq Ramadan during his trials for rape in France and Switzerland. Burgat was also attacked for signing a petition that raised several questions about those charges.
The weekly French magazine "Marianne" considered this to be doubting French justice and accusing the judges of bias against Ramadan. The media attacks on him did not stop, describing him as a defender of Islamists and the Brotherhood, due to his research methodology, which operates outside the flock and opposes the narrative of the dominant secular elite in France.
French researcher Francois Burgat in 1995 (Getty)
He did not bow to pressure and criticized the Israeli occupation's aggression on Gaza after the operation "Deluge of Al-Aqsa" in October 2023 and criticized the unconditional Western support for the aggression.
The media arrows aimed at him again at the beginning of January 2024, accusing him of "glorifying terrorism" after he announced in a tweet on Ex (formerly Twitter) his great respect for the Islamic Resistance Movement (Hamas) and said it represents the will of the Palestinian people, affirming he does not respect Israeli leaders. This was in response to a New York Times article about allegations of rape and violence committed by the resistance against prisoners.
Francois Burgat has faced numerous pressures in Arab and Western countries to influence his theses and to deter him from meeting with opposition political figures from Islamists, leftists, and others. He was also pressured by the pro-Israeli lobby in France, which failed to bring him down with its multiple accusations, including that he is an "Islamic leftist".
Francois Burgat remains one of the greatest scholars of Arab and Islamic culture, presenting it through direct experience and field engagement, offering the West a different view of Islamic currents in all their varieties rather than the accustomed perspective of researchers who focused on the theoretical side, religious and sectarian Islamic texts and interpretations, and historical perspectives without interacting with or listening to the daily pulse of the Arab and Muslim world, yielding to their ideological backgrounds and the desires of Western decision-makers rather than objective facts on the ground.
Book "Understanding Political Islam: A Research Path Around the Islamic Other" (Al Jazeera)
Publications
Through his extensive research career, he produced and supervised the completion of dozens of research projects and studies. He authored significant books born from field research, focusing on Islamic currents of all orientations. In these works, he shed light on their different internal dynamisms, views, and concepts, and also how the West perceives and understands them. Some of his publications include:
- "Political Islam… Voice from the South".
- "Political Islam in the Age of Al-Qaeda".
- "Understanding Political Islam: A Research Journey around the Islamic Other, 1973-2016".
