[ad_1]
IVRY-SUR-SEINE, France – At age 42, Mehdy Belabbas embodied the French Republican promise of upward social mobility: the son of a Muslim construction worker of Algerian descent, he was the first in his family to attend graduate school and served for 12 years. years as deputy mayor of the working-class city where he grew up.
And yet, for the past two weeks, Belabbas has been thinking about only one thing: “I wonder if I should leave France.”
Belabbas’ thoughts emerged from days of heated, if not hostile, public debate largely fueled by President Emmanuel Macron’s own ministers, which began in response to the gruesome beheading of a teacher by an 18-year-old Muslim extremist and was resupplied by what officials believe was an Islamist terror attack in Nice on Thursday.
French officials have vowed to crack down on what hard-line Interior Minister Gérald Darmanin has called “the enemy within”: shutting down a mosque, proposing to ban several Muslim groups that the government considers extremist, and even suggesting the elimination of the aisles of ethnic food in stores.
Macron, who began a campaign earlier this month against the Islamic “separatism” of deep-rooted secular values in France, recently said that Muslims needed to develop an “Islam of the enlightenment,” which many considered condescending.
While these statements and others by French officials have sparked a backlash in some Muslim countries, they have mostly caused discomfiture among the nearly six million Muslims in France, nearly all of whom condemn the violence but fear they will all be labeled terrorists. .
“After this attack, five or six million people have to justify themselves,” Belabbas said. “But we just don’t know what is expected of us.”
The knife attack on a Nice church on Thursday promises to deepen the confusion, despite condemnation of the killer by Muslim leaders. Naziha Mayoufi, a member of LES Musulmans, an association of Muslim groups and mosques, said she felt “dread and infinite sadness for the families of the victims, for our Catholic friends.”
But he said that after Thursday’s attack, he feared that politicians and commentators would feel even more entitled to label Islam as an “enemy from within.”
“As Muslims,” he said, “we pay the damages of these two forms of extremism.”
The disarray among the Muslim community in France is particularly pronounced in Ivry-sur-Seine, the working-class suburb east of Paris where Belabbas grew up and where several thousand Muslims have integrated economically and socially since the 1950s.
“Everything that has been said and done suggests that all Muslims are a target, that we are all likely related to this new paradigm of ‘separatism’, of which we are all suspected,” said Mohamed Akrid, president of Annour, a organization that oversees the construction of a mosque that is expected to be completed in 2023.
Since 2004, Muslim worshipers in Ivry-sur-Seine have had to settle for a dingy gymnasium and a tent that the city council has lent them to welcome the roughly 2,000 people who attend Friday prayers.
Akrid acknowledged that Islam in France had been flanked by radical factions that have a powerful influence on young people, especially on social media. But he added that France’s recent crackdown on Muslim individuals and groups accused of radicalism ran the risk of creating more confusion than fighting this dominant influence.
Mr. Darmanin said that the 250 or more police raids last week devastated “dozens of people not necessarily related to the investigation” of the beheading but to whom the government wanted to send a message: “Not a minute of respite for the enemies of the Republic “. He later added that the raids had produced only seven legal processes.
“It is to convey a message,” Akrid said. “But who? For these people or for all Muslims? “
It was Darmanin’s comments about ethnic food aisles in supermarkets, such as shelves of halal products, which he said could foster “communitarianism” and lead to “separatism” that attracted attention and seemed to suggest that a broader debate on integration. .
“The confusion is dangerous in the sense that it runs the risk of further radicalizing certain tensions in Muslim society, especially the young, who may feel rejected by such comments,” said Claire Renklicay, a restaurant owner of Kurdish descent. who described the fight against jihadism as “A fight for humanity.”
Belabbas said that when he grew up in the “Cité Gagarine”, once an ambitious social housing project in Ivry-sur-Seine, “the French model of meritocracy told us: ‘If you work, if you study, if you respect the laws of the Republic , you will have the right to social mobility ”.
But “that did not necessarily mean that we had to eat like everyone else, or believe like everyone else,” he said, adding that the current model implied that Muslim customs and practices were incompatible with the laws of the Republic.
Central to France’s complicated relationship with its Muslim citizens is the authorities’ vote to defend those who publish cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad, as part of their strict laws on secularism that allow blasphemy. But many Muslims, from shoppers at the Ivry-sur-Seine open-air market to the chairman of the French Council of the Muslim Faith, have voiced their displeasure with the cartoons, arguing that there should be limits to the offense when it comes to beliefs. religious.
A poll published in early September indicated that while 59 percent of French people support publishing the cartoons in the name of freedom of expression, only 19 percent of Muslims agree.
Vincent Geisser, a sociologist specializing in Islam at the University of Aix-Marseille, said the current debate reflects a failure of the French model of integration, which was often “accompanied by a distancing or even a break with religion.”
He said that “not only did it not happen, but the opposite actually happened.” pointing to the thousands of French Muslims who had integrated into society while preserving their religious practices. This development is considered a “republican betrayal” by some political leaders.
In 2016, a report on French Muslims from the Paris-based Institut Montaigne showed that 70 percent always buy halal meat and that 65 percent favor the hijab, the veil or headscarf that many Muslim women wear but which has sparked years of disputes in France.
For Muslim youths who fail to assimilate, said Hakim El Karoui, the report’s author, “the question is, ‘Who am I?’ And the answer is: ‘I am a Muslim.’
He added: “They are going to want to make religious identity their first identity.”
But in the commotion that followed the teacher’s beheading and now the terrorist attacks, several prominent imams and representatives say they have realized their responsibility to ensure that a peaceful version of Islam is promoted in mosques and to call on Muslims who publicly support Mr.’s strategy to fight “Islamist separatism”.
Sitting next to plans for the future mosque in Ivry-sur-Seine, a modern 20,000-square-foot building that will include prayer rooms, classrooms and a library, Mr. Akrid said that many young people were ignorant of religion “and are leaving. to educate on social networks, at the mercy of manipulators ”.
Akrid said he agreed with the need for Muslims to enter the public debate and work towards a better understanding of religious texts. But he added that France’s assimilation policy, which tends to deny differences, could contradict that role.
“We are asked to do two contradictory things at the same time,” Akrid said. “To step aside and appear.”
Elian Peltier contributed reporting from London.
[ad_2]
