Updated: October 28, 2020 7:52:44 am
French President Emmanuel Macron. (File photo)
French President Emmanuel Macron’s comments on Islam have pitted France against several countries in the Islamic world. See what he said and why:
Why are many countries in the Muslim world angry with France?
France has a long and complex relationship with Islam and its 5 million Muslim citizens (just under 9% of its population).
On October 16, when an 18-year-old Chechen refugee in France beheaded schoolmaster Samuel PatyThe 47-year-old, days after showing cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad to his students, President Macron said: “We will continue … We will defend the freedom that you taught so well and we will bring secularism.” He said France “would not give up cartoons, drawings, even if others back down.”
Days before Paty’s murder, Macron had delivered a controversial speech. He declared that “Islam is a religion that today is in crisis throughout the world”, “plagued by radical temptations and the desire for a reinvented jihad that is the destruction of the other.”
He spoke of an “Islamist separatism” within the country, and the need to counteract it through the rules and values of the Republic, to build a French version of Islam, an “Islam of the Enlightenment” that better integrates French Muslim citizens with the French way of life. French secularism was not the problem, he said. It was the “conscious, theorized, politico-religious project, which materializes in repeated deviations from the values of the Republic, often results in the constitution of a counter-society, and whose manifestations are the school dropout of children, development of sports practice and community cultural practices that are the pretext for the teaching of principles that do not conform to the laws of the Republic. It is indoctrination through the denial of our principles, equality between women and men, human dignity ”.
Macron called it an attempt to create “a parallel order, to erect other values, to develop another organization of society, separatist at first, but whose ultimate goal is to take control. And this is what makes us reject freedom of expression, freedom of conscience, the right to blasphemy ”.
Macron’s speech and pronouncements after Paty’s murder have angered many Islamic countries, with Turkey and Pakistan leading the way in the French president’s denunciation of Islamophobia. Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who has long-standing disputes with France and Marcron, over gas reserves in Cyprus, over Nagarno Karabakh and over the wars in Libya and Syria, questioned Macron’s mental health after the speech. Several Islamic countries have declared that they will boycott French products. 
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Police officers investigate the beheading of a teacher in Paris on October 16 (AP Photo / Michel Euler)
What is the French definition of secularism?
Macron’s statements highlighted the difficulties France has faced in reconciling its strictly construed secularism with the growing assertion of religious identity by its Muslim citizens, and how France itself has changed its view of Islam.
French secularism, or secularism, sees no place for religion in the public sphere. In this way, it is the opposite of how India has practiced its secularism. Over the years, the laity have come up against the religious practices of many immigrant groups in France, including Sikhs. But the biggest clashes have involved its Muslim citizens, who make up the largest group of Muslims in Europe, ahead of the four million Turkish Muslims in Germany. Most of today’s French Muslims were born in France, descendants of first-generation immigrants from former French colonies in North Africa. The French constitution requires that those seeking citizenship must commit to integration. But this has proven difficult to achieve.
Macron acknowledged in his speech that there have been shortcomings in the way France has met this challenge. He acknowledged that the country had not addressed the legacy of its troubled Algerian war. He also said that French governments had to take the blame for creating ghettos in Muslim communities across the country and creating the conditions for radicalization.
Only a few thousand may be radicalized Islamists, but France’s troubled relationship with Islam has manifested itself in many ways: in the 2005 riots in the banlieus of Paris, suburban ghettos where immigrants were confined; in the refusal, for secular reasons, to allow Muslim women to wear the hijab in public spaces; 2010, burqa ban. In 2011, the Charlie Hebdo cartoons sparked angry reactions in the Islamic world, but the French have the right to blaspheme as an absolute individual freedom, equally available to those who want to insult Jesus Christ as to those who blaspheme against Islam. This is considered the French “way of life”, which also includes knowledge of the language, as well as adherence to the laicite.
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Macron’s controversial speech long before Paty’s assassination; So what triggered it?
The murders at Charlie Hebdo’s office in January 2015, apparently to avenge the publication of the cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad, were a turning point for France. Then, in November, a series of coordinated terrorist attacks took place in Paris and a suburb that shook the entire world. The attacks included suicide bombings, shootings at a soccer stadium, mass shootings in cafes and restaurants, and another mass shooting and hostage-taking at a theater. In Europe, France was the country with the highest number of citizens who left to join ISIS in Iraq and Syria in 2014-15.
So while there is a real constitutional basis for Macron’s position on Islam, as laity requires, it is also a political necessity. No French politician at this time believes that he can afford to ignore the impact of these events on French national life. The Trial of the Charlie Hebdo Killers It began last month, five years after the attack, and for many, Paty’s murder was a continuation of the terrorist attack on Charlie Hebdo.
Macron, who describes his politics as “neither right nor left” – he was with the Socialist Party until 2009 – will go to the presidential elections in early 2022. Right wing Marine La Pen, whom he defeated in the 2017 elections, has The indictment has been directed against Macron for failing to crack down on Islamism. Last year, Macron made changes to immigration law on the grounds that it was being misused.
Just in case, Macron has also announced a controversial “anti-separatism” bill to crack down on Islamic radicalism that will be presented to Parliament in December. It contemplates a number of measures, including school education reforms to ensure that Muslim children do not drop out of school, tighter controls on mosques and preachers, and has caused concern among Muslims in France.
The president’s remarks showed how far France has traveled since the September 11, 2001 attack on the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center. As Le Monde declared “We are all Americans today,” Jacques Chirac, then French president, had drawn the lines for his country’s support for the US war on terror.
France, more than any other country in the West, knew the dangers of combining an entire religion with terrorism, and she was concerned that the United States might end up doing just that. He sent troops to Afghanistan, but voiced his opposition to the invasion of Iraq. As US President George W. Bush and British Prime Minister Tony Blair lobbied the UN to back the planned invasion, French Foreign Minister Dominique Villepin made a passionate call against it at the UN Security Council.
Of France’s own assessment of available intelligence, he said, “nothing allows us to establish […] links ”that the United States was establishing between Saddam Hussein’s regime in Iraq and al-Qaeda. “On the other hand, we must evaluate the impact that the military action in dispute would have on this plan. Couldn’t such an intervention exacerbate the divisions between societies, cultures and peoples, divisions that fuel terrorism? “
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