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Emmanuel Macron finds clear and self-critical words about the conditions in some parts of the country. To regain its authority, the state will have to rely on the deeply divided Muslim community.
According to Emmanuel Macron, the French state and the Arab community should work better together in the future.
Children sitting in windowless rooms on religious scriptures and being taught by veiled teachers. Bus drivers denying women transportation because they are allegedly not dressed properly. Or religious bookstores that spread radical ideas and illegal drugs: these are phenomena that the French authorities have discovered not only once in recent years and that the president wants to make impossible in the future. In a keynote address on the fight against separatism, announced in February and postponed several times, Emmanuel Macron made it clear early on Friday that he was primarily concerned about its Islamist characteristics.
Children in schools
The government should produce a legal text in the coming weeks. The president now outlined its main characteristics and also declared his goal: the state must return to the areas where it has lost influence. Among other things, this provided space for radical Islamic currents that violated the principles and laws of the French Republic and built their own order, Macron said. A development that was also to blame by allowing social and economic problems to concentrate. To counteract this decades-old trend, the French president wants, among other things, that
- The Islamic clergy working in France are no longer trained in Algeria, Morocco and Turkey, but in France. The government wants to work out the guidelines with the French Central Council of Muslims,
- Arabic lessons will be expanded in state institutions; children are often learning the language in mosques or cultural associations,
- Beginning with the 2021/22 school year, children are only taught at home or outside state-recognized institutions in exceptional cases, for example, for medical reasons,
- Clubs that obviously violate the basic values of the French constitutional state may be dissolved in the future,
- financing of mosques will be more strictly controlled in the future.
A fundamental challenge to Macron’s strategy is likely to be the heterogeneity of the Muslim community, on which he wants and must build, especially when it comes to education issues: the strict separation of church and state in France calls for a strict moderation when it comes to religious education. At the national and regional levels there are a multitude of actors who come and go and deny each other legitimacy. The dominant role of the French Central Council of Muslims (CFCM) is also controversial.
Hakim El Karoui, a former government adviser and author of several studies on Islam and Islamism for think tank Institut Montaigne, says there is no way the solution will be a top-down approach. Muslims must do their part. However, he, who heads an organization committed to French Islam, claims to have stated that the dialogue between the government and various actors has improved significantly in the last five years. The Karoui values very positively Macron’s intentions expressed on Friday, as they would provoke concrete changes of a fundamental nature: the end of “imported” imams, for example, or better control over the teaching of Arabic and the financing of mosque communities . The latter is particularly important for French Muslims themselves, who finance most of the communities.
Mosques play a minor role
But El Karoui also warns that mosques are less and less the place where Muslims radicalize. The 28 percent who, according to their latest study, represent values contrary to those of the French constitutional state, are predominantly young. These would be shaped by the environment of your colleagues or the Internet. It is not uncommon for a psychological dimension to be added. Ultimately, his research has shown that radical influence comes less and less from abroad, but that “French Islamism” now exists.
While the proportion of Muslims in the French population can only be estimated (the number fluctuates between 5 and around 15 percent), the Interior Ministry announced new figures on possible threats in late August. According to this, at present just over 8,000 people are being observed by the national secret service for possible terrorist activities. Last week’s attack in Paris showed that this dataset is just one piece of the puzzle in the fight against Islamist-motivated terrorism. The young Pakistani who attacked two people in front of the former headquarters of the satirical magazine “Charlie Hebdo” and seriously injured them was not known to the secret services and, according to what is known, acted alone.
A nationwide problem
Macron chose neither the time nor the place of his Friday speech by chance: He spoke the day before the anniversary of the attack on the Paris police prefecture in a suburb of the capital, where there has been a tentative increase in police presence since 2018. Last November, the then Minister of the Interior announced there that, thanks to the increased presence, two places of worship with Islamist influence had been closed in Les Mureaux and the opening of a Koran school had been prevented. The program expanded from 17 to 32 neighborhoods across the country last year. Because the problem of ghettoization, as Macron called the negative development of problem areas, no longer only affects the notorious suburbs of Paris and Marseille, but also structurally weak neighborhoods in medium-sized cities and sometimes even small communities.
