Muslims in FranceEmmanuel Macron's Plans to Protect French Values Anger Muslims
Upcoming legislation crafted to “protect” the Republic and French values promises to be deeply divisive, with French Muslims fearing it will unfairly single them out. Some also see political calculus behind the effort.
Macron’s discourse was a curtain-raiser of sorts for an upcoming draft bill against “separatist” threats, which officials say also include groups like white supremacists. But with many observers considering it clearly aimed at Islamist extremism, the legislation has already sparked sharp controversy well before its rollout later this year.
While some welcome the government’s so-called anti-separatisms drive as long overdue, leaders of France’s roughly six-million-strong Muslim community —western Europe’s largest — fear it may unfairly single them out.
“We’re near the end of Macron’s first term,” said Jawad Bachare, director of the Collective Against Islamophobia in France, which has sometimes been accused of having links to the Muslim Brotherhood. “And with each election there are the same questions about Muslims, and the financing of Muslim places of worship.”
Charlie Hebdo Attacks
Macron’s address on Friday was closely followed, coming just days after two people were stabbed in front of Charlie Hebdo newspaper’s former headquarters — and as a trial unfolds over the 2015 terrorist attacks against the satirical French weekly and a kosher supermarket.
He announced the draft legislation would be introduced in December and described it as a was to preserve France’s secular state by keeping religion — including displays of religiosity — outside of education and the public sector. “Secularism is the cement of a united France,” Macron said.
Among other areas, the bill is expected to further crack down on foreign financing of mosques and private religious schools, bar foreign imams, increase surveillance of associations and individuals suspected of “separatism” — including in the public sector and in sports — and ban efforts threatening gender equality, including pre-marriage “virginity certificates” for Muslim women.
“There is no incompatibility between being Muslim and being a (French) citizen,” Interior Minister Gerald Darmanin, the grandson of a Muslim immigrant, told French radio recently.
Rather, he said, the legislation aims to attack the “enemies of France” — terrorist but also political groups threatening “the French model of free expression, our way of living, the way we teach our children.” Macron, too, has called for protecting the nation against separatist forces. In a nod to Charlie Hebdo, he defended “the right to commit blasphemy.”
“There will never be any place in France for those who try to impose their own law,” the president said, “often in the name of a God, sometimes with the help of foreign powers.”
