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From Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan questioning his mental health to his posters pasted on a road in South Mumbai, French President Emmanuel Macron and the French laïcité, or secularism, seem to have come under a massive ire of the Islamic world.
France has always had a difficult relationship with religion and religious bodies since 1905, when it put an end to “recognised religions”. In recent years, controversies around the burqa, Islamic hijab and Sikh turbans have clashed with what many call France’s forceful integration. But the latest spike of tensions began on 2 October, exactly two weeks before the French middle-school history teacher Samuel Paty was killed at a suburb in Paris by a Chechen refugee for showing cartoons of Prophet Muhammad to his students.
On 2 October, President Macron gave a clarion call of sorts to strengthen separation of religion and State in France and thus defending French laicite from “Islamist radicalism.” He said this while calling Islam a religion that was “in crisis all over the world”.
This invited sharp criticism from leaders such as Erdogan and Pakistan Prime Minister Imran Khan. Several Muslim-majority countries have since called for boycotting French products. Some stores in Pakistan have even removed sections that sell French goods. Protests have erupted in Bangladesh with tensions rising elsewhere. Soon after the beheading, three people were killed in a knife attack in Nice city on Thursday, prompting Macron to say that “it is France that is under attack.”
This is why France is ThePrint’s Newsmaker of the Week.
Also read: France attacks show Muslims’ self-inflicted paranoia. But Quran allows freedom of expression
The crisis beyond cartoons
The French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo recently republished cartoons, which had led to a terrorist attack on its office in 2015. The cartoons had originally appeared in a Danish newspaper in 2005 before they were printed by the French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo the following year. Charlie Hebdo published other drawings of Prophet Muhammad in 2011 and 2012, which resulted in the terrorist attack in which 12 cartoonists were killed.
The latest crisis, once again, spotlights France’s unique model of secularism, and pushes the country to re-articulate its liberal values in a way that lessens its internal tensions – both political and social. It also forces the Muslim community to relook at its identity politics in the West. It didn’t help when the French Education Minister Jean-Michel Blanquer blamed the country’s Left of being Islamo-Leftism, which he said amounts to ‘intellectual participation’ in terrorism. But at the heart of the argument is the place of Muslim community in the 21st-century Europe, with France and Germany having the largest Muslim population in the region, according to Pew Research Centre.
Also read: Why French President Macron’s clash of civilisations with Islam is misguided
‘Message of peace to the Muslim world’
Macron, whose meteoric rise in France and subsequent win in May 2017 election was hailed by many as the win of liberalism over popularism, said on Thursday that France is being attacked for “our values, our taste for liberty, the possibility on our soil to believe freely” and “we will give up nothing.”
However, many see these rising tensions between France and the Muslim world as the failure of ‘French integration’ model, which is enshrined in the country’s Constitution, and are of the opinion that it needs an overhaul.
For this, one needs to look outside of France and analyse its long history of colonialism, especially in Africa, and Paris’ complicated relationship with that continent. Adding to this, the rising Islamophobia in France has complicated the cosmopolitan fabric of the French society.
France’s long and bloody war in Algeria, which is also known as the Algerian War of Independence or Algerian Revolution, fought between France and the Algerian National Liberation Front from 1954 to 1962.
The impact of that bitter confrontation continues to simmer even today in France.
Macron had called that episode “a crime against humanity” during one of his election campaigns in 2017, which drew sharp criticisms from his opponents. He is the first French president to be born in post-colonial era.
France continues to maintain a large military base in Djibouti.
Besides, political leaders from Mali, to Rwanda, to Ethiopia have also stood up against France time and again, demanding an apology from the French. Another fact that cannot be ignored about France is that not just Islam, Paris had run into tensions with Jews, Christians, Sikhs and others as well.
If Macron was to be blamed for the recent stir in the Muslim world, then his predecessor Francois Hollande should shoulder equal responsibility, who wrote the following in his book A President Should Not Say That: Secrets of Five Years in Office:
“It’s true there is a problem with Islam … and nobody doubts that. There’s a problem with Islam because Islam demands places (of worship), recognition. It’s not that Islam is a problem because it’s a religion that is in itself dangerous but because it wants to assert itself as a religion on the Republic. What might also be a problem is if Muslims don’t criticise acts of radicalisation, if imams behave in an anti-republican way.”
Also, in 2011 under former French President Nicolas Sarkozy, a ban was imposed by his conservative government on wearing face-covering veils in public. This was later upheld by the European Court of Human Rights in 2014.
Since then, the French society has seen unrest several times over wearing of hijab by Muslim women there.
However, it was the very same Macron who last year spoke against this and urged French people to stop “stigmatising” Muslims and called for understanding of the religion.
Also read: Macron, Erdogan, Imran Khan must respond as leaders, not politicians
Challenges for France going forward
France boasts of a sizeable Muslim population, which also consists of migrants from former French colonies. A 2017 study by the Pew Research Centre states that 8.8 per cent of French population is Muslim and in the coming decades, it is expected to grow.
Macron, thus, will have to now walk the tightrope and follow some of his predecessors who have now become legends of sorts.
It was under former President Jacques Chirac that the French national legislature passed a bill in March 2004, called ‘la Loi 2004-228’, banning wearing of religious symbols in schools.
When Charles De Gaulle became President in 1941, he sought to bring about a paradigm change to the 1905 laws and declared France to be “indivisible, secular, democratic and social republic”.
While India has denounced the personal attack on President Macron, New Delhi believes both counties face “similar non-traditional security threats in the form of radicalism and terrorism and increasingly cyber-security challenges”.
On Friday, foreign secretary Harsh Vardhan Shringla, who is visiting France, spoke on the attacks, saying India had “experienced what unbridled radicalism can wreak”, asking the “civilised world… to act together”.
“In some respects, these are linked – not least because online radicalisation has emerged as a pressing concern. Both India and France have suffered. The fight today is not against specific communities or individuals but against a radical politico-religious ideology that attempts to negate the progress made by secular democracies,” Shringla said.
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