ISLAM IN EUROPE

[kmaherali]

Denmark Passes Muslim-focused Handshake Law

Denmark has passed a law stating individuals who take citizenship tests must shake hands during ceremonies, in a move seen as deliberately targeting religiously conservative Muslims.

The law, approved on Thursday by the country’s right-wing coalition, states that from January 1, would-be citizens undergoing Denmark's naturalization process must perform the contact gesture with the presiding dignitary, such as the local mayor. Those who refuse would be denied citizenship.

The measure has been met with anger, with campaigners arguing it discriminates against conservative Muslims who do not shake hands with members of the opposite sex for religious reasons. Instead, such Muslims may prefer to place their hand on their chest. Some conservative Jewish people also follow a similar rule.

Gloves, which some Muslim women wear to conceal their skin, are also prohibited at citizenship ceremonies by the new law.

Martin Henriksen, the spokesman on immigration for the nationalist Danish People’s Party who is an outspoken critic of Islam told The New York Timeshe hoped the law would create a domino-effect, leading to a ban on women wearing veils at citizenship ceremonies.

“If you arrive in Denmark, where it’s custom to shake hands when you greet, if you don’t do it it’s disrespectful,” he told the newspaper.

“If one can’t do something that simple and straightforward, there’s no reason to become a Danish citizen."

The law was met with opposition since it was put forward in June. One opinion poll published in September showed 52 percent disagreed with the rule,The Guardian reported. And a number of mayors said they were refuse to enforce it.

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https://www.msn.com/en-ca/news/world/de ... ailsignout

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France Has Millions of Muslims. Why Does It Import Imams?

State secularism works in funny ways.

PARIS — What to do about Islam in France? Considering Islamist terrorist attacks, communalism and the international manipulation of Muslim communities, the matter is pressing. But it’s contentious, because managing Islam seems to go against laïcité, France’s staunch version of state secularism, and a 1905 law that mandates the separation of church and state.

Wouldn’t revising that law be an admission that secularism is bowing to Islamism? On the other hand, if the law isn’t revised, or if the French state cannot find other ways of monitoring and steering Islam, then Islam in France risks falling under the control of foreign states or the influence of radicals. That is already the case, actually: Since laïcité prohibits the French authorities from using public funds to build mosques or train imams, Algeria, Morocco, Turkey and Saudi Arabia have stepped in. According to the newsmagazine L’Express, 70 percent of imams practicing in France are not French.

In an attempt to overcome these paradoxes, President Emmanuel Macron recently convened at the Élysée Palace the country’s various Muslim leaders and then representatives from all religions. The order of the day for the broader meeting, held on Jan. 10, was old emergencies: how to punish radicalism, control the financing of mosques and make Muslim authorities accountable. The news daily Le Monde, which obtained the note that the president handed to attendees, reported that the government was proposing to revise the 1905 law while “confirming” “its principles.”

It was an attempt to square a circle, a malaise, so very French. And the narrower question of what to do about imams — their origins, their trainings, their salaries — summarizes it well.

More...

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/28/opin ... dline&te=1

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Post-doctoral researchers on the “European Qur’an”

The Université de Nantes, the Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas, Università di Napoli l’Orientale, the University of Kent and the University of Amersterdam are hiring post-doctoral researchers to join our project “The European Qur’an: Islamic Scripture in European Culture and
Religion (1150-1850)” (EuQu).This is an exciting opportunity for early career researchers to be involved in a highly visible, international collaborative research project that involves leading academic institutions in Europe and
beyond. We offer outstanding work and research conditions, competitive salaries, funded travel opportunities, options for prolonged stays at partner universities and involvements in ventures at the forefront of cultural studies and digital humanities. You will be conducting research under the supervision of four leading scholars in the field of Christian-Muslim relations and have the
opportunity to collaborate and exchange with colleagues from a wide range of disciplinary, institutional and personal backgrounds.

Project summary

“The European Qur'an. Islamic Scripture in European Culture and Religion 1150-1850” (EuQu) is a six year research project funded through a synergy grant from the European Research Council (ERC). Its four principal investigators (and host institutions) are Mercedes García-Arenal (Centro de Ciencias Humanas y Sociales, CSIC, Madrid, Spain), John Tolan (Université de Nantes), Jan Loop (University of Kent) and Roberto Tottoli (Università di Napoli l’Orientale).

The project studies the ways in which the Islamic Holy Book is embedded in the intellectual, religious and cultural history of Medieval and Early Modern Christians, European Jews, freethinkers, atheists and European Muslims. We will conduct research on how the Qur’an has been translated, interpreted, adapted and used in Christian Europe from the Middle Ages through to early modern history, in order to understand how the Holy Book has influenced both culture and religion in Europe. EuQu will look at the role of the Qur’an in interactions with Islam, in debates between Christians of different beliefs and in critiques of Christianity during the Enlightenment.

The six-year project will produce interdisciplinary research through scientific meetings across Europe, a GIS-database of Qur’an manuscripts, translations and other works in which the Qur'an is discussed, and through PhD theses and monographs. It will bring the fruits of this research to non-academic audiences though a creative multimedia exhibition on the place of the Qur’an in European cultural heritage.

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https://www.kent.ac.uk/history/document ... TQAoumV2Zs

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Tulips were introduced into Europe by an Austrian ambassador at the Ottoman court

Posted by Nimira Dewji

Tulips are depicted on a variety of Ottoman decorative arts including textiles and ceramics. Called lale in Ottoman-Turkish, tulips held a range of meanings in Muslim contexts. For Sufis in the Ottoman realms, the numerical value assigned to the letters forming the word lale, the total being 66, corresponded to the value assigned to the letters for Allah which suggested a mystical association between the flower and the Divine.

Iznik tile ottoman
Ceramic under-glazed tile depicting a tulip made in Diyarbakir (south-eastern Turkey) in the second half of the 16th century. Source: Islam an Illustrated Journey
Tulips are thought to have been introduced to Europe from Ottoman Turkey in the 16th century by the herbalist and diplomat Ogier Ghiselin de Busbecq (d.1592) who served as the Austrian ambassador at the court of Sulayman the Magnificent [r.1520-1566]. In his Turkish letters (vol. I, pp. 24-25) he writes:

“As we passed through this district [on the road from Adrianople to Constantinople] we everywhere came across quantities of flowers – narcissi, hyacinths, and tulipans, as the Turks call them. We were surprised to find them flowering in the mid-winter, scarcely a favourable season… The tulip has little or no scent, but it is admired for its beauty and the variety of its colours. The Turks are very fond of flowers, and, though they are otherwise anything but extravagant, they do not hesitate to pay several aspres for a fine bloom…”

During the 17th and 18th centuries Europe became obsessed with tulips. In the Netherlands, tulips became fashionable and an expensive traded commodity, especially among the class-conscious merchants and craftsmen. The high demand for tulip bulbs led to massive speculation on the tulip exchange in what later became known as ‘tulipmania.’ Speculation raised the prices of bulbs dramatically during the 1630s before a sudden collapse that led to the financial ruin of many Dutch merchants.

In the 17th century, the Ottomans created manuals on the cultivation and care of tulips and detailed lists and description of the varieties they developed. By the early 18th century, during the reign of Sultan Mehmed III (r. 1703-1730), tulip cultivation and representation in the arts came to define a period of Ottoman westernisation known as the Tulip Period (lale devri) when the elite looked to the courts of Europe and cultivated new attitudes… focussed on celebrating life.

Re-printed from Islam an Illustrated Journey, Farhad Daftary, Zulfikar Hirji, p 278-280

Iznik rustem pasha istanbul
Iznik tiles with tulip motifs in the Rustem Pashah Mosque (Istanbul) built by Sinan in 1563. The tiles used in this mosque depict some 41 tulip designs. Source: Islam an Illustrated History
Ottoman silk caftan
Silk caftan, Turkey, late-16th century, Istanbul, Topkapi Palace Museum. The intersection points of the climbing tendrils are overlaid with medallions filled with flowers, from which rise tulips and pomegranates. Source: Almut von Gladib, Islam Art and Architecture
Iznik style
Under Ottoman reign, in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, the Turkish city of Iznik (formerly Nicaea) became a major centre of pottery making. Iznik was close to wood needed for kilns as well as other ingredients required for the production of ceramics. As a result, a distinctive style developed and came to be known as Iznik style: it involved combinations of a wide range of colours including cobalt blue, turquoise, green, black, and red.

Iznik Turkey Aga Khan Museum
Dish, c. mid-16th century, Iznik, Turkey, Source: Aga Khan Museum
Ottoman Empire (1301-1922)
Osman I, a leader of the Turkish tribes in Anatolia, founded the Ottoman Empire around 1299. The term “Ottoman” is derived from Osman’s name, which was “Uthman” in Arabic. In 1453, Mehmed II the Conqueror led the Ottoman Turks in seizing the ancient city of Constantinople, the Byzantine Empire’s capital. Sultan Mehmed re-named the city Istanbul, meaning “the city of Islam” and made it the new capital of the Ottoman Empire. Istanbul became a dominant international centre of trade and culture. The Ottomans are remembered for their powerful military, ethnic diversity, artistic ventures, religious tolerance, and architectural marvels.
Source: Ottoman Empire BBC – Religions in Islam

nimirasblog.wordpress.com/2019/03/15/tulips-were-introduced-into-europe-by-an-austrian-ambassador-at-the-ottoman-court/

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The Flowery Journey of Tulips From the Ottoman Empire to Europe

The origin of tulips – from the Ottoman Empire to Europe
Tulips were imported into Holland in the 16th century by Oghier Ghislain de Busbecq, an ambassador of Emperor Ferdinand I to Suleyman the Magnificent. De Busbecq was astonished to find highly sophisticated hybrids growing in the royal court in Istanbul. He shipped some bulbs to Carolus Clusius in Prague, who eventually took over the botanical gardens in Leiden, ensuring the widespread distribution of tulips in Europe.

Tulips were originally wild flowers from Central Asia, from the Hindu Mountains in Kazakhstan, but were first cultivated by the Turks, as early as 1000 AD.

We see tulips for the first time in the artworks of the Seldjuks. In the 12th century, tulips were included in motifs, especially in the city of Konya, which was the capital of the Anatolian Seldjuks. It seems certain that tulips and tulip culture came with the Turks to Anatolia.

When Constantinople was redesigned as Istanbul, following the Ottoman conquest, Sultan Mehmet II ordered tulips to be planted in the new parks and gardens. The Sultan himself was a keen gardener. In his free time, he worked in the gardens of the Topkapi Palace.

Sultan Suleiman took the love of tulips to another level. He professionalized the planting and use of tulips in Istanbul, and it became more popular than the rose. In the picture, below, we see the Sultan with a tulip in his hands. Suleiman was also a great poet, and mentioned tulips several times in his poems. His poet name was “Muhibbi.”

More....
https://mvslim.com/the-flowery-journey- ... to-europe/

[kmaherali]

Muhammad: an anticlerical hero of the European Enlightenment

Publishing the Quran and making it available in translation was a dangerous enterprise in the 16th century, apt to confuse or seduce the faithful Christian. This, at least, was the opinion of the Protestant city councillors of Basel in 1542, when they briefly jailed a local printer for planning to publish a Latin translation of the Muslim holy book. The Protestant reformer Martin Luther intervened to salvage the project: there was no better way to combat the Turk, he wrote, than to expose the ‘lies of Muhammad’ for all to see.

The resulting publication in 1543 made the Quran available to European intellectuals, most of whom studied it in order to better understand and combat Islam. There were others, however, who used their reading of the Quran to question Christian doctrine. The Catalonian polymath and theologian Michael Servetus found numerous Quranic arguments to employ in his anti-Trinitarian tract, Christianismi Restitutio (1553), in which he called Muhammad a true reformer who preached a return to the pure monotheism that Christian theologians had corrupted by inventing the perverse and irrational doctrine of the Trinity. After publishing these heretical ideas, Servetus was condemned by the Catholic Inquisition in Vienne, and finally burned with his own books in Calvin’s Geneva.

During the European Enlightenment, a number of authors presented Muhammad in a similar vein, as an anticlerical hero; some saw Islam as a pure form of monotheism close to philosophic Deism and the Quran as a rational paean to the Creator. In 1734, George Sale published a new English translation. In his introduction, he traced the early history of Islam and idealised the Prophet as an iconoclastic, anticlerical reformer who had banished the ‘superstitious’ beliefs and practices of early Christians – the cult of the saints, holy relics – and quashed the power of a corrupt and avaricious clergy.

Sale’s translation of the Quran was widely read and appreciated in England: for many of his readers, Muhammad had become a symbol of anticlerical republicanism. It was influential outside England too. The US founding father Thomas Jefferson bought a copy from a bookseller in Williamsburg, Virginia, in 1765, which helped him conceive of a philosophical deism that surpassed confessional boundaries. (Jefferson’s copy, now in the Library of Congress, has been used for the swearing in of Muslim representatives to Congress, starting with Keith Ellison in 2007.) And in Germany, the Romantic Johann Wolfgang von Goethe read a translation of Sale’s version, which helped to colour his evolving notion of Muhammad as an inspired poet and archetypal prophet.

More...

https://aeon.co/ideas/muhammad-an-antic ... ightenment

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In Copenhagen, Reaction to an Anti-Muslim Event Turns Violent

COPENHAGEN — After an anti-Muslim provocateur publicly desecrated the Quran in Copenhagen, demonstrations against him on Sunday and early Monday descended into violent clashes between protesters, who set about 70 fires in the streets, and the police, who made 23 arrests.

The unrest in the Norrebro district of the Danish capital began on Sunday after Rasmus Paludan, the founder of a tiny far-right party, tossed a book he claimed was the Quran into the air and let it fall to the ground.

Mr. Paludan has spent the past months touring Denmark and staging offensive protests against Muslims and immigrants, often in neighborhoods with large immigrant populations. Until recently, he had largely been ignored by mainstream Danish news outlets, but the riots have propelled him to the center of national attention.

Protesters shouted at Mr. Paludan on Sunday, pressing against the lines of police officers who were protecting him. Violence then broke out and spread into surrounding streets, much of it shown live on television.

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https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/15/worl ... 3053090416

[kmaherali]

The heritage of Notre Dame – less European than people think

Few seem to know that the Parisian cathedral's architectural design owes a vast debt to Middle Eastern predecessors

Excerpt:

The Gothic arch

When Frankish crusaders saw these designs in the 12th century, they brought the idea back to Europe.

What we today call the Gothic arch, prevalent in Notre Dame and in all the great cathedrals of Europe, evolved from the pointed arch, was an architectural design first seen in the Ibn Tulun Mosque in Cairo and passed via Amalfi merchants to Sicily.

With their advanced knowledge of geometry and the laws of statics, Muslims developed both the horseshoe (also known as Moorish arch, first seen in Damascus's Umayyad Mosque, then further developed by the Umayyads in Andalusia in the Great Mosque of Cordoba) and the pointed arch to give more height than the classical arch.

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https://www.middleeasteye.net/opinion/h ... ople-think

[kmaherali]

Ottoman traders introduced coffee into Europe

An old tale tells the story of a young goat herder in Ethiopia in the 6th century, who was astonished to see his herd of goats become particularly excited when they ate certain red berries of an unknown plant. He picked some of these berries and took them to the local monastery. The Prior used them to make a brew, which he drank, and found that he remained incredibly alert during evening prayers. Other legends suggest that the monks threw the beans into the fire, but retrieved them due to their pleasant aroma, placing the beans in hot water to preserve them, but later drinking the water. The stimulating effect of the drink kept the monks awake during their evening prayer services; thus coffee became a beverage. The word ‘coffee’ is from the Turkish qahve, derived from the Arabic qahwah which in turn is derived from the Swahili kahawa.

While there are many legends about the origin of coffee, it is generally agreed that large-scale cultivation of coffee trees began in Yemen, becoming well-established there by the 15th century, when Sufis consumed it to remain alert during their long devotional practices. Its consumption became controversial when some ulama likened it to alcohol, an intoxicant, and deemed it impermissible to consume. Coffee was also censored because some ulama and rulers regarded coffee-houses as hotbeds of impious behaviour and rebellion. Coffee-houses became male abodes whereas women consumed coffee in private.

Istanbul coffee
A Coffee House in Tophane, by Megerdich Jivanian, late-19th century, Pera Museum, Istanbul. Source:Wikipedia
During the 16th century the Ottomans imposed a tax on coffee and at various times both coffee and coffee-houses were banned, most famously under the sultan Murad IV (r. 1623-1640).

Ottoman traders introduced coffee into Europe between the 16th and 17th centuries. European coffee-houses and paraphernalia were often replete with Ottoman references including coffee tokens produced in London.

coffee turkey cafe Ottoman
Coffee token with a ‘Turk’s head.’ Source: Islam: An Illustrated Journey
Referred to as a ‘drink of the Muslims,’ attempts were made to ban coffee. Pope Clement VIII (d. 1605), who liked its taste, sanctioned the drink. By the mid-17th century, coffee, coffee-houses or cafés, along with chocolate, tea and tobacco became fashionable. Cafés became places for literary, political, and economic gatherings. A London coffee-house opened by the publisher Edward Lloyd (d.1713) in 1686 was frequented by merchants, seamen, traders, and brokers. Eventually, Lloyd’s café became Lloyd’s of London, one of the world’s largest insurance brokers. But there were also efforts to ban coffee-houses in Europe owing to their potential to generate political dissent or as alleged in a London women’s petition, the drink’s ability to make men ‘feeble’ and ‘dull-witted.’

coffee cafe
Source: Islam an Illustrated Journey
As the demand for coffee increased, there was competition to cultivate plantations. The first attempt by the Dutch to cultivate trees in India in the 17th century failed, but they were successful on the island of Java, in modern-day Indonesia, subsequently expanding their cultivation in Sumatra and Celebes. Travellers, missionaries, and traders took coffee seeds all over the world, giving rise to one of the most profitable commodities (A Brief History of Coffee)

Adapted from Islam: An Illustrated Journey, Farhad Daftary, Zulfikar Hirji, Azimuth Editions in association with The Institute of Ismaili Studies, p 272-273

nimirasblog.wordpress.com/2019/04/25/ottoman-traders-introduced-coffee-into-europe/

[kmaherali]

15th-century manuscript reveals links between Gaelic and Islamic worlds

A previously undiscovered 15th-century Irish vellum manuscript, reveals an enchanting connection between Gaelic Ireland and the Islamic world, and illustrates how medieval Ireland was once at the centre of medical scholarship in the world.

Image and more...

https://www.ucc.ie/en/news/15th-century ... orlds.html

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Echoes of al-Andalus: The Portuguese town celebrating its forgotten Islamic past

Home to the only surviving medieval mosque in Portugal, Mertola doesn't hide a past shaped by Muslims, Christians and Jews alike

An imposing building with cylindrical towers stands out on the steep hill of Mertola, a southern Portuguese town on the banks of the Guadiana river, not far from the Spanish border.

Is it a church with a mihrab? Or a mosque with a cross?

The whitewashed building with horseshoe arches is known as the church of Nossa Senhora da Anunciacao. Those who come to visit its vaulted interior are told it’s the best preserved medieval mosque in Portugal.

“It’s a mixture of many things,” says Germano Vaz, who is from Mertola and lives nearby. “It was built on top of a Roman temple. It was a mosque and now it’s a church. We are very proud of this assemblage of religions and cultures.”

Inside the church that used to be a mosque, Christians still pray facing Mecca. The mihrab, a semi-circular niche in the wall, is directly behind the main altar.

A bell tower stands where, less than a thousand years ago, a minaret would call Muslims to prayer.

Photos and more...

https://www.middleeasteye.net/discover/ ... al-andalus

[kmaherali]

Documentary Film

When the Moors Ruled in Europe

Video:

https://topdocumentaryfilms.com/when-mo ... ed-europe/

[kmaherali]

Norway Police Investigate Mosque Attack as Attempted ‘Act of Terrorism’

OSLO — The police in Norway said on Sunday that they were investigating a foiled attack at a mosque near Oslo as an attempted act of terrorism after a white gunman in a helmet and body armor opened fire but was overpowered before injuring anyone.

They also said a young woman found dead in the suspect’s home was his 17-year-old stepsister.

Friends and former classmates of the suspect, whose name has not been released by the police but was being reported by Norwegian media, said he had taken increasingly extremist stances against immigrants and women.

The mosque attack on Saturday came amid a polarizing debate in the country about immigration and Islam, and prompted the authorities to order police officers to guard mosques in the city. Officers, who generally do not carry weapons, were armed for the rest of the weekend, the authorities said.

“I guarantee that the police are doing everything we can to keep people safe,” a police spokesman, Jan Eirik Thomassen, said at a news conference on Sunday.

More....

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/11/worl ... 3053090812

[kmaherali]

Denmark Has a National Songbook. Should It Mention Ramadan?

Communal morning singing is a cherished tradition, anchored by the country’s best-selling book. And it’s become an unlikely focus for debates about immigration and national identity.

COPENHAGEN — Because of the summer vacation, the crowd that gathered early Wednesday morning in the lobby of Copenhagen’s central library was smaller than usual. But what it lacked in numbers, it made up for in gusto.

Accompanied by piano, and holding well-worn blue songbooks, 90 or so people, ranging in age from 11 to well over 70, belted out four songs selected for the day. And then, in roughly the same time it took customers in the coffee shop next door to finish their lattes, it was over, and Christina Walldeskog, 31, was back on her way to work.

“Morgensang always puts me in a much better mood,” she said. “Who doesn’t get happy from singing songs together?”

Maybe not everyone. In Denmark, morgensang — communal morning singing — is a cherished cultural tradition, a form of bonding that many children acquire at school, but that is also happily practiced at universities, in large corporations, even at political party conferences. Yet recently, controversy over which songs should be sung has threatened to undermine the bonhomie.

The latest flap, which began at the end of July, centers on the planned selections for the 2020 edition of “The High School Songbook,” the country’s most beloved morgensang anthology. Among the hundreds of melodies being considered is an invited submission by a rapper called Isam B. titled “Ramadan in Copenhagen.” Some critics say a song about the Muslim holiday has no place in such a quintessential symbol of Danishness.

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https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/12/arts ... ogin-email

[kmaherali]

Harris J - Salam Alaikum | Official Music Video

'Salam Alaikum' is the first official music video to be released from Awakening artist Harris J's debut album 'Salam' and is directed by Mike Harris. Album OUT NOW!
-
Listen/Download "Salam Alaikum": https://ampl.ink/gqP5r
--
Download Harris J's Mobile App. Free Now:
From iTunes (iOS): http://apple.co/1ljVtrj
From Google Play Store (Android): http://bit.ly/HJ-app

Harris J is a young British Muslim artist signed to Awakening Music after winning Awakening's social media powered talent contest. He has a passion and natural talent for singing and performing. In July 2015 Harris J graduated from the world renowned BRIT School of Performing Arts in London (alumni include Adele, Amy Winehouse and others). His debut album "Salam" is OUT NOW.

Video:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u_-McEv ... e=youtu.be

[kmaherali]

Reality Check: Islam 🕌 and the myth of French secularism 🇫🇷 - UpFront

Video:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cGdfK4G ... rce=Direct

From a recently proposed ban on Muslim women wearing burkinis to banning face veils in public, France has cracked down on Islamic practices in the public sphere.

The French government points to the concept of "laicite", the strict French secular separation of church and state, to justify such measures, but a look at France's practice of laicite proves there may be a double standard when it comes to Islam.

In this week's Reality Check, Mehdi Hasan highlights some of the myths of French secularism.

[kmaherali]

Macron wages a war on 'Islamist separatism’

Last month, France was plunged into yet another bitter debate about the incompatibility between the republican values espoused by its secular leaders and those of the country’s rapidly growing Muslim population. The trigger this time was a video posted online by a teenage girl who did not mince words in depicting Islam as a religion unworthy of respect.

L’affaire Mila sparked an online war between the girl’s critics and defenders. Politicians all the way up to President Emmanuel Macron were soon forced to weigh in after the 16-year-old whose video started it all became the target of violent threats and was pulled out of school.

Few countries hold blasphemy in as high regard as France. The right to condemn and criticize any religion, no matter how crudely, has been protected since the French Revolution of 1789. But the risks associated with the practice have never seemed as high since a terrorist attack, five years ago, on the offices of the satirical publication Charlie Hebdo left 12 dead.

While the attack led to a global “Je suis Charlie” movement in support of freedom of speech, it also changed the way religion, especially Islam, is discussed in France – much to the chagrin of the French right, which has criticized Mr. Macron for being too politically correct.

So when Mr. Macron’s Justice Minister Nicole Belloubet suggested that Mila could be charged for “insulting Islam,” her boss, anticipating a backlash on the right, quickly moved to correct her. “The law is clear: We have a right to be blasphemous, to criticize, to caricaturize religions,” Mr. Macron insisted. “What is prohibited is hate speech or an attack on [someone’s] dignity.”

With two years left in his five-year mandate, and less a month before French voters go to the polls in municipal elections that Mr. Macron’s République en Marche will contest for the first time, the President moved further this week to neutralize criticism from the right. In a speech denouncing “Islamist separatism” within France, Mr. Macron criticized the isolationism of some Muslim communities that seek to live apart from broader French society.

“The problem we have is when, in the name of belonging to a religion, one wants to separate oneself from the Republic, and therefore no longer respect its laws,” Mr. Macron said in a speech in Mulhouse, a city near the German border that has seen an influx of Turkish and North African immigrants in recent years. “In the Republic, we must never accept that the laws of religion can become superior to the laws of the Republic. It’s as simple as that.”

As part of a strategy to combat Islamist separation, Mr. Macron announced that imams sent by foreign countries such as Turkey, Algeria and Morocco would no longer be allowed to preach in French mosques. A shortage of French-raised imams has led the country’s five million Muslims to increasingly recruit spiritual leaders from abroad, leading to charges of proselytism by religious leaders with no allegiance to the Republic. Henceforth, Mr. Macron said, imams will need to be trained in France by the state-sanctioned French Council of the Muslim Faith.

The President also announced the end of a long-standing program to teach children of immigrants their parents’ language by teachers from their home country. “I’m not comfortable with the idea of having, in our public schools, men and woman who can teach without any control by [France’s Department of] National Education,” Mr. Macron said.

His speech coincided with a battle being waged between Marine Le Pen’s National Rally (RN) and the more centrist Les Républicains (LR) party for a spot on the final ballot in next month’s municipal elections. LR has traditionally fared better in local elections, but Ms. Le Pen’s party is hoping for a breakthrough this year that will serve as springboard to the presidency in 2022.

The RN Leader did not immediately comment on Mr. Macron’s speech. Rather, in a Twitter post, Ms. Le Pen questioned whether a woman in a niqab who was photographed near Mr. Macron in Mulhouse had been arrested, “as the law requires.” France prohibited the wearing of face-coverings in public in 2011. Ms. Le Pen’s tweet seemed to imply that Mr. Macron was not really not serious about cracking down on Islamist separatism at all.

Meanwhile, the president of the Île-de-France region that includes Paris’s multi-ethnic suburbs, Valérie Pécresse, went even further in warning that Islamism "does not just have separatism as its objective, as [Mr. Macron] says; it has an objective of taking power.”

Ms. Pécresse, who quit Les Républicains last year to form her own party, is also considering a presidential run in 2022. The theme of that election may just have been decided this week.

https://www.theglobeandmail.com/opinion ... VgMaFxFnIY

[kmaherali]

Why Is Europe So Islamophobic?

The attacks don’t come from nowhere.

We live in a time of Islamophobia.

In February, two violent attacks on Muslims in Europe, one in Hanau in Germany, the other in London, took place within 24 hours of each other. Though the circumstances were different — the attacker in Hanau left a “manifesto” full of far-right conspiracy theories, while the motivations of the London attacker were less certain — the target was the same: Muslims.

The two events add to a growing list of violent attacks on Muslims across Europe. In 2018 alone, France saw an increase of 52 percent of Islamophobic incidents; in Austria there was a rise of approximately 74 percent, with 540 cases. The culmination of a decade of steadily increasing attacks on Muslims, such figures express a widespread antipathy to Islam. Forty-four percent of Germans, for example, see “a fundamental contradiction between Islam and German culture and values.” The figure for the same in Finland is a remarkable 62 percent; in Italy, it’s 53 percent. To be a Muslim in Europe is to be mistrusted, visible and vulnerable.

Across the Continent, Islamophobic organizations and individuals have been able to advance their agenda. Islamophobic street movements and political parties have become more popular. And their ideas have been incorporated into — and in some instances fed by — the machinery of the modern state, which surveils and supervises Muslims, casting them as threats to the life of the nation.

From the street to the state, Islamophobia is baked into European political life.

This has been nearly 20 years in the making. The “war on terror” — which singled out Muslims and Islam as a civilizational threat to “the West” — created the conditions for widespread Islamophobia. Internationally, it caused instability and increased violence, with the rise of the Islamic State in part a consequence. Domestically, in both Europe and the United States, new counterterrorism policies overwhelmingly targeted Muslims.

More...

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/06/opin ... 0920200306

[kmaherali]

New Horizons in British Islam (@n_Horizons): “Family, Business and Community – Mediation Among Muslims: Diversity, Ethics and Contemporary Practice”
BY ISMAILIMAIL POSTED ON SEPTEMBER 11, 2020

Conflict Resolution Day is celebrated globally in the third week of October each year. This year, New Horizons in British Islam brings together four international specialists to describe the pluralistic nature of mediation practice among the Muslim communities of the world in an online seminar titled: “Family, Business and Community – Mediation Among Muslims: Diversity, Ethics and Contemporary Practice”.

Save the date: Thursday 15th October 2020, at 4pm BST, via Zoom. (Further joining instructions will follow closer to the event.)

The Discussion will focus on what mediation is, the advantages and disadvantages of informal justice, how Muslim communities deal with conflict resolution in Muslim majority countries and in Diasporic settings. A must-attend event for ADR specialists, Policy planners, lawyers, academics, students and community leaders.

The seminar will be opened with an address by Mr. Jean Ayoub, Secretary General of the International Social Service of Geneva. It will also include 4 leading, global specialists with extensive field experience highlighting the diversity and pluralism inherent in Alternative Dispute Resolution among Muslims.

Dr. Amr Abdalla is Professor Emeritus at the United Nations-mandated University for Peace (UPEACE) and also a Senior Advisor on Conflict Resolution.
Dr. Mohamed M Keshavjee is an international specialist on cross cultural meditation and author of the book Islam, Sharia and Alternative Dispute Resolution.
Kim Lecoyer is a Lecturer and Researcher, working on issues of gender and diversity in family support and conflict mediation.
Aisha U-Kiu is an Attorney and Social Entrepreneur, working to advance ADR opportunities in the Muslim American community.
Dilwar Hussain, Chair of New Horizons in British Islam and Assistant Professor at Coventry University, will be moderating the session.

https://ismailimail.blog/2020/09/11/new ... -practice/

[kmaherali]

Macron Vows Crackdown on ‘Islamist Separatism’ in France

President Emmanuel Macron’s speech addressed a deep-rooted problem in French society: its enduring difficulty to integrate significant parts of its large, nonwhite, Muslim population of immigrants and their descendants.

PARIS — President Emmanuel Macron of France on Friday outlined measures designed to rein in the influence of radical Islam in the country and help develop what he called an “Islam of France” compatible with the nation’s republican values.

In a long-awaited speech on the subject, Mr. Macron said that the influence of Islamism must be eradicated from public institutions even as he acknowledged government failures in allowing it to spread.

The measures include placing stringent limits on home-schooling and increasing scrutiny of religious schools, making associations that solicit public funds sign a “charter” on secularism. While these measures would apply to any group, they are intended to counter extremists in the Muslim community.

Under the measures, the widespread practice of bringing over foreign imams to work in France, where they are often accused of preaching an outdated or extreme version of Islam, would be ended.

The issue of the effects of Islamism has been a persistent one in France, amid fears of the kinds of terrorist attacks the country has faced in recent years, putting pressure on Mr. Macron as he faces re-election.

Many of the proposals from Mr. Macron were ideas that had been floated in the past or ones he had already approved. His speech on Friday assembled it all into a comprehensive package that the government is expected to present as a bill in December.

“What we must attack is Islamist separatism,” Mr. Macron said in front of six of his ministers in Les Mureaux, a town northwest of Paris.

“Secularism is the cement of a united France,” he said, calling radical Islam both an “ideology” and a “project” that sought to indoctrinate children, undermine France’s values — especially gender equality — and create a “counter-society” that sometimes laid the groundwork for Islamist terrorism.

But Mr. Macron also recognized that France bore responsibility for letting that ideology spread uncontested.

“We built our own separatism ourselves,” he said. For too long, the authorities had amassed largely immigrant populations in poverty-stricken neighborhoods with little access to jobs or public transportation, leading to a “ghettoization of our republic,” he said.

The speech was postponed several times this year as the president searched, sometimes publicly, for the best approach and language. The stakes were high, as the setting indicated: Mr. Macron’s speech and answers to journalists, which lasted nearly two hours, were broadcast live on television and the internet.

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https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/02/worl ... 778d3e6de3

[kmaherali]

A Teacher, His Killer and the Failure of French Integration

For generations, public schools assimilated immigrant children into French society by instilling the nation’s ideals. The beheading of a teacher has raised doubts about whether that model still works.

ÉVREUX, France — They could have easily shared the same classroom — the immigrant teenager and the veteran teacher known for his commitment to instilling the nation’s ideals, in a relationship that had turned waves of newcomers into French citizens.

But Abdoullakh Anzorov, 18, who grew up in France from age 6 and was the product of its public schools, rejected those principles in a horrific crime that shocked and enraged France. Offended by cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad shown in a class on free speech given by the teacher, Samuel Paty, 47, the teenager beheaded him a week ago with a long knife before being gunned down by the police.

France has paid national homage to Mr. Paty because the killing was seen as an attack on the very foundation — the teacher, the public school — of French citizenship. In the anger sweeping the nation, French leaders have promised to redouble their defense of a public educational system that plays an essential role in shaping national identity.

The killing has underscored the increasing challenges to that system as France grows more racially and ethnically diverse. Two or three generations of newcomers have now struggled to integrate into French society, the political establishment agrees.

But the nation, broadly, has balked at the suggestion from critics, many in the Muslim community, that France’s model of integration, including its schools, needs an update or an overhaul.

President Emmanuel Macron’s emphatic defense of the caricatures has also led to ripples overseas. Several Muslim nations, including Kuwait and Qatar, have begun boycotting French goods in protest. President Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey questioned Mr. Macron’s mental health in a speech, prompting France to recall its ambassador to Turkey.

Mr. Anzorov was the latest product of France’s public schools to turn against their ideals: Two brothers who went to public schools in 2015 attacked Charlie Hebdo, the satirical magazine that published — and republished last month — caricatures of the Prophet Muhammad.

Jean-Pierre Obin, a former senior national education official, said that public schools played a leading role in “the cultural assimilation and political integration” of immigrant children who “were turned into good little French” and no longer felt “Italian, Spanish, Portuguese or Polish.” Other institutions that also played this role — the Catholic church, unions and political parties — have been weakened, leaving only the schools, he said.

“Today, public schools can’t fully do this," Mr. Obin said. “But I don’t see another model — especially the Anglo-Saxon model of multiculturalism, which I don’t think is more successful.”

The French model ran into obstacles when the immigrants were no longer European, white or Roman Catholic. Today about 10 percent of France’s population is believed to be Muslim.

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https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/26/worl ... 778d3e6de3

[kmaherali]

Is France Fueling Muslim Terrorism by Trying to Prevent It?

Emmanuel Macron’s government may unwittingly be breeding the kind of communalism it wants to ward off.

MARSEILLE, France — Once again, terrorism strikes France — and once again, terrorism is exposing the country’s dangerous contradictions.

First there was the murder of Samuel Paty, a history teacher who was decapitated near Paris on Oct. 16 by a young Chechen man after Mr. Paty showed students caricatures of the Prophet Muhammad in a class about freedom of expression. Then, on Thursday, three churchgoers were knifed and killed in the southern city of Nice. The prime suspect in that attack is a Tunisian man who later yelled “Allahu akbar” at police officers.

Within days of Mr. Paty’s murder, the interior minister, Gérald Darmanin, announced a crackdown against people “who spread hate online.” BarakaCity, a humanitarian NGO that the government says “took pleasure in justifying terrorist acts,” has been dissolved. The government has threatened to ban Le Collectif contre l’islamophobie en France, a nonprofit organization that says it combats anti-Muslim racism: According to Mr. Darmanin, the C.C.I.F. is at work “against the Republic.”

In addition to security and counterterrorism measures, the French government responded to Mr. Paty’s killing by vigorously reaffirming the right of free speech — including the right to satirize and blaspheme — as well as the central role of France’s version of secularism, known as laïcité, in all state institutions, especially public schools.

In his homage to the teacher, President Emmanuel Macron said Mr. Paty had been killed for “embodying the French republic” and in his name vowed to “hold laïcité up high.”

But the French government’s conception of radical Islamism also rests on a problematic assumption: namely that the principal cause of terrorism in France is the failure of French Muslims to fully endorse the country’s secular culture.

In early October, before the recent killings, Mr. Macron had announced a new government plan, including an upcoming comprehensive bill, “to strengthen laïcité and consolidate republican principles” in order to combat what he calls “separatism.”

The president’s notion of “separatism” seems to assume that a significant minority of Muslims are tempted to set themselves apart somehow from the rest of French society, perhaps by creating enclaves in disaffected suburbs or building Muslim ecosystems of sorts around Islamic schools, halal stores or mosques.

But this diagnostic is questionable, and it risks being self-defeating: It, itself, may endanger social cohesion.

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https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/31/opin ... 778d3e6de3

[kmaherali]

France's Macron issues 'republican values' ultimatum to Muslim leaders

French President Emmanuel Macron has asked Muslim leaders to accept a "charter of republican values" as part of a broad clampdown on radical Islam.

On Wednesday he gave the French Council of the Muslim Faith (CFCM) a 15-day ultimatum to accept the charter.

The CFCM has agreed to create a National Council of Imams, which will reportedly issue imams with official accreditation which could be withdrawn.

It follows three suspected Islamist attacks in little more than a month.

The charter will state that Islam is a religion and not a political movement, while also prohibiting "foreign interference" in Muslim groups.

Mr Macron has strongly defended French secularism in the wake of the attacks, which included the beheading of a teacher who showed cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad during a class discussion last month.

Late on Wednesday, the president and his interior minister, Gérald Darmanin, met eight CFCM leaders at the Élysée palace.

"Two principles will be inscribed in black and white [in the charter]: the rejection of political Islam and any foreign interference," one source told the Le Parisien newspaper after the meeting.

The formation of the National Council of Imams was also agreed upon.

President Macron has also announced new measures to tackle what he called "Islamist separatism" in France.

The measures include a wide-ranging bill that seeks to prevent radicalisation. It was unveiled on Wednesday, and includes measures such as:

- Restrictions on home-schooling and harsher punishments for those who intimidate public officials on religious grounds

- Giving children an identification number under the law that would be used to ensure they are attending school. Parents who break the law could face up to six months in jail as well as large fines

- A ban on sharing the personal information of a person in a way that allows them to be located by people who want to harm them

"We must save our children from the clutches of the Islamists," Mr Darmanin told the Le Figaro newspaper on Wednesday. The draft law will be discussed by the French cabinet on 9 December.

Samuel Paty, the teacher who was killed outside his school last month, was targeted by an online hate campaign before his death on 16 October.

Le Monde newspaper has published emails sent between Paty and colleagues in the days after he showed the cartoons in class.

"It's really distressing and particularly as it comes from a family whose child wasn't in my lesson and isn't someone I know," Paty wrote. "It's becoming a malicious rumour."

He later wrote in a separate email: "I won't do any more teaching on this topic - I'll choose another freedom as a subject for teaching."

Earlier this year, President Macron described Islam as a religion "in crisis" and defended the right of magazines to publish cartoons depicting the Prophet Muhammad. Such depictions are widely regarded as taboo in Islam and are considered highly offensive by many Muslims.

Following these comments, the French leader became a figure of hate in several Muslim-majority countries. Protesters have also called for a boycott of French products.

In France, state secularism (laïcité) is central to the country's national identity. Freedom of expression in schools and other public spaces is part of that, and curbing it to protect the feelings of a particular religion is seen as undermining national unity.

France has western Europe's largest Muslim population.

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-55001167

[kmaherali]

After Terror Attacks, Muslims Wonder About Their Place in France

French officials’ attack on “Islamic separatism” and the “enemy within” has Muslims questioning whether they will ever fully be accepted.

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 as the deputy mayor of the working-class city where he grew up.

And yet for the past two weeks, Mr. Belabbas has been thinking about just one thing: “I’m wondering if I should leave France.”

Mr. Belabbas’s thoughts stemmed from days of heated — if not hostile — public debate, largely fueled by President Emmanuel Macron’s own ministers, that started in response to the gruesome beheading of a teacher by an 18-year-old Muslim extremist and was refueled by what officials believe was an Islamist terror attack in Nice on Thursday.

French officials have vowed to crack down on what the hard-line interior minister, Gérald Darmanin, has called “the enemy within,” closing a mosque, proposing to ban several Muslim groups the government considers extremist and even suggesting the elimination of ethnic food aisles in stores.

Mr. Macron, who began a campaign earlier this month against Islamic “separatism” from France’s deeply held secular values, said recently that Muslims needed to develop an “Islam of enlightenment,” which many considered patronizing.

While these statements and others from French officials have engendered a backlash in some Muslim countries, they have mostly caused bewilderment among France’s nearly six million Muslims, almost all of whom condemn violence but fear they are all being labeled terrorists.

“After this attack, five or six million people have to justify themselves,” Mr. Belabbas said. “But we just don’t know what is expected of us.”

The knife attack in a Nice church on Thursday promises to deepen the confusion, despite Muslim leaders’ condemnation of the killer. 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 she said that after the attack on Thursday, she feared politicians and commentators would feel even more entitled to label Islam an “enemy from within.”

“As Muslims,” she said, “we pay the damages of those two forms of extremism.”

The bewilderment among France’s Muslim community is particularly pronounced in Ivry-sur-Seine, the working-class suburb east of Paris where Mr. Belabbas grew up and where several thousand Muslims have integrated economically and socially since the 1950s.

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https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/29/worl ... 778d3e6de3

[kmaherali]

Macron’s Rightward Tilt, Seen in New Laws, Sows Wider Alarm in France

One bill would reach into Muslim life, and another would place new restrictions on filming of police. Critics say they’re part of a drift toward repressive government policies.

PARIS — A rightward push by the French government is alarming civil liberties advocates in France and raising questions about President Emmanuel Macron’s positioning ahead of an expected electoral challenge from the far right in 2022.

Propelled by a national wave of anxiety following recent terrorist attacks by Islamist extremists, two proposed new laws underscore what critics have called an alarming drift toward repression in government policy.

One bill, which passed an initial hurdle in the lower house of Parliament, the National Assembly, on Tuesday, restricts the public filming of the police, a step civic groups consider a shield for brutality at a moment when law enforcement has come under more scrutiny for aggressive tactics, often from citizens armed with cellphone cameras.

The other, still to be considered by Parliament, seeks further restrictions against Islamism as the French government has defined it, reaching into some aspects of Muslim life. This bill would ban home-schooling, flag in a database those deemed to “excuse” terrorist acts, subject organizations that receive government subsidies to a test of allegiance to “the values of the republic,” and increase strictures against polygamy, which is already illegal.

The law aimed at curbing Islamist extremism follows a series of terrorist attacks, including one at a basilica in Nice that left three dead and the beheading of a teacher in a suburb of Paris, that have set off a government crackdown that critics have contended is already overly broad, in rare cases sweeping up even children as young as 10.

In tilting right, Mr. Macron, a shape-shifting centrist who came out of the Socialist Party, has placed himself largely in step with public opinion. In the wake of the terrorist attacks, pollsters say, much of the French public is demanding protection from a perceived Islamist threat, and from public disorder of the sort seen during the Yellow Vest protests against economic hardship two years ago.

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https://www.nytimes.com/2020/11/25/worl ... 778d3e6de3

[kmaherali]

They ‘Bombed My Dream’: Denmark Strips Some Syrians of Residency Status

The country is the first E.U. nation to make such a move. Many Syrians say that returning to their native country isn’t an option, and rights groups warn that the policy will tear some families apart.

Ghalia al-Asseh had just begun studying chemistry and biotechnology at the Technical University of Denmark when the country’s immigration services summoned her for an interview.

For five hours, immigration officers asked about her proficiency in Danish, which she speaks fluently. They inquired how well integrated she was in Denmark, where she has lived with her family since fleeing Syria in 2015.

During the interview, in February, officers also told Ms. al-Asseh that the security situation in her hometown, Damascus, had improved, and that it was safe for her to return to Syria, she recalled in a telephone interview last week.

Ms. al-Asseh, 27, was losing her right to live in Denmark — even as her four brothers and parents could stay, and she had nowhere else to go.

Since the Danish immigration services said in 2019 that they deemed Damascus and its surrounding areas safe, they have reviewed the residence permits of 1,250 Syrians who, like Ms. al-Asseh, left their country during its civil war. The authorities have now revoked or not extended the residence permits of more than 250 of them.

In doing so, Denmark has become the first European Union country to deprive Syrian refugees of their asylum status, even as Syria remains shattered. The bloc and the United Nations describe most areas in Syria as not stable enough to be considered safe for returnees.

Those being asked to leave include high school and university students, truck drivers, factory employees, store owners and volunteers in nongovernmental organizations. All risk being uprooted from a country where they have built new lives.

“It is as if the Danish immigration services has bombed my dream, just as Bashar al-Assad bombed our homes,” said Asmaa al-Natour, 50, referring to Syria’s president. “Only this time the bombing is psychological.”

Ms. al-Natour was speaking from the town of Ringsted, 30 miles southwest of Copenhagen, where she and her husband live. In February, the couple were told that their residence permits would not be renewed, while their two sons, ages 20 and 22, can stay. The sons were granted asylum on the basis of risking persecution in Syria.

Most of the 34,000 Syrians who have obtained residence permits in Denmark since the war began in their country in 2011 have not had their residency reviewed. Yet the move to strip hundreds of their legal status is the latest in a series of measures by Denmark that rights groups say have targeted migrants and minorities.

The authorities have imposed mandatory instruction in “Danish values” for children in low-income and heavily Muslim neighborhoods that the government labeled “ghettos,” and doubled punishments for certain crimes in these areas.

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https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/14/worl ... 778d3e6de3

[kmaherali]

France, Islam and Secularism | Start Here

Video:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fQJUaYQN4os&t=13s

French President Emmanuel Macron says he wants to get tough on “Islamist separatism”.

So why does his proposed new law have some people feeling like he is targeting Muslims?

And why is he being accused of trying to score political points?

[kmaherali]

U.K. Far Right, Lifted by Trump, Now Turns to Russia

The anti-Islam agitator Tommy Robinson struck gold in America. Keeping it might require help from Moscow, where other British far-right activists are also finding friends.

LONDON — Two days after supporters of former President Donald J. Trump stormed the U.S. Capitol, but failed to reverse his election defeat, a defiant shout sounded from across the ocean. Tommy Robinson, Britain’s loudest amplifier of anti-Islam, far-right anger, insisted the fight was not over.

“You need to pick yourselves back up,” Mr. Robinson said in an online video viewed tens of thousands of times. “As Donald Trump says, it’s only just beginning.”

A former soccer hooligan and founder of the English Defence League, one of Britain’s most notorious nationalist groups, Mr. Robinson has largely been a pariah in his home country but Trump loyalists embraced him much the way they embraced many of the American extremist groups whose members would join the Capitol riot, including the Proud Boys and the Oath Keepers.

Mr. Robinson appeared on Fox News and Infowars. A right-wing U.S. research institute even bankrolled a 2018 rally in London that foreshadowed the violence at the Capitol: Mr. Robinson’s supporters attacked police officers in a street fight near Parliament. A month later, Representative Paul Gosar, Republican of Arizona, flew to London to speak at a second rally for Mr. Robinson.

His message? Keep fighting.

The Capitol riot on Jan. 6 has brought new scrutiny to the ties that bind the far right, not only within the United States but abroad. Few fringe figures have enjoyed more cross-national appeal than Tommy Robinson. Anti-Islam groups in Germany and Denmark have given him awards. Enrique Tarrio, the Proud Boys leader, called him an inspiration. At one point, the White House took up Mr. Robinson’s cause directly, and the president’s son tweeted his support.

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https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/23/worl ... 778d3e6de3

[kmaherali]

Terrorism Fears Feed the Rise of France’s Extreme Right

The far-right leader Marine Le Pen called for “hundreds of thousands of illegals” to be deported. Her message resonates after the fatal stabbing of a police officer on Friday.

PARIS — “Marine Le Pen does not have to say anything,” said Alain Frachon, a former editor of the French daily Le Monde. “Each time France is hit by terrorism, the extreme right benefits.”

Mr. Frachon was reflecting on the fatal stabbing Friday of a police officer by a Tunisian immigrant who had been in France for a decade without legal status before securing authorization to stay in 2019 and a temporary residence permit last year.

In fact, Ms. Le Pen, the leader of the far-right National Rally, did say something. She told the BFM-TV news network that France needs “to expel hundreds of thousands of illegals in France. We need to return to reason. Support our police, expel the illegals, eradicate Islamism.”

How, she asked, was it possible for “somebody who was illegally here for 10 years to have his situation regularized?”

In France, where tensions are simmering after a series of terrorist attacks, Ms. Le Pen’s rhetoric resonates. The left, which is in tatters, bereft of an effective leader or message, appears to have no answer for the moment.

France is divided between vehement supporters of the police on the right, who view the force as beleaguered by the government and exposed to the double threat of vandalism and Islamist terrorism, and a left that has focused on repeated cases of police violence and the state of some French Muslims in ghettoized suburbs of misery.

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https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/24/worl ... 778d3e6de3

[kmaherali]

Rioting continued on Sunday in Norrköping

Clashes have taken place for a fourth day in several Swedish cities, sparked by the apparent burning of a Quran by a far-right, anti-immigrant group.

Local media said three people were injured in the eastern city of Norrköping on Sunday when police fired warning shots at rioters.

Several vehicles were set on fire and at least 17 people were arrested.

On Saturday, vehicles including a bus were set on fire in the southern city of Malmo during a far-right rally.

Earlier, the governments of Iran and Iraq summoned Swedish envoys to protest about the burning.

Danish-Swedish extremist Rasmus Paludan, who leads the Stram Kurs, or Hard Line, movement said he had burned Islam's most sacred text and would repeat the action.

At least 16 police officers were reported to have been injured and several police vehicles destroyed in unrest on Thursday, Friday and Saturday in places where the far-right group planned events, including in the suburbs of Stockholm and in the cities of Linköping and Norrköping.

Paludan had threatened to hold another rally in Norrköping on Sunday, prompting counter-demonstrators to gather there, Deutsche Welle reported.

Local police said in a statement that they fired warning shots after coming under attack and three people were apparently hit by ricochets.

Sweden's national police chief Anders Thornberg said in a statement on Saturday that demonstrators had shown an indifference to the lives of police officers, adding: "We have seen violent riots before. But this is something else."

Protests against plans by Stram Kurs to burn the Quran have turned violent in Sweden before. In 2020, protesters set cars on fire and shop fronts were damaged in clashes in Malmö.

Paludan - who was jailed for a month in 2020 for offences including racism in Denmark - has also attempted to plan similar burnings of the Quran in other European countries, including France and Belgium.

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-61134734

[kmaherali]

TOULOUSE, France — In 2017, we thought we’d seen the worst French politics could offer.

Marine Le Pen, the far-right leader, had made it through to the second round of the country’s presidential elections. For the first time since 2002, a far-right figure was in the runoff to become president — and with considerably more support. When Ms. Le Pen lost to Emmanuel Macron, albeit with a worrying 34 percent share of the vote, we breathed a collective sigh of relief. Many hoped Ms. Le Pen, after falling at the final hurdle, would fade into obscurity.

It was not to be. Ms. Le Pen never went away, instead biding her time and preparing for the next tilt at power. She now has more chance of winning it than ever: After taking 23 percent in the first round, she’s within eight points of Mr. Macron in the second, on April 24. She’s benefited from the presence of the even more hard-line Éric Zemmour, whose lurid reactionary persona made Ms. Le Pen seem, by contrast, more reasonable. Yet she’s also embarked on a comprehensive effort to soften her image, renaming her party, downplaying the harsher elements of her platform and presenting herself as a warm, even folksy woman who loves her cats.

But no one should be fooled. At the head of a party that long housed Nazi collaborators, Ms. Le Pen is an authoritarian whose deeply racist and Islamophobic politics threaten to turn France into an outright illiberal state. She may pretend to be a regular politician, but she remains as dangerous as ever. For the good of minorities and France itself, she must not prevail.

If Ms. Le Pen looks more mainstream now, it’s because the mainstream looks more like her. In the years running up to the last election, she ran on a hard-right platform, stoking antagonism toward immigrants and French Muslims under the guise of protecting public order. She especially targeted minorities, “to whom,” she said bitterly, “everything is due and to whom we give everything.” In response to her success in 2017, nearly every party on the political spectrum — centrist, traditional right wing and even socialist — used the talking points of her party, now named National Rally (formerly National Front).

The tenor of political discussion, as a result, has shifted substantially to the right. There is now barely any space in French politics to advocate for French citizens who don’t look, behave, pray or eat the way “traditional” French people are supposed to — let alone to champion the rights of immigrants and refugees. In this environment, Ms. Le Pen can turn her attention to more everyday issues, such as rising energy bills and the cost of living, safe in the knowledge that on immigration, citizenship and “national identity,” she’s already won the argument.

That success didn’t happen overnight. For more than 30 years now, French political debate has centered itself around issues of identity at the expense of more pressing topics such as health care, climate change, unemployment and poverty. The far right has led the way. Exploiting feelings of decline at the end of the 1960s — as France shed its colonial empire, lost the war in Algeria and submitted to American domination of Western Europe — the far right became a potent political force. It used its influence to defend its conception of French identity, evoking a thousand-year-old European Christian civilization threatened by North African Muslim immigration.

This was the foundation upon which the National Front was created in 1972 by Ms. Le Pen’s father, Jean-Marie Le Pen. As people from France’s former colonies migrated to the metropole, the party focused obsessively on the supposed dangers of immigration. Mr. Le Pen’s tone was often apocalyptic: “Tomorrow,” he infamously said in 1984, “immigrants will stay with you, eat your soup and sleep with your wife, your daughter or your son.” Such rancorous resentment found some sympathy in certain quarters of French society, where the homogenizing effects of globalization and the increased visibility of Islam among French-born citizens were held to be stripping France of its essential character.

This antipathy took in many targets, among them French Jews. Mr. Le Pen was notorious for his antisemitic remarks — for which he was condemned by the courts multiple times — and the party created in his image trafficked in antisemitic ideas, tropes and images. Though Ms. Le Pen claimed to be moving past her father’s fixation on Jews, she continued to fan the flames — refusing in 2017 to accept France’s culpability for the Vichy regime’s role in the Holocaust and even, in a campaign poster this April, appearing to make a gesture associated with neo-Nazis. Capped by Mr. Zemmour’s open embrace of the Vichy regime, antisemitism has re-entered the political mainstream.

Muslims have similarly borne the brunt of bigotry. Initially considered a threat from elsewhere — supposedly coming to France to deprive the native-born of jobs — Muslims have in recent decades been viewed as an internal threat. With the rise of Islamist terrorism, Muslims were seen to be practicing an inherently violent religion that required containment by public authorities. To be a Muslim was to be guilty until proved innocent

The past decade has taken this equation to a new level. The widespread fear now is not that a handful of people among nearly six million Muslims might pose a danger to public safety, but that all French Muslims by their very existence threaten the cultural identity of “traditional France.” It is, for some voters, an existential fear. In response, politicians have pushed measures to curb Islam’s purported infringement on French life, such as banning religious attire in public schools, full-face coverings in public spaces and burkinis on public beaches, and passing a bill that gives the state power to monitor Muslim religious observance and organizations.

To justify such moves, politicians weaponized the liberal concept of laïcité — effectively state-backed secularism — to restrict freedom of religion and conscience in the interests of an anti-Muslim agenda. This process, crucially, has made it possible for Ms. Le Pen to turn from radical firebrand to reasonable truth-teller. But underneath the sheen of normalcy, the brutally racist ideology her party pioneered over the past 30 years is very much intact.

Her manifesto, for example, promises to amend the Constitution to prohibit the settlement of a “a number of foreigners so large that it would change the composition and identity of the French people” — a rewording of the white-supremacist “Great Replacement” theory. She also plans to legally distinguish between “native-born French” and “others” for access to housing, employment and benefits, and allow citizenship only to people who have “earned it and assimilated.” Completing the picture, Ms. Le Pen has said she would ban the wearing of the head scarf in public spaces.

In these promises as well as the company she keeps — she has associated with Vladimir Putin, Bashar al-Assad and Viktor Orban — Ms. Le Pen has made clear her intention to reshape France at home and abroad. Her administration would echo those in Brazil, India and other countries where a similar rightward slide has taken hold. For minorities, immigrants, dissidents and democracy itself, it would be a disaster. Though her momentum appears to have stalled in recent days, Ms. Le Pen is not going away, no matter what happens on Sunday. As a French Muslim citizen born and raised here, I fear for my country.

And it is my country, as much as it is Ms. Le Pen’s or Mr. Macron’s. At a time when politicians and pundits are demanding Muslims “abide by republican values” if they want to be part of the country, it’s instructive that voters may elect a politician whose core ideology violates the values of liberty, equality and fraternity that France has long championed. In that irony lies the gap between what France could be and what it is.

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/04/20/opin ... 778d3e6de3