Frances secular ayatollahs
Anti-religion fundamentalists threaten Macron’s integration effort.
Protestors against Islamophobia in Paris, France | Alain Jocard/AFP via Getty Images
By Paul Taylor
3/5/18, 4:07 AM CET
Updated 3/5/18, 10:08 AM CET
PARIS — France, the nation that trademarked the term “Wars of Religion” in the 16th century, has a new fundamentalism problem. And it’s got less to do with hardcore Islamists than militant secularists.
Hard-liners — including a former prime minister, philosophers, eminent feminists, talk show pundits and politicians — have declared war on encroachments into public life by Islamists. Fair enough. But when they demonize Islam in general, as they so often do, they risk pushing young Muslims into the arms of the fanatics they abhor.
To make matters worse, these ayatollahs of secularism are jeopardizing President Emmanuel Macron’s efforts to fashion a more diverse and inclusive society, one in which Islam — the country’s second religion after Roman Catholicism — would be just as much at home as Christianity and Judaism.
The president said this month that he aims to reorganize the Muslim faith in France, shaking up its representative institutions and engaging religious leaders in a national dialogue on issues such as medical ethics.
At stake is the ability of the self-proclaimed “homeland of human rights” to integrate an estimated 5.7 million citizens of Muslim origin (8.8 percent of the population), most of them descendants of immigrants from former French colonies in North Africa. Other Western European countries face similar challenges, but France’s are starker because of unhealed wounds from the colonial past and the 1954-62 Algerian War.
https://www.politico.eu/article/religion-fundamentalism-emmanuel-macron-france-secular-ayatollahs/
