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§ The first legislative rider abolished the
obligation of religious associations to declare themselves as lobbying groups
-- a measure that clearly opens the way for entities such as Muslim Brotherhood
to lobby Members of Parliament without leaving a trace.
§ Is it, however, the business of the secular
State of France to organize Muslims and train "republican" imams?
§ The tradition in France ever since the 1905
secularism law -- one accepted by all religions except Islam -- is that
religion may not to impose its rules on secular society. Now it is France that
must adapt to Islam.
§ The big question is: Who will be heading and
managing this new framework? Will it be the Muslim Brotherhood, the most
powerful organization, which controls more than 2,000 mosques in France? Or a
young guard of Muslim technocrats close to the president but with no ties to
mosques, imams and the organized Muslim community in general?
In a confessional book,
"A President Shouldn't Say That...", published in 2016, a few months
before the 2017 French presidential election, France's then President François
Hollande admitted that France has
"a problem with Islam. No one doubts it," he wrote. He wrote as well
that France has a problem with veiled women in public and with mass
immigration. Then he added: "How can one avoid a partition? Because that
is still what is happening: a partition".
The
"partition" about which Hollande was talking was the partition of
France -- one part for Muslims and another for non-Muslims.
Hollande's
successor, President Emmanuel Macron, elected to office in 2017, appears to
think that this risk of partition is actually the solution. Looking at what he
has said and done since his election, one can say that the division of the
country is in progress. Officially, of course, Macron continues to be the
guardian of the Constitution, which embodies national unity. But step by step,
a strategy of the partition of France appears to be at work.
The first
step of this partition process was, it seems, to create a new adversary. For
Macron, the adversary was not radical Islam, which some see as having murdered
hundreds of people in France in recent years, but radical secularism,
which has never murdered anybody. In December 2017, for instance, a few months
after his election, Macron organized a meeting with the
representatives of six religions (Catholic, Protestant, Eastern Orthodox,
Muslim, Jewish and Buddhist) at the presidential Elysée Palace. At this
meeting, Macron reportedly "critically
questioned the radicalization of secularism." Not much filtered out of
this meeting beyond that little quote -- presumably on purpose. In October
2016, before his election, Macron had denounced the defenders
of "a spiteful vision of secularism." After his election, however,
the presidential creed has never varied. According to it, political Islam is a
not the problem; the resistance to it is.
In this
strategy -- to isolate secularism and build it up as the new adversary --
Macron needed allies. He found one easily in the guise of the Catholic Church,
which has suffered in France since a law in 1905 broke the
link between Church and state. In April 2018, Macron accepted an invitation
from the Conference of Bishops of France, and, in the sumptuous decor of the
College of the Bernardins, in front of more than 400 Catholic personages, the
President of the French Republic, Emmanuel Macron, delivered an erudite and
lyrical speech, empty of any
proposition apart from an allusion to "repair the damaged link"
between the Church and the state. After the speech, the 400 Catholic officials
jumped to their feet and gave him a standing ovation.
In June
2018, Macron revitalized his vision by visiting Pope Francis in the Vatican and
accepting from him the inherited title of Honorary Canon of the Basilica of St.
John Lateran. Macron also reaffirmed his willingness "to deepen our
relations of friendship and trust with the Holy See".
With this
powerful Catholic ally in his pocket, Macron could launch the second stage of
what seems his partition strategy: To launch a process of empowering the
Muslims in France by entrusting them with the keys of "urban policy," the
synonym for France's integration and assimilation policy. In the last 30 years,
the French state has poured 48 billion euros into renewal projects in the poor
suburbs that house millions of immigrants -- including millions of first-,
second- and third-generation Muslim immigrants. The new buildings, new roads and
new public transit vehicles, however, seem to have produced the opposite of the
desired effect: recurrent riots, attacks on schools and police precincts, drug
dealing on almost every corner, a proliferation of Salafist mosques and
more than 1,700 jihadists gone to
join ISIS.
In May 2018,
Macron skillfully rejected the recommendation of the Borloo Report to pour
another 48 billion euros over another 30 years, a policy that has already
failed. Instead of continuing to buy a (shaky) social peace with billions of
taxpayers' money, Macron did better: he created the
"Presidential Council of the City", a political structure, composed
mostly of Muslim notables (two third of the total members of the Council) and
representatives of organizations working in the suburbs. Today, this body is in
charge of monitoring the urban policy. There are no more billions, but there is
a "Muslim advisory committee" to redirect the money from the old
policy. Two agencies are involved in financing the renovation of neighborhoods
in "sensitive urban areas": ANRU (National Agency for Urban Renewal)
and ACSÉ (Agency for Social Cohesion and Equal Opportunities). Both of these
agencies will soon be replaced by the Office of the Commissioner General for
Territorial Equality. The budget devoted to the urban policy, described in the
draft budget, law amounts to 429 million euros for
2018.
The idea of
entrusting the keys of the Muslim suburbs to Islamic organizations is not new.
It was first formulated by State Counselor Thierry Tuot in a famous report, "The Great
Nation: For an Inclusive society", presented in 2013 to then-Prime
Minister Jean-Marc Ayrault. The main proposal in the report was to transfer
urban policy to Islamic organizations, with the role of the State being reduced
merely to subsidize them.
To complete
this scheme of empowering political Islam in France, two legislative riders
were voted in the "Law for a State in the Service of a
Trusting Society", at the end of June 2018. The first legislative rider
abolished the obligation of religious associations from declaring themselves as
lobbying groups. This measure clearly opens the way for entities such as the
Muslim Brotherhood movement to lobby Members of Parliament without leaving a
trace. The second legislative rider -- in
contravention of the secularism law of 1905 -- authorized all religious
organizations to act as private actors in the real estate market. According to the Comité
Laïcité République (Committee for Secularism of the Republic, CLR), this
legislative rider would deprive a municipality or a region of the ability to
appropriate land or buildings sold by a church or a mosque. "Thus, the
code of town planning and the law of 1905 would be modified for this
purpose" said CLR. In other
words, private funding for creeds is allowed.
The third
stage of partition is a work in progress. It concerns the tentative plan to
build an "Islam of France" -- disconnected from the old
"Islam in France." In other words, the Grand Mosque of Paris
may no longer be considered as if it is the equivalent of the Algerian Embassy.
"As soon as this autumn, we will give to Islam a framework and rules to be
sure this religion will be exercised in a manner consistent with the laws of
the Republic", Macron said. It was a
surprising declaration because the tradition in France since the 1905 law --
and a tradition accepted by all religions except Islam -- is that religion may
not to impose its rules on secular society. Now it seems that France has to
adapt to Islam.
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What will
happen in September? The government seems to be thinking of doing what Austria did:
cutting the financial ties between French Muslim communities and their
countries of origin (e.g. Turkey, Algeria, Morocco); creating a tax on the halal
business (which makes more than 6 billion euros
annually), and then using these new tax revenues to train
"republican" imams in France.
The
government also appears to intend to create a kind of national agency to
organize pilgrimages to Mecca.
Estimated at more than 250 million euros,
the business of pilgrimages is trusteed by about 40 Muslim travel agencies
approved by the Ministry of Hajj of Saudi Arabia to receive their quotas of
visas. Many Muslim travel agencies are rumored to operate
illegally and charge exorbitant prices for bad service. So, Macron is
supposed to reform and give the system an appearance of "normalcy".
These are the "framework" and "laws" Macron is talking
about.
The big
question is: Who will be heading and managing this framework? The Muslim
Brotherhood, the most powerful organization, which controls more than 2,000
mosques in France? Or a young guard of Muslim technocrats close to president
but with no ties to mosques, imams and the organized Muslim community in
general? We will soon know. Additionally, rumors are spreading that Tareq
Oubrou, an imam in Bordeaux, and known to be a prominent figure of Muslim
Brotherhood, could become "Grand
Imam of France".
Is it,
however, the business of the secular State of France to organize Muslims and
train "republican" imams? No, not even slightly. Is it a problem that
two-thirds of the imams serving in France are not fluent in French? Can Islamist
imams be trained the "republican" way? Yes, but for what result? The
imam of Brest, in Brittany, became famous because he was filmed explaining to
children that music could transform a
listener into a pig or a monkey, and he filmed himself drinking camel urine; it is written in a Hadith
that camel urine is good as medicine. In 2017, the
same imam of Brest was graduated, "referent-secularity"
– meaning, an Islamist informed about what is secularism but with no obligation
to respect it -- from the University of Rennes in Brittany.
Back in
1627, Cardinal de Richelieu, the prime minister of King Louis XIII, stormed the
city of la Rochelle in southwest France to bring back the Protestants to the
bosom of France. Now, in 2018, Macron is providing aid to French Muslims to
bring back the Muslims to the bosom of France.
Yves Mamou, author
and journalist, based in France, worked for two decades as a journalist for Le Monde.
His next book, "Le Grand abandon, les élites françaises et
l'islamisme," (The Great Abandonment, French Elites and Islamism) is to
be published in October, 2018.