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On June 27, El Hidaya Mosque in Roussillon in Southern France was attacked and vandalised. Home windows have been smashed and furnishings overturned; the partitions have been plastered with racist flyers. Earlier the identical month, a burned Quran was positioned on the entrance of a mosque in Villeurbanne of Lyon.
Sadly, virulent Islamophobia in France has not stopped at vandalism.
On Might 31, Hichem Miraoui, a Tunisian nationwide, was shot useless by his French neighbour in a village close to the French Riviera; one other Muslim man was additionally shot however survived. A month earlier, Aboubakar Cisse, a Malian nationwide, was stabbed to demise in a mosque within the city of La Grand-Combeby by a French citizen.
There was a big spike in Islamophobic acts in France – one thing the French authorities stay reluctant to publicly touch upon. One report confirmed a 72 p.c improve in such incidents between January and March 2025 in contrast with the identical interval in 2024.
There are numerous components which have contributed to this, however central amongst them is the French state’s personal Islamophobic rhetoric and anti-Muslim insurance policies.
The newest iteration of this was the discharge of a report titled “The Muslim Brotherhood and Political Islamism in France” by the French authorities. The doc claims that the Muslim Brotherhood and “political Islamism” are infiltrating French establishments and threatening social cohesion and names organisations and mosques as having hyperlinks to the group.
The report got here out simply days earlier than Miraoui was shot useless and two weeks after the French authorities raided the houses of a number of founding members of the Brussels-based Collective Towards Islamophobia in Europe (CCIE) residing in France.
With the rise of anti-Muslim assaults and discrimination in France, it’s more and more onerous to consider that the obsession of the French state and authorities with what they name “Islamist separatism” just isn’t, in reality, inciting violence towards the French Muslim inhabitants.
The concept French Muslims are someway threatening the French state by means of their id expression has been championed by the French far proper for many years. However it was within the late 2010s that it entered the mainstream by being embraced by centrist politicians and the media.
In 2018, French President Emmanuel Macron, who additionally embraced the time period “separatism”, referred to as for the creation of a “French Islam”, a euphemism for domesticating and controlling Muslim establishments to serve the curiosity of the French state. On the coronary heart of this challenge stood the thought of preserving “social cohesion”, which successfully meant suppressing dissent.
Within the following years, the French state began appearing on its obsession with controlling Muslims with extra and more durable insurance policies. Between 2018 and 2020, it shut down 672 Muslim-run entities, together with faculties and mosques.
In November 2020, the French authorities compelled the Collective Towards Islamophobia in France (CCIF), a nonprofit organisation documenting Islamophobia, to dissolve; the organisation then reconstituted in Brussels. In December of that 12 months, they focused 76 mosques, accusing them of “Islamist separatism” and threatening them with closure.
In 2021, the French Parliament handed the so-called anti-separatism law, which included quite a lot of measures to supposedly fight “Islamist separatism”. Amongst them was an extension of the ban on spiritual symbols within the public sector, restrictions on dwelling education and sports activities associations, new guidelines for organisations receiving state subsidies, extra policing of locations of worship, and so on.
By January 2022, the French authorities reported that it had inspected greater than 24,000 Muslim organisations and companies, shut down greater than 700 and seized 46 million euros ($54m) in property.
The Muslim Brotherhood boogeyman
The report launched in Might, like many official statements and initiatives, was not aimed to make clear coverage or guarantee authorized precision. It was presupposed to politicise Muslim id, delegitimise political dissent and facilitate a brand new wave of state assaults on the Muslim civil society.
The report names varied Muslim organisations, accusing them of getting hyperlinks to the Muslim Brotherhood. It additionally argues that campaigning towards Islamophobia is a software of the organisation. In accordance with the report, the Muslim Brotherhood makes use of anti-Islamophobia activism to discredit secular insurance policies and painting the state as racist.
This framing is aimed to invalidate official critiques of discriminatory legal guidelines and practices, and frames any public recognition of anti-Muslim racism as a covert Islamist agenda. The implication is evident: Muslim visibility and dissent aren’t simply suspect — they’re harmful.
The report additionally dives into the Islamo-gauchisme or Islamo-leftism conspiracy theories – the concept that “Islamists” and leftists have a strategic alliance. It claims that decolonial motion is challenneling Islamism and references the March Towards Islamophobia of November 10, 2019, a mass mobilisation that drew members from throughout the political spectrum, together with the left.
The report that was commissioned underneath the hardline former Inside Minister and now Justice Minister Gerald Darmanin, who again in 2021 accused far-right chief Marine Le Pen of being “too comfortable” on Islam.
All of this – the report, the laws, the police raids and rhetorical assaults towards the French Muslim neighborhood – follows the lengthy French colonial custom of in search of to rule over and management Muslim populations. The French political centre has needed to embrace Islamophobia to comprise its falling reputation. It might assist with slender electoral victories over the rising far proper, however these might be short-lived. The extra lasting affect might be a sigmatised, alienated Muslim neighborhood which can more and more face state-incited violence and hatred.
The views expressed on this article are the creator’s personal and don’t essentially replicate Al Jazeera’s editorial stance.
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