France must foster an Islam of Enlightenment free of 'foreign influence', said Mr Macron
Emmanuel Macron on Friday unveiled plans to ramp up the fight against "Islamist separatism” in France whose proponents seek to build a "parallel society" that rejects the rules of the Republic.
In a much-awaited speech delayed due to the Covid outbreak, the French president described Islam as “a religion in crisis all over the world today that is corrupted by radical forms”.
In France, he said, the religion must free itself from “foreign influences” to become an “Islam of Enlightenment” in the country of Voltaire and Diderot.
Home to an estimated five million Muslims, Islam is France’s second religion.
Under a 1905 law, the country follows a strict form of secularism, known as laïcité, which is designed to separate Church and State. It was drawn up to staunchly protect the right to practice one’s faith privately while banning religion from public life.
“Secularism is not the problem,” he said during a visit to the deprived Paris suburb of Les Mureaux.
Secularism guarantees Muslims and other believers the freedom to practice their faith in peace and remain “fully part of the Republic”, insisted Mr Macron.
"The problem is an ideology which claims its own laws should be superior to those of the Republic” and can veer into violence as last week when an Islamist stabbed two outside the former offices of Charlie Hebdo.
The fault partly lay with France, he added, which stands guilty of fostering the “ghettoisation” of ethnic minorities and the poor that created the conditions for radical Islam to thrive where the state had failed.
To tackle its “insidious” spread, he outlined a five-point plan to be translated into a bill debated in parliament in January.
Measures include banning homeschooling except on medical grounds and making school education compulsory for all children over three in order to avoid “indoctrination” by extremists in madrassas.
The role of all schools, he said, was to “train citizens, not believers”.
The President confirmed France will phase out over four years the tradition of "foreign countries" notably Turkey, Morocco and Algeria, sending imams to preach in French mosques.
He tasked the French Council of the Muslim Faith with drawing up plans to train French imams.
France must reclaim areas where Islamists have gained power where the state has failed, said Mr Macron
Credit: LUDOVIC MARIN/POOL/EPA-EFE/Shutterstock/ Shutterstock
The new bill would bolster powers to ward off "hostile putsches" in mosques by fundamentalists, he said. Funding of mosques would also be more tightly controlled.
Mr Macron also announced plans to boost the number of Islamic scholars and courses in French universities to avoid "Anglo-Saxon influences over social sciences”.
The new legislation would help clamp down on associations that toe an Islamist line or fail to abide by a secular charter by getting them to repay state funds or closing them down.
Mr Macron said that local state prefects with approval from a judge would now have the power to overrule local officials, notably mayors, who, for instance, introduce menus catering to religious demands in state schools or who “exclude men or women from certain swimming pool time-slots”.
Some €10m (£9m) of public funds would be used for education and research into Islamic culture and civilisation. The teaching of Arabic in France will be encouraged and an Institute of Islamology will be created, he said.
Less than two years before the next presidential campaign, Mr Macron’s speech can also be seen as a response from the far-Right and conservative opposition that he has failed to get a handle on radicalism and law-and-order issues such as crime and immigration.
“The country has been hit by Islamic terrorism since 2012 and we have progressively rearmed against this threat,” he insisted.
But the centrist also said that France’s colonial past had helped to create the problems the country faced.
“We have created our own separatism in some of our areas. We have concentrated populations of the same origins, the same religion,” he said, adding that social housing policy required “deep change”.
“We cannot keep adding poverty to poverty.”
Political opponents expressed scepticism. "After good intentions, we need acts," said Gérard Larcher, Right-wing head of the Senate. "This is an issue the President has put off now for two and a half years," he told France Info.
For Olivier Faure, leader of the Socialist Party, Mr Macron had "avoided the trap of stigmatising an entire religion". But he had not announced how he would improve life in deprived areas where radicalisation thrives.
"You don’t win back lost ground with sand in your hands," he said.
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