French President Nicolas Sarkozy joined Muslim groups Sunday in condemning attackers who set fire to a mosque in a Lyon suburb, and hundreds gathered outside the building to protest against racism and Islamophobia.
The fire at the mosque in the Lyon suburb of Saint-Priest was started early Saturday before morning prayers and caused damage to the entrance, walls and religious books before being put out.
Europe’s human rights court has thrown out a complaint by two French Muslim girls who were expelled from their school for refusing to remove their headscarves during sports lessons.
France, which takes secularism in state schools very seriously, passed a law in 2004 banning pupils from wearing conspicuous signs of their religion at school after a decade of bitter debate about Muslim girls wearing headscarves in class.
Extraordinarily for secular France, in the Alsace-Moselle region the state not only helps to finance the construction of places of worship but also approves the appointments of clergy members and even pays their salaries. But not for Islam.
Plus: France has only four Muslim schools. So the 8,847 Roman Catholic schools have become a refuge for Muslims seeking what an overburdened, secularist public sector often lacks: spirituality, an environment in which good manners count alongside mathematics and higher academic standards.
A series of highly publicized incidents involving Muslim women has reinforced popular perceptions that an intolerant, sexist brand of Islam is on the march in France, home to Europe’s largest Muslim population.
Yet religion experts, and many Muslims, caution against easy stereotypes. Far from submissive, they say, Muslim women are looking for a fit between their faith and the highly secularized society around them.
A Muslim member of the French government has backed a court’s decision to deny citizenship to a Moroccan woman who wears the burqa.
Urban Affairs Minister Fadela Amara said she hoped last month’s ruling would “dissuade certain fanatics from imposing the burqa on their wives”.
She told the newspaper, Le Parisien, the head-to-toe garment was a “prison”.
France has denied citizenship to a Moroccan woman who wears a burqa on the grounds that her “radical” practice of Islam is incompatible with basic French values such as equality of the sexes.
The case yesterday reopened the debate about Islam in France, and how the secular republic reconciles itself with the freedom of religion guaranteed by the French constitution.
About 60 to 70 percent of all inmates in the country’s prison system are Muslim, according to Muslim leaders, sociologists and researchers, though Muslims make up only about 12 percent of the country’s population.