Since the Paris terror attacks and the Charlie Hebdo shooting in 2015, Muslims in France have been increasingly stigmatized and discriminated against while the French government continues to please the anti-muslim sentiment. Recently, a French teacher was decapitated in broad daylight for sharing Hebdo cartoons with his class, and since then, the government has responded with laws proposed to “overhaul of the way Islam is organized in France,” but many Muslims argue that those laws just add more stigmatization to their already downtrodden religion. On one side are the free-speech supporting, often Catholic, and white protestors and movements around France and the rest of Europe calling for less immigration and Islamic influence in their countries, and on the other side are the Muslims who feel like their religion is under attack by the French government and are being unfairly grouped with radical Islamists.
Government interference in religion is a controversial idea in many places in the world, but currently, the French Government is trying to prevent future attacks by influencing Islam’s practice in France. In this case, each side is a community, but because Muslims are a minority in France, they would be the individuals within a greater community. An argument could be that by appealing to the majority, the people who are actively opposed to the spread of Islam, the French government is inadvertently causing more attacks because individuals in the Muslim community feel like their religion is under attack, and so they are too. Of course, this is a very small minority of Muslims. By forcefully changing things like where France gets its imams, the government is changing how Islam will be practiced in France, which would certainly go against the wishes of French Muslims who already feel stigmatized. For Muslims, as the article points out, Islam plays a much larger role in their lives than Christianity does for Christians, so any changes will be felt more and probably cause more violence by bad actors. All of the Islamic attacks are horrible, but by appealing to the anti-muslim sentiment with separatism more than to the Muslims’ wishes, the possibility for more violence rises so far seemingly despite the government’s attempt to root out Islamists. It is a broad goal, and the article implies that so far it has hurt and upset Muslims more than anything else. In this situation, there are two sets of individuals, Muslims in their broader French communities and Islamists in the Muslim community. For the broader French community trying to prevent further attacks, the belief is that principles such as freedom of speech are more important than appealing to their Muslim neighbors. The larger community is worried about violence from Muslims, which in turn seems to be causing more violence. In the long term, by protecting the core principles of their society like free speech and the protestors being unwilling to compromise their beliefs, it is unfair that Muslims are being forced to change while the other side gets their way without any change of themselves. The larger community believes that the spread of Islam will hurt their community but the ways that they are trying to prevent violence, at least in the short term, seem to be causing more violence by radical Islamists influenced by the government’s decisions. The irony in the situation is that if France made it clear that they wanted to see short-term results, the protestors would probably end up giving up the rights that are core to this fight because the government would take up a much more active role in suppressing communities. In China, there is the example of Xinjiang, a province that had a similar issue of Islamic attacks, but there, the government responded with a harsh crackdown on Uighurs, a Chinese Muslim minority, and it is well known that rights in France like the Freedom of speech are not present there, especially in response to the violence. In recent years, governments around the world have taken action to try to prevent Islamic terrorism and while their motivations are clearly to stop violence, those countries must consider the wishes of the majority of Muslims whether or not they agree with Islam to ensure justice for all, not just the majority. Source: https://apnews.com/article/paris-france-emmanuel-macron-islam-europe-ea5e15bb651bbe443b27bc19948cae6b
1 Comment
Ann Diederich
10/14/2021 12:21:48 pm
You bring to light a very complex global issue here. I could not help but think about the US's policies and actions concerning Muslims in the past year.
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