Horrified by attacks, French Muslims protect church
paris — As a French-born Muslim, Elyazid Benferhat’s stomach turned when he heard about a deadly extremist attack on a church in Nice. Then he decided to act.
A self-described man of peace and pragmatism, Benferhat and a friend gathered a group of young Muslim men to stand guard outside their town’s cathedral for the All Saints’ holiday weekend, to symbolically protect it and show solidarity with Catholic churchgoers.
Parishioners at the 13th-century church in the southern town of Lodeve were deeply touched. The parish priest said their gesture gave him hope in a time of turmoil.
Benferhat, speaking with a distinctive southern French accent, identified himself as “more French than anything.” While his mother was born in Algeria, he was born in France and grew up speaking only French. “But I am also Muslim ... and we have seen Islamophobia in this country, and terrorism,” he said.
“In recent years, I’ve had a pit in my stomach,” because every time extremist
violence strikes France, he said, French Muslims face new stigmatisation, even though “we had nothing to do with it.”
He called the beheading of a teacher near Paris last month — targeted because he showed his class blasphemous caricatures — an act of “unbelievable, unprecedented cruelty.”
Then when three people were killed
last Thursday in the Notre Dame Basilica in Nice, Benferhat said he was so sickened that he wanted to do something “so that everyone wakes up.”
Benferhat, who works for French oil company Total and coaches at a local football club, talked to a Muslim friend who was in Nice that day, “and we had this idea. We needed to do something
beyond paying homage to the victims. We said, we will protect churches ourselves.”
They recruited volunteers among their friends and at his football club, and guarded the church that night and again for Sunday Mass. He said they coordinated with local police, after France’s government promised to raise security at sensitive religious sites. —