Muslim world: Fury over French efforts to reform Islam
France has picked a fight with global Islam, said Talha Kose in the Daily Sabah (Turkey). Last month, a Chechen refugee beheaded a French schoolteacher who as part of a civics class had shown his students cartoons from a satirical newspaper mocking the Prophet Mohammed. Rather than condemn the terrible crime on its own terms, French President Emmanuel Macron sought to associate “a marginal terrorist attack with Islam’s essence.” Railing against what he called the “evil that is radical Islam” and denouncing Islamism as a threat to free speech, Macron cracked down on Muslim groups and charities and ordered a mosque in a Paris suburb—where thousands worship daily—to be closed for six months. All this comes just weeks after Macron declared that Islam was “in crisis” and unveiled an arrogant plan to “reform” the religion and make his country’s nearly 6 million Muslims comply with French secular values. In response to that attempt at “collective punishment” Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan called on the Muslim world to boycott French goods, and tens of thousands of people in Bangladesh, Pakistan, Lebanon, and Turkey marched in the streets and denounced Macron. Former Malaysian premier Mahathir Mohamad even tweeted that Muslims would be justified in murdering “millions” of French people—though he added that they would not do so.
Europeans pretend that freedom of expression is the highest good, said the Tehran Times (Iran) in an editorial. They use that abstract notion to justify sacrilege against Allah’s prophet, deeply insulting millions of Muslims. Yet they recognize the limits of free speech when it comes to Holocaust denial. Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei asked on Instagram last week why it is a crime in France to raise doubts about the Holocaust, yet “blasphemy against the prophet is permissible?” That post that got him briefly banned from French Instagram—a clear sign that the French don’t value all speech, just the kind they agree with. This is “hypocrisy par excellence.”
Macron is “fanning the flames of Islamophobia” for political reasons, said Ali Saad in AlJazeera.com (Qatar). France has been in a state of crisis since he took office three years ago. His decision to increase fuel taxes sparked months of Yellow Vest protests in 2018, and 2019 saw mass demonstrations against his pension reforms. With his approval rating now below 40 percent, Macron believes “the only thing that can save his political career is taking a page out of the far right’s playbook.” Erdogan is also playing to a domestic audience, said Faisal Abbas in Arab News (Saudi Arabia), and trying to distract voters from their mounting economic woes. But his incitement is dangerous. Already, another attack has taken place: A Tunisian man last week stabbed three people to death in a Catholic church in Nice. And this anti-French rhetoric doesn’t just threaten French secularists, it also puts French Muslims “at risk of personal and financial harm.” Two Algerian women were stabbed recently at the Eiffel Tower in a hate crime. “We live in grave and perilous times.”