The Death of Samuel Paty : Its Consequences for Laicite and for Islam

The awful decapitation on October 16th of Samuel Paty, a 47 years high school teacher, has created great emotion in French society. While the rallies to honor Samuel Paty seemed to unite the whole country and to bring out some important features of French values, e.g. the evocation of Camu’s debt to his teacher[1], the…

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“Pray at home”: French Muslims facing corona-virus pandemic

As Europe is now the epicentre of the coronavirus, France is amongst top three European countries struck by the global pandemic. Monday 16th of March in the evening, French President Emmanuel Macron made a public allocution on TV in which he repeated six times: “we are at war” (with the virus). He then listed several public…

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President Macron announces his plan to fight “ Islamist separatism”

On February 18, French President Emmanuel Macron held his first speech aiming at fighting “separatism” in France. Announced a few months ago, this one and an half hour discourse  finally took place on the eve of municipal elections during a visit of the President in Mulhouse, a 15 000 inhabitants city in east France. The choice…

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The closure of an Islamic Institute in Paris’s region

More than one month ago (the 26thof November), the IESH (the European Institute of Human Sciences) [Institut Européen des Sciences Humaines] has been forced to close its doors for preventive security measures under the order of the prefecture. The institute, located in Saint-Denis near from Paris, which was created in 2001, is an emblematic centre…

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The « reopening » of French debate on veil: a national debate without any Muslims?

“Not here, not today”. This is what a local elected politician from the Rassemblement National(a far-right party) told to a veiled mother, who accompanied her son’s class for a school visit in the regional parliament in Burgundy (eastern France) the 11thof October. The politician urged the mother to remove her headscarf or to leave the…

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