News and Analysis on Islam in Europe and North America
Leila Laouati is leaving France. At 30, she still lives in her home town of Dreux, 60 miles west of Paris, in her childhood room in her parents’ apartment. But in September she starts work teaching French in the Japanese prefecture of Osaka. The multilingual Ms Laouati has a degree in international relations from the
Radical Muslims in France’s housing estates are waging an undeclared “intifada” against the police, with violent clashes injuring an average of 14 officers each day. As the interior ministry said that nearly 2,500 officers had been wounded this year, a police union declared that its members were “in a state of civil war” with Muslims
The president of the National Federation of Muslims in France, Muhammad Bechari, has been sent to a new office. Contested in his own party, he was at the origin of the impasse.
Muslims in France feel “stigmatised” by a new law which will outlaw Islamic headscarves in schools, a male Muslim leader has said. The ban on religious symbols in schools will come into force at the start of the new academic year this autumn. It is meant to underpin France’s strict separation of religion and state.