Secularisation – the process of a dividing the realms of politics and religion – has been influencing national and worldly affairs for several hundred years. The idea of the desirability of such a division – secularism – is nowadays a given backdrop for public policy issues regarding education, family, gender, media, migration, personal integrity and…
National Front vice-president Marine Le Pen has offered her reflections on what President Nicholas Sarkozy has termed “positive secularism.” On the occasion of Pope Benedict XVI’s visit to France, Le Pen noted, “I have battled against positive secularism, but for reasons other than those I have seen in the newspapers in the last few days.”…
Pope Benedict XVI denounced fundamentalist fanaticism in his address to a variety of figures, including Muslim leaders, at the start of a French pilgrimage at Lourdes. Over the course of Benedict XVI’s visit to France, he has emphasized the importance of religion in shaping public policy, a stand which has enraged some of the country’s…
The author has already written elsewhere about the failure of political Islam because of the non-compatibility of the Islamic imaginary with the structure of the modern state. A political agenda based on Revelation will be bound to coercively suit society to law rather than the other way around. Olivier Roy, France’s leading philosopher-political scientist, disagrees…
France has denied citizenship to a veiled Moroccan woman on the grounds that her “radical” practice of Islam is incompatible with French values, particularly with mixité (the equality of the sexes). Le Monde daily newspaper claims it was the first time a Muslim applicant has been rejected because of his/her personal religious practice, particularly her…
