Paris denies French school is teaching sharia law in Qatar

February 5, 2014   France’s Foreign Ministry has denied media reports that a French international school in Qatar has agreed to teach Islamic sharia law and separate boys and girls into different classrooms. A recent agreement between the Lycée Voltaire in Doha and French authorities does not involve changes to religion classes or dividing classes…

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The management of security and religious affairs: the disappointing results of Interior Minister Manuel Valls in 2013

February 5, 2014   According to the recently released 2013 report by the National Observatory of Delinquency and Penal Action, France’s Interior Minister Manuel Valls has not brought down crime nor been active on the regulation of religious committees, contrary to popular perception. Enjoying successful poll ratings, Manuel Valls has been portrayed as the ‘strong…

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Zaman interview with Dounia Bouzar on radical Islam

January 16, 2014   Anthropologist of religion and expert at the National Observatory of Secularism, Dounia Bazar addresses the issue of radical Islam in her latest work, ‘Countering Radical Islam’ in which she delivers the fruits of her fifteen years of analyses on this minority phenomena that nonetheless often gets conflated with the entirety of…

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Religious leaders removed from the board of the National Advisory Council on Ethics

January 27, 2014   In nominating the new board of the Comité Consultatif National d’Ethique (CCNE) or National Advisory Council on Ethics in September 2013, President Francois Hollande chose not to include any religious leaders, and replaced them with secular figures. This Council, created in 1983, is in charge of providing advisory guidelines on bioethical…

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Knowledge on secularism diplomas awarded

10.10.2013 Liberation 28 people, including public officials, religious representatives and imams were awarded on Thursday in Lyon with a university diploma which validates their ‘knowledge on secularism’. The diploma was awarded by France’s Home Minister, Manuel Valls, who intends to expand this course to all religious representatives in the country. The course is financed by…

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