Islam in France Essay Example

style="text-align: justify">Violence and crime are rampant in those areas. Seven hundred Muslim neighborhoods are listed as "violent"; four hundred are listed as "very violent," meaning not just that organized crime and firearms are present but that residents have a systematic strategy to keep the police out. Unemployment is the order of the day not withstanding the massive investment carried out by The French government in terms of Infastructure for this supberbs . Even after all this investments crime is still rife in these muslim neighbourhoods.

It is a fact that a relationship exists in the ghettoes between the underclass way of life and ethnic/religious separatism. These Muslims see the ghettoes as a way to gain from immigrating to France without assimilating into French society. Some level of violence has the advantage of ensuring separation from the outside world and can be used as a bargaining tool with the authorities to get more de facto autonomy meaning that Muslim neighbourhoods are ruled only by Muslims according to Islamic law and morals as well as to obtain more funding.

It also serves as a social control tool against liberal-minded Muslim individuals, for conservative Muslim leaders can easier exert pressure on liberal minded Muslims for instance to compel females to don the veil within the context of the ghettos' violence. Muslims in France have learnt how to assert themselves in their community. From building large Mosques in Central Paris to a using a shed in the central Toulouse market, French Muslims are getting bolder and bolder.

Alaine Besancon in his book makes clear "according to the Shari`a [Islamic sacred law], a non-Muslim country is not

to be seen any more as Dar al-Harb [house of war] but rather as Dar al-`Ahd [house of covenant]"; and "the Platform is an expression of such a covenant. "24 Fully aware of the legal or constitutional difficulties implied in such a statute of covenant, the platform refers to a de facto revision of the 1905 law of separation: " These days Muslims build Mosques in France and ask for government aid because they put in their mosques library and schools.

In principle, public funding is not available for mosque’s because of the 1905 Law of Separation of Churches and State, which the French Government "neither recognizes nor funds" any religious organization. Various ways have been ochestrated, however, to bend these laws, to the point that any Islamic center with a sound building project can count on extensive public funding, either in cash or credit. Most mosque projects include not just the place of worship but also, clinics, bookshops, and baths.

The demand for Islamic schools is also growing: according to the 1995 Louis Harris poll, 76 percent of all Muslims in France would like to send their children not to secular schools but to Islamic schools run under the supervision of the state and with its financial help, the same arrangement that Catholic and Jewish schools have. The same applies to ritually acceptable (hallal) food: the government has no choice but to extend to Muslims the same slaughtering and processing privileges customarily granted to Jews.

As for Ramadan observance, also on the increase, the government takes it into account in the case of Muslim civil servants. As a result of these

acts by the French government home grown terrorists and Islamic militants are grown. Take the case of Mohammed Merah the French Muslim who killed seven people at Toulouse in 2012, it was reported that his brother was proud of his actions. This breed of Islamic taught French born citizens who enroll in this Islamic schools are brainwashed to the need to attack their fellow French citizens.

Islam in France today has seen a dramatic increase and rise. Islam’s appeal to Non-Muslims is disturbing to say the least. Most seminaries in France today are being run by African and Asian Priests, converts to Islam is on the rise as French academicians and celebrities are following this trend. Their numbers include well-known intellectuals and artists, including Maurice Bejart, the world-famous choreographer who has settled for a low-profile brand of Sufism; and Roger Garaudy, a former communist philosopher who is leader of the Spain-based International Islamic Center.

Quite a few converts have achieved positions of leadership within Islamic circles: Daniel-Youssouf Leclerc, the leader of the strictly orthodox Sunni group Integrite and the only European-born member of the World Islamic League's High Council; Ali-Didier Bourg, the founder of the Islamic University in Paris (a part-time seminary rather than a university but still very influential); and Jacques-Yacoub Roty, who was rumored in the early 1990s to be the next head of the Great Mosque. There has been a downward movement for church attendance in France and the Muslims have capitalized on that.

In the 50’s for example French catholics voted their conservative leaders into parliament, were pro family and attended mass, but today most catholic parties have

become secular and divorce rate is on the high. According to divorce magazine 38. 3 percent of all marriages in France end in divorce. Black African priests can be seen today throughout the country, even in rural areas of France; a black Zairian priest held mass for former President Jacques Chirac in mid-1996. Female religious communities are, if anything, even more foreign: a substantial number of French nuns under thirty are of African or Asian origin.

The decline in French Christians has given rise to the gradual islamitization of France. Islam now appeals to this non-muslims. This is a grave mistake the French are making in their gradual loosing of their heritage. A decline in the French nation-state is also a major cause of concern. It was one thing for France to take in large number of Italians, Spaniards, Portuguese, Poles, Jews, into a well managed,highly centralized, and fully sovereign state, with a strong unified school system, a strong police, and compulsory military service for all male youth, as was the case until the 1960s.

It is another thing altogether to take in large numbers of Arabs, Berbers, Turks, and black Africans into a much weaker state, with many powers given to the local authorities, a more weaker police force, a shattered school system, no more drafting of citizens to the military, and the prospect of merging into the European Union. A case study would be Corsica, the birth place of Emperor Napoleon, it has over the past 20 years gradually slid into anarchy, separatism and terrorism without a strong response from the French central government.

At the same time, sovereign attributes,

money issuance, border control, and much else are being transferred from the French state to the European Union radical French Muslims may wonder why they should come to terms with the national government in Paris rather than the supranational authority in Brussels. The Muslim vote. The routine process of French politics may fasten Islamization. Almost 50 percent of Muslims living in France today are French citizens and eventually nearly all of them will become French citizens.

France has an extremely generous naturalization policy, one that permits all legal residents to apply for citizenship after five years in France and every child born on French soil to apply for citizenship, even if his parents are in the country illegally. In the longer term, as Muslims become citizens, their vote will be as crucial in many elections as the observant Catholic vote used to be; to win it may mean having to woo it, notably by allowing for further immigration and the consolidation of Islam in French society.

Along these lines, one might also wonder whether Jacques Chirac's pronouncements in late 1996 strongly favoring an independent Palestinian state and the lifting of the embargo against Iraq were not intended to garner the Muslim vote in France. The French Government through assimilation thought it would bring in Muslims into the mainstream and remove the radical vices in them but that idea has failed. These Muslims feel un-itegrated. Opinion poll indicate that while a clear majority of French citizens believe that Muslims are not well integrated into French society.

A December 2010 survey found that 68% of French people believe that Muslims are “not well integrated

into society,” with 61% of these citing muslims’ “refusal” to do so as the primary factor. Futhermore, 42% of those surveyed viewed the presence of a muslim community as a threat to their country’s identity. Thirty one percent of French people associated Islam primarily with a rejection of western values compared to 12% in 1994 and 17% in 2001.

Some Muslim advocates argue that France is not granting its Muslim population a true equality of rights when the government demands that elements of Muslim traditional life and culture be abandoned in order for Muslims to enjoy full participation in French life In combatting home grown terrorism the French government in 1986 created a special police force for terrorism. Today it considers Al-Qaeda as the country’s greatest terrorist threat. The problem France faces is the presence of radical Imams in French Mosques who preach radicalism, in response to that the French government started direct contacts with Muslim communities in France.

The government stopped foreign Imams from coming to France if they didn’t speak French, or had little knowledge of the French culture. This measure failed and the French government demanded that All Imams must be French born or at least educated in France. With this, the French government wished all Imams would have views formulated in France with a French perspective. In 2010 the French government supported a workshop for Imams run by mainstream Muslims According to the U.

S Department of State’s 2009 and 2010 country report on terrorism, The French government are particularly concerned with the Islamic radicalization in French schools and French prisons. The government has initiated programs some with

other E. U states to limit Islamic radicalization of the prison system. In 2010, the government initiated after school programs targeting at risk youths. In conclusion every community has the right to uphold and protect its way of life, so long as minorities' rights are protected as well. Not so long ago, this consideration applied primarily to colonial areas threatened by the industrial West.

Arguably, it applies to Western industrial nations as well, should they be threatened by mass immigration. In the case at hand, the main point is not whether mosques may be built or if hallal food may be distributed; but whether polygamy is to be tolerated and the police to operate in Muslim neighborhoods. In other words, Islam ought to adapt to the traditional French way of life, with its emphasis on individual freedom and secularism, rather than the reverse. The current debate about immigration in America is much more about ethnicity and language than about religion. Still, many lessons may be drawn from the case of France.