On June 27, El Hidaya Mosque in Roussillon in Southern France was attacked and vandalised. Home windows had been smashed and furnishings overturned; the partitions had been plastered with racist flyers. Earlier the identical month, a burned Quran was positioned on the entrance of a mosque in Villeurbanne of Lyon.
Sadly, virulent Islamophobia in France has not stopped at vandalism.
On Could 31, Hichem Miraoui, a Tunisian nationwide, was shot useless by his French neighbour in a village close to the French Riviera; one other Muslim man was additionally shot however survived. A month earlier, Aboubakar Cisse, a Malian nationwide, was stabbed to dying in a mosque within the city of La Grand-Combeby by a French citizen.
There was a big spike in Islamophobic acts in France – one thing the French authorities stay reluctant to publicly touch upon. One report confirmed a 72 p.c improve in such incidents between January and March 2025 in contrast with the identical interval in 2024.
There are numerous components which have contributed to this, however central amongst them is the French state’s personal Islamophobic rhetoric and anti-Muslim insurance policies.
The newest iteration of this was the discharge of a report titled “The Muslim Brotherhood and Political Islamism in France” by the French authorities. The doc claims that the Muslim Brotherhood and “political Islamism” are infiltrating French establishments and threatening social cohesion and names organisations and mosques as having hyperlinks to the group.
The report got here out simply days earlier than Miraoui was shot useless and two weeks after the French authorities raided the properties of a number of founding members of the Brussels-based Collective Towards Islamophobia in Europe (CCIE) residing in France.
With the rise of anti-Muslim assaults and discrimination in France, it’s more and more exhausting to consider that the obsession of the French state and authorities with what they name “Islamist separatism” will not be, the truth is, inciting violence in opposition to the French Muslim inhabitants.
The concept that French Muslims are someway threatening the French state by their identification expression has been championed by the French far proper for many years. But it surely was within the late 2010s that it entered the mainstream by being embraced by centrist politicians and the media.
In 2018, French President Emmanuel Macron, who additionally embraced the time period “separatism”, referred to as for the creation of a “French Islam”, a euphemism for domesticating and controlling Muslim establishments to serve the curiosity of the French state. On the coronary heart of this mission stood the concept of preserving “social cohesion”, which successfully meant suppressing dissent.
Within the following years, the French state began performing on its obsession with controlling Muslims with extra and more durable insurance policies. Between 2018 and 2020, it shut down 672 Muslim-run entities, together with colleges and mosques.
In November 2020, the French authorities compelled the Collective Towards Islamophobia in France (CCIF), a nonprofit organisation documenting Islamophobia, to dissolve; the organisation then reconstituted in Brussels. In December of that yr, they focused 76 mosques, accusing them of “Islamist separatism” and threatening them with closure.
In 2021, the French Parliament handed the so-called anti-separatism legislation, which included quite a lot of measures to supposedly fight “Islamist separatism”. Amongst them was an extension of the ban on non secular symbols within the public sector, restrictions on dwelling education and sports activities associations, new guidelines for organisations receiving state subsidies, extra policing of locations of worship, and many others.
By January 2022, the French authorities reported that it had inspected greater than 24,000 Muslim organisations and companies, shut down greater than 700 and seized 46 million euros ($54m) in property.
The Muslim Brotherhood boogeyman
The report launched in Could, like many official statements and initiatives, was not aimed to make clear coverage or guarantee authorized precision. It was speculated to politicise Muslim identification, delegitimise political dissent and facilitate a brand new wave of state assaults on the Muslim civil society.
The report names numerous Muslim organisations, accusing them of getting hyperlinks to the Muslim Brotherhood. It additionally argues that campaigning in opposition to Islamophobia is a software of the organisation. In line with the report, the Muslim Brotherhood makes use of anti-Islamophobia activism to discredit secular insurance policies and painting the state as racist.
This framing is aimed to invalidate professional critiques of discriminatory legal guidelines and practices, and frames any public recognition of anti-Muslim racism as a covert Islamist agenda. The implication is evident: Muslim visibility and dissent usually are not simply suspect — they’re harmful.
The report additionally dives into the Islamo-gauchisme or Islamo-leftism conspiracy theories – the concept that “Islamists” and leftists have a strategic alliance. It claims that decolonial motion is challenneling Islamism and references the March Towards Islamophobia of November 10, 2019, a mass mobilisation that drew contributors from throughout the political spectrum, together with the left.
The report that was commissioned underneath the hardline former Inside Minister and now Justice Minister Gerald Darmanin, who again in 2021 accused far-right chief Marine Le Pen of being “too tender” on Islam.
All of this – the report, the laws, the police raids and rhetorical assaults in opposition to the French Muslim neighborhood – follows the lengthy French colonial custom of looking for to rule over and management Muslim populations. The French political centre has needed to embrace Islamophobia to include its falling recognition. It could assist with slender electoral victories over the rising far proper, however these can be short-lived. The extra lasting impression can be a sigmatised, alienated Muslim neighborhood which is able to more and more face state-incited violence and hatred.
The views expressed on this article are the writer’s personal and don’t essentially mirror Al Jazeera’s editorial stance.