As expected, and predicted by this very blog, French President Emmanuel Macron’s plan, set out on February 11th, to reform the communal structures that govern Islam’s relationship with the French state, has run into trouble. It took just a couple of days for Islamic organisations in France to start to whine about President Macron’s proposed policies and start to obstruct them.
According to a Reuters report published on the 14th February a French Muslim group, the French Council of the Muslim Faith, loudly objected to President Macron’s ideas and this group’s leader, Ahmet Ogras, said: “The Muslim faith is a religion and, as such, takes care of its own household affairs. The last thing you want is the state to act as guardian.” In effect the head of the largest French Islamic group, and a group that itself was set up in 2007 to improve relations between Muslims and the state, has told the president of France to ‘sod off’.
This immediate and vehement objection by a group that is the primary interface between to policies that are vital to French national security, which recognise and seek to preserve France’s secular character and which will not be at all onerous any any Muslim apart from extremist ones, bodes ill for the future. This swift objection also probably sets the stage for similar or more aggressive reactions to this policy in the future.
Although I support President Macron’s attempt to bring Islam under some sort of control in France and to strengthen the hands of those allied to more moderate strands of Islam, it’s looking like a policy that is doomed to failure. I very much doubt that President Macron is going to succeed in making the big impact on the worsening security situation viz a viz Islam in the first half of 2018, as is his stated intention.
I predict that over the course of the coming year President Macron’s plan to reform the relationship between the French state and its Muslim citizens will be met with more and more objections of the sort made by the French Council of the Muslim Faith. I also predict that other groups who don’t want their dodgy, jihad promoting mosques raided and shut down will also kick off. It remains to be seen whether these arrogant and aggressive Muslims that have brought so much terror and horror to France will be content with political objections, or whether they will turn to violence in order achieve their aims? Sadly, going by past Islam related incidents that have afflicted France, I would say that the likelihood of violent Muslims committing atrocities as a form of vengeance against this policy is very high.
The arrogant rejection of what are reasonable plans to reduce terrorism and Islamic radicalism so early in the day really does not give me confidence that the French government can deal with its Islamic problems peacefully and politically. With no goodwill coming from major French Islamic organisations like the FCMF, prospects of dealing with the issue of Islamic radicalism in the manner that President Macron is suggesting really do not look good.
