PARIS — French Muslims have been officially invisible, expected to blend in with the rest of the citizenry in secular France. But now they are speaking out — and being called on to take a larger role in combatting the threat from Islamist extremists.
The killing of a priest last week at the altar of his Normandy church by two 19-year-old extremists has become a lightning rod for change.
In an unusual joint statement published Sunday, a group of more than 40 Muslim lawyers, doctors and other professionals said that French Muslims must move from the shadows to front and center, and take action because those representing Islam have lost touch with the young.
“We were silent because we learned that in France religion is a private affair,” the signers wrote, referring to the secular values France prizes and the French model of integration by which citizens forego their cultures of origin for Frenchness. “Now we must speak because Islam has become a public affair and the current situation is intolerable.”
The signers said Muslim leaders are unable to reach out, let alone represent, a younger generation of Muslims — some of them “the prey of jihadi Islam ideologues.”
France’s strict brand of secularism was behind two laws to ban Muslim apparel — headscarves in classrooms in 2004 and face-covering veils in streets, in 2010. It has also meant French authorities normally communicate only with Muslim leaders through the French Council for the Muslim Faith, or CFCM — an umbrella group the government helped set up in 2003 as conduit for dialogue with a religion that, unlike Catholicism, has no hierarchy.
But now, even the government is reaching beyond Muslim officialdom to implore citizens of the Islamic faith to join in the battle for hearts and minds against extremists.
“The most important challenge is not that of institutions. It is that of our citizens of the Muslim faith who in their families, their neighborhoods, must feel concerned and take their responsibility in hand,” Prime Minister Manuel Valls said in an interview Tuesday with the daily Liberation.
In an exceptional reach-out, he said that “Islam of France” must be rebuilt, expanding training for imams and reducing foreign financing of mosques.
“Muslims have an immense responsibility” helping the state “combat those who put into question our public freedoms,” he said.
With an estimated 5 million Muslims in France — the largest Muslim population in western Europe — Islam is the country’s second religion after Roman Catholicism. But previous attacks elicited little more than communiques from the main Muslim organizations deploring the horrors — and recrimination from some quarters because Muslims weren’t strongly denouncing the acts of the terrorists.
Raphael Liogier, an expert on Islam at the prestigious Science Po university in Aix-en-Provence, says signs that Muslims are stepping into the fray may be the start of real change.
“They are under two injunctions: be quiet and at the same time take a position,” Liogier said. “If they say nothing, one thinks they have accepted the attacks … Today, they consider that this double injunction is no longer manageable.”