On June 27, El Hidaya Mosque in Roussillon in Southern France was attacked and vandalised. Windows were smashed and furniture overturned; the walls were plastered with racist flyers. Earlier the same month, a burned Quran was placed at the entrance of a mosque in Villeurbanne of Lyon.<\/p>\n
Unfortunately, virulent Islamophobia in France has not stopped at vandalism.<\/p>\n
On May 31, Hichem Miraoui, a Tunisian national, was shot dead by his French neighbour in a village near the French Riviera; another Muslim man was also shot but survived. A month earlier, Aboubakar Cisse, a Malian national, was stabbed to death in a mosque in the town of La Grand-Combeby by a French citizen.<\/p>\n
There has been a significant spike in Islamophobic acts in France \u2013 something the French authorities remain reluctant to publicly comment on. One report<\/a> showed a 72 percent increase in such incidents between January and March 2025 compared with the same period in 2024.<\/p>\n There are various factors that have contributed to this, but central among them is the French state\u2019s own Islamophobic rhetoric and anti-Muslim policies.<\/p>\n The most recent iteration of this was the release of a\u00a0report<\/a> titled \u201cThe Muslim Brotherhood and Political Islamism in France\u201d by the French government. The document claims that the Muslim Brotherhood and \u201cpolitical Islamism\u201d are infiltrating French institutions and threatening social cohesion and names organisations and mosques as having links to the group.<\/p>\n The report came out just days before Miraoui was shot dead and two weeks after the French authorities raided the homes of several founding members of the Brussels-based Collective Against Islamophobia in Europe (CCIE) living in France.<\/p>\n With the rise of anti-Muslim attacks and discrimination in France, it is increasingly hard to believe that the obsession of the French state and government with what they call \u201cIslamist separatism\u201d is not, in fact, inciting violence against the French Muslim population.<\/p>\n The idea that French Muslims are somehow threatening the French state through their identity expression has been championed by the French far right for decades. But it was in the late 2010s that it entered the mainstream by being embraced by centrist politicians and the media.<\/p>\n In 2018, French President Emmanuel Macron, who also embraced the term \u201cseparatism\u201d, called for the creation of a \u201cFrench Islam\u201d, a euphemism for domesticating and controlling Muslim institutions to serve the interest of the French state. At the heart of this project stood the idea of preserving \u201csocial cohesion\u201d, which effectively meant suppressing dissent.<\/p>\n In the following years, the French state started acting on its obsession with controlling Muslims with more and tougher policies. Between\u00a0\u00a02018 and 2020, it shut down 672 Muslim-run entities<\/a>, including schools and mosques.<\/p>\n In November 2020, the French authorities forced the Collective Against Islamophobia in France (CCIF), a nonprofit organisation documenting Islamophobia, to dissolve; the organisation then reconstituted in Brussels. In December of that year, they targeted\u00a076 mosques<\/a>, accusing them of \u201cIslamist separatism\u201d and threatening them with closure.<\/p>\n In 2021, the French Parliament passed the so-called anti-separatism law<\/a>, which included a variety of measures to supposedly combat \u201cIslamist separatism\u201d. Among them was an extension of the ban on religious symbols in the public sector, restrictions on home schooling and sports associations, new rules for organisations receiving state subsidies, more policing of places of worship, etc.<\/p>\n