Friday is a holy day for practising Muslims – a time to look at the religion extra deeply and, the place potential, attend prayers on the mosque. That’s precisely what Aboubakar Cissé did early on Friday 25 April.
Within the southern French village of La Grand-Combe, Cissé, a 22-year-old carpenter initially from Mali, volunteered at his native mosque and was a well-recognized face amongst worshippers. So when he supplied steerage by the prayers and rituals that Friday to a newcomer, a younger man he didn’t know , it was a wholly pure gesture. The stranger, nonetheless, had come to prayers with very totally different intentions.
As Cissé bowed in prostration, he was stabbed with a knife 57 instances. The assailant then posted a video on Snapchat of his sufferer writhing in agony in a pool of blood. Within the video, a person could be heard saying “I did it” and insulting Allah.
But in France, this dying – and obvious focusing on of a Muslim worshipper – has not been unequivocally understood as a hate crime.
Ongoing controversy across the case is a dismaying reminder of how institutionally Islamophobic France is. For greater than a fortnight, there have been public protests on the inadequacy of the investigation, the largest of which up to now befell in Paris on Sunday. However, with some notable exceptions, in political and media circles extra time has been dedicated to debating whether or not a horrific killing in a spot of worship deserves to be known as “Islamophobic” than the terrifying implications of such violence for Europe’s largest Muslim inhabitants.
Proper from the outset we are able to see double requirements: following a deceptive steer from the general public prosecutor’s workplace, a lot of the French media together with nationwide information networks wrongly framed the atrocity as a dispute between worshippers, repeating this pretend narrative time and again.
After three days on the run, the suspect, a 20-year-old French nationwide named as Olivier H, gave himself as much as police in Italy. The suspect’s lawyer denied that his shopper harboured any hatred in the direction of “Muslims or mosques”. He has been charged in France with homicide aggravated by premeditation on grounds of race or faith. But this was deemed inadequate to categorise the case as a terrorist incident. The killing was an “isolated event”, the general public prosecutor mentioned, the suspect “driven by a violent urge, rather than ideology”.
The political reactions one would possibly moderately have anticipated after violence of this nature in a mosque by no means got here both.
Bruno Retailleau, the inside minister who can be liable for spiritual affairs, posted a temporary message of solidarity with the Muslim group on the day of the killing. However he didn’t cancel any public engagements (quite a few, as he’s campaigning for the management of the conservative get together Les Republicains) to right away go to the city as he has completed after different violent incidents.
It took one other full 24 hours for the prime minister, François Bayrou, to sentence the “vile Islamophobia … shown on video” and one other day after that for the president, Emmanuel Macron, to publicly remark, expressing condemnation of “racism” and “religious hatred” in France. He was faster to specific solidarity following an assault in Vancouver – the place a driver rammed a crowd – although that tragedy, throughout a Filipino cultural occasion, occurred a day after the mosque assault in France.
In keeping with Mediapart, no member of the federal government nor any consultant of the state took half in a silent march in La Grand-Combe. When Retailleau finally confirmed up within the city on 27 April, a lack of urgency criticised even inside his personal get together, he restricted his presence to closed-door talks on the sub-prefecture and introduced safety safety for mosques. He neither went to the mosque nor met the sufferer’s household.
Requested in a TV interview in regards to the delay, Retailleau blamed his warning on uncertainty in regards to the motivation for the crime, regardless of the video and the anti-Muslim sentiment the suspect had allegedly posted on-line. All through, Retailleau referred to the sufferer merely as “the individual”, by no means utilizing his title, and later blamed the homicide on our “multicultural society”.
When a minute’s silence on the nationwide meeting was proposed, the president of the chamber, Yaël Braun-Pivet, initially refused, claiming that minutes of silence weren’t noticed for “individual cases”. But just a few months earlier, silence had been noticed for a younger lady murdered by an undocumented immigrant, in addition to for a French hostage killed whereas being held by Hamas.
Braun-Pivet finally relented, however her counterpart within the senate refused to comply with go well with, claiming: “We only hold minutes of silence … for serious events, particularly terrorist attacks.”
Why are France’s highest-ranking politicians so reluctant to name a horrendous assault a terrorist incident? The suspect apparently expressed a want to strike at different Muslims within the video he allegedly posted on social media. Why does it appear so onerous to see the apparent?
Mourad Battikh, a lawyer representing Cissé’s distraught household, rightly described the choice to not have the case handled by the nationwide anti-terrorism prosecutor’s workplace as “shocking”, and the primary killing in a spot of worship to not be handled as ideologically motivated.
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However there’s a sample right here. When Muslims are focused by hate crimes, the attackers’ motives are not often, if ever, labelled as they need to be. There may be, because the journalist Widad Ketfi has identified, a obvious double customary for the way assaults are reported relying on whether or not victims are in a mosque or at a synagogue.
A couple of weeks earlier than Cissé’s homicide, Politis detailed the staggering variety of mosques which were subjected to violence lately (33 up to now 10 years). Most of those crimes have gone unpunished by the justice system, have been weakly condemned by political leaders and under-covered by the media. Islamophobia is rampant and but, in its most violent expression, it’s consistently downplayed as random crime and reported in forgettable headlines reserved for “faits divers” (information in short), barely worthy of nationwide information consideration.
Extremely, the phrase Islamophobia itself is nonetheless contested. Some ministers, together with Retailleau, refuse to make use of it, alleging that it was created by Islamist extremists to stop any criticism of Islam. That pretend information was debunked 20 years in the past. However the absence of a primary consensus on the time period speaks volumes in regards to the denialism surrounding the fact of Islamophobia as a type of racism.
And but, the details are simple. Between January and March 2025, the variety of recorded Islamophobic incidents in France rose by 72% in contrast with the identical interval in 2024.
Within the days after Cissé’s dying, a person was arrested close to a mosque carrying a butcher’s knife, whereas a lady sporting a hijab says she was assaulted on the street and had her headband forcibly eliminated. She was pushing her youngster in a pram. A person was run over and killed in entrance of his daughter final summer season, after receiving explicitly Islamophobic threats. But his household is nonetheless preventing for the crime to be formally recognised as racially motivated.
It’s not that Islam is just not mentioned within the public sphere. It’s consistently debated. Whether or not it’s banning Muslim girls from sporting headscarves in sports activities, the hyper-regulation of college costume codes, or the passing of a regulation whose Islamophobic penalties have been condemned by human rights organisations, the day by day lives of Muslims are more and more hemmed in by an ever extra intrusive political agenda.
In keeping with the NGO Sleeping Giants, in 2023 the phrases “immigration” and “Islam” appeared within the headline banners of CNews, the main information community in France, 335 days out of 365.
In the meantime, Islamophobic rhetoric continues to proliferate and escalate. At a current political rally, Retailleau overtly declared “Down with the veil”, which not solely solely breaches the precept of secularism but additionally undermines his position as minister for spiritual affairs and the state’s obligation to stay impartial.
After Aboubakar Cissé’s brutal dying, one may need anticipated the federal government to announce a plan to sort out Islamophobia. In actuality, our political leaders are amongst its major drivers.
