Table of Contents
What happened in France?
- An attacker armed with a knife killed three people inside a church on Thursday in the southern French city of Nice,
- Prompting the government to raise its security alert status to the maximum level hours before a nationwide coronavirus lockdown.
- The attack took place near the Notre Dame church.
- The Notre Dame Basilica is less than a kilometer from the site in 2016 where
- Another attacker plowed a truck into a Bastille Day crowd, killing dozens of people.
High level security
- French President Emmanuel Macron said he would immediately increase the number of soldiers deployed to protect schools and religious sites
- From around 3,000 currently to 7,000, and France’s anti-terrorism prosecutor opened an investigation.
significance
- It was the third attack in two months in France that authorities have attributed to Muslim extremists,including the beheading of a teacher.
- It comes during a growing furor over caricatures of the Prophet that were republished in recent months by the satirical newspaper Charlie Hebdo –
- Renewing vociferous debate in France and the Muslim world over the depictions that Muslims consider offensive but are protected by French free speech laws.
France & Islam
- France has a long and complex relationship with Islam, and its 5 million Muslim citizens (just under 9% of its population).
- Many of whom live in poorer areas and are often marginalized in politics and media.
- The vast majority of those do not support Islamic extremism, but often face unfair stereotypes, experts say.
- The recent attacks are reminders of the tensions in France’s secular society,
- Which frequently extols the values of free speech and freedom to practice religion.
French definition of secularism
- French secularism, or laicite, sees no place for religion in the public sphere. In this way, it is the opposite of how India has practised its secularism.
- Over the years, laicite has been in confrontation with the religious practices of many immigrant groups in France, including the Sikhs.
- But the biggest confrontations have been to do with its Muslim citizens.
- Most French Muslims of today were born in France, descendants of first-generation immigrants from former French colonies in north Africa.
- The French constitution demands that those seeking citizenship must commit themselves to integration.
- But this has proved elusive.
- Macron acknowledged in his speech that there have been shortcomings in how France has dealt with this challenge.
- He acknowledged that the country had not dealt with the legacy of its problematic Algerian war.
- He also said French governments had to take the blame for ghettoising Muslim communities across the country and creating conditions for radicalisation.
- Only a few thousands may be radicalised Islamists, but France’s troubled relationship with Islam has manifested itself in many ways —
- In the 2005 rioting in the Paris banlieus, suburban ghettos where immigrants were confined; in the refusal, on the grounds of laicite, to allow Muslim women to wear the hijab in public spaces; the 2010, burqa ban.
- In 2011, Charlie Hebdo’s cartoons triggered angry reactions in the Islamic world,
- But the French hold the right to blaspheme as an absolute individual freedom,
- Equally available to those who want to insult Jesus Christ as those who will blaspheme Islam.
- This is considered the French “way of life”
Turning point in 2015
- The killings at the Charlie Hebdo office in January 2015,
- Apparently to avenge the publication of the Prophet Mohammed cartoons, were a turning point for France.
Q) With respect to the Indian Constitution, a community can be declared a minority community on the basis of?
- Either religion or Race
- Either caste or Language
- Either Religion or Language
- Only Relgion
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