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Foreign Policy
Foreign Policy
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Mustafa Akyol, Benjamin Haddad, Talib Shareef, Yaya J. Fanusie, Muhammad Fraser-Rahim, Karina Piser, Benjamin Haddad, Talib Shareef, Yaya J. Fanusie, Muhammad Fraser-Rahim, Karina Piser

Yes, Islam Is Facing a Crisis. No, France Isn’t Helping Solve It.

Activists of the Pakistani Sunni Tehreek organization burn a poster of French President Emmanuel Macron during an anti-French protest in Lahore on Nov. 1, 2020. ARIF ALI/AFP via Getty Images

“Islam is a religion that is in crisis all over the world today.” That is what the French President Emmanuel Macron said on Oct. 2, while announcing his “anti-radicalism plan.” Just two weeks later, on Oct. 16, a devotee of that radicalism killed and beheaded a high-school teacher, Samuel Paty, in a Paris suburb, merely for showing the infamous cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad in his classroom. And soon after, three worshippers at a church in Nice were savagely murdered by another terrorist who seemed to have the same motivation: to punish blasphemy against the prophet of Islam.

In return, the French authorities initiated a crackdown on anything they deemed to be Islamism, and also projected the controversial cartoons of Prophet Muhammad on government buildings in France—only to provoke mass protests in various parts of the Muslim world.

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