بسم الله الرحمن الرحيم
Press Release
French Government Resorts to Terrorizing Muslim Children in its Desperate Attempt to ‘De-Islamicize’ its Muslim Population
On the 7th November, the media reported that police in the city of Albertville in France raided the homes of four 10-year-old Muslim children because during a counselling session in their school, they stated that although they condemned the killing of the French teacher Samuel Paty, they did not approve of derogatory caricatures of Prophet Muhammad (saw). According to the father of one of the children, around 10 police officers stormed into their house shortly before 7 am, armed with long barrelled weapons, awoke the children from their sleep and then searched through their house, including checking the books of his daughter and even taking photographs of Islamic calligraphy frames on their walls. The children were then taken to the police station and interrogated for 11 hours without their parents, on charges of “glorification of terrorism”. The parents were also interrogated by the police with absurd discriminatory questions, such as whether they attended the mosque for prayer, if their children accompanied them, whether they had any duties at the mosque, and their view towards the insulting cartoons of the Prophet (saw). One of the parents stated that they were treated like terrorists, their fingerprints were taken and that his wife was asked to remove her headscarf for photographs.
France does not need any introduction with regards to its brutal history and repressive policies against Islam and Muslims. Now, the French government wants to further its campaign to achieve the impossible task of eliminating Islam from its Muslim population or watering it down to something well-suited and in servitude to the French secular republic by terrorizing Muslim children. It has decided that it’s not sufficient to only raid the homes and businesses of Muslims, close mosques and private Islamic schools, intimidate Muslim charities and pursue the closure of Muslim civil society organisations. They have now targeted their secular arrows at Muslim children and youth, using aggressive bullying tactics in order to indoctrinate them with flawed secular liberal beliefs. That’s why President Macron focused especially on education in his latest witch hunt against Muslims and Islam, promising to ban home-schooling in his new “Islamist separatism” bill, which in truth is an “Islam eradication” bill, and stating that: “no concessions would be made in a new drive to push religion out of education and the public sector in France.”
All this is a clear sign that the French political establishment is desperate. The long years of repression and assimilation policies, such as Hijab and Niqab bans, and the general stigmatisation of Islamic beliefs and practices, ranging from growing a beard to the separation of the genders to eating Halal food, all aimed at distancing Muslims from Islam and coercing them into adopting western secular ideas, have failed miserably. Alhamdulillah, the Muslims in France have not only rejected these aggressive secular integration initiatives but have grown in strength in adherence to their Islamic beliefs and obligations. So now, French authorities resort to brute force, in order to force-feed the new generation of Muslims with secularism, having failed spectacularly to convince them intellectually of their defective beliefs through strength of argument. They don’t even shy away from deliberately spreading fake and deceptive news about young Muslim children to achieve their de-Islamicization aims. Macron, for example, in a recent letter to the Financial Times, clearly aimed at stoking further the fire of Islamophobia in the country, claimed falsely and without any evidence, that Muslim girls as young as 3 were being forced to wear the Niqab and being separated from the rest of French society.
Whilst these hard measures have the purpose to defend their secular values the opposite is realised, for they lay bare the inherent flaws, fallacies, contradictions and dangers of secularism which is in crisis globally. This harsh reality should sharpen the focus of the Muslim community, that this is a struggle for the very existence of Islam and the Deen of their children, and that the steadfastness of this generation will determine the future of Islam in France and the West.
[الَّذِينَ قَالَ لَهُمُ النَّاسُ إِنَّ النَّاسَ قَدْ جَمَعُواْ لَكُمْ فَاخْشَوْهُمْ فَزَادَهُمْ إِيمَاناً وَقَالُواْ حَسْبُنَا اللّهُ وَنِعْمَ الْوَكِيلُ]
“Those to whom the people said: Surely men have gathered against you, therefore fear them, but this increased their faith, and they said: Allah is sufficient for us and most excellent is the Protector.”[Al-i Imran: 173]
Women’s Section in The Central Media Office of Hizb ut Tahrir