Decried and mocked in equal measure, Paris announced another policy widely seen as targeting the country’s embattled Muslim community.
(TRT WORLD) When the right-wing French Interior Minister Gerald Darmanin declared in December of last year, “never at any given time is Allah superior to the Republic,” he meant it.
Now the French government has set up a new inter-ministerial committee on secularism that will evolve into the bureau of secularism in a move widely believed meant to teach Muslims to “love the Republic.”
In a lengthy Twitter thread by the “Committee for the prevention of crime and radicalisation,” a French government agency announcing the new committee declared that laicite is “first and foremost freedom.”
Laicite is a French brand of secularism that is austere and draconian. French politicians have increasingly used secularism as a tool to discriminate against the country’s growing Muslim population.
The proposals set out by the committee on secularism seeks to convince people, in particular Muslims, that only laicite protects different “cults” from practising their faith equally because the country has no official religion.
Despite not adopting France’s extreme version of secularism, countries like the United Kingdom (UK), which have no official separation between church and state, have a vibrant and free society where people of different faiths can practice their religious convictions.