Macron is right to take on Erdoğan and promote a modern, secular French Islam

The truest test of political leaders is not the way in which they deal with the issues about which they feel most confident, but rather how they handle those that refuse to be swept under the carpet and for which there are no easy answers.

This week, Emmanuel Macron came under fire from his Turkish counterpart, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, for daring to suggest that France’s Muslim population – numbering some six million – must, as a matter of urgency, define itself as French first and Muslim second.

Erdoğan’s response was to claim that Macron is treating Muslims much as the Nazis treated the Jews in the 1930s. The French leader, he suggested, had developed a mental condition and should seek professional help. Similar, if less highly-charged criticism was levelled by prominent figures in the Arab world, a number of whom, especially in the Gulf states, exhibit little tolerance for non-Muslims in their own domains.

Support for Macron came from the usual suspects: Germany’s Angela Merkel – who rejected Erdoğan’s description of Macron as “grossly defamatory” – the Dutch and Italian prime ministers, Mark Rutte and Giuseppe Conte, and the leaders of Austria and Greece, Sebastian Kurtz and Kyriakos Mitsotakis. The EU was rallying round.

Macron was obviously angered by Erdoğan’s intervention in a sensitive internal matter and immediately recalled the French ambassador for “consultations”.

The issue of integrating Muslims into the French mainstream has been a running sore for at least the last 50 years, dating back to the post-war arrival of large numbers of immigrants from the former colonies of Algeria, Tunisia and Morocco. But the more recent rise of militant Islam across the Muslim world has hit France particularly hard. Islamist violence has claimed the lives of more than 220 French citizens as well as a number of foreign visitors since 2015, with hundreds more injured, many of them seriously.

Earlier this month, the decapitation by a self-styled jihadist of Samuel Paty, a teacher who had shown his pupils cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad during a lesson on free speech, brought the issue into renewed focus. A wave of revulsion swept across France. It was clear, not for the first time, that something had to be done, not least because both the Far Right and the Far Left were demanding radical reform.

In his speech delivered in a Muslim majority suburb west of Paris just days prior to Paty’s murder, Macron had vowed to bring Islam into the embrace of secularism and liberty – laïcité – that has held a central place in French governance since the Revolution. In future, he said, imams would be trained and certified in France. The existing system, known as “consular Islam,” which has allowed Muslim governments to send hundreds of clerics to France to preach in mosques funded by those same governments, is to end.

The President, whose subsequent requiem for Paty was almost universally praised, was careful not to confuse the practise of Islam with Islamist terrorism. What he hoped to encourage was an “Islam of the Enlightenment,” compatible with the Fifth Republic’s foundational principle guaranteeing the separation of Church and State. To this end, Islamic associations controlled by governments and agencies outside France, which have been blamed for promoting the concept of a global caliphate rather than loyalty to the Republic, face closure.

In future, instruction, including the inculcation of shared values, is to be regulated by the state, most obviously by way of the National Council for the Muslim Faith, a body established by former president Nicolas Sarkozy in 2003.

Among the changes understood to be in prospect are restrictions affecting the home-schooling of Muslim children and an end to the separation of the sexes in classrooms and swimming pools. On what might be viewed as the positive side of the ledger, the teaching of Arabic is to be encouraged in state schools and more money will be spent on improving living conditions in those areas of French towns and cities in which most Muslims live.

One of France’s leading Muslim clerics, the Grand Imam of Bordeaux Tariq Oubrou, applauded what he said was the moderate and rational tone of the speech. But, inevitably, there was push-back from other French Muslims. One prominent critic complained that the aim was the establishment of a “comprehensive institutional framework to control and regulate Islam”. Another charged that the President had opened “a Pandora’s Box of bigotry”.

But it was Erdoğan’s intemperate remarks – which he combined with a call for a boycott of French goods ­– that caused most dismay in the Élysée. Turkey is a key player in the lives of France’s Muslim communities. More than 150 Turkish imams are currently registered with French mosques, against 120 from Algeria and 30 from Morocco.

At the same time, Turkey – supposedly a Nato ally – has opposed French intervention in Libya and is currently operating against French interests in Syria. In addition, Erdoğan has denounced France for the support it has given to Greece and Cyprus in their ongoing dispute over oil exploration in the eastern Mediterranean, warning Macron not to be foolish enough as to provoke a confrontation.

How this will end is anyone’s guess, but it is sure to be part of a grand strategy by the Turkish leader, whose narcissistic indulgence of a feud with France is intimately bound up with his determination to abandon the secular reforms of his great predecessor Mustafa Kemal Atatürk and restore a form of political Islamism as the basis of his country’s foreign policy.

Back home, Macron, who faces re-election in just 18 months’ time, will be hoping that he can rebuild trust with France’s Muslim citizens, leading to their longer-term cultural, if not religious, assimilation into the world of laïcité. If he succeeds, he will have the support of the overwhelming majority of voters. If he fails, Marine Le Pen and her Rassemblement National will be waiting in the wings to capitalise on his misfortune.