Macron needs help from France’s moderate Muslims to take on Islamist extremism

It is hard to know what to say anymore in the wake of the attacks on the French people by a succession of lone-wolf Islamist terrorists.

Today, three citizens of the Republic were stabbed to death in the basilica of Notre Dame in Nice by a madman who, according to the city’s mayor, Christian Estrosi, could not stop shouting Allahu-Akbar! (“God is great!”) even after he was shot and seriously wounded by officers of the municipal police.

One of those killed, a worshipper in her seventies, was all-but beheaded, recalling the grisly murder two weeks ago of the history teacher Samuel Paty outside the gates of his school in the north-west of Paris. A second victim was the sacristan of Notre Dame, a 54-year-old married man with two children. The third, a woman in her forties, managed to crawl from the scene but died soon after in a nearby café.

Further north, in the historic city of Avignon, a second lunatic was shot and killed by police after he threatened passers-by with a knife. And in Saudi Arabia, the heartland of Islam, a security guard on duty outside the French embassy in Jeddah was wounded by a knife-wielding attacker who was subsequently arrested and detained.

In recent years, France has become the front line in the ongoing confrontation between Western, secular values and militant Islam. President Macron, who earlier this month outlined reforms aimed at instilling the concept of laïcité – the separation of Church and State – into the governance of France’s six-million-strong Muslim community, has become the leader on whom open season has been declared by Islamist elements and leaders throughout the Muslim world.

The rest of us can express our heartfelt solidarity with France as it faces an Islamist murder-spree. But our words, though necessary and no doubt appreciated by the nation’s community at large, can be of little comfort to the families and friends of those whose lives have been so brutally ended.

Nothing but scorn, however, will be reserved by the French of all political persuasions for the Turkish foreign ministry, which after the murders in Nice issued a statement describing the attack as “heinous” and piously expressing the view that “terror has no religion, language or colour”. Just this week, President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan denounced France for treating its Muslim citizens much as the Nazis treated the Jews in the 1930s while mocking Macron as mentally ill. He has even threatened to take action against the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo – the victim of an Islamist terror attack in 2015 in which twelve people died and another eleven were wounded – for publishing an unflattering cartoon of him in this week’s issue.

The latest victims of Islamist contempt for France will be mourned, as Samuel Paty was mourned. The Great and the Good will attend their obsequies resolved to put measures in place to ensure that nothing like the Nice killings can ever happen again.

But who will believe them? The problem is that embedded within the mainly peaceful Muslim family is a small but persistent minority who regard their religion as inviolate and who perceive disregard by unbelievers of its central precepts as an invitation to violence. It may be only one in a hundred thousand among the faithful who would go so far as to kill for their beliefs, but the suspicion is that thousands more, encouraged by their often foreign-born imams, may secretly approve of such acts of retribution as a fitting response to what they believe to be blasphemy.

There was a time not so long ago, of course, when the French were at the forefront of such thinking. Burnings, beheadings and the destruction of whole towns were a commonplace in medieval France whenever heresy was suspected. It was only in the final years of the sixteenth century that the extraordinarily brutal wars of religion came to an end, and later, when the Revolution attempted to outlaw Christian belief, it replaced the old certainties with new ones, policed by the guillotine.

Since then, France – once deemed to be “the First Daughter of the Church” – has mellowed to the extent that Christian observance is now very much a minority pursuit. Most weddings, even most funerals, these days are secular events, with the mayor performing a pseudo-clerical role. Many towns do not even have a full-time priest. Churches on Sundays cater mainly to small groups of the elderly. The Archbishop of Paris, whom Charles De Gaulle would have considered one of the few deserving of his deference, is no longer seen as an authority figure, but rather as the leader of an outdated cult.

By and large, there are many Muslims who do not share this religious insouciance. To them laïcité is a contradiction. How can you separate Church and State when the Church – in this case Islam – is the state. Militant Islamism, which has grown in strength over the last fifty years in various varieties, is founded on the presumption of a universal caliphate, one in which earthly loyalties are subservient to a believer’s higher duty to Allah and where society is governed according to a strict interpretation of Islamic principles.

Macron – ever an optimist in spite of all the disappointments of his presidency – is hoping to persuade his Muslim fellow citizens of the virtues of secularism, in which all, of whatever faith or none, can participate equally. He is not trying to denature French Islam; rather he is hoping that it will take its place with all the other strands of national identity that combine make up the Republic. His problem is that most of those at whom he is directing his message do not yet feel that their Frenchness has been fully acknowledged and that, in spite of idealistic rhetoric, they are always seen as outsiders.

Deep down, meanwhile, among France’s Muslims, there are those who regard any compact with the secular world as a betrayal. These are the ones Macron can never hope to reach. Only if France’s Muslims themselves take on the extremists on and both isolate and identify them can there be any realistic expectation that heads will not continue to roll on the streets of Paris, Nice and beyond. Only then can the President’s reforms truly take root.