The disparities additionally contact on every thing from authorities subsidies to non-public colleges to credit on private revenue for donations, which overwhelmingly favor Catholics and high-income taxpayers. But they’re maybe most obvious in bodily buildings. Even as Mr. Macron has pledged to nurture an “Islam of France,” followers of the religion undergo from an acute scarcity of correct mosques throughout the nation.
“It’s a total paradox,” Saïd Aït-Laama, an imam, mentioned in an interview earlier than Friday Prayer.
Unable to finance mosque-building themselves, typically unassisted by the state, Muslim communities have turned to governments overseas for assist.
But that will now change into harder beneath Mr. Macron’s new law, which is meant to fight Islamism by toughening guidelines on secularism and controls over non secular organizations, together with tightening the circulate of international donations.
Last week, the government said that the brand new legislation would permit it to oppose the general public financing of a giant mosque in Strasbourg, in the jap area of Alsace, the place, for historic causes, the development of non secular buildings can nonetheless qualify for presidency subsidies.
The inside minister, Gérald Darmanin, pressed the native authorities to cancel the funding, saying that the affiliation behind the Strasbourg mosque had ties to the Turkish authorities.
Even earlier than new legislation was drafted, the City Council of Angers used real-estate laws final yr to cease mosque leaders from turning to Morocco. A provision in Mr. Macron’s law would permit the nationwide authorities, too, to oppose the sale of non secular buildings to a international authorities if the French authorities contemplate the sale a menace.
Mr. Macron has mentioned that the laws is essential to fighting the kind of radical ideology that has despatched French youths to battle in Syria and led to the deaths of greater than 250 French individuals in Islamist terrorist attacks since 2015. Last fall, 4 individuals had been killed in three separate terrorist assaults.
