Since 2018, the Macron administration has designated French 47 districts — including Bourtzwiller and its 15,000 people — as quartiers de reconquête républicaine (areas of republican reconquest) in a drive to retake control of previously lawless zones by sending in extra police and improving schools. Moderate Muslims have backed Mr Macron’s approach. “There really is an ideology to separate Muslims from the rest of society,” said Hassen Chalghoumi, an imam from Drancy near Paris who needs state bodyguards to protect him from extremists who have threatened to assassinate him. “The republic has to wake up and deal with these Islamists who try to impose themselves in schools and elsewhere.” Jean-Yves Camus, an expert on political extremism, said French society had long been peculiarly sensitive to attempts by any religion to encroach on public life or challenge rigorously enforced secularism. While Mr Macron was not a secular “maximalist”, he was a hyperactive politician who was always eager “to take measures that have not been taken before”, Mr Camus said.
Political Islam Part 31
