Another assignment in Marseille reacquainted me with a city of which I have grown very fond.
Ramadan began in France on Saturday and it seemed a good idea to report on the festival from the country's second city, which also has a Muslim population that is closer to one in three of all inhabitants than one in four. In fact, it was really Mme Salut!'s idea, as many of these good ideas happen to be.
With the patience and co=operation of people like Jihane (above), I was able to make the most of a short time exploring the Capucins market, a bustle of narrow streets behind the smart Canebière boulevard that owes more to the Maghrebin, in sights and sounds and smells, than to Provence.
In my piece for The National in Abu Dhabi, I contrasted the chaotic hotchpotch of cultures in Marseille, one that someone seems most of the time to be tolerably successful, with the difficulties France experiences generally in assimilating its large Muslim population (the figure of five million, quoted most regularly is almost certainly an underestimate):
Fears about fundamentalism and challenges to secular values occasionally turn voters towards the simplistic attractions of the far Right, in numbers large enough to cause concern though not to rule. Recent controversy over the burqini, an Islamic-friendly swimsuit that a French convert to the Muslim faith was banned from wearing in public swimming pools, highlighted these conflicts. France’s insularity means that internationally high-profile cases such as the imminent caning of a Malaysian model for drinking beer, or the threatened flogging of a Sudanese woman for wearing trousers, make relatively few headlines. But the country has been outraged by the treatment of one of its own, Clotilde Reiss, a student accused of spying by Iran after taking mobile phone pictures of anti-government protests. The cause of better community relations is not helped by the them-and-us mentality engendered by an urban planning model that confines immigrant families to ugly sprawling suburbs on the fringes of elegant cities. Yet in Marseille, there are signs of a cultural melting pot that works. No city of angels, it has fiery, sometimes troublesome football supporters and rife gangsterism that sees scores settled at gunpoint. But the depressing cycle of tension and violence experienced on the outskirts of Paris and other big cities seem to pass it by.
Roland Blum, the conservative first deputy mayor, and Noureddine Cheikh, president of the project to build a grand mosque for the city by 2011, both spoke reassuringly moderate words, which does not mean Marseille has no problems but does suggest they are quite skilled at preventing them boiling over.
They're even having some success in trying to persuade supporters of Olympique de Marseille - who, sadly, failed in their Ligue 1 title bid last season, probably because I had devoted 2,000 words to saying how well placed they were to win it - to stop lighting fires on the terraces at the Vélodrome.
Before you know it, gangsters will be taking their turf wars to arbitration panels instead of charging into restaurants and murdering their rivals.
* The full article can be seen at this link. I will not be giving up the day job just because the paper kindly used another of my photographs, at the Tunisian-owned Univers bazaar, to illustrate the piece ...
This coming Saturday's Mark My Words column - My Word at The National - will offer another reason why I rather like Marseille, and it has nothing to do with the name of the city having only one s, whatever British newspapers think.
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