The number of Muslims in France is usually put at five million. Since by law, no one can be asked to declare a religion in a census, this is guesswork. The true figure is probably higher. So it is hardly any great surprise that the Muslim community - Europe's largest - should figure so much in my reports on France for The National, a newspaper based in the Middle East ...
A book I recently rediscovered, by the Canadian journalists Jean-Benoît Nadeau and Julie Barlow, bears the catchy title Sixty Million Frenchmen Can't Be Wrong and sets out, with much success, to explain why the French should be judged on their own terms - "resolutely modern and ferociously archaic at the same time" - and not on anyone else's.
Although the book first appeared six years ago, I wondered whether the authors may have overlooked the important fact that of those 60 million, at least five million, but probably rather more, are Muslims, most with roots in the former French colonies of North and sub-Saharan Africa. France has Europe's largest Muslim population and this will remain so until Turkey gains EU entry.
In the Nadeau/Barlow book, the Algerian war of independence receives several mentions. But Muslim and Islam are words absent from the index.
This is not a book review and the authors may feel they nevertheless address France in its entirety which is just as well since, in so many ways, that large community is highly relevant to what France does and what happens in French daily life.
To confirm my proposition, I need only look back over my work as a correspondent of The National based mainly in France. An electronic conversation with a colleague, broadly on the question of how interesting France is to the Middle East, prompted me to take that look. I am, in the event, surprised by how often my articles touch on that sizeable minority of Muslims, now the country's largest religious grouping after Roman Catholics.
People often assume that if a western reporter writes about Islam, there will be a negative slant. Yes, negativity crops up in my dispatches. The leader of the so-called gang of Barbarians, who kidnapped, tortured and murdered a young Parisian Jew, sought to invoke Islam, and Muslim causes, in his search for self-justification. To most people of whatever faith, or indeed of none, he was just an evil killer. Naturally, I have also looked at the problems of the banlieues, the deprived suburbs in which immigrant families live, and at the burqa and burqini controversies.
But there have been uplifting stories, too. Readers may recall my account of the Algerian man who, nearing 100, is among France's oldest - and most fully integrated - of North African immigrants. Then there were the Pakistani brothers Wahid (pictured above) who, as chef de cuisine and chef pâtissier at the upmarket Oustau de Baumanière in Les Baux de Provence, are the talk of French fine cooking.
Best of all, however, were the couple of days I spent in France's second city, Marseille, observing the start of Ramadan in a city where at least one resident in four is Muslim. I talked happily to traders and shoppers in the Capucins market, just behind the Canebière, this vibrant port's own Champs-Elysées. As Ramadan draws to a close, I wish the Tunisians, Moroccans and Algerians I met there, and those from farther afield, a satisfying Eid, French-Maghrebin style.
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