This past week, Muslims in Europe and elsewhere were subject to a number of attacks from political and religious figures who ought to know better.
While the US and Europe are engaged in serious reflection and conversations concerning race, The Muslim Association of Britain finds it outrageous that the French President should deliver a lecture accusing Islam of being isolationist and facing a crisis of some sort. At a time when President Emmanuel Macron and France should be considering the legacy of colonialism left behind in Africa and elsewhere, these comments are nothing more than a deflection away from the immense suffering, death and destruction left behind.
With France’s extremist secular model inhibiting the rights and freedoms of Muslim French women who choose to wear the Hijab, making an absolute mockery of its claim to fraternity and equality and failed economic and social policies that have created division, cracks and significant inequality throughout French society, Macron’s speech was worse than tone-deaf.
His words were soon followed by Egypt’s Grand Mufti, Shawqi Allam, famously known for his trigger-happy attitude towards signing off execution sentences passed by sham trials for political prisoners, who stated that half of European Muslims’ children are ISIS supporters; an incredibly ignorant and false statement which only fires up far-right and racist appetites.
The flurry of offensive, false and ignorant statements come as a deflection in the face of discontent, the French President with an overwhelmingly dissatisfied nation and failed policies, and in Egypt, a country on the brink of public outrage in economic hardship and silencing of dissent. Muslims in Europe, and across the globe, continue to embrace the human values promoted by Islam and to seek to excel on every front and in every field, regardless of the detractors.
MAB condemns in the strongest terms possible, both the speech of President Macron and the statement of the Mufti of Egypt, and remains committed to working tirelessly for not only British Muslims, but for Britain and for British society of all creeds, faiths, and ethnicities, equally and without favour or prejudice.
Muslim Association of Britain
13th October 2020
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- Muslim Association of Britain (MAB) is a UK organisation founded in 1997, dedicated to serving society by promoting the accepted understanding of Islam with its spiritual teachings, ideals, civil concepts and moral values, all directed towards serving humanity.
