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Emojis - the mini cartoon pictures beloved of smartphone owners - are fast becoming a global language.

In the Gulf, though, users have hit a problem: There are no Arab emojis - unless you count a generic turban-wearing guy, who could equally be a Sikh.

Keen to fill the void, two Dubai-based friends have launched an app starring shisha smokers, belly dancers and 200 other playful characters.

They called it "HALLA WALLA" - which is Arabic slang for "Hi there!", and a common greeting around Kuwait, Saudi Arabia and Bahrain.

Yasmine Rasool, 31, from Bahrain, and Eriko Varkey, 30, who is originally from Japan, hit on the idea during a trip to New York.

"It's been a cultural and social experiment for us," says Yasmine. "We actually started this because we were jumping between cities, and people were asking us, 'Okay, so what is it like in the Arab world?' Me and Eriko were trying to explain what the culture is like, the beauty and the richness of it."

They made an app for the modern Middle East, to match stories of loud families, endless cousin gatherings, fashion statements, fast cars, strong feelings and late-night trips for shawarma (a much-loved meat wrap).

"People would ask me, do you have any rights, as a girl living there? And yeah, we have a lot of rights, actually," says Yasmine.

"A lot of people have such bad connotations about the Arab world, so we thought - okay, we need to explain it."

The HALLA emoticons include men in more conservative Islamic dress - the kandura, an ankle-length white robe, and the keffiyeh, a headdress. But others wear casual baseball caps.

Likewise the female emojis, which range from a bare-headed woman crying with laughter, to a girl in a loose hijab giving a flirty wink.

"We really wanted to capture how fun-loving people are here - how everybody's comedic," Eriko says.

"Some of Yasmine's relatives are super-covered, they're conservative - but they're cheeky and fun-loving. Others are quite liberal, but also wear traditional dress.

"Our friends are mixed - we have some covered, some non-covered. So we really just wanted to capture all of that - to show that there's such a diversity here, especially in our generation."
London firm seeks emoji translator Sir Patrick Stewart to star as poo emoji Gran hoping for 'emoldji' approval Saudi teenager plans hijab emoji
Yasmine says one of their gifs - an animated snippet of a woman in a hijab, blowing a kiss - was inspired by her cousins.

"All of them are covered - but most of them are so cheeky," she laughs. "We are Arab, but we're like every other human being."

When HALLA WALLA was in the works, the duo met focus groups in Bahrain, Dubai and Saudi Arabia to find out which emojis they were pining for.

They then worked with London-based developers Oxygn Consulting to make an app for iOS and Android.

The emoji keyboard lets users pepper their texts, emails or Facebook chats with emojis, or send animated gifs.

Of course, some of the little emoticons have more fans than others.

"I love the guy with the shisha and the heart," Yasmine sighs. "Like, a guy is blowing a heart from a shisha pipe! That doesn't happen. If I find that man - I'm gonna date him!"

Eriko favours the gifs, which include a woman contouring her make-up - a big trend for fashion-conscious Gulf girls.

She hopes HALLA WALLA will find pride of place in the big family WhatsApp groups that Arab relatives use to stay in touch - much like families in her native Japan.

"It's a beautiful marriage of the two countries," she smiles. "They're two worlds apart, but they're kind of similar."

Decoding the most popular Arab emojis
Shway-Shway
The shway-shway gif is an early hit with the app's users. Shway means "little", but two shways are a plea to slow down.

It's a popular saying with a matching gesture - a pinch formed with all the fingers and an upturned palm.

Eriko explains: "It basically means, 'wait, I'm coming!' or 'calm down!'"
Sword dancing man
It's a vaguely menacing man waving a sword over his head. What's he up to?

Eriko has the answer: "The guy holding up the sword is a very traditional dance that people do at weddings and celebrations."

Yep, it's the Ardah - or Arabian sword dance. (For a non-animated taster, see Prince Charles's latest tour of the Middle East).

The female version features three long-haired women swishing their locks in unison.

"Oh! The girls dancing - that's a favourite one of mine," says Yasmine. "From childhood I always wanted long hair so I could copy the traditional dance!"
The flying slipper
The HALLA creators burst out laughing when asked about this one.

"The slipper is basically - if you have done wrong, mother will bend down to pick up her slipper and throw it at you. And then you know that you should start running!"

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Emojis - the mini cartoon pictures beloved of smartphone owners - are fast becoming a global language. In the Gulf, though, users have hit a problem: There are no Arab emojis - unless you count a generic turban-wearing guy, who could equally be a Sikh.

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Paris, France - Last year, the 19-year-old elected leader of the Paris-based Sorbonne branch of the French National Students' Union (UNEF) found herself at the centre of a frenetic controversy.

Maryam Pougetoux had appeared on a brief segment on national TV following demonstrations across France by students protesting against the changes to ways they can choose their universities after high school.

But it was not her comments that incensed TV pundits and French politicians alike. It was the fact that she wore a hijab, a headscarf worn by many Muslim women who feel it is part of their religion, which for a few weeks became the focus of polemic once again.

The hijab has for decades been a source of controversy in France, which in 2004 banned it from being worn in public schools.

Gerard Collomb, France's interior minister, called Pougetoux's appearance "shocking" and likened her hijab to a symbol of the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant ( ISIL or ISIS) armed group.

The country's gender-equality minister, Marlene Schiappa, said she viewed Pougetoux's hijab as a "form of promoting political Islam".

UNEF publicly condemned the comments as a "wave of racist, sexist, and Islamophobic hatred".

One year after the firestorm, Maryam Pougetoux sat down with Al Jazeera and talked about how the backlash changed her life, the support she received and France's fixation with the hijab.

Following the hostile public exposure you received last year, how has your life changed?

Maryam Pougetoux: I'm still one of the co-presidents of the student union. In the professional area, nothing has really changed. We're still working on students' rights within the university.

I'm graduating in a few months. Whenever I'm at university, I'm just a normal 20-year-old student: I attend classes, have essays to write, meet up with my friends.

The only thing that's completely different relates to my personal life, I guess.

I've met incredible people, people I thought I'd never meet, like the author, activist and filmmaker Rokhaya Diallo. I was also invited to speak at the French embassy in [Canada] to talk about my story and this whole controversy.

It was pretty challenging and a tough time to go through. The summer of 2018 will always be marked in my mind. It happened during my big finals exams. Managing a national controversy and having university on the other side was really hard.

It's pretty bizarre seeing your name on headlines, being quoted by famous authors ... It's still a lot to handle.

Yet I decided to take from this experience only positivity. That kept me sane. The negativity is behind me. Thank God, I had such a supportive system around me. My family and friends really helped me to overcome all these obstacles.

One thing that is still strange to me is that people recognise me and come up to me in the streets. It still feels weird, and I haven't adjusted to that yet.

Al Jazeera: In previous interviews, when you were asked your opinion on political Islam, you said you didn't know much about it. How has that changed now?

Pougetoux: The term was thrown at me several times. Why would anyone ask me my opinion about that? I still don't get it!

At the end, I decided to check on the internet what that meant because I had no idea. The answer was surprising. I still can't understand why they'd associate me with any of this. My position within the UNEF has never had any links with my religion or anything. In fact, we don't discuss that within the union.

My identity was used to serve the political agenda of these ministers and commentators. They used me as a political puppet, when, again, that's not who I am.

They thought that my position has something to do with my veil, or that I was hiding a political Islamic agenda ... If only they knew that that was so far from the truth. They simply couldn't understand that I wanted to represent my fellow students. But no, to them it had to be something else, some ulterior plan something. This is completely insane.

It was hard because by saying this, they took away all my ability to manage a union like UNEF. To them, I wasn't elected because of my ability to handle this position. It had to do with my hijab. It's frustrating, because they take away from you everything that makes you a human.

I separate my faith from any of my unionist actions. These are two different worlds. No one within the UNEF has ever mentioned my veil to me, or found it problematic. There are black people, Arab people, Asian people, poor and wealthy students within UNEF. I don't get why other people could reach this position with no backlash, but I received negative reaction because of the fabric I wear on my head? It makes no sense.

Al Jazeera: During this period, what has been the reaction of the faculty and the students?

Pougetoux: A few days after the controversy, the dean expressed to me his support. It was a private conversation, and no press release from the university was written or anything. Of course if he went public with it, it would have been a great gesture, but I didn't really need that back then.

All I cared about was the support shown by my family and the UNEF, the latter who published press releases. Back then, the president of National UNEF was Lila le Bas and she was interviewed by several media outlets regarding students' issues. Eventually, some questions about my controversy came up, and she always showed maximum support, saying that they'll continue fighting for me.

Al Jazeera: What do you think of the role of media in how they portray Muslims and Islam in France?

Pougetoux: The real problem is, as minorities, we are not represented in the media. It's not even a question of religions. Minorities in general are misrepresented. The traditional media outlets are pretty reactionary on some many topics.

Old generations are still present in newsrooms, and analyse situations through their own prism, due to the lack of minorities present. This is a huge problem. They cover stories through one angle: the 50-year-old Caucasian man. If the newsroom were full of minorities, maybe this all stigmatisation wouldn't happen. There would be more discussion about it. The stigmatisation of so many communities is a direct consequence of lack of diversity in the newsroom.

Al Jazeera: What do you think of France's war against the visibility of Islam in the country? Do you think these laws go against laïcité (secularism) or do they cement that?

Pougetoux: It's neither way I think. I feel like both are the extreme and this is scary that it's only seen as a binary choice. I understand France's position on secularism. However, we're the country of [ Liberté, Égalité, Fraternité ], and it's a freedom to wear wherever you want. This applies to everything, not only to the veil. France always adopts a reactionary process. They react to a situation. When the 2011 full-face veil (niqab) ban was passed, France was reacting to a certain context.

Yet, there will always be Muslim women in France, walking in the streets, veiled or not. A few weeks ago, another controversy hit France about a sport hijab being sold by Decathlon, which resulted in Decathlon removing it from its stores. But I will continue to practise a sport no matter what the government and the French society say. It's insane how every time we go back to the same controversy. Wearing a hijab is legal, I'm not doing something illegal here. There's an everlasting barrier here, on what women should wear or not. It's exhausting.

Al Jazeera: How do you feel about giving interviews to media outlets who would only want to discuss your hijab?

Pougetoux: Before the controversy, when I was getting interviewed by the media, they'd only ask me about the student issues. The veil wasn't a problem to them. No one asked me a question about my hijab when I did interviews with huge networks such as BFMTV or France 3. Then after the 10 seconds interview on M6 channel (which kick-started the controversy), the journalists' approach totally changed.

After the controversy, journalists offered me to react to this. But quickly, they'd ask me to comment on other Islam-related controversies. They quickly put me in the box. To them, I became the Muslim women's spokesperson. It was frustrating.

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French student on hijab, media and being used as political puppet

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Paris, France - Last year, the 19-year-old elected leader of the Paris-based Sorbonne branch of the French National Students' Union (UNEF) found herself at the centre of a frenetic controversy. Maryam Pougetoux had appeared on a brief segment on national TV following demonstrations across France by students protesting against the changes to ways they can choose their universities after high school.

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* Note: This story contains strong language in English and French.
France is the place where for decades you weren't supposed to talk about someone's blackness, unless you said it in English. Today, we're going to meet the people who took a very French approach to change that.
Further reading:

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France is the place where for decades you weren't supposed to talk about someone's blackness, unless you said it in English. Today, we're going to meet the people who took a very French approach to change that. (Note: This story contains strong language in English and French.)

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Qantara.de - Dialogue with the Islamic World

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I'm interviewing a woman in Southern Jordan. She could hardly be dressed more conservatively. Headscarf, long dress, no make-up. And yet, she is clear and uncompromising as she begins telling me about her work as a local councillor in Madaba province. "Women are not content to be held back anymore," she claims, once she has outlined how difficult it was to find her voice in male-dominated, rural Jordan and how she is fighting to have women's interests taken into consideration on the provincial council. She uses all her influence to empower women and support their projects. She wants to go much further, she says.

Asma Rashahneh, 50, is just one of number of very active Arab women. An enormous wave of social change is underway from Lebanon to Yemen, Jordan to Morocco, from the Emirates to Sudan. Notions of the family and ideas about marriage are changing. Younger Arab women expect more from life than their mothers and are less easily satisfied.

What was the exception a generation ago is increasingly the everyday norm. Women are establishing businesses, feeding their families as single parents, working as sportswomen, artists, lawyers and politicians. In their free time, they are discovering new freedoms beyond the watchful eyes of their brothers or fathers. They are protesting for their rights or fighting for a new, feminist interpretation of the Koran.
A lopsided view
Nevertheless, these changes in women's lives barely feature in public discourse in the West. Instead, the lives of women in the Islamic world are reduced to forced marriage, honour killings and male violence. The publishing industry produces an endless supply of books like "I choose freedom. How I survived forced marriage and oppression and found hope" (published in German by Adeo).

Most Arab women are more likely to have problems struggling to pay the rent, facilitating their children's educations and their own personal development. Yet in the eyes of popular Western "enlightenment literature", Middle Eastern women are only able to lead independent lives when they cut all ties with their cultural and religious roots.

The gleeful obsession with grisly individual cases blocks our understanding of the struggles, aspirations and contradictions in Arab women's lives. Extreme examples have little to say about the reality of these women's existence. The media's ongoing debate about the headscarf only serves to strengthen preconceptions.

Thus, the notion of the "oppressed Arab woman" whose headscarf or hijab is the key symbol of her desolate existence has become an especially persistent stereotype. Today, it is stock fixture in the opinions of a broad middle class. The image of a woman in a headscarf triggers a slide show in the collective mind, which shows a Middle Eastern woman playing the role of the weak, helpless Other. This hides the reality of the changing lives of women in the region from view.

There is no doubt that Arab women experience discrimination where their rights and their society are concerned. Discrimination and sexualised violence are grave problems. They are to be staunchly condemned. Like Christianity, Judaism and reputedly tolerant religions such as Buddhism and Hinduism, Islam has reinforced and legitimised its patriarchal structures over centuries.

Yet the image of the ʺoppressed Arab woman" disregards crucial factors. For a start, it does not reflect the whole breadth of gender relations in the region. In the Arab world, as elsewhere, there are normal families in which parents lovingly encourage their daughters (and their sons) and support them in following their own paths. Alongside the macho pashas, there are fathers and husbands who are happy to compromise and live out their relationships as equals. More than anything, those who fight for greater women's rights in their society deserve to have their commitments recognised.

This image has also become a stereotype because it is simplistic in its pitting supposedly free sisters in the West against wretched victims in Arab countries. Muslim societies are assumed to have sweeping patriarchal structures, while it is claimed that Western societies are pictures of progressive modernity, says Swiss social anthropologist Annemarie Sancar. Neither of these absolute views are correct.

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An enduring stereotype: The West's gleeful obsession with the 'oppressed Arab woman' - Qantara.de

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The stereotype of the oppressed Arab woman continues to dominate public discourse throughout Europe. Not only is this skewed image altering the perception of changing notions of family and roles within the Arab world, it is also an expression of our own cultural insecurity, writes Claudia Mende

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Rabat - According to a survey by the French Institute of Public Opinion (IFOP), 42% of Muslims in France have experienced religious discrimination at least once in their lives.

The survey found that 60% of women wearing a headscarf were subject to discrimination, while 37% of them have been a victim to verbal harassment or defamatory insults. The study, however, revealed that 44% of Muslim women who do not wear headscarves found themselves in similar situations.

The survey found that13% of incidents of religious discrimination happened at police control points, while, 17% happened at job interviews. A further 14 % of incidents occurred while the victims were looking to rent or buy accommodation.

Muslims aged between 30 and 40 years are more vulnerable to discrimination, with an average of 46% of women and 38% of men experiencing religious discrimination.

The IFOP conducted the study from August 26 to September 18, based on a sample of 1007 Muslims aged 15 and above.

Discrimination and racism are not centered only on Muslims but also affect non-Muslim communities.

The IFOP pointed out that one Muslim in four (24%) was exposed to verbal aggression during their lifetime, compared to 9% among non-Muslims. In addition, 7% of Muslims were physically attacked, compared to 3% of non-Muslims.

In France over the last five years, approximately 40% of Muslims have been the subject of racist behavior, compared to 17% among non-Muslims. Around 16% of the discrimination cases were religiously motivated, and 15% due to the skin color were racial.

On October 11, Julien Odoul, a member of France's National Rally (RN), asked a Muslim woman to remove her hijab while she was accompanying her son and his class on a school trip to explore the mission of the democratic assembly.

Odoul and his colleagues asked Marie Guite Dufay, the President of the Regional Council, to have the woman either remove her hijab or leave the meeting.

Dufay, however, replied that she can only intervene when someone exhibits disruptive or offensive behavior, reported Le Bien Public .

The Muslim woman subsequently left the room with her son after the argument. Following the event, pictures of the son crying after witnessing the discrimination his mother had experienced were widely shared on social media.

Public figures and officials strongly criticized Odoul for the racist move.

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Nearly Half of France's Muslim Population Experience Discrimination

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Rabat - According to a survey by the French Institute of Public Opinion (IFOP), 42% of Muslims in France have experienced religious discrimination at least once in their lives. The survey found that 60% of women wearing a headscarf were subject to discrimination, while 37% of them have been a victim to verbal harassment or defamatory insults.

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Last week, in the French town of Bayonne, an 84-year-old man attempted to set fire to a mosque. When two passersby tried to stop him, he shot and wounded them both, before he was eventually arrested. That same day in Paris, President Emmanuel Macron was meeting Muslim leaders at the Elysee Palace - not to discuss threats against their community, but to urge them to step up efforts to combat religious extremism.

The day's events were just part of a vicious cycle of recrimination and demonisation that has erupted in France since the stabbing in Paris on October 3 of four policemen by a colleague who had converted to Islam.

Internationally, the incident attracted little attention, especially when compared with the mass killings in Paris in November 2015 and Nice in July 2016.

But in France, it has sparked a deeply concerning escalation of Islamophobia - one that is being fuelled at least in part by the words and actions of Macron and other political leaders.

In his speech at a ceremony honouring the four slain policemen, Macron called for "a society of vigilance" to act as a barrier against the "Islamist Hydra". He also called on the nation to rise up against "this underground Islamism that corrupts the children of France", by identifying "the little nothings that become terrible tragedies." These are the fight of the nation "at school, at work, in the areas of daily life".

Three days later, a local right-wing politician in the city of Dijon turned on a Muslim mother who was wearing a headscarf during an elementary school visit to her local regional council. He asked the council's president to order the mother to remove the scarf or leave the assembly, saying her presence was unacceptable given the police killings.

That, in turn, thrust the fraught question of what Muslim women wear back into the public spotlight, all against the emotionally-charged background of the stabbings. A slew of television and radio debates followed - none of which included any headscarf-wearing women. On the same day as the attack on the mosque in Bayonne, the French Senate began considering a bill that would ban women from wearing headscarves while accompanying school trips. In 2011, France banned the wearing of full-face veils in public, while public officials including teachers are not allowed to wear headscarves

Macron has said that no one should be stigmatised for wearing the headscarf or veil. Yet his government's efforts to combat extremist violence increasingly look like a cultural assault on Islamic religious practices. France's interior minister, in a speech to the National Assembly, recently listed conservative religious behaviour, including "regular and ostentatious" praying, growing a beard and declining to exchange kisses with a woman on greeting, as potential signs of radicalisation. A public university outside Paris, Cergy Pontoise, subsequently asked its staff to report students who might be displaying a similar list of indicators of orthodox practice - later apologising following an outcry.

France already has an aggressive regime of measures that overwhelmingly target Muslims, first introduced under the state of emergency that followed the November 2015 Paris attacks, and then passed into law two years ago. Individuals may be assigned to residence, subject to restrictions on their freedom of movement, subject to house searches or dismissed from employment, based largely on secret intelligence information without due process. Speech that is judged to be an "apology for terrorism" can also result in prosecution.

Against this background, individuals are reporting being called into police stations after anonymous tip-offs expressing concern about their behaviour. One woman who converted to Islam published an account of such an interview session on her Facebook account on October 17, which included questions about her mosque, her husband, her family and the way she dressed.

"It is truly humiliating to find oneself alone interrogated by two men, obliged to justify oneself and one's choices," she wrote.

Where does this end? Discrimination against minority communities is not only unlawful, but it is also counterproductive for two reasons. First, repression and discriminatory treatment invariably breed resentment and reaction. And second, relations with affected communities, who are the best allies of the police in the effort to maintain public safety, are damaged. A recent article in Le Monde, for example,noted that of the 59 "terrorist" attacks that the Ministry of Interior claims have been "prevented" on French territory in the last six years, 58 have relied on human intelligence sources.

France needs to regain the battered confidence of its Muslim citizens. And it needs to start by ending this witch-hunt.
The views expressed in this article are the author's own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera's editorial stance.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Lanna Hollo

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Last week, in the French town of Bayonne, an 84-year-old man attempted to set fire to a mosque. When two passersby tried to stop him, he shot and wounded them both, before he was eventually arrested.

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Rabat - French President Emmanuel Macron is at the center of a controversy after his comments on the Muslim veil, or hijab, as it is known in Islam.

On Thursday, October 24, the French president told reporters that the wearing of hijabs in public spaces is not his "business."

"However, in public services, at school and while educating children, the headscarf issue is my business. That is what secularism is about," he added.

The French president that in some neighborhoods in France, "some people use the headscarf as a symbol to break one's connection with the republic."

Macron's comments came two weeks after French far-right politician Julien Odoul requested that a veiled woman remove her hijab at a plenary meeting of the Regional Council of Burgundy-Franche-Comte on Friday, October 11.

The Muslim woman was accompanying her son at a school activity for children to explore the mission of the "democratic assembly."

The attack on the Muslim woman prompted discussions on the wearing of hijabs in public spaces.

Macron's statement received drew criticism from both Muslims and parties against the hijab in public spaces.

France has a rapidly growing Muslim population.

World Population Review said that the population in France is estimated to be 65.10 million in 2019.

Muslims represent 8% of the population or six million. France is also one of the European countries with the highest levels of Islamophobia.

The Organization against Islamophobia in France (CCIF) announced that Islamophobic attacks by in 2018 compared with 2017.

Recently, the deputy editor of French newspaper Le Figaro Yves Thread said on national television that he hates Islam religion.

"If I see a Muslim woman on the same bus as I am, I'll leave the bus," he said during debate show "Le Grand Soir" (the Big Evening) broadcast on LCI on October 14 ,

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Macron: Hijab in Public Spaces is 'None of My Business'

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Rabat - French President Emmanuel Macron is at the center of a controversy after his comments on the Muslim veil, or hijab, as it is known in Islam. On Thursday, October 24, the French president told reporters that the wearing of hijabs in public spaces is not his "business."

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Rabat - French police have arrested a gunman after he opened fire near a mosque in Bayonne, southwest France.

Police arrested the gunman near his home after the incident.

A statement from the Pyrenees Atlantiques prefecture reports the gunman injured at least two people aged 74 and 78. The two victims are seriously wounded.

Police reportedly seized a gas cylinder in from the suspect's car.

The incident took place in front of the mosque at about 2:30 p.m local time on Monday, October 28.

Reports said that the suspect was in his 80s and that the gunman also tried to throw an "incendiary device at the building."

The attack comes amid rising concerns over Islamophobia in France. The Hijab or Muslim veil is a hot topic in France after far-right politicians from the National Party openly attacked a Muslim woman in a meeting on October 14 for wearing the hijab.

The issue urged French President Emmanuel Macron to intervene, drawing criticism from both opposition and Muslims.

Macron said on October 24 that the wearing of hijab in public spaces is not his business.

"However, in public services, at school and while educating children, the issue is my business. That is what secularism is about," he added.

Muslims represent 8% of the French population estimated at 65.10 million this year.

France is also one of the European countries with the highest levels of Islamophobia.

The Organization against Islamophobia in France (CCIF) has said that Islamophobic attacks by in 2018 compared with 2017.

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Gunman Opens Fire Near Mosque in Southwest France, Injures 2

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Rabat - French police have arrested a gunman after he opened fire near a mosque in Bayonne, southwest France. Police arrested the gunman near his home after the incident. A statement from the Pyrenees Atlantiques prefecture reports the gunman injured at least two people aged 74 and 78.

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Rabat - Amid anti-radicalization debates in France, a university in the Paris region has provided its employees with a list of what it considers signs of radicalization.

In an email to its staff on Monday, October 14, the University of Cergy-Pontoise urged employees to "signal events that may have serious consequences," referring to behavior and physical appearance considered to hide signals of Islamist radicalization.

The email, in accordance with the l by France's Emmanuel Macron to be "collectively vigilant against the Islamist Hydra," listed a typically Muslim attire and Islamic ethical recommendations as potential signs of radicalization. In the email, the university requested that its staff report fellow employees or students whose behavior they deem suspicious.

According to the list, sent to professors in the form of an Excel file, growing a beard, wearing short trousers, or a jellaba should all be considered as suspicious signals of radicalization. Also cited is a person's "sudden change of conviction" or "heightened interest in international affairs."

The "sudden change of conviction" mostly has to do, according to the list, with a perceived refusal to defer to "women's authority" in professional settings or the "non-consumption of alcohol."

As far as the "warning" list is concerned, anyone who stops consuming alcohol, starts exhibiting religious or creationist tendencies in their behavior or during conversations, declines handshakes, "suddenly stops consuming pork," or even starts showing interest in "discussing the role of women's " in society is considered suspicious.

The document echoes a recent call from the French ministry of interior, which, in the aftermath of the murder of four police officers by a fellow, radicalized officer, called on French society to collectively tackle the country's Islamist radicalization issue.

The French government called on the entire country to be "vigilant" against the "invisible signs of radicalization," invoking long beards and "a regular and ostentatious practice of prayer" as potential radicalization signs.

When asked to comment on the move from the University of Cergy-Pontoise, however, a spokesperson from the French Ministry of Higher Education denied any links with the government's call, saying that the university's email was "not reflective of government's directives."

Likewise, in a subsequent message on Twitter, the university apologized for the "inconvenience," tweeting that the move was "in no way a warning system." Rather, argued the tweet, the university's action was simply designed to help "the people who may be affected by these phenomena."

For his part, Francois Germinet, the president of the university, stopped short of conceding that the move was discriminatory or particularly offensive to the university's Muslim community. He merely told France's Liberation newspaper that the email's list "had no sense. Therefore, the message has simply and purely been removed."

The controversy comes as France grapples with the resurgence of Islamist radicalization in the wake of the murder of the police officers. Since then, there have been rampant, repeated calls in France's conservative circles condemning France's supposed "cultural surrender" to Islam and Muslims.

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French University Lists Wearing Jellaba, Beard, Declining Handshakes as Signs of Radicalization

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Rabat - Amid anti-radicalization debates in France, a university in the Paris region has provided its employees with a list of what it considers signs of radicalization. In an email to its staff on Monday, October 14, the University of Cergy-Pontoise urged employees to "signal events that may have serious consequences," referring to behavior and physical appearance considered to hide signals of Islamist radicalization.

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Rabat - French newspaper will publish, October 16, an open letter to the president of the French Republic, Emmanuel Macron, calling for an end to Islamophobia.

Ninety French public figures have called on Macron to condemn verbal attacks on Muslims after members of a French political party publicly insulted a Muslim woman.

On October 11, France's National Rally members called on the president of the regional council, Marie Guite Dufay, to ask a woman accompanying her son in a school activity to leave a meeting at the Regional Council of Burgundy-Franche-Comte because she was wearing a veil or hijab.

Photos circulating online show the woman's son in tears after seeing his mother subjected to insults in front of his peers.

The request, which came from the leader of RN Julien Odoul stirred controversy in France, drawing criticism. "It's the republic, it's secularity. It's the law of the Republic, no ostentatious [religious] symbols." Said Odoul, exploiting France's secularity to promote his own agenda.

"We cannot start the session with a minute of silence for the victims of the police headquarters and accept that [the hijab]," he added, explicitly linking the mother in a veil to the recent attack in the Paris police headquarters which left four police officers dead.

The collective statement to denounce hatred against Muslims in France comes as a direct response to the RN incident, among other public displays of religious hatred.

"How long will we keep tolerating hatred against Muslims," the French public figures asked, calling for an end to the growing tolerance of hate speech among French politicians and journalists.

Cited by Le Monde, the condemnatory message emphasized that such actions constitute "incredible violence and hatred for all those children."

"By our cowardice, by our renunciations, we have contributed little by little to letting [these behaviors] pass, and accepting them."

The list of public figures who have condemned the RN's move includes French actor Omar Sy, Sociologist Christine Delphy, and Ce French screenwriter Celine Sciamma.

Le Monde's decision to publish the statement calling for an end to islamophobia comes after the deputy editor of France's Le Figaro publicly stated that he "hates the Muslim religion," and that he believes it is his "right" to make openly criticize a religion on national television

Islamophobic attacks in France increased by 52% in 2018 compared with 2017, according to the Organization against Islamophobia in France (CCIF).

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French Public Figures Call on Emmanuel Macron to 'End Islamophobia'

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Rabat - French newspaper will publish, October 16, an open letter to the president of the French Republic, Emmanuel Macron, calling for an end to Islamophobia. Ninety French public figures have called on Macron to condemn verbal attacks on Muslims after members of a French political party publicly insulted a Muslim woman.

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France Debates Where to Teach Arabic: Public School or Local Mosque? - The New York Times

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Arabic-language students at the Claude Monet high school in Paris. Here, the teacher opens the lesson by using LinkedIn to show students how many jobs are open to them if they speak Arabic. Credit Credit Sara Farid for The New York Times

ROMAINVILLE, France - Early on Sunday mornings, Habiba Hatem, 9, prepares her own breakfast, grabs her flashy pink school bag and jumps into her father's car - bound for Arabic lessons at her local mosque in a suburb north of Paris.

Colorful sketches of how to perform ritual washings decorate the walls of the classroom, along with drawings of butterflies, cars and carrots, with their Arabic names underneath.

"Today we are going to do a dialogue about 'duyuf' coming for dinner," the teacher tells Habiba and a dozen other boys and girls ages 9 to 17, all born in France. "Duyuf means guests," she says, writing the word on the blackboard.

Habiba's grandparents came from Tunisia in the 1960s, and her father believes it is important that his child stays connected to her roots.

But the public school she attends does not offer Arabic classes, so she makes the weekly trip to the mosque in Romainville, a part of the Seine-Saint-Denis department north of Paris, which is home to a large immigrant community.

The Hatem family's situation is a common one in France.

About three million people use Arabic on a daily basis in France, making it the country's most spoken foreign language, according to the Culture Ministry. But Arabic is barely taught in public schools, so mosques and private associations have stepped in to address this educational gap.

Now, the government is growing worried about an increasing number of students learning Arabic outside the state's oversight.

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Habiba Hatem was dropped off by her father at a mosque for an Arabic-language lesson on a recent Sunday morning. Credit Sara Farid for The New York Times

As part of France's fight against extremism, the Education Ministry announced in September a plan to take back control of Arabic teaching "in order to provide a secular curriculum rather than the one offered by associations, which can drift toward radicalization," the ministry's spokeswoman said.

Jean-Michel Blanquer, the education minister, says he wants to give Arabic "prestige," as it is "a great literary language."

While the ministry wants to promote the study of Arabic and make classes more readily available, it has not provided many details about the plan, other than to say that Arabic teaching will be strengthened alongside that of Russian and Chinese.

And most French schools will have to start their Arabic programs from scratch.

Only 0.2 percent of students in public middle and high schools in France took Arabic classes in the 2017-2018 school year, putting the language far behind the widely taught English, Spanish and German.

In addition to the pedagogical challenges of jump-starting Arabic programs in public schools, there are social and political obstacles, as well.

Rime Abdel Nabi, who teaches Arabic at two public high schools, as well as at Sorbonne University in Paris, said public school principals were reluctant to open classes, saying, "'No, we don't have enough Arabs here," or "'No, we don't want to attract Arabs.'"

The ministry's plans is causing particular alarm on the political right. Luc Ferry, a former education minister, suggested that the measure was tantamount to allowing Islamism in public schools.

Nicolas Dupont-Aignan, a right-wing lawmaker who endorsed Marine Le Pen in the second round of the 2017 presidential election, said, "With the pretext of fighting against fundamentalism, Blanquer is paving the way to the Islamization of France."

A student at Claude Monet high school with an Arabic textbook. "Offering secular Arabic classes in public school prevents the language from becoming the hostage of religion or extremism," says the school's principal. Credit Sara Farid for The New York Times

But many leaders in the Arabic community support the Education Ministry's plan.

Azzedine Benjemaa, the president of the Muslim association at the mosque where Habiba attends classes, said the public school classes would be of higher quality than religious ones. The Quran-based courses at the mosque, he said, can rely too heavily on memorization rather than allowing students to express themselves.

"Our professors have a lot of passion and good will, but they are not trained teachers," Mr. Benjemaa said. "They didn't pass national exams."

Habiba's class at the mosque starts with a prayer. That is not how lessons begin at the Claude Monet high school in the 13th arrondissement of Paris, one of the few French public schools offering Arabic.

Here, the teacher opens the lesson by using LinkedIn to show students how many jobs are open to them if they speak Arabic. One student, Imène, 13, used to learn Arabic at the Grand Mosque of Paris, but stopped going once she started taking classes in her public middle school.

Marianne Cossé, the school's principal, said that offering Arabic prevented families with Arab origins from sending their children into the hands of people who could "radicalize" them.

"Offering secular Arabic classes in public school prevents the language from becoming the hostage of religion or extremism," she said.

That position is supported by a report on the spread of political Islam in France by the Institut Montaigne, a policy research think tank. "Arabic classes have become the best means for Islamists to attract young people into their mosques and schools," the report states.

But many argue that the government's rhetoric around the new policy sometimes dangerously conflates the Arabic language, Islam, political Islam and religious fundamentalism.

Habiba with her father and grandfather at home. Her grandparents came from Tunisia in the 1960s, and her father believes it is important that she keeps a connection to her roots. Credit Sara Farid for The New York Times

"While the education minister underlines that learning Arabic at school celebrates Arabic culture and civilization, this decision is mainly taken in the name of the fight against Islamist radicalization," said Sarah Mazouz, a researcher at the state-run National Center for Scientific Research.

Ms. Mazouz, who studies discrimination and naturalization, said that such an approach confirmed an "anchored stereotype that Arabic is the language of fanatics and obscurantists."

Arabic has long been a popular and uncontroversial subject at public universities in France, where the language is viewed as a valuable asset for careers in business and diplomacy. At Sciences Po, an elite university in Paris, there are 37 teachers of Arabic, compared with 180 such teachers across all of France's public schools.

But at the primary- and secondary-school levels, the Education Ministry's plan has spurred resistance because of the role French schools are expected to play in shaping a shared national identity, Ms. Mazouz said.

"In France there is a strong belief that it is the public school that forms the French, that produces French citizens no matter their origin or their parents' history," Ms. Mazouz said.

While university students who have been through the process of "becoming French" are encouraged to learn Arabic, any attempt to teach it in public schools, she added, has been perceived by some as a deviation from that path, one that will promote a hyphenated identity of French-Arabs.

What does Habiba, who speaks French at school, with her friends and at home think of her own efforts to learn Arabic?

When her school homework gets intense, she said, she wishes she did not have to go to Arabic classes. But she needs to be ready for the summer, she said, for a visit to her cousins in Tunisia.

"Of course I want to learn Arabic," she said. "All my family speaks it."

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page A9 of the New York edition with the headline: Divided France Debates Where to Teach Arabic. Order Reprints | Today's Paper | Subscribe

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France Debates Where to Teach Arabic: Public School or Local Mosque?

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ROMAINVILLE, France - Early on Sunday mornings, Habiba Hatem, 9, prepares her own breakfast, grabs her flashy pink school bag and jumps into her father's car - bound for Arabic lessons at her local mosque in a suburb north of Paris.

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"I'm trying to bring a different perspective as much as I can."

Can a grassroots media project help improve the representation of minorities in French media? Follow Widad Ketfi on her assignment:...

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At this year's Paris edition of Nuit des idees (the Night of Ideas), Nigerian writer Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie made two remarks that caused a stir. The more widely publicised one was her gentle rebuke of interviewer Caroline Broue's question as to whether there are bookstores in Nigeria. Adichie replied, "I think it reflects very poorly on French people that you have to ask me that question."

The second statement provoked discussion among African academics. Asked by a member of the audience what she thought of postcolonial theory, Adichie answered: "Postcolonial theory? I don't know what it means. I think it is something that professors made up because they needed to get jobs."

African academics interpreted Adichie's comment on postcolonial theory as a dismissal of the theory as an important analytical tool or of the theoretical work of "Third World" scholars.

However, this interpretation misses the overall context in which these remarks were made - that of France wrestling with its Anglo-Saxon nemesis for cultural power on the global stage on the backs of people of colour.

Anglo-Saxons are racists, the French are not

France has always imagined itself as a country that is free of discrimination against black people. In the view of the French majority, that status of "racist" is reserved for the Anglo-Saxons. The French contrast themselves with Americans who, they say, are racist because of the violent segregation in their society. The French, on the other hand, are supposed to be "colour-blind".

Towards the end of the interview, Adichie actually referred to this popular idea in France. She pointed out that a French government official insisted in front of her that there is no racism in France, something many "Anglophone" Africans get told in France.

Postcolonial theory confined colonialism's impact to the past and most of all, diluted nationalist struggles...

But French racism is no less disorienting than the American one. French racism constantly swings between universality and particularity, making Africans seem like they can never be rooted in one place.

Exemplified by Jean-Paul Sartre's famous work "Black Orpheus", the French intellectual tradition requires Africans to claim a universal human identity. But when the Africans do so, it demands that they reclaim their African culture. The African never wins in what Sartre called a "temporary dialectic", because once the African affirms an African identity, the African is told that that affirmation alienates them from human freedom.

Similarly, the Paris interview began with Broue's questions that required Adichie to express reservations about her work being considered "African literature" because often that tag reduces African literature from artistic to anthropological work.

But once Adichie talked about wanting to be seen as just a writer and a human being, the next set of questions swung her to the other extreme of particularity. Broue talked of Adichie growing up in Nigeria, speaking Igbo but writing in English, not being the "typical" Nigerian child, writing on the theme of military coups in her novels - all of which crystallised into the controversial question about whether there are bookstores in Nigeria or not. In other words, Adichie is both Nigerian and American, but at the same time neither Nigerian, nor American.

This confusing pendulum is a central theme of postcolonial theory.

Postcolonial theory vs pan-African thought

Postcolonial theory became popular in Western academia which glorified hybrid identities and multiculturalism. From their positions in prestigious American universities, migrant scholars from countries that suffered under imperialism could criticise an empire for its past, while avoiding materialist critiques of the continuing, exploitative relationship between the empire and the Global South.

Postcolonial theory confined colonialism's impact to the past and most of all, diluted nationalist struggles by claiming that the primary project of nationalists, such as anti-colonial theorist Frantz Fanon, was a cultural one: to reject essentialism and embrace a universal humanity.

The other benefit of postcolonial theory for the empire was that it alienated African-born scholars in the US from African American scholarship, given that African American scholars (unlike their migrant peers) were unwilling to play down the critique of material conditions of black peoples.

Despite these weaknesses, the popularity of postcolonial theory in the American academy spread to African universities. The theory gave African scholars in Africa a temporary reprieve in the continued American dominance of knowledge production, because scholars were excited to read rigorous critiques of empire by scholars of African and Asian origin. The scholars, therefore, missed the nuanced, but important distinction between the postcolonial thought and nationalist pan-African thought.

It is this aspect that makes postcolonial theory resonate in France. Both postcolonial theory and the French universal-particular pendulum entrench a feeling of rootlessness in African intellectuals, by endorsing the criticism of empire that is cathartic for the West, but not strong enough to inspire a pan-African intellectual tradition that supports both cultural and material liberation.

France's intellectual anxiety

One must also bear in mind that the Nuit des idees event with Adichie was held at the French foreign affairs office located at Quai d'Orsay in Paris. France has always targeted African intellectuals as part of their goal to assert French dominance in the world of ideas.

Successive French governments have been worried about the star status Francophone African intellectuals and their writings have gained in the United States. For instance, Frantz Fanon and Senegalese historian Cheikh Anta Diop are more widely read in American academia, largely thanks to African American scholars. Several American universities host professors and writers from the Francophone world such as Manthia Diawara at New York University, Maryse Conde at Columbia University and Alain Mabanckou at University of California, Los Angeles.

In fact, in 2007, then presidential candidate Nicolas Sarkozy warned that France was losing its cultural influence because there were hardly any chairs for Francophone studies in France to "retain" the literary talent of people like Diawara, Conde, and Mabanckou. Sarkozy lamented: "The soul and the future of la Francophonie are less and less French, and paradoxically, more and more Anglo-Saxon. Francophonie saved by America? That caps it all!"

And so France still has a reason to worry. While on his African tour, newly elected French President Emmanuel Macron faced an increasingly hostile African youth and had to field questions from African students about the French treasury guaranteeing the CFA currency, and about justice for the pan-Africanist revolutionary Thomas Sankara.

In other words, Broue's interview of Adichie was a clear political project. Adichie's comment on postcolonial theory was on point, and the reaction to it exposed how the sibling rivalry between France and the Anglo-Saxons continues to fragment intellectual production by people of African origin and descent.
The views expressed in this article are the author's own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera's editorial stance.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Wandia Njoya

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French racism, anxiety and love for postcolonialism

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At this year's Paris edition of Nuit des idees (the Night of Ideas), Nigerian writer Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie made two remarks that caused a stir. The more widely publicised one was her gentle rebuke of interviewer Caroline Broue's question as to whether there are bookstores in Nigeria.

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Paris, France - In March, police killed Shaoyo Liu, a 56-year-old Chinese immigrant, at his home in the 19th arrondissement in Paris during a raid.

The officer who fired the fatal shot said he was acting in self-defence, claiming that the father-of-five wounded a policeman with a "bladed weapon" - an account his teenage daughter, who witnessed the killing, denies.

The family lawyer, Calvin Job, said Liu was preparing his children's dinner and was cutting fish with scissors. An investigation is ongoing.

"Ten to 15 people die every year from police brutality. They [police] are never punished," says Rokhaya Diallo, an author, film director, journalist and activist, as she sips on a hot chocolate in a cafe one kilometre from where Liu was murdered.

"I think here, there is denial. If you read the newspapers here, you have very good coverage of police brutality in the US. You know the victims' names. But of events here, you won't read anything. Even when these national stories are covered, the victim's race is not mentioned."

Diallo spends her days fighting for racial equality and dissecting the sensitivities of French society and politics, from racism and secularism to the decline of the left.

Al Jazeera spoke to Diallo following the recent presidential election, which was won by Emmanuel Macron, a 39-year-old centrist who beat his far-right rival Marine Le Pen with more than 65 percent of the vote.
Al Jazeera: Shortly after the election result, you tweeted that there was "no cause for celebration". What did you mean by that?
Diallo: Marine Le Pen got 10.6 million voters. In 2002, her father Jean-Marie Le Pen - who also reached the second round - got 5.5 million. She was able to make the Front National (NF) mainstream and settle it into the French political landscape.

Yes, she's lost - we have avoided the worst option. But I'm afraid of the way her ideas will spread further across other parties. Political parties have been adopting far-right ideas to appease such voters for decades.

Many have tried to send signals to Le Pen's supporters by, for example, supporting certain policies that were Islamophobic, or those that favour of [excessive] law and order such as the state of emergency. That's something the NF would have backed if it was in power.

The state of emergency was meant to last 12 days. It's been one and a half years. For a democratic country, it's very concerning. We are being ushered to a police state. None of the candidates said what they would do with that. Macron said it was not the best solution, he hasn't said whether he will stop it.
READ MORE: French police 'abuse' Muslims under emergency laws
The state of emergency gives police exceptional powers: home arrests, more searches, they can seize data from computers - all without authorisation from judges.

Thousands of people, mostly Muslims, have been searched, and there has not been any results. Experts of terrorism say this is not an effective way to stop terrorism. It's just a signal to reassure people that [the state] is acting, but it has no effect.
Al Jazeera: Some people would say the state of emergency is a small sacrifice to pay for security ...
Diallo: We should not give up our basic human rights. Many people have accepted the fact they are not treated as citizens, especially Muslim and black people. A lot of young people are used to being stopped and frisked, they don't even consider whether it is legal or not. They should not be searched in this way. Most have not done anything wrong.

It only affects one part of the population. The other does not see it.

However, the state of emergency was used during COP21 in November 2015 to arrest ecologist activists. Also, last year, there were protests against a labour law. Many people and activists were denied the right to protest. The state of emergency has obviously been extended and used for other purposes.
Al Jazeera: How did you personally feel the moment Macron was announced as the next French president?
Diallo: I was relieved it was not Le Pen but not satisfied because Macron supports a neoliberal agenda. He will probably damage the French social model. Le Pen supporters who are in fragile situations and facing economic challenges could become poorer under Macron, and have more reason to support her.

He doesn't have a strong agenda on ecology. I have not heard him say anything [useful] on that topic. He has not addressed anything related to discrimination. These issues are interconnected. Minorities are over-represented in the sections of society that face poverty. The effects of climate change can be linked to migration.

Macron is trying to dismantle social laws, the labour laws. He will face many protests on the streets.

Le Pen supporters will not change. They think that we need a change. They say: "The only party that has not been tried is the NF."
Al Jazeera: In her campaign, Le Pen denounced immigration as a menace and rallied against the European Union. She won more than 30 percent of the vote. What does this mean for France, and what is Macron's greatest challenge?
Diallo: To pull people together, there is a deep divide here. To make people in the same country feel as though they share the same destiny. People should not feel like there is one part of the population threatening the other.

We need to reframe the way we think of us as French people. It's not a white Christian country any more and this is something that really needs to be thought about. The narrative should be changed.
Al Jazeera: Although it is illegal for the French state to collect data on ethnicity and race, there are various estimates regarding demographics. Of 67 million people, more than five million are Muslim, some five million are black, and around 500,000 are Jewish. Why is racism still a problem given this diversity?
Diallo: It comes from the country's history. France was a slave-trading colonial power. Many French people here now are the kids of those from French departments of overseas territories, such as the Caribbean, people whose ancestors were slaves. But they really inherited the status of their ancestors. Today, we still have colonial policies.

The state of emergency was created during the war in Algeria in 1955 to prevent activists fighting for Algerian independence gathering on French soil. It [was] used in New Caledonia, a French territory, and during the uprising in 2005 that took place in the suburbs. (In 2005, protests erupted after the deaths of Arab and black teenagers - Zyed Benna, 17, and Bouna Traore, 15 - who were electrocuted after running away from police.) Most of the people uprising then were of colonial descent.

France has a deep problem of institutional racism that has its roots in history. We need to face it and address it really clearly.
Al Jazeera: You have explored the entrenched economic links between France and Africa. How was the continent involved in the election?
Diallo: During the 1980s, several dictators in Africa were supporting candidates with cash money. They were coming here with full suitcases of money.

Still today, Africa is really part of financing the campaigns.
INTERACTIVE: France's footprint in the world
There are still French interests in Africa. French commodities companies such as Areva and Total are still all there. The French army is still in countries in Africa, even if those countries are supposed to be independent.

The currency in former French colonies is named the CFA Franc - it's aligned with the euro. They don't have their own money.
Al Jazeera: In February when Macron visited Algeria, he condemned France's colonial past, calling it "a crime against humanity", a comment that upset the far-right. Was Macron's speech a positive development?
Diallo: It was a good thing to say colonisation was a crime against humanity. It was really symbolic and interesting to see a French politician recognising the fact that in France's history, it really denied human rights while invading Algeria.

Al Jazeera: From immigrants who became citizens decades ago, to citizens born in France whose parents or grandparents have roots in other countries, being universally recognised as French seems to be a challenge. Why is this?
Diallo: The country sees itself as a white country. Everything that is produced as French, in films and television, is white.

I take part in many TV debates and I am always the only minority, mostly the only woman. There is never another minority to take a seat at the table to discuss French issues. There is no political will, or will in the media, to change the image.
Al Jazeera: Many complaints over racism stem from police brutality, of which non-white citizens are often victims. What is the solution to this?
Diallo: There's a simple solution. There are many identity checks here. Police can just stop someone in the streets and check his - it's mostly his - ID, without any reason. When you are black or Arab and young, you are 20 times more likely to be stopped. It's not just in the suburbs.

If you go to Gare du Nord in Paris, for example, you have many young black and Arab men arrested for no reason. If you take the train to go to London or Brussels, you have people who are stopped for no reason. It's during these interactions when violence breaks out.

During the 2012 campaign, I was part of the Stop le Controle au Facies (Stop appearance-based stop and searches) collective.

We demanded a very simple measure. Police would have to give a document to those they stopped, providing their reasons for the search and the time of the interrogation. People who felt harassed would have proof and police would be accountable.

Data could have been produced from this initiative - such as in which areas are police more likely to carry out stop and searches, and which reasons are most often cited.

In the suburbs, some police stop the same person every day, they see them growing up. It's to reconfirm who the boss is.
Al Jazeera: What was the response of government representatives to that initiative?
Diallo: The president in power at that time, Francois Hollande, was in favour of it. Jean-Marc Ayrault, the prime minister, Christiane Taubira, the minister of justice, and Benoit Hamon also supported the measure.

But Manuel Valls, then minister of the interior, was very close to the police. He stopped the measure and nothing happened. He has an Islamophobic vision of secularism. He didn't want to do anything to stop racial profiling. This measure was very simple and costless.
Al Jazeera: What comparisons can you make between police-led racism in the US and France?
Diallo: I think here, there is denial. If you read the newspapers here, you have very good coverage of police brutality in the US. You know the victims' names. But of events here, you won't read anything. Even when these national stories are covered, the victim's race is not mentioned.

You can guess if they are black or Arab because of their names, such as Adama Traore (who died in police custody in July 2016). In the case of Theo (who was beaten raped by an officer with a baton in February), his photograph was published. But you never see in writing: "A white police officer has killed a black man".
Al Jazeera: Why not?
Diallo: Because we're "colour-blind". We're supposed to all be French. It's taboo to mention people's races ... but thanks to social media, activists are able to publicise the victims' names.
Al Jazeera: Are minorities under-represented in the media?
Diallo: Yes, they are. The press is so white in all the big newspapers.

But La Liberation has made an effort to hire new journalists from diverse backgrounds, and there are new voices emerging thanks to social media. And the Bondy Blog, for instance, is very good. (Bondy Blog is an online news website with voices from the suburbs).
Al Jazeera: If Macron was sitting in front of you, what would you advise him to do about police brutality?
Diallo: I would say he has to address institutional racism and tell him that the state is a part of the problem. He really needs to meet people involved in the issue and adopt policies that would stop it.

There is part of the population that does not feel French because they are mistreated and not respected.

We have families that have lost relatives, brothers, kids, because of police brutality. It's very urgent to address this. It's one of the reason people in the suburbs do not vote.
This interview has been edited for clarity and length.

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Rokhaya Diallo: 'France sees itself as a white country'

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Paris, France - In March, police killed Shaoyo Liu, a 56-year-old Chinese immigrant, at his home in the 19th arrondissement in Paris during a raid. The officer who fired the fatal shot said he was acting in self-defence, claiming that the father-of-five wounded a policeman with a "bladed weapon" - an account his teenage daughter, who witnessed the killing, denies.

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Paris, France - Women of Muslim background are the most talked-about minority in France.

From conversations about the discrimination towards those who wear the hijab, niqab and burkini, to the sensitive discussions over French females who join hardline groups such as the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant ( ISIL) - an issue raised by centrist presidential candidate and frontrunner Emmanuel Macron in a televised debate on Wednesday with his far-right rival Marine Le Pen - they are rarely far from the headlines.

They are often grouped together as a homogenous entity, and the focus tends to be on younger women.

Have they always experienced discrimination? And what does the older generation think of today's situation?

Al Jazeera spoke to two women - Djima Bouraima, 77, a retired chartered accountant, and Salika Amara, 67, an author, activist and feminist - about the country they call home, the complexities of immigration, racism, and the forthcoming election.

This is Djima Bouraima's story. (Salika Amara's story can be read here.)

I arrived in France from Benin in 1963 to attend business school. Forty years later, we had a reunion. I didn't recognise anyone, but all of them recognised me. I had been the only black student.

The reunion was during the 2007 presidential election. One of my former classmates had become a senator, and was supporting Francois Bayrou, a centrist candidate. He said: "You have to pray for him. If he wins, he will nominate you as a minister."

When you come to France, you're happy to come here. I was a little star.

When my son was born, if every single person who touched his face, his hair, had given me one franc, I would be a rich person. A black baby. White people were amazed to see a black baby for the first time.

I was very well-integrated. I was well-received by everyone. Back then, I was not praying.

There were two Moroccans at the business school. It was winter, Ramadan, and very cold when I arrived. I was fasting by myself, which was hard. I ate alone at night, and was hiding in the school's corners to pray. When the Moroccans saw me praying, they said I was crazy. "Don't pray here," they said. "In our country we pray because we were poor."

I was 23 and a bit naive. I believed them. I went along with what they were suggesting.

I had been living with a French family. The Moroccans said if I carried on, I was going to die from the hardship. It was something of a relief when they said that. It removed my troubles. I forgot Islam from that point on.

I was drinking, smoking. It was like another life. The only thing I didn't do was eat pork.

I became a chartered accountant. I was doing very well, had no issues. The government back home wanted to appoint me as a minister in Benin. I attended gatherings with former presidents and prime ministers - Giscard d'Estaing and Raymond Barre.

And then a few years later, when I was 42, I started practising Islam. I had had an operation, and started reflecting on my mortality. I had some kind of epiphany and thought about God. Whenever I was screaming in pain, the medical staff came to give me injections, but I thought that the one who is going to save me is God. I made a promise that whenever I left hospital, I would never not pray five times a day.

I was sent to a recovery ward to a room with another woman. I started praying in that room, and the woman told the nurses I was crazy. The nurses said: "It's OK, she's a Muslim."

It wasn't until 2003 that I started wearing the hijab. That's when there was a controversy in France about the veil. I started hearing about it, how women were being targeted, and started wearing it. It raised my interest in finding out more and made me realise I had to wear it, for God. I believed women had to cover.

I was lucky to have passed my exams before practising because I didn't have to go through the struggles of wearing a hijab while needing to get a degree and professional experience.

At work, there was a lot of small discriminations. This was an important one.

The boss gave me an office on the basement floor. All of the other employees were on another floor. Once, a client visited so I went upstairs to the main floor to explain some issues. The boss shouted at me and said: "You're not allowed to come to the main floor. You have no right to speak directly to the clients. You have to go to the basement." He didn't even have a degree. He wanted my expertise, but he didn't want me to be visible.

That's when I realised why I had been put in the basement. I was discriminated [against]. The whole experience made me feel as though I needed to be independent. I left the next day.

I was lucky to have my degree. It enabled me to open my own business.

I'm very active in the community. We have sister groups in my house. Someone died yesterday and I organised some prayers. I've been to Mecca seven times for pilgrimages, and I have financed the trips for seven people including my mother, grandfather and uncle. I built a mosque in my hometown in Benin, and bought a field which I gave to the Muslim community living there. They will build a school there which will have my name. And I have another field which I will donate so a cemetery can be built. I'm also going to provide water and electricity, where there is none.

The last time the far-right was in the second round in 2002, I was like all French people - shocked.

This time around, I received two leaflets in the post - one of Macron and one of Marine [Le Pen]. I thought, "Why do I have to look at this woman?"

With Macron, I make sujud [prostration prayer position]. I am praying for Macron. I fear that Le Pen will win, but at the same time I don't believe that French people are ready to be governed by a woman.

I was in the market, and an Arab told me I have to vote or else I will lose out. It's obvious that the main feeling is the rejection of Le Pen.

I've been in France since [Charles] De Gaulle.

[Francois] Mitterand started like Le Pen, with 2 to 5 percent of the vote, which increased progressively.

In the 1960s, De Gaulle used to laugh at Mitterand. He wasn't doing well. When Mitterand became president, I remembered the days when he was being mocked by De Gaulle.

That's how I see it with the Le Pens as well. They are rising to power. Le Pen started from nothing, and since the beginning, when [Marine Le Pen's father and founder of the Front National Jean-Marie Le Pen] was not doing much, I was always comparing him to how Mitterand got into power. I saw it coming.

The Le Pens are against us, as dual nationals, and we are all scared.

As for the situation in France now, there are social problems. To live you need a minimum - a house, work, money to dress. The state should provide the basic minimum.

And the situation for Muslim women is even harder. Some who wear the veil have to take off their hijabs before going to school [where it is banned]. They can't pray at the office. It's a dramatic situation.

In some ways, I consider it safer now that there is a ban on the niqab. As women don't have to wear it, and they are not targeted.

In Islam they say you have to respect the law of the country. If you can't, you have to leave the country. But everything depends on your own life situation.

In 1963, it was better. There was not all this hatred from French people. French people were more welcoming. They were more helpful. There was more solidarity towards minorities.

Now, we have to beg them to help us. They blame us when things go wrong.

The solution is integration. That's the only way to get protection. If people know you, they are more likely to stand up for your rights. Mixing cultures keeps the peace.

There should also be solidarity among Muslims - they should support each other. People should not become fundamentalists. I know of a woman who was being denied work for wearing the hijab, so someone found her a job.

The situation is now difficult. You have to be strategic. White French people can reject us, but we can't afford to reject them. You have to be clever.

A dirty n****r and a dirty white is not the same. One is much more powerful than the other. All of the differences are there."
Additional reporting by Naima Bouteldja. This interview has been edited for clarity and length.

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France in 1963: 'There was not all this hatred'

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Paris, France - Women of Muslim background are the most talked-about minority in France. From conversations about the discrimination towards those who wear the hijab, niqab and burkini, to the sensitive discussions over French females who join hardline groups such as the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant ( ISIL) - an issue raised by centrist presidential candidate and frontrunner Emmanuel Macron in a televised debate on Wednesday with his far-right rival Marine Le Pen - they are rarely far from the headlines.

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A Word With

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The writer Ta-Nehisi Coates is curating a festival that celebrates French and American culture. Credit Credit Gabriella Demczuk for The New York Times

WHEN James Baldwin arrived in Paris in 1948, at the age of 24, he was a little-known writer with $40 in his pocket. When Ta-Nehisi Coates arrived there last fall, at the age of 40, he was the author of a huge best seller, "Between the World and Me," which won comparisons to Baldwin and upended his plan for a quiet, exploratory year abroad.

"As a writer, I was prepared for failure but not for success," Mr. Coates said of the frenzy around the book, which brought him back to the United States more than once during the year. "I definitely experienced the city, but I wish I had been able to get lost a bit more."

Mr. Coates is now back home in New York. But next week he'll return to Paris, in a sense, as curator of the third annual Festival Albertine, a free New York celebration of French and American culture. Running Wednesday through Nov. 6, the festival is organized by the Cultural Services of the French Embassy and the Albertine bookshop in Manhattan.

This year's installment, which will be streamed live online, brings well-known figures like the television creator David Simon, the poet Claudia Rankine, the painter Kehinde Wiley and the choreographer Benjamin Millepied, together with less familiar French counterparts to discuss issues of race, identity, citizenship and belonging.

"France is going through its own process of thinking about what it means to be French, about who is French," Mr. Coates said. "It's a moment where these two countries are really looking at similar things." These are edited excerpts from the conversation.
"Between the World and Me" came out in French while you were there. How was the reception there different from its reception in the United States?
I didn't want to hustle anybody and pose as this big-time intellectual, which is something I'm uncomfortable with, even here. But the book became an organizing place for talking about their own issues, and I was happy to allow for that. Americans are always saying, "We need to have a national conversation about race!" But we have no idea - France doesn't even acknowledge race.
The festival's brochure cites as a jumping-off point a passage from Baldwin's book "No Name in the Street," in which he draws a comparison between himself and Algerians he met in Paris, who "spoke French and had been, in a sense, produced by France" and yet "were not at home in Paris, no more at home than I." How did you build the festival up from that idea?

I got a lot of help, but thematically it was me. Given the influence of Baldwin on my work, given this being the year of Donald Trump, coming off the first black president, and Baldwin having a renaissance, I wanted to reach back and use him as a framing device. This is an arts festival, so then we went through all the different art forms and figured out how they would fit in.

There are panels on film, art, dance, literature and popular culture, as well as politics. Is there one you're particularly excited about?
I'm maybe most excited about the dance panel, with Benjamin Millepied. I really don't know anything about ballet. I do know about the flak that he got at the Paris Ballet, and that there's debate around race in ballet, but I don't know anything about the history. With the exception of two panels I'm moderating, I chose things I'm not an expert on. I just asked myself, what would I like to know?
Are many of the speakers people you met in Paris?
In Paris I was lucky enough to sit a few times with Nacira Guénif-Souilamas [a sociologist who has written about structural racism and Islamophobia in France]. She's a dual citizen of both France and Algeria, and just listening to her talk about that experience showed me why it was dangerous to make a one-on-one comparison between black folks there and black folks here. Her experience sounded a lot more similar to African-Americans, with the Algerian war being a rupture, in the same way the Civil War was a rupture. Maboula Soumahoro [a scholar who has tried to establish an offshoot of Black History Month in France] is someone else who is going to be really brilliant. When I came to these people, I felt like a 5-year-old, with all my dumb and silly questions.
You're moderating the opening panel, "When Will France Have Its Barack Obama?," which features Jelani Cobb from The New Yorker, along with three French scholars, including Pap Ndiaye, The Albertine bookstore, which is co-organizing the festival, is sort of like a gorgeous dream version of a French bookshop. Did you have a favorite bookstore in Paris? the author of "La Condition Noire" and a founder of black studies in France. What's your answer to that question?
I'm going to let the folks on the panel talk. But I'd say that Barack Obama, to an extent that is not fully understood, is really a product of black institutions. It's not like he ran from Hawaii. He went to the South Side of Chicago, which has a long, long political tradition. There was a community to root himself in. How does that happen in France? There you had the lack of a trenchant Jim Crow system, the lack of slavery on the mainland. The things that made racism so severe here actually gave black institutions much of their vigor. And there is a strong sense of community held together by those institutions. I could be dead wrong about this, but it would be tough to look for a Harlem in Paris. There are black neighborhoods, don't get me wrong. But that's not all Harlem is.

It's horrible to say, but my favorite was the English-language bookstore Shakespeare & Company. They have a really quiet reading room where you can just sit and look at the river. People always asked me if I got in touch with my inner Baldwin. I didn't feel too much of that, but in that room I felt deeply connected.

Did you follow the Baldwin trail You've been back for a few months. How did your year in Paris change your view of America? when you were there?
I really didn't. I love his work, but I don't want to fetishize him. I avoided Les Deux Magots. The last thing I wanted to do was look like some poseur.

We get into this very simplistic analysis of which country is more racist. But it's more productive to look at the history of a country. Racism certainly exists in France, but it's not the same. Is it better? I don't know. But I like it here. It feels like home.

Festival Albertine runs Wednesday through Nov. 6 at Cultural Services of the French Embassy, 972 Fifth Avenue. Schedule: albertine.com. Livestream: livestream.com/frenchembassy.

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Ta-Nehisi Coates Asks: Who's French? Who's American?

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A Word With WHEN James Baldwin arrived in Paris in 1948, at the age of 24, he was a little-known writer with $40 in his pocket. When Ta-Nehisi Coates arrived there last fall, at the age of 40, he was the author of a huge best seller, "Between the World and Me," which won comparisons to Baldwin and upended his plan for a quiet, exploratory year abroad.

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The Interpreter

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A woman wearing a "burkini," a full-body swimsuit designed for Muslims, at a Morocco beach. Credit Credit Fadel Senna/Agence France-Presse - Getty Images

WASHINGTON - There is something inherently head-spinning about the so-called burkini bans that are popping up in coastal France. The obviousness of the contradiction - imposing rules on what women can wear on the grounds that it's wrong for women to have to obey rules about what women can wear - makes it clear that there must be something deeper going on.

"Burkinis" are, essentially, full-body swimsuits that comply with Islamic modesty standards, and on Wednesday, Prime Minister Manuel Valls of France waded into the raging debate over the bans in some of the country's beach towns, denouncing the rarely seen garb as part of the "enslavement of women."

This, of course, is not really about swimwear. Social scientists say it is also not primarily about protecting Muslim women from patriarchy, but about protecting France's non-Muslim majority from having to confront a changing world: one that requires them to widen their sense of identity when many would prefer to keep it as it was.

"These sorts of statements are a way to police what is French and what is not French," said Terrence G. Peterson, a professor at Florida International University who studies France's relationship with Muslim immigrants and the Muslim world.

While this battle over identity is rising now in the wake of terrorist attacks, it has been raging in one form or another in French society for decades, Professor Peterson said. What seems to be a struggle over the narrow issue of Islamic dress is really about what it means to be French.

During France's colonial era, when it controlled vast Muslim regions, the veil became a "hypercharged symbol," Professor Peterson said. Veiling was treated as a symbol of Muslims' backwardness, and Frenchwomen's more flexible standards of dress were seen as a sign of French cultural superiority, views that helped to justify colonialism.

Colonialism set France up for the identity crisis it is experiencing today by ingraining a sense of French national identity as distinct from and superior to Muslim identities - and, at the same time, holding out the promise of opportunity to colonized Muslims, who began migrating in large numbers to France. The resulting clash has often played out in debates over clothing.

The veil remained a potent symbol of difference as colonialism collapsed after World War II and Muslims from colonized countries flocked to France. But now, that difference was within a country trying to sort out its own postcolonial identity.

Over generations, the veil became more common among France's Muslims, as a religious practice and, perhaps, as a symbol of their distinct cultural heritage. It was a visible sign of the way that France itself, as well as its role in the world, was changing.

As a result, the veil became a symbol not just of religious difference, but of the fact that people of French descent no longer enjoyed exclusive dominance over French identity. France had become a multicultural and multiethnic nation, where traditions meant very different things to different people.

The colonial-era symbolism of the veil as a sign of Muslim inferiority made it a convenient focus for arguments that the "traditional" French identity should remain not only the dominant but also the sole cultural identity in France.

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On the beach in Nice, France, on Aug. 7. Credit Dan Kitwood/Getty Images

Burkinis may seem frightening because they are seen as threatening that particular type of French identity by expressing an alternative form of identity - in this case, as Muslims. Many French, rather than believing that those two identities can coexist, perceive them as necessarily competitive.

There is even a pejorative French word for the introduction of these alternate identities, "communitarianism," the growth of which is seen as a national crisis.

Muslim clothing items such as the veil or burkini have become symbols of the fact that French national identity is no longer the sole domain of the demographic groups that lived there for centuries. Rules like this summer's burkini bans are meant to prevent the widening of French identity by forcing French Muslims not only to assimilate, but also to adopt the narrower, rigid identity.

This is a method that France has been using for decades, to repeated failure.

John Bowen, an anthropologist at Washington University in St. Louis, said France tended to experiment with such restrictions at times when it was struggling with both domestic and international tensions relating to Muslims and the Muslim world.

This began in 1989 with the so-called affaire du foulard ("affair of the scarf"), in which three French schoolgirls were suspended for refusing to remove their head coverings. Ostensibly, this was because the scarves were visible religious symbols and thus ran afoul of the French rule of laïcité, or secularism. But laïcité had been on the books since 1905, with head scarves nonetheless by and large permitted.

What changed, Professor Bowen wrote in a book on the subject, were events elsewhere in the world that made Islam seem like a particularly pernicious force. In 1989, Iran's leader, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, issued a fatwa against the novelist Salman Rushdie. Around the same time, some Algerians formed the Islamic Salvation Front, a hard-line Islamist party and later insurgency.

Banning head scarves from French schools became a way to deal with the anxiety arising from those domestic and foreign events, and to stake a claim to protecting French values.

Head scarves in schools returned to the national spotlight in 1993 and 1994, as the French authorities worried that young men from Algerian immigrant families would join the Islamist insurgency in Algeria. After the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, veils were once again a focal point for fears of Muslim communities that were isolated from mainstream French society and culture.

And this summer, France is reeling from a series of deadly terrorist attacks, and is increasingly concerned about young French Muslims' traveling to Syria to join the Islamic State or other jihadist groups. Once again, some in France view the drive for assimilation as a national security issue.

The veil is an especially potent symbol of anxiety over assimilation because wearing it is a choice. Whereas fixed characteristics like race or skin color do not imply any judgment on French culture or values, clothing implies a decision to be different - to prioritize one's religious or cultural identity over that of one's adopted country.

Garment bans are meant, in effect, to pressure French Muslims to disregard any sense of communitarian identity and adopt the narrowly French identity that predates their arrival. But trying to force assimilation can have the opposite effect: telling French Muslims that they cannot hold French and Muslim identities simultaneously, forcing them to choose, and thus excluding them from the national identity rather than inviting them to contribute to it.

France does have another choice: It could widen its national identity to include French Muslims as they are. This may feel scary to many French, more like giving up a comfortable "traditional" identity than gaining a new dimension to it. In the absence of accepting this change, there is a desire to pressure French Muslims to solve the identity crisis, but decades of this have brought little progress - and significant tension.

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page A6 of the New York edition with the headline: France's 'Burkini' Bans Are About More Than Religion or Clothing. Order Reprints | Today's Paper | Subscribe

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France's 'Burkini' Bans Are About More Than Religion or Clothing

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The Interpreter WASHINGTON - There is something inherently head-spinning about the so-called burkini bans that are popping up in coastal France. The obviousness of the contradiction - imposing rules on what women can wear on the grounds that it's wrong for women to have to obey rules about what women can wear - makes it clear that there must be something deeper going on.

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Urban green spaces - including parks, woodlands, riverbanks, and gardens - are an essential part of a web of physical and mental well-being. They provide spaces to socialise and opportunities to connect with the natural world. They are restorative enclaves in stressful cities.

The UK government's first strategy on loneliness, recently launched, recognises the importance of green spaces in supporting this web of connections. But England's urban natural environment is increasingly at risk, jeopardising the ambitions of the loneliness strategy from the outset.

A whole chapter in the loneliness strategy is devoted to community infrastructure - the places, spaces and activities that bring people together where they live. The strategy promises to unlock the potential of underused community space, including local parks. It recognises the wealth of research that shows how green spaces enhance health and well-being and provide community meeting places.

Our research at the University of Sheffield's Department of Landscape Architecture reinforces and enriches these key messages about green space and well-being. We are examining the relationship between natural urban spaces and mental well-being, exploring spaces, stories and connections in Sheffield, Britain's fifth-largest city.

Endcliffe Park, Sheffield: a restorative and social space. Image: Paul Brindley/IWUN/creative commons.

What we have found in Sheffield resonates internationally. A study in Adelaide, for example, highlighted the interrelationships of green space, walking and social interaction in supporting well-being. Another study in the Netherlands highlights the role of green spaces in reducing stress, encouraging physical exercise and enhancing social cohesion. Our concern has been not only to enrich this scholarly understanding, but to examine how it can be better translated into practice.

Getting outside

In our own research we have worked with local professionals and community members, from volunteers in parks to doctors and urban planners. We have identified five simple and inexpensive interventions that will help to maximise people's connections with urban nature and create more favourable contexts for well-being. Three of those interventions have a direct bearing on isolation and loneliness.

One is the provision of toilets and cafes in parks and woodlands. As one community worker told us: "It's not that the toilet improves people's mental well-being, it's that the toilet allows them to do the activity that will improve their well-being." Without them, many older people, parents with young children, or people with disabilities or long-term illnesses may decide that the city's parks are only for the fit and healthy. More than 1,700 UK public toilets have closed in recent years, although MPs have long argued that councils should have a duty to provide facilities in key locations such as parks.

A second intervention is the provision of staff in parks. These are people employed to look after and maintain the environment but also to run activities and support voluntary groups. One member of a local volunteers group told us how invaluable Sheffield City Council's park rangers were in helping to organise and inform their work. Without them, the opportunity this group provided for meeting others and engaging in meaningful activity might be lost. According to the trade union Unison, 81 per cent of parks departments have lost skilled staff since 2010.

We are also recommending support for voluntary and community organisations to put on activities in parks and green spaces. These are the organisations that are rooted in local communities and can provide a vital bridge between spaces and people, creating safe and supportive environments for those who might be nervous about venturing outside.

Groups like Manor & Castle Development Trust, for example, offer health walks and confidence-building activities for people in one of Sheffield's most deprived neighbourhoods. Such community infrastructure doesn't simply sustain itself: it requires support, links with local planners and policymakers, and financial and material resources.

One voluntary sector worker explained the difference a trusted local organisation can make:

Having a friendly face - having people there that they know and that they recognise... that's so important. And for so many people, that might be the only contact that they have all day.

Austerity impacts

These interventions are not expensive, but they do cost. They are also the easiest costs to strip out of hard-pressed local government budgets, with the effects felt disproportionately by disadvantaged people in deprived areas. When they are cut, green spaces become underused and can appear hostile rather than welcoming.

The government's loneliness strategy highlights the £500,000 recently allocated by the Ministry of Housing, Communities & Local Government to "identify and share effective and deliverable models of service delivery" through the new Parks Action Group.

But the funds for managing the green spaces that people use to socialise, to meet friends or find restorative environments outside the home, continue to shrink. In just one city, Newcastle-upon-Tyne, funding for parks and allotments has been cut by 90 per cent. Over the next ten years, without further cuts, the council faces a shortfall of a further £17.5m.

These cuts are directly linked to austerity policies that have removed resources from local government while adding to local authority responsibilities. In 2019-20, English local authorities face a further loss of £1.3bn in government funds.

In this context, even simple, cheap interventions to increase well-being and reduce loneliness become harder to achieve. The words in the loneliness strategy may be warm, but the climate lonely and isolated people face in English cities continues to grow harsher.

Julian Dobson, Research Associate, Improving Wellbeing through Urban Nature, University of Sheffield.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

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Will the government's efforts to unite Paris actually work?

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Urban green spaces - including parks, woodlands, riverbanks, and gardens - are an essential part of a web of physical and mental well-being. They provide spaces to socialise and opportunities to connect with the natural world. They are restorative enclaves in stressful cities.

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Widad Ketfi is a bold journalist for Bondy Blog, a news outlet set up to give young journalists in Paris' deprived suburbs an opportunity to shape their own narrative and combat negative stereotypes depicted in the mainstream media.

One of the issues Widad feels most strongly about is the social inequalities that begin at school - her next assignment for the blog.

For Widad's investigation, she travels around the suburbs of Paris, where she meets locals, teachers and students, while trying to track down the national education minister for an all-important interview.

In an area where one in five people are out of work - double the national average - Widad sees education as key to empowering so many dispossessed youth, as it did in her own experience.

The blog was started after the 2005 Paris riots, the worst in France for decades.

Against the backdrop of the 10-year anniversary, Widad tries to investigates the deep social issues that exist in France's suburbs today but faces challenges beyond her control.
FILMMAKER'S VIEW
By Horia El Hadad

In October 2005, riots broke out in the Parisian suburb of Clichy-sous-Bois after two boys of African and Arab descent were killed while trying to escape from the police.

The deaths of Bouna Traoré, 15, and Zyed Benna, 17, triggered two days of riots in the impoverished banlieues (suburbs), with the French government forced to declare a state of emergency.

With nearly 3,000 people arrested and more than 120 police officers injured, the violence resulted in the birth of Bondy Blog - a media outlet aimed at giving a voice to the suburbs' dispossessed youths.

People who don't know the suburbs only see what the mainstream media presents, especially in the news. In the minds of people today, the suburbs are full of 'terrorists'.

Widad Ketfi, Journalist, Bondy Blog

I first heard about Bondy Blog in May 2015. The Blog's aim is to dispel negative perceptions of the suburbs and its residents by training citizen journalists to report on issues that affect them, using their local knowledge and connections. In an area where the unemployment rate is over twice the national average and more than half the residents are of Arab and sub-Saharan African origin, many of the bloggers reflect the area's working class and immigrant backgrounds.

This is something that makes the Blog quite extraordinary, Nordine Nabili, the Editor-in-Chief, explains. "Bondy Blog is unique because it was born out of tragedy. Nobody expected to see people from these areas doing this work," he says. "The fact that these young people are able to write and present TV shows, is almost a provocation for the French elite. The Bondy Blog is the revenge of these working class kids."

With 220,000 visitors a month, the blog has won awards for its work and, over the years, become a respected media outlet and the go-to resource for anything relating to Paris's notorious banlieues.

Initially, the idea for this film was to document the Blog's work during the 10th year anniversary of the riots, through the eyes of one journalist, as they investigated a story relating to the area. We wanted to see whether anything had changed in the suburbs a decade after the unrest and, more importantly, to see whether the Bondy Blog had achieved what it set out to do; change people's perceptions of Paris's suburbs through the work of its local journalists.

But then, mid-shoot, the Paris attacks of November 2015 happened. In a series of coordinated assaults across the city, 130 people were killed. The Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) claimed responsibility for the attacks, saying it was in retaliation for French strikes on ISIL targets in Syria and Iraq. But the link between the suburbs and the attackers was quickly made in the media, and once again, the spotlight was firmly on the banlieues.

According to 30-year-old Widad Ketfi, a journalist at the Blog and our main protagonist, French society sees the suburbs as a no-go zone. "People who don't know the suburbs only see what the mainstream media presents, especially in the news. In the minds of people today, the suburbs are full of 'terrorists'."

We followed Widad as she investigated a story into social diversity in schools, while trying to track down Najat Vallaud-Belkacem, the National Education Minister, for an important interview.

Through her journey, we got an insight into these so-called "no go" areas. What we saw was a community that was suspicious and tired of the media.

Nawufal Mohamed, a youth worker in Clichy-sous-Bois, told us stories of television crews being chased out or robbed of their equipment by local gangs. He explained that locals were simply fed up by the endless stream of journalists coming to report on the state of the suburbs, only for no real change to materialise for local residents. "Since the riots, some homes have been renovated and some big high rises have been knocked down. But just because you move people from one building to another, it doesn't mean the problems disappear."

We did not know it at the time but the focus of the film would shift from being an empowering story about a deprived community finding its voice, to an unsettling story about the institutional and psychological challenges they continue to face amid increasing suspicion from wider French society.

"The attacks of November 13 were a shock for all of us, especially the Bondy bloggers. But we knew that when the gunmen fired those bullets we would also be hit," Nabili explains. "If we don't have a political class that takes measure of what happened, attacks like this will only continue."

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Widad Ketfi is a bold journalist for Bondy Blog, a news outlet set up to give young journalists in Paris' deprived suburbs an opportunity to shape their own narrative and combat negative stereotypes depicted in the mainstream media. One of the issues Widad feels most strongly about is the social inequalities that begin at school - her next assignment for the blog.

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"Acting for us, but without us, is the same as acting against us."

Residents of a French housing estate get behind the camera to challenge negative stereotypes of multicultural banlieues. [Via...

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Excited children shout out the answers during a Sunday afternoon Arabic class at the grand mosque in the Paris suburb of Argenteuil. The mosque has thousands of worshipers and is one of the largest in Western Europe.

Aboubakar Sabri is a part-time imam there. During the week he runs a successful elevator-construction firm in Paris. Sabri came to France from Morocco in 1980 for doctoral studies at the Sorbonne, then stayed and raised three daughters.

He says Muslims can live perfectly well in French secular society.

"We've succeeded in France, and we are totally integrated," he says. "Our kids attend the public schools. We love France. On Friday we say prayers for France, because if France is in good shape so are we. We are all in the same boat."

These days there is a lot of talk about the couple hundred Muslims suspected of being involved in extremist activities - and about those who feel excluded from French society.

But the fact remains that France has the largest Muslim population in Western Europe - a number estimated to be anywhere between 5 million and 8 million - and the vast majority are integrated into French society and helping shape the future of the country.

Things have been tense since three self-proclaimed Islamist extremists attacked satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo and a kosher grocery store in Paris in January, killing 17 people.

In jarring contrast to the children playing at the Argenteuil mosque, there also are three heavily armed French soldiers who now live there to protect the congregation.

Sabri says everyone is glad to have them. There have been thousands of Islamophobic attacks around the country since the January attacks. Sabri laments that some people lump all Muslims together with what he calls "the crazy killers."

Television producer Amirouche Laidi says the media plays a big role in stigmatizing Muslims, because they are underrepresented except when it comes to news or films related to Islamist extremism. He is working to show a more realistic representation of ordinary French people of Muslim background in films, advertisements and television.

We watch a skit of French comedian Jamel Debbouz, a Frenchman of North African descent and one of the country's most popular actors. But Laidi says there are too few like him in France.

"A country's media creates a sort of common, imaginary world, a view of how we all live together," he says. "The lack of Muslims on the screen, and the warped view shown of them is chipping away at our feeling of togetherness as a nation."

Laidi says that could lead some French people who might not know any Muslims to believe that Muslim lifestyles are incompatible with the values of the French Republic - a notion he calls "completely false."

Laidi, who is a second generation Frenchman with Algerian and Muslim roots, is also deputy mayor of the well-heeled town of Suresnes, west of Paris, and one of his duties is officiating courthouse marriages. He says statistics show France has the highest number of mixed unions between people of different religions and ethnic groups of any country in Europe.

"France is a very multiethnic country," he says, "but you wouldn't know it watching television."

Laidi blames the country's political elite for not understanding and taking the right steps to fix the problems. One of the biggest barriers to integration and social mixing in France are the banlieues - rings of housing projects around major French cities that are overwhelmingly populated by families who are poor, immigrant and Muslim.

Journalism student Amira Bouziri says she hopes to be a TV news reporter. The 23-year-old, whose parents emigrated to Paris from Tunisia, says she never has faced discrimination. What annoys her, she says, is all the talk about Muslims and integration.

"No one talks about Buddhists or Jews integrating," she says. "Why would it be more difficult for Muslims?"

But Bouziri admits things might be different if she wore a headscarf, or lived in one of the public housing projects far from the city center.

"I do think I'm lucky to be raised and educated here in Paris," she says. "I thank my father for that. He worked for the post office and was offered a bigger place on the outskirts of town, but he wanted to stay in the center of the city - even in a smaller apartment - for our education and for the city's cultural life."

As a hard-working, born-and-bred Parisian, Bouziri says, she's always assumed she'll have the same chances as any other citizen of France.

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Many French Muslims Find Lives Of Integration, Not Separation

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Excited children shout out the answers during a Sunday afternoon Arabic class at the grand mosque in the Paris suburb of Argenteuil. The mosque has thousands of worshipers and is one of the largest in Western Europe. Aboubakar Sabri is a part-time imam there. During the week he runs a successful elevator-construction firm in Paris.

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The new reality of being young, French, and Muslim | PBS NewsHour

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The new reality of being young, French, and Muslim