(BIG LEAGUE POLITICS) – French President Emannuel Macron has asked a French Islamic council to accept a liberal “Charter of Republican Values” as the nation reels from an Islamist beheading attack last month, in which a militant attacked and killed a man for publishing a political cartoon of the so-called Islamic prophet Mohammed.
Through the republican values program, a national Islamic organization will accredit imams of the religion. The charter will also require that Islamic groups recognize the religion as just that- a religion- as opposed to a political movement.
France, which has the largest Islamic population in Western Europe, has increasingly struggled with social strife and distrust between the country’s Muslim demographic and broader French society. As other western societies have increasingly moved on from a daily focus on Islamic extremism, regular terror attacks in France have kept the topic alive in the nominally secular, liberal country.
