On June 27, El Hidaya Mosque in Roussillon in Southern France was attacked and vandalised. Windows were smashed and furniture overturned; the walls were plastered with racist flyers. Earlier the same month, a burned Quran was placed at the entrance of a mosque in Villeurbanne of Lyon.Unfortunately, virulent Islamophobia in France has not stopped at vandalism.
On May 31, Hichem Miraoui, a Tunisian national, was shot dead by his French neighbour in a village near the French Riviera; another Muslim man was also shot but survived. A month earlier, Aboubakar Cisse, a Malian national, was stabbed to death in a mosque in the town of La Grand-Combeby by a French citizen.
There has been a significant spike in Islamophobic acts in France – something the French authorities remain reluctant to publicly comment on. One report showed a 72 percent increase in such incidents between January and March 2025 compared with the same period in 2024.
There are various factors that have contributed to this, but central among them is the French state’s own Islamophobic rhetoric and anti-Muslim policies.
The most recent iteration of this was the release of a report titled “The Muslim Brotherhood and Political Islamism in France” by the French government. The document claims that the Muslim Brotherhood and “political Islamism” are infiltrating French institutions and threatening social cohesion and names organisations and mosques as having links to the group.
The report came out just days before Miraoui was shot dead and two weeks after the French authorities raided the homes of several founding members of the Brussels-based Collective Against Islamophobia in Europe (CCIE) liv …
