France, Islam and ‘Laïcité’

At the heart of the Iranian regime’s defiant stance toward the United States and Israel in the war is Mojtaba Khamenei, the new supreme leader and a son of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the regime’s longtime ruler. Farnaz Fassihi, who covers Iran for The New York Times, discusses the e ...  Show more

With the world’s attention on the U.S.-Israeli war with Iran, a second front in the conflict has opened in Lebanon. Israel has pummeled an area in the southern outskirts of Beirut where Hezbollah holds sway, as well as southern Lebanon, with airstrikes, displacing almost one mill ...  Show more

From the Charlie Hebdo shootings a year ago to the November terrorist atrocities in Paris, a string of Islamist attacks has left French society reeling in the face of home-grown terror. The events raise many issues, including the nature of religious and cultural integration in Fr ...  Show more

Over the last few weeks, Islamist terror attacks in France, and then Austria shook Europe, and the world. In response, the UK has also raised its terror threat level to "severe". But the French President Emmanuel Macron's response to the attacks has sent ripples ...

Le dimanche 28 août, à moins d’une semaine de la rentrée scolaire, le nouveau ministre de l’Education nationale annonce <a href="https://www.leparisien.fr/societe/nouveaux-textes-dialogue-avec-les-eleves-role-des-proviseurs-comment-labaya-va-etre-interdite-a-lecole-28-08-2023- ...

In many popular accounts of contemporary “Western” society there is an inherent contradiction between the principles underlying liberal secularism and Islam. This type of binary discourse about “religion” and “secular” naturalizes these differences and promotes the seeming rigidi ...  Show more