by Ibrahim Moiz

Footballer Mahamadou Diawara has returned from the French national Under-19 squad in order to complete his Ramadan fast after the French Football Federation forced him into an exclusive choice. The move, indirectly discovered only after Diawara was spotted training at a club in his hometown Lyon, is the latest instance of France’s intrusive laïcité clashing head-on with the religious rights of its citizens and in particular Muslims.

Diawara, 19, was called up to the Under-19 squad last week for the 2024 Euro Elite U-19 tour. But his unwillingness to compromise his fast for the tour earned him the wrath of the football federation, which has long discouraged its considerable pool of Muslim players, many of West or North African background, from the fast during the season. Born in France of Malian descent, Diawara joined Lyon in summer 2023 and made his debut in the autumn of 2023, making this his first Ramadan in senior football. Given the ultimatum to postpone his fast, the teenager showed considerable resolve in standing his ground and was divested of his squad place as a result.

This hostility is neither new for French football where, as recently as last Ramadan, players were asked to postpone their fasts, nor for the French state, whose particularly punishing brand of secularism, laïcité, has long weighed particularly heavy on the country’s sizeable Muslim minority. Owing in large part to its colonial history in Africa, much of whose north and west was conquered in the nineteenth century, and wherein Paris continues to maintain controversially intrusive economic, political, and military interests as part of the so-called Francafrique, the historically autocratic Western European republic has one of Europe’s largest Muslim populations, estimated at about five million people.

French legislation and political campaigns have often disproportionately targeted Muslims in the minutiae of their personal and public lives. French politicians across the political spectrum, including incumbent ruler Emmanuel Macron, have also insisted on treating Islamic practice as part of a supposed “Islamist separatist” or “Islamo-leftist” project. The weaponization by both Macron and his political rivals of anti-Islam sentiments has even had international repercussions: in 2020 Pakistan’s former prime minister Imran Khan, for instance, condemned these tactics before major anti-France protests in the country.

The Madagascar-born French rapper “Rohff” Housni M’Kouboi applauded Diawara’s moral fiber in a tweet, and pointed out that fasting does not necessarily impede physical activity and has often been observed by practical sportsmen. “Everybody,” he observed, “has their own stomach! They want to police the mind, the clothes, and now the stomach lol. They mix everything up under whose orders? In the name of what? Atheism? The secularism of December 9, 1905 [the date that France adopted its laïcité]?”

M’Kouboi noted that the rule fails its own standard: the same secularist edicts’ first article officially guarantees freedom of religion, and yet “they want blacks and Arabs without religion, without culture, without spices… Lol.”

In spite of this, French institutions have pressed ahead as if nothing is wrong. Representative of this sentiment was Federation president Philippe Diallo – himself the son of a boxer born in France’s then-colony Senegal – who described the circumstances of Diawara’s removal as part of a “framework of neutrality” that supposedly does “not modify the conditions of practice for our selections for religious purposes.” In practice, as so often in French secularism, this means a censure on Islamic practice. The teenaged Diawara is simply the latest to fall foul of France’s warped relation with its Muslim populace, but his moral fortitude gives as salutary an example as anything he might do on the pitch.

Related:

– The Disenfranc(e)hisement Of Muslims And Why We Need To Stay Focused

– Conflating Laïcité with Free Speech: The French Are Making a Mistake about Charlie Hebdo