France, Islam and ‘Laïcité’

The Daily

The New York Times

Daily News, News

4.4 • 102.8K Ratings

🗓️ 12 February 2021

⏱️ 30 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

“Laïcité,” or secularism, the principle that separates religion from the state in France, has long provoked heated dispute in the country. It has intensified recently, when a teacher, Samuel Paty, was beheaded after showing his class caricatures of the Prophet Muhammad. We look at the roots of secularism and ask whether it works in modern, multicultural France.

Transcript

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0:00.0	From New York Times, I'm Michael Bavaro. This is Daily.
0:10.0	Today,
0:12.0	In the coming days, lawmakers in France are poised to adopt controversial legislation
0:18.0	to combat the threat of Islamist radicals, which the country's president has called,
0:24.0	the enemy of the Republic. My colleague, Constell Meier, on the debate raging there,
0:32.0	about the role of government in religion.
0:44.0	It's Friday, February 12.
0:48.0	Constell, tell me about Samuel Paddy.
0:54.0	Samuel Paddy was a history and civic teacher in a suburban north of Paris called Confluence Antonorine.
1:02.0	He was 47 years old, he had been teaching for more than 20 years.
1:07.0	And almost all of Paddy's former students I talked to told me that he was that type of teacher
1:14.0	who was always eager to stimulate their critical thinking, always eager to organize debates.
1:22.0	Sounds like he was a good teacher.
1:24.0	He was a great teacher. I mean, he was really beloved by his students.
1:28.0	And he was always this teacher who, again, according to students I talked to,
1:34.0	who basically left his mark.
1:36.0	So last October, he goes to class to give his lesson on freedom of expression,
1:42.0	which is a lesson he'd given years and years before.
1:45.0	And it's actually part of the French national curriculum.
1:48.0	And the way he normally taught this lesson was by challenging students to engage with what could be considered offensive.
1:58.0	And he did that by showing two caricatures of the Prophet Muhammad, including one where Prophet Muhammad is naked.
2:06.0	And here you need to understand something about France in general.
	...

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