A stabbing at a southern French mosque last Friday sparked terror and protest among France’s Muslims. Yet many top politicians refuse to speak of “Islamophobia,” instead leaning into far-right narratives of the Islamic danger to France.
Last Friday, April 25, Aboubakar Cissé was stabbed to death inside a mosque in the southern French town of La Grande-Combe, where the twenty-two-year-old Malian man had lived for three years. Two videos recovered by police investigators — one from the mosque’s CCTV and the other filmed by the attacker from his own smartphone and posted to social media before it was removed — revealed a scene of horrific violence. Cissé was impaled with upward of forty stabs to his body.
According to the summaries of the videos reported in the press, the attacker — a French man also in his early twenties — took to imitating an Islamic prayer before lunging toward his victim with a kitchen knife. Over Cissé’s body, the assailant twice shouted, “your shitty Allah,” before fleeing the scene. Late on Sunday night the presumed suspect surrendered himself to Italian police in the Tuscan town of Pistoia after a nearly three-day-long manhunt. He has since been handed over to French authorities. Pending a murder trial, and the probable criminal implication of individuals involved in his several-day escapade, the arrest and a confession of the suspect brings the case of Cissé’s killing to a quick close.
Given the taboo surrounding anti-Muslim violence in France, the killing seems primed to join a growing, yet relatively anonymous list of Islamophobic crimes that have targeted the country’s Muslim community in recent years. Coming on the heels of the Christchurch attack in New Zealand, in October 2019, a man in his eighties tried to burn down a mosque in southwestern France before shooting and injuring two practitioners. In late August 2024, a neofascist militant killed forty-three-year-old Djamel Bendjaballah near Dunkirk in a hit-and-run car attack, an incident that drew nowhere near the same level of public uproar as Cissé’s murder. The charges filed against the suspect in that case — a member of the Brigade française patriote, a far-right gang — did not include aggravation on racial grounds.
All told, France’s interior ministry reported some 173 anti-Muslim acts in 2024, a figure that represents a 29 percent decline relative to the 2023 tally. Critics claim that incidents are woefully underreported, however. Between January and March 2025, cases of anti-Muslim violence surged by 72 percent compared to the same period the previous year.
The omertà around Islamophobic crimes is not for lack of people trying to raise awareness of the problem. Some two thousand people participated in a memorial march in La Grande-Combe this past Sunday. Hundreds likewise gathered at a rally in Paris’s Place de la République, drawing representatives from various left-wing parties and rights groups. This united front had divisions of its own, given how far questions pertaining to Islam have become a key divining rod in French politics, even among parties and civil society on the Left.
At a press conference held at the National Assembly, the lower house of parliament, on Tuesday afternoon, Mams Yaffa, a municipal councilmember in Paris, called Cissé’s killing “a terroristic and Islamophobic act.” As of now, however, the public prosecutor has refused to attach the qualifier “terrorism” to the murder charges, which could be limited to homicide with racist and discriminatory motives. The National Assembly ultimately held a moment of silence on Tuesday called by the parties of the left-wing Nouveau Front Populaire, after the body’s leadership initially rejected the demand.
“The Terms of One’s Enemy”
Confronting the root causes, or even just identifying the full meaning behind the killing of someone like Cissé faces a steep uphill battle.
For most of the last three decades, the place of Islam and of Muslims in French society has come to occupy a place in national politics not unlike the so-called “Jewish question” of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. Limitations on Islamic attire in public schools may have conformed with modern France’s secular traditions, yet such moves have swelled over the years into a broad campaign to limit public expression of Muslim identity and faith.
The fear of creeping “Islamization” has been behind legislation like 2021’s so-called “separatism” law, designed to increase state overview of civil society organizations. Watchdogs like the Collective Against Islamophobia in France have been closed by state authorities. This week, an administrative court rejected the government’s attempt to withdraw accreditation for the largest private Muslim high school in the country.
France’s stilted debate on Islam has paralyzed the attempt to make sense of the motives behind Cissé’s murder. Some government figures, like Prime Minister François Bayrou have conceded the “Islamophobic” nature of his killing. Yet others have pushed back, preferring qualifiers such as “anti-Muslim hate” on the spurious grounds that the notion of “Islamophobia” is a cover to prevent broader criticism of Islam as a religion.
After dragging his feet on addressing last Friday’s murder, hard-right interior minister Bruno Retailleau visited a local police station near the town where the crime was committed. Considering a presidential bid in 2027 that might straddle the centrist governing bloc and the hard right, Retailleau has also rejected the idea of “Islamophobia.” “At the interior ministry, we consider that this term [Islamophobia] has an ideological connotation because it comes from the Muslim Brotherhood,” Retailleau told right-wing daily Le Figaro. (At a rally in late March titled “For the Republic, Against Islamism,” Retailleau told attendees, “Down with the veil.”)
The debate over Islamophobia is not a matter of mere semantics. Right-wing commentators and academics have long worked to deny the existence of the problem. They insist it cannot be confused with an expression of “racism” given the diversity of ethnic groups among the community of Muslim believers. Unlike when it comes to explaining antisemitism, one also routinely hears that what goes by the name of Islamophobia is in fact a “defensive” reaction or an expression of a legitimate concern over the place of Islam in French society. Moreover, what many might deride as “Islamophobia” is really about silencing sincere concerns about Islam, or so the argument goes.
These debates have spread across the political spectrum. The communiqué signed by NGOs such as the Human Rights League and SOS Racisme calling on people to attend Sunday’s rally in Paris elided the term “Islamophobia,” denouncing instead the “deafening silence” of the interior minister and the “racist nature of this murder.”
“An Islamophobic climate has been nurtured and cultivated for months,” France Insoumise leader Jean-Luc Mélenchon argued at the rally in Paris. The largest parliamentary force on the Left, Mélenchon’s movement has been exposed to frequent accusations of “Islamo-leftism” for its defense of French Muslims.
That stance itself was the result of a significant shift in France Insoumise, starting after the 2019 mosque attack, when it was the only major force on the Left to attend a solidarity march in Paris against Islamophobia and racism. In a sign of the tensions among the various left-wing currents, at Sunday’s march more radical militants heckled several of the attendees, notably from establishment NGOs.
The Left’s splits over Islam have deep roots. It was in the center-left Parti Socialiste’s last government under president François Hollande (2012–2017) that the fear of Islam grew into a central dividing line in French politics, in the aftermath of the spate of Islamist attacks over 2015 and 2016.
The Parti Socialiste’s prime minister at the time, Manuel Valls, has been more responsible than just about any political figure for hardening attitudes toward the French Muslim community. And in the days after the Cissé murder, Valls — now a pro–Emmanuel Macron figure who returned to government this winter as minister of France’s overseas territories — was back manning the barricades of his old cause: the denial of Islamophobia.
Valls was quick to distance himself from those on the Left — and even in the government — who had ceded to the undeniable in their characterization of Cissé’s murder. “I will never use the term ‘Islamophobia,’” Valls told news network Public Sénat on Monday. “It was invented more than thirty years ago by the Iranian Mullahs. . . . One must never use the terms of one’s enemy.”
For Valls, it’s the Mullahs; for Retailleau, the Muslim Brotherhood. No matter that those genealogies are patently false: According to Le Monde, the first appearance of the term “Islamophobia” in France was in a 1910 law dissertation. It seems like politicians like these will do anything to avoid addressing the deadly consequences of a festering national hysteria.