Jean Castex had, in April 2021, sent a “message of fraternity and wished a good Ramadan” to “our Muslim compatriots” at the beginning of the Islamic month of fasting. This year, silence is required, obviously because of the presidential campaign. Gone are the days when, in 2001, Lionel Jospin invited the members of the French Council for Muslim Worship (CFCM) to Matignon for a “Republican Iftar”.
Emmanuel Macron had attended, in 2017, an iftar organized by the CFCM, before choosing, the following years, to delegate his Prime Minister, then his Minister of the Interior, in charge of worship. While the CFCM is in crisis and the Elysée intends to replace it with a Forum de l’islam de France, the caution of the French authorities in this month of Ramadan contrasts with the iftars very officially organized this week by the ambassadors in Paris of the United States and the United Arab Emirates.
At the United States Ambassador’s
Denise Bauer, whom Obama had already appointed ambassador to Belgium, led the “women for Biden” committee during the 2020 presidential campaign. This Democratic activist was unable to take office due to the Republican deadlock in the Senate. in Paris only last February. And she would like to point out, on her invitation card, that she is also an ambassador to the Principality of Monaco.
Once an imam has launched, in a living room of his residence, the call to prayer which marks the end of the daytime fast, the ambassador wishes his many guests ” an excellent Ramadan, conducive to renewing the commitment to each other “. It evokes the memory of Thomas Jefferson, one of the first ambassadors of the United States in Paris, who regularly consulted a Koran now exhibited in the Library of Congress.
Comparing the Declaration of Independence of the United States of 1776 and the French Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen of 1789, she judges ” more urgent than ever to make these values resound », at a time when the resistance to the Russian invasion of Ukraine is part of a global defense of the rule of law. Finally, she underlines that in China the Uighurs can observe the Ramadan fast only in secret, while in Myanmar the Rohingya have been the victims of a real “genocide” solely because of their Muslim faith.
At the Ambassador of the United Arab Emirates
Hend Al-Otaiba, ambassador to France for less than a year, is the sister of the ambassador of the Emirates in Washington, the wife of the ambassador to Unesco (United Nations Organization for Education, science and culture) and the daughter of a former oil minister.
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