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There’s a cutting-off-the-nose-to-spite-the face aspect to a Saudi plan to turn Qatar into an island by digging a 60-kilometre ocean channel through the two countries’ land border that would accommodate a nuclear waste heap as well as a military base. If implemented, the channel would signal the kingdom’s belief that relations between the world’s only two Wahhabi states will not any time soon return to the projection of Gulf brotherhood that was the dominant theme prior to the United Arab Emirates-Saudi-led imposition in June of last year of a diplomatic and economic boycott of Qatar.

The message that notions of Gulf brotherhood are shallow at best is one that will be heard not only in Doha, but also in other capitals in the region

the nuclear waste dump and military base would be on the side of the channel that touches the Qatari border and would effectively constitute a Saudi outpost on the newly created island.

Europeans are concerned about the growing sway of Islamist groups that seek to push members of local Muslim communities to detach from mainstream society—mostly through preaching but also through various forms of social pressure, intimidation and, occasionally, violence— and resort to alternative legal, educational, and social systems

For obvious reasons, terrorist attacks get all the attention from policymakers, security services, and the media. The activities of nonviolent Islamists, on the other hand, tend to be ignored: They are mostly legal, rarely flare up in dramatic incidents, and often bring (sometimes justified, sometimes not) charges of racism and Islamophobia to those who highlight them.

These concerns are not new, but what is noteworthy is that they are no longer expressed almost exclusively by those on the right of the political spectrum but, much more frequently than in the past, by politicians and commentators of all political persuasions—not to mention security services.

thousands — possibly tens of thousands — of people, rights groups and academics estimate, who have been spirited without trial into secretive detention camps for alleged political crimes that range from having extremist thoughts to merely traveling or studying abroad. The mass disappearances, beginning the past year, are part of a sweeping effort by Chinese authorities to use detentions and data-driven surveillance to impose a digital police state in the region of Xinjiang and over its Uighurs, a 10-million strong, Turkic-speaking Muslim minority that China says has been influenced by Islamic extremism

Uighur activists and international human rights groups argue that repressive measures are playing into the hands of the likes of al-Qaida, which has put out Uighur-language recruiting videos condemning Chinese oppression. “So much hate and desire for revenge are building up,” said Rukiye Turdush, a Uighur activist in Canada. “How does terrorism spread? When people have nowhere to run.”

While forced indoctrination has been reported throughout Xinjiang, its reach has been felt far beyond China’s borders. In April, calls began trickling into a Uighur teacher’s academy in Egypt, vague but insistent. Uighur parents from a few towns were pleading with their sons and daughters to return to China, but they wouldn’t say why. “The parents kept calling, crying on the phone,” the teacher said. Chinese authorities had extended the scope of the program to Uighur students abroad. And Egypt, once a sanctuary for Uighurs to study Islam, began deporting scores of Uighurs to China.

Even if the pandemic has been dominating the news during the last year, it has been coupled with somber headlines. The gruesome murders by radical Islamists of the teacher Samuel Paty, the police employee Stéphanie Monfermé, and many other similar attacks have added fuel to the fire. Public debate was already infected, focusing on the legitimacy of the state in terms of living up to the hard-liner discourses on republican values, notably French secularism, while fighting radical Islamism and separatism, the current buzzword (before it was communitarianism). Navigating these issues, the legislators are faced with the problem of protecting liberal democracy without turning France into an illiberal state. It is safe to say that the perpetual social and political crisis at the nexus of secularism, nationhood, security, migration, and Islam endures. 

While the proposal would surely make life harder for a caricature of a Salafi-jihadi-violence-preaching imam, the measures are far-reaching for the average citizen in terms of civil liberties and freedom of association. As Philippe Portier explains, this project might turn the idea of French civil society on its head. Up until now, according to the Waldeck-Rousseau Law from 1901, “associations were seen as vectors of plurality of life aspirations in civil society.” With this project, however, “the state will turn them into relays of the values it promotes.” Since the state withholds the power to define the values and principles these associations are supposed to withhold, the state can thusly be seen to take a tighter grip on the contours of French civil society. 

One year ahead of the next presidential election, Le Pen has momentum. The hypothesis that crises serve radical political voices was difficult to affirm during the initial phases of the pandemic for Le Pen and her party. She was struggling to find a legitimate oppositional line. However, the government’s difficulty in fighting the spread of the virus and its imposed infringements on public liberties have been politicized by her to argue for the incompetence of the government and for the government’s non-respect for the fundamental values of French citizens while letting Islamic radicals run loose. In a typically populist logic, she creates political divides between the native people, the elites, and the enemies of the people.

The Syrian/Lebanese mercantile community of Manchester existed in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, but they were not the only Arab group in the UK during this period. Moroccan traders formed a very distinct Arab community in Manchester.

Moroccan merchants began visiting Britain as early as the sixteenth century, arriving at the port of St. Ives in Cornwall in 1589

In the nineteenth century, Moroccan Muslim and Jewish traders began to settle in Manchester on a more permanent basis. In the 1830s Britain and Morocco signed treaties permitting their subjects to travel and trade in each other’s territories.