EFL
She came to France from Algeria when she was two years old and, for her and her family, Marseilles is home. Her husband works at an employment agency, and her father fought on the French side in the Algerian war. Yet Nacera fears that life has changed for the worse for Muslims in France, with Islam viewed with suspicion since the 11 September 2001 attacks. "We feel as if we’re being pointed out as the guilty ones - even we Muslim people living here in France feel as if we are somehow held responsible for the climate of insecurity which prevails in much of the West now," she tells me.
And for moderate Muslims in France, Nacera admits, there is an added fear - that more fundamentalist forms of Islam are seeking a foothold here, and often finding it among younger Muslims in the smaller mosques. "Ten or 15 years ago, we were living a peaceful form of Islam in France, and all of a sudden foreign influences came in and are changing things. Imams are coming from Afghanistan or Pakistan, going in to the little mosques in Marseilles, preaching another Islam, an Islam we didn’t know before," she says. |