On Sunday, I reached the summit of the col de Riou in the Pyrénées to find a shepherd tending his flock. He asked if I’d seen a bear on my way up through the forest. One of his sheep was missing and he suspected a bear was responsible. I’d seen no sign of one but that got us talking, and I asked what he thought about the government repopulating the Pyrénées with bears. He shrugged and said the time for protesting was past. The bears are here to stay and that was that. One could say the same about Salafists, I reflected that evening, as I read Le Journal du Dimanche. Spread across two pages of the newspaper was an interview with Hakim El Karoui, the author of a report published last week by the Institut Montaigne entitled ‘The Fabric of Islamism”.
Two years ago the same liberal think-tank published “A French Islam is Possible”, in which El Karoui said that despite the Islamification of many young French Muslims (half of under 25s surveyed said they would prefer Sharia Law to Republican Law), there was still time to win the ideological war.
The latest report (a copy of which is on Emmanuel Macron’s desk) suggests that the war is being lost.
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