Paris: Muslims in France were called to pay homage at Friday prayers to the 12 victims of this week's magazine massacre, which has stoked fears of Islamophobia in a country that has struggled to integrate its millions-strong Islamic minority.
The French Muslim Council had called on people to gather 'in dignity and silence' and urged imams to condemn 'violence and terrorism'. But this week's shocks have put the country's Muslims in a difficult position.
"To be a Muslim in this country today is to be stuck between the hammer and the anvil: between these guys who massacre in the name of their religion and growing anti-Muslim racism," Mustafa Amokrane, the well-known singer with band Zebda, said this week.
Shots have been fired at mosques in several towns since Wednesday's massacre, racist slogans daubed on walls and a pig's head hung on the door of a prayer hall in Corsica.
France has long had a combustible relationship with its Muslim minority, the largest in Europe at between 3.5 and 5 million that dates back to its bloody struggles in its former North African colonies and the legacy of immigrants trapped in some of France's poorest districts.
Long decades of insurgency against French rule in Algeria in the mid-twentieth century, followed by a spate of Algerian terrorist attacks in France in the 1990s created difficulties for communal relations which reawakened with the rise of global jihadism after 9/11.
A study by the Open Society Institute in 2009 found 57 percent of French Muslims considered religious discrimination widespread and a majority thought it had worsened in the past five years.
The rise of the far-right National Front and the fact that hundreds of young French Muslims have left to join jihadist brigades in Iraq and Syria has only hardened the barriers.
