The International Herald Tribune on France’s Muslim students finding refuge in Roman Catholic schools:

The quiet migration to fee-paying Catholic schools highlights how hard it has become for state schools, long France’s tool for integration, to keep their promise of equal opportunity – irrespective of color, creed or zip code.

…”Laïcité has become the state’s religion and the republican school is its temple,” said Imam Soheib Bencheikh, a former grand mufti in Marseille and founder of its Higher Institute of Islamic Studies. Bencheikh’s oldest daughter attends Catholic school.

“It’s ironic, but today the Catholic church is more tolerant of, and knowledgeable about, Islam than the French state,” he said.

Read the full story here.

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