Hawzah News Agency - As France prepares to ratify a bill targeting Muslims and bringing a range of restrictions on their liberties, the Turkish-Islamic Union for Religious Affairs (DITIB) continues its efforts toward the Turkish community's preservation of religious values, as well as integration at a time when pressure on Muslim institutions has grown.

DITIB has accelerated its activities in the regions and provinces with a large Turkish population, including in the capital Paris, Bordeaux, Lyon, Strasbourg and Limoges. It carries out social, religious and cultural works through associations and mosques it has built.

DITIB ensures social integration and the preservation of religious values by appointing religious officials born and raised in France, besides the experienced ones coming from Turkey. It has been functioning in this way since before France ratified the bill that states Muslim officials in France must be raised in the country.

The year 2020 saw France descend into yet another dispute over its relationship with the Muslim minority. The issue has long been a vexed one and bears the scars of France's history – including colonization and struggles for independence in largely Muslim North and West Africa, to say nothing of the encouragement of immigration from those countries to staff factories.

In a high-profile October speech in a Paris suburb, Macron declared that France must fight "Islamist separatism" while avoiding "the trap" of "stigmatizing all Muslims."

But one episode, shortly after Macron's speech, showed just how tricky the issue is. An activist group called the Collective Against Islamophobia in France (CCIF) charged that the speech was "of a clearly extremist inspiration" and was "calling into question France's democratic principles and fundamental freedoms."

Tensions flared between France and Muslim countries over remarks by President Emmanuel Macron in October defending cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad, considered blasphemous by Muslims, and saying that Islam was "in crisis."

Islamophobia in France has become violent, as was exhibited in an incident where police treated four Muslim children, three of them Turkish, as terrorists, detaining the 12-year-old schoolchildren for 11 hours and opening an investigation into them over suspicions of "terrorist" propaganda. France has the largest Muslim minority in Western Europe, totaling around 5 million.

As part of efforts to counter xenophobia and Islamophobia, DITIB also introduces Islamic thinkers such as Mevlana Jalaluddin Rumi and poet Yunus Emre, who are known all over the world for their teachings, with social and cultural programs to enable the French people to get to know Turks better and improve integration. Furthermore, the institution works in coordination with local administrations in France to aid the needy and the homeless.

Mehmet Çoban, head of the Yunus Emre Mosque Association in central Limoges, told Anadolu Agency (AA) that there are two mosques in the city while the Yunus Emre Mosque has been in service since 1998. He elaborated that the current religious official at the mosque was born in France and studied there until high school. He is fluent in French and Turkish.

"Our goal is to encourage the youth under the age of 40 to come to the mosque. Our imam has received positive feedback from the young for his reading of the Friday sermon in both Turkish and French," Çoban said, adding that besides the imam, the mosque also has a female teacher who teaches the Quran. She was raised in France and went on to study theology in Turkey.

He underlined that the French media associating Muslims with terrorism has made people fearful of coming to mosques.

Eyüp Arık, the mosque's imam, said he has been serving there since 2018.

One of the founders of the mosque, Şükrü Erçelik, on the other side explained he was surprised by the lack of mosques in France when he moved to the country in 1972. He added that the Turkish community for a long time had no mosque and that the Yunus Emre Mosque was only built in 1998 after extensive efforts.