Hawzah News Agency- Aboubakar Cisse, a young Black Muslim man of Malian descent, had been killed inside a mosque in southern France.

Initially described in the media as a personal dispute, that narrative quickly fell apart as a local prosecutor announced the case was being investigated as “an act with Islamophobic connotations''.

Cisse wasn’t just killed; he was targeted in a sacred space. After cleaning the mosque for Friday prayers, surveillance footage showed him teaching another man how to pray. As Cisse prostrated himself in prayer, the other man pretended to follow along before pulling out a knife, stabbing him 57 times and shouting vile Islamophobic slurs.

The emotional wreckage this has caused is immense. Since the footage surfaced, each detail has deepened the Muslim community’s collective grief, and ignited a seething anger.

Like many others, I’ve found myself asking the same question over and over: could we have prevented this?

I wish I could say I was shocked. But as a visibly Muslim French woman who leads a pan-European network of Muslim youth and student groups, I know we’ve seen the warning signs for years. These signs have been deliberately ignored.

Cisse was young, Black and Muslim. He quietly served his community, like so many people who sustain the spaces where others find peace. And yet he also embodies everything that political hate merchants have spent years dehumanising.

Even with stark video evidence, many are still refusing to label this incident as a hate crime at the convergence of Islamophobia and anti-Black racism. It was not a personal quarrel, but the inevitable outcome of decades of normalised bigotry.

A Bosnian French man has been arrested in the case. His lawyer denies that Cisse was targeted because of his religion, but to Abdallah Zekri, vice president of the French Council of the Muslim Faith, the evidence is clear: “This is an Islamophobic crime, the worst of all those committed in France against our community''.

This isn’t about one deranged individual. It’s about an entire ecosystem of hate, one that is propped up by state policies cloaked in neutrality, media narratives that cast Muslims as threats, and daily indignities faced by Muslim students, workers and families.

When a veiled Muslim woman in France has an 80 precent lower chance of landing a job interview; when Muslim schools face disproportionate scrutiny; and when a man can be murdered in his own mosque, nowhere is truly safe for Muslims in France.

We have raised the alarm for years. We’ve asked for dialogue, protection and dignity. But our calls have been met with locked doors and institutional exclusion.

Source: MIDDLE EAST EYE