In France, a Push to Teach Arabic in Public Schools, Not Mosques

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Now President Emmanuel Macron’s government is considering giving parents a secular alternative to that intertwining of Arabic and Islam by prodding more of France’s public schools to offer children as young as age 6 Arabic lessons — without religious content.

France is home to one of the world’s biggest Arab diasporas, but only a fraction of the country’s public schools have the resources to offer Arabic courses. Instead, tens of thousands of children attend classes partly funded by Arabic-speaking countries, according to the government. Countless others attend private schools linked to mosques, where instruction ranges between teachers with a clear command of Arabic and those who don’t fully understand the language and encourage rote memorization of Quranic verses.

The idea of teaching Arabic across the public school system touches a nerve in France, a country that jealously guards the classroom as an incubator for its particular brand of colorblind, religion-free republicanism. The first public spaces where France banned the wearing of headscarves were its schools for fear the Muslim garb was blurring the country’s strict separation of church and state.

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For senior French officials, the absence of Arabic in most public schools has had the unintended consequence of fueling communautarisme, a term the French use to describe the social divide between France’s Muslim-minority community and the rest of the country.

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Much of France’s Muslim population flocked to the country after its rule of North African colonies crumbled in the 1950s and 60s. Many live in banlieues like Pantin, suburbs at the edge of cities where unemployment and crime tend to run high.

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“Arabic courses have become for Islamists the best means of attracting youth in their mosques and schools,” Hakim El Karoui writes in “The Islamist Factory,” a study published in September by the Institut Montaigne think tank. Radical preachers wield their seeming knowledge of Arabic to impress younger generations, Mr. El Karoui writes. {snip}

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Robert Ménard, mayor of the southern town of Béziers, said some of the elementary schools he oversees have classrooms where 90% of the students have parents who are immigrants.

“Nobody integrates,” Mr. Ménard said. “Teaching Arabic will create more ghettos.”

In Aubervilliers, a suburb north of Paris, 51-year-old street-sweeper Franck Durieux was dropping his 9- and 10-year-old sons off at the Babeuf elementary school.

By now the French-speaking boys are used to hearing their friends speaking Arabic, he said. Some children “arrive at the school and don’t speak a single word of French,” Mr. Durieux said, adding that France needs to make its national tongue a priority.

For now, part of the demand for Arabic instruction is being met by the governments of Algeria, Morocco and other former French colonies that send teachers to France and pay their salaries through a program the French government created decades ago. Its aim was to help the children of immigrants maintain ties with their ancestral homeland so they could eventually return there.

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At the Centre Culturel Islamique Bangladais, a mosque north of Paris in the town of Stains, crayon drawings dot the walls where about 180 children study Arabic in separate classrooms for boys and girls. {snip}

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Teachers who can speak literary Arabic like Ms. Hamoud are rare, because North African dialects are more commonly spoken in France, said M’hammed Henniche, who heads a local association of mosques.

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