From Washington Post
March 7, 2013
By Edward Cody, Thursday, March 7, 6:50 AM
For Abdelrahman Binjalloun, a Moroccan-born pharmacist who doubles as a guide, the questions were routine. Since it was inaugurated in September after a three-decade controversy — and even while it was under construction — the Great Mosque of Strasbourg has become a tourist site, a destination for school excursions and a meeting place where often-uneasy French people come face to face with their increasingly numerous Muslim neighbors.
Such coming together is not the norm in France, whose army has been dispatched to Mali to destroy bands of radical Islamists who hold 15 French citizens hostage. At home, the country’s Christian traditions have been rubbed the wrong way by a Muslim minority that is often so concentrated in certain suburban neighborhoods that veils are common and Arabic is more spoken than French.
A law banning full-face veils for women was passed two years ago, one much-discussed symptom of the unease, and right-wing political leaders have opposed mosque projects in a number of cities, including Strasbourg.
The number of Muslims in France has never been established with certainty, in part because of a law forbidding officials or researchers from asking about ethnic origins. But the Interior Ministry and mainline researchers have estimated that more than 5 million people, 8 to 10 percent of the population, were born into families of Muslim tradition.
