Marseille: France's Muslim City

Muslims demographically and numerically predominate
in Marseilles, France. From the BBC

France slowly becomes a new Islamic Republic

• The Death of the West  -  Europe is expected to provide Freedom of Religion for Muslim immigrants while non-Muslims are not given Freedom of Religion in Muslim nations. 

Marseille is France's second city, and according to demographers it's likely to become the first Western European metropolis where the majority of the population will be Muslim.

Marseille can appear dirty, poor and covered in graffiti. Crime on the streets is commonplace, and in whole neighborhoods, criminals, not the police, are said to maintain their own version of law and order.

There were fewer than one million Muslims in Western Europe after World War II before guest-worker programs fueled immigration. Today there are 15 million Muslims, five million in France alone. That change has exacerbated tensions between communities and local governments struggling to cope with the newcomers. 

From the Smithsonian.com  -  One morning in early November 2005, Kader Tighilt turned on the radio as he drove to work. The news reported that 14 cars had burned overnight in Marseille's northern suburbs. "They've done it," Tighilt said out loud. "The bastards!" It seemed his worst fears had been confirmed: riots, which had first broken out in the suburbs of Paris on October 27, had now spread to the port city and one of the largest immigrant communities in France. For the previous two weeks, Tighilt, his fellow social workers and community volunteers had been working feverishly to prevent this very thing from happening, fanning out across the city to places where young people gathered to spread the word that violence was folly.

"We were worried that [our youths] would try to compete with Paris," says Tighilt, 45, who grew up in an Algerian family in a shantytown on the outskirts of the city. He was not alone. Marseille is not only arguably Europe's most ethnically diverse city, but also has as high a proportion of Muslims as any place in Western Europe. It suffers from high unemployment and the usual brew of urban problems. "We were waiting for the place to explode," one city official confided later.    (Smithsonian.com)

(Thanks to the Bloviating Zeppelin for a heads up on this story)

Women wearing niqabs walk in the street in Marseille, France