Baku. TurkicWorld/ Daspina Hasanova:

“Azerbaijan in particular is a secular country in the true sense of the term. Everyone is free to have – or not to have their faith. The religions not only cohabit, but work together for the peace and happiness . The virtues do not fight against each other, they add up.”

Chief editor of the Musulmans en France journal Jean-Michel Brun said this in an exclusive interview for TurkicWorld.

In his opinion, there is no difference between Muslims that is specific to being born in the East or in the West.

“The Muslim community is, by nature, varied and diverse, and there is a wide variety of ways to practice its religion, there is not an Eastern Islam and a Western Islam,”.

Brun said that, he does not see any reason why people from Middle East and Asia would have more difficulty being integrated in the European life style than others.

“Moreover, if there may be differences between their way of life and the way of life in France, this is more due to custom than to Islam,” – expert added.

“What does the European lifestyle mean? Europe was formed by successive contributions. Our traditions are borrowed from Catholicism, Judaism, Islam, the Romans, the Viking peoples, Africa. The European way of life is changing every day and cannot be defined in a fixed way, as some far-right fanatics would like,”.

While talking about French people’s sad tradition - the scapegoat – Brun expressed that, when the French society was in crisis, as was also the case for Germany between the 1930s and 1940s, populist forces point to a common enemy against whom they hope the nation will unite. Firstly it was the Protestants, then the Jews, and now the Muslims.

“Today, in France in particular, Muslims are the victims of discrimination that we thought belonged to the past. Muslim schools, mosques have been closed, imams have been banned from preaching, French government wants to ban women from wearing a headscarf, even though it is a very old tradition in France. This Islamophobia is explained by the trauma of the terrorist attacks, but also by the spirit of revenge of those nostalgic for the colonial era,” – Brun said.

He specifically added that, Islamophobia also rubs off on foreign policy, with some politicians trying to interpret territorial disputes as inter-religious clashes, which is totally absurd.

Expert repeated that, there is no incompatibility between the practice of Islam and the Western way of life.

"Excepting France, in the United States, in the United Kingdom, in Canada, this kind of problems does not even arise,".

“Of course, there are, among Muslims as everywhere else, groups that advocate a fundamentalist and rogue version of religion and, indeed, this can pose serious problems. But in fact, these excesses are more political than religious,” – expert mentioned.

He believes that the great tragedy of our time is that we are losing value. Citizens are pushed away from spirituality in order to make them docile consumers. The loss of values generates violence and fear of others.

As André Malraux said: “the 21st century will be spiritual or it will not be”.

In the conclusion Brun underlined that, some still try to instrumentalize religion to make it a factor of division, when it is fundamentally a factor of union.