President calls government meeting to address finding that Muslim Brotherhood poses ‘threat to national cohesion’

Emmanuel Macron’s centrist political party has suggested banning girls under 15 from wearing the Muslim headscarf in all public places, as the president chaired a high-level government meeting to discuss what it called “political Islamism” in France.

The French president’s office said he had asked ministers to come up with proposals before June to address the “serious” findings of a report that Macron commissioned last year into the presence of the Muslim Brotherhood in France.

Spiritual practices can induce a sense of being part of something that is bigger than oneself

• Making sense of it is a column about spirituality and how it can be used to navigate everyday life

When I was a kid, my sister’s favourite biblical passage was from the gospel according to Luke. “Suffer little children to come unto me,” Jesus told his disciples, “for of such is the Kingdom of God.”

My sister had been diagnosed with terminal cancer and she understood Jesus to be saying that children like her, who felt pain, would inherit paradise. Her favourite saints were the youthful martyrs – Angela of Fatima, Bernadette of Lourdes, Thérèse of Lisieux, the Little Flower. Every week my parish gathered to pray for my sister and the priest offered up her suffering, everyone’s suffering, all the suffering of the world, to God.

The man who stabbed and partially blinded novelist Salman Rushdie in 2022 has been sentenced to 25 years in prison on Friday for an attack that also wounded a second man, a district attorney has said. Hadi Matar was sentenced in a western New York courtroom, where a jury found him guilty earlier this year of attempted murder and assault. The 27-year-old stabbed Rushdie multiple times, blinding him in one eye, as the author was about to speak at the Chautauqua Institution

• Man who stabbed Salman Rushdie sentenced to 25 years in prison

Exclusive: Christian, Muslim and Jewish representatives write to prime minister after ‘island of strangers’ speech

• UK politics live – latest updates

More than a dozen bishops and other senior Christian, Muslim and Jewish faith leaders have written to the prime minister after his “island of strangers” speech, urging him to use a more “compassionate narrative” about migrants.

The letter was sent to Keir Starmer after his speech on Monday, which preceded the publication of the government’s immigration white paper that has been widely criticised by migrant rights organisations and civil society groups.

I created the hijabi mom character in #1 Happy Family USA. How she wears it is part of her personality – so I knew I had to get it right

If you’ve seen a hijab on a screen – animated or otherwise – it’s likely that this Islamic head covering was one specific style.

Think Princess Jasmine in the 1992 movie Aladdin, Claire Danes in the series Homeland, or the Zamins in the animated show The Proud Family:

Hundreds of women forced to confess to ‘moral crimes’ they did not commit have been publicly lashed in Afghanistan

Three Afghan women who were brutally flogged in public by the Taliban after being accused of “moral crimes” have bravely spoken out about the cruelty they endured.

More than 1,000 people – at least 200 of whom were women – are now known to have been humiliated in public floggings since the Taliban’s return to power in 2021, according to court records and media reports. The true numbers are probably much higher.

The not-for-profit, which has been recording anti-Muslim hate crime for 13 years, now faces an uncertain future

For 13 years, Tell Mama has been the government-funded not-for-profit tasked with recording anti-Muslim hate crime and helping victims get justice.

For its pains, staff faced death threats from the far right, a risk so serious it necessitated an office change at the height of the hate. There have been critics too within Britain’s Muslim community, who, according to the Tell Mama leadership, were intolerant of the organisation’s tolerance.

‘Any strategy based on either phasing out fossil fuels in the short term or limiting consumption is a strategy doomed to fail,’ says former PM

Severin Carrell is the Guardian’s Scotland editor.

Keir Starmer is not expected to campaign in the Hamilton byelection, a critical contest for Scottish Labour which takes place in early June, Anas Sarwar has confirmed.

I wouldn’t expect Keir to be campaigning in the byelection. That’s not to say he won’t, but I’m not expecting Kier to campaign in the byelection.

I’ll be on the stump campaigning for a Labour win. I’m the candidate for first minister next year. I’m the one that wants to remove the SNP from government.

Next year, we’ve got to demonstrate to people that for all Nigel Farage might want to come here with his easy answers and create a bit of a circus, the reality is a vote for Reform only helps the SNP. If you want to get rid of the SNP, only Scottish Labour can beat them.

Man held in Italy over killing of worshipper in French mosque amid growing concerns over Islamophobia

• Europe live – latest updates

French Muslim leaders have said more must be done to counter anti-Muslim hatred in France after a man was arrested on suspicion of stabbing a young worshipper to death inside a mosque in a southern village.

Olivier A, 21, a French national born in Lyon, surrendered to police in Italy on Sunday after three days on the run, French prosecutors announced on Monday morning.

Groups such as Muslim Votes Matter and The Muslim Vote are hoping to gain support from those who feel left out of the major parties and disenchanted by the status quo

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When I first arrived in Melbourne four years ago, my introduction to the country’s political landscape came in an unexpected form – posters.

They bore the image of a fellow Afghan from the Cameleers’ era, accompanied by the curious label: Aussie. I spent weeks pondering its significance and discovered much later that this striking image was the work of Australian artist Peter Drew, who sought to challenge the exclusivity of national identity and acknowledge the often overlooked histories shaped by the White Australia policy.

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Shadi Khan Saif is a Melbourne-based journalist and former Pakistan and Afghanistan news correspondent

Some candidates don’t want to mention the war

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Campaigns that have sprung up to energise Australia’s 650,000 voting-age Muslims say the ramifications will extend well beyond 3 May

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In elections gone by, Az Fahmi volunteered for Labor’s home affairs minister, Tony Burke, in her electorate of Watson in Sydney’s south-west. Now she wants change.

“Enough is enough. We’re sick of being taken for granted. We’re sick of being ignored,” says the campaign volunteer, who works in communications.

Parents argue constitutional religious rights should allow them to opt children out when LGBTQ+ books are read

The US supreme court is considering on Tuesday an attempt by Christian and Muslim parents in Maryland to keep their elementary schoolchildren out of certain classes when storybooks with LGBTQ+ characters are read in the latest case involving the intersection of religion and LGBTQ+ rights.

The justices are hearing arguments in an appeal by parents with children in public schools in Montgomery county, located just outside Washington, after lower courts declined to order the local school district to let children opt out when these books are read.

The Catholic church has taken the first steps to canonise the architect of Barcelona’s extraordinary Sagrada Família

I don’t understand the processes by which people become saints, but the case for the canonisation of the great Catalan architect Antoni Gaudí, now progressing with the blessing of the pope, seems strong. He was devout – he tried to go without food for 40 days in emulation of Jesus Christ, until a bishop friend talked him out of likely death. The unprecedented phantasmagoria that he designed in stone, iron and ceramic could be called miracles. He even suffered a form of martyrdom, being hit by a tram while apparently deep in thought about his most famous work, the church of Sagrada Família. It’s not quite the same as a burning at the stake or a fusillade of arrows or the other grisly ends of ancient saints, but has its own significance. Gaudí’s mission was to find spiritual meaning in a world transformed by industry and machines, of which the fatal tram might be considered a representative.

Freedom of information requests reveal disproportionate use of batons and rigid handcuffs for Muslims behind bars

Muslim prisoners are disproportionately subjected to force including pain-inducing techniques by jail staff, according to new data.

Freedom of information requests found that in eight out of nine prisons with high Muslim populations, Muslim men were more likely than the average inmate to be confronted with batons, made to wear rigid bar handcuffs, or deliberately held in a painful position.

At Belmarsh, a prison in south-east London often used to hold terrorist suspects, Muslim prisoners made up 32% of the population in 2023. Over the same period, Muslim men were subjected to 43% of incidents involving the use of rigid bar handcuffs and 61% of incidents involving the use of pain-inducing techniques.

At HMP Whitemoor, in Cambridgeshire, Muslim prisoners constituted 43% of the prison population. But more than half – 55% – of the use of rigid bar handcuffs and pain-inducing techniques over the year was on Muslim prisoners.

At HMP Isis in Thamesmead, south-east London, Muslim prisoners made up 45% of the inmates. But batons were used on Muslim prisoners in more than 57% of the incidents where batons were drawn, and 56% of incidents of pain-inducing techniques involved Muslim prisoners.

At HMP/YOI Feltham B in west London, Muslim prisoners were 42% of the population. Figures showed they were subjected to 53% of the uses of rigid bar cuffs, 57% of the instances where batons were drawn and 64% of pain-nducing techniques.

At HMP Woodhill, in Milton Keynes, Muslim prisoners constituted 37% of the population but were subjected to 49% of the uses of rigid bar handcuffs, 63% of instances of batons being drawn and 64% of incidents using pain-inducing techniques.

Part-school, part-social network, a Mouride circle on the Spanish island is helping teenage asylum seekers prepare for adulthood and navigate a challenging welfare system

• Photographs by Diana Takacsova

In a three-storey building in a residential neighbourhood in Gran Canaria, about an hour’s drive from the airport, more than a dozen teenage Senegalese boys in colourful, flowing robes sit in a circle, soulfully chanting supplications. Behind them, girls sit with their heads covered, praying. On the top-floor terrace a feast of steaming rice, meat and vegetable gravy is being prepared.

It is a bright Sunday afternoon in February. The young people are mostly asylum seekers from Senegal, who live in detention centres where conditions can be brutal, according to Spanish human rights groups.

Muslim Votes Matter concerned about policy preventing religious schools from discriminating against teachers or students

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A potentially influential Muslim advocacy group is planning to tell voters to preference the Greens above Labor on how-to-vote cards in several key seats, despite objecting to the minor party’s position on religious freedom in schools.

Muslim Votes Matter has expressed concern about the party’s plan to ensure religious schools cannot discriminate against teachers or students on the basis of their sexuality, but has welcomed a commitment to ensure “all rights are acknowledged and taken into account”.

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Condemning them as ‘sectarian’ is only adding to the clamour that they have no place in the west

A poll suggests that most British Muslims identify more with their faith than with their nation. The head of the Saudi-backed Muslim World League counsels British Muslims to talk less about Gaza and more about domestic issues. Labour MP Tahir Ali is criticised for campaigning for a new airport in Mirpur in Pakistan-controlled Kashmir; he claims the criticisms have led to “Islamophobic” attacks. After push-back, the BBC changes a headline describing converts to Islam as “reverts”, a term some Muslims use to suggest that Islam is the natural state of humankind.

Just a taster of debates about British Muslims over the past week. At the heart of each of these controversies is the question of how Muslims should relate to western societies, and western societies relate to them. For some, the answer is easy. On the one side, many claim Islam to be incompatible with western values and that allowing Muslims to settle here has led to what they regard as the degeneration of western societies. On the other are those who insist there is no issue, and those who raise concerns are bigots. Both are wrong. There are issues about Muslims and integration that need discussing, but those issues are rarely as presented in these debates.

Do you have an opinion on the issues raised in this article? If you would like to submit a letter of up to 250 words to be considered for publication, email it to us at observer.letters@observer.co.uk

At 18, Mustafa was told his only way out of prison was to join the regime forces. After 14 years, his past as one of Assad’s fighters could get him killed

By Ghaith Abdul-Ahad. Read by Mo Ayoub

Shaista Gohir questions Tell Mama’s use of public funds, creating debate over its role, accountability and future

A leading Muslim peer has called for an inquiry into the Islamophobia monitoring group Tell Mama over concerns about a “lack of transparency” on how it is spending public money.

Shaista Gohir, the chief executive of the Muslim Women’s Network UK, has also accused Tell Mama of failing to provide detailed data on anti-Muslim hate crimes, being “silent” when politicians have targeted Muslims, and questioned whether the Tories used it as a vehicle to monitor extremism.