I It was Friday, October 16, 2020, the last day of school before the All Saints’ Day break at the Bois-d’Aulne middle school in Conflans-Sainte-Honorine on the outskirts of Paris. In front of the school, a man named Abdullakh Abouzeidovich Anzorov decapitated Samuel Paty, a professor of history, geography, and civics. The knife-wielding executioner was an eighteen-year-old Chechen born in Moscow who had been granted political refugee status with his family in France. In the minutes following the brutal act, the killer posted on his Twitter account a photo of the victim’s severed and bloodied head on the pavement, along with this prepared comment: In the name of Allah, the Most Merciful, the Most Merciful. From Abdullah, the Servant of Allah, to Marcon (sic), the leader of the infidels, I executed one of your dogs from hell who dared to belittle Muhammad (Sal’am); calm those like him before you are severely punished. The teacher had already been the subject of an online harassment campaign that was begun on October 7 by Brahim Chnina, the father of a girl in one of his classes. The reason was that Samuel Paty had shown the students in his civics class a cartoon of the Prophet, depicted naked, that appeared in the satirical weekly Charlie Hebdo. It was a pedagogical exercise designed to stimulate reflections on freedom of expression and blasphemy. Paty had been careful to excuse anyone likely to be offended by the picture on religious grounds from the classroom. The father, however, accused him of singling out Muslims and ejecting them. With such an interpretation, clearly designed to be prejudicial, he wanted to prove that they had been purposely discriminated against. It turned out later that his daughter had not even been in class that day. Chnina senior, born in Oran, Algeria, drawing in-work welfare and child subsidy payments for his six daughters, had a following on the Islamist web as an organizer of pilgrim-ages to Mecca and charitable activities connected to mosques. His half-sister had joined ISIS in Syria in 2014 and at the time was still detained in the Al-Hol camp in northeastern Syria at Rojava, a territory controlled by Kurdish forces, from which he had tried to repatriate her. His several hundred social media friends included many well-known activists of the Muslim Brotherhood and Islamo-leftist movements who lost no time sharing his message. In his first video on Facebook, posted on October 7, Chnina urged his Internet audience to mobilize — to ensure that, as he put it, “this scoundrel does not stay in public education.” He also advised them to protest if they became aware of similar cases. The video was rebroadcast on the website of the Pantin Mosque, located in a large banlieue in Paris, to its nearly 100,000 subscribers, on the orders of its president, M’hammed Henniche. It went viral as far as Algeria and the rest of the Maghreb. But this was just the beginning. Henniche, himself of Algerian origin, the son of a senior gendarmerie officer in Algeria and an erstwhile student at a suburban Parisian university, controlled the umbrella group for this mosque that had been founded in 2013. In 2001, in the Seine-Saint Denis department north of Paris, he had established the Islamic political lobby UAM 93 (Union of Muslim Associations, the numeral 93 being the postal code for Seine-Saint Denis), which claimed to be the first of its kind. Having claimed that the area’s population consisted mostly of his coreligionists, he hit on the idea of creating a political pressure group modeled on CRIF, the Representative Council of Jewish Institutions of France. He used it to “monetize” Muslim votes in elections by pressuring candidates to take positions favorable to various Islamic causes in return for the group’s support. It gave him control or influence over the issuance of building permits to mosques, the granting of subsidies to “cultural” or charitable associations endorsed by his group, the opening of Islamic charter schools, and more. The group even staged an annual UAM 93 iftar to break the fast of Ramadan, in imitation of the annual CRIF dinner. Local politicians rushed to it as if to some kind of halal popularity contest. UAM had an opportunistic attitude towards right and left, socialist, centrist, or communist ideologies. Patterned on the way Israel’s Orthodox Jewish religious parties horse-traded their votes in the Knesset in return for subsidies to their yeshivas, Henniche could boast of making or unmaking mayors, department councilors, or members of Parliament in the “most Muslim department in France.” In October 2020, the Pantin Mosque occupied temporary quarters in a former sports hall that could accommodate up to 1,300 people. The cornerstone for a permanent building had been laid on Saturday, February 29, 2020, just prior to the municipal elections of March 15, in which the incumbent Socialist mayor Bertrand Kern was reelected during the first round. Close to Henniche, he had signed off on a long-term leasehold for the mosque as early as 2013, conditioned on its being open to all ethnic components of the local Muslim population. Hence the Friday imam, Ibrahim Doucouré, also known as Ibrahim Abou Talha, was of Malian origin, and had been educated in Dammaj, in northern Yemen, an area now occupied by Houthi rebels. This was where the principal local Salafist ideologue, Muqbil al Wadi’i, a lapsed Zaidi (local Shiite), had established his seminary, Dar al-Hadith, after he had joined the most virulent current of Wahhabism in neighboring Saudi Arabia in the 1990s. In Yemen, he preached an ultra-rig-orist doctrine with a new convert’s zeal, attracting many foreigners, including French-speaking converts. The rebel Houthi movement in fact was created in reaction to Muqbil’s brand of fanatical proselytism. In 2015, when the rebels took over the area and then the capital at Sanaa, they destroyed the seminary’s buildings and hunted down its students. Many of Muqbil’s French-speaking disciples today are refugees in Birmingham, the nerve center of the main Islamist power networks in the United Kingdom. It also
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