The attackers claimed to have attacked the cartoonists who drew cartoons which depicted the Prophet Muhammad (P.B.U.H). Muslims have been a target of abuse and have been a target of violence.
A mosque was targeted in Lyon after the Charlie Hebdo attacks and was showered with bullets and blank grenades. Similarly a couple of days back, 28 year old Mohamed El Makouli was attacked at his home and stabbed to death with the attackers shouting, “I am your god, I am your Islam”.
Muslims are being targeted and marginalized by people on social media and on the streets in Europe with anti-Islam rallies being held in Germany.
Such wasn’t the sentiment during the second World War, when the rector of the Great Mosque of Paris, Si Kaddour Benghabrit helped shelter hundreds of Jews during the holocaust. In the early 1940s, a large population of North Africans lived in France and thousands of whom were Sephardic Jews.
Muslims and Jews share several similar traditions, such as circumcision, similarity in names, and both religions forbid the consumption of pork. The similarities between the Jews and Muslims allowed them to hide in the mosque without arousing suspicion from the German Nazis.
The story was told in a French film called “Les Hommes Libres”(Free Men). The story was adapted from several French accounts, which date back to 1940′s which claimed the suspicion of Muslims giving fake Muslim IDs to Jews.
The founder and rector of the Great Mosque of Paris, Si Kaddour Benghabrit had provided Jews refuge and fake Muslim IDs in an attempt to rescue them from possible arrest or deportation. Another account of this story was recovered belonging to Albert Assouline, a North African Jew who had fled a German Prison and had taken refuge at the mosque.
“No fewer than 1,732 resistance fighters found refuge in its underground caverns. These included Muslim escapees but also Christians and Jews. The latter were by far the most numerous.” according to Assouline. Although the numbers of the refugee might differ.
The story is not only a tale of heroism, but of compassion and unity at a time of moral crisis.