The Rise of the Minaret – French Town Sees Sixth Mosque Near Completion
Damien Cowley
TheGatewayPundit.com
Mar 31st, 2017
Roubaix is a northern French town, close to the Belgian border. Counting just under 100,000 inhabitants, it is home to the celebrated art installation, ‘La Piscine’, located within a grandiose Art Deco era swimming pool, and to the rough terrain Paris – Roubaix bicycle race, one of the world’s first cycling fixtures dating from 1896.
In recent times, Roubaix has been defined by its poverty, having the undesirable distinction and recent media celebrity of being France’s poorest town, with an estimated 45% of its residents living below the poverty line and an unemployment rate of 30%.
The former textiles boomtown northeast of Lille saw its industrial prowess dwindle from the 1970s onwards, and has since witnessed a demographic transformation due primarily to mass immigration from France’s former colonies and beyond.
Today an estimated 40% of its residents hail from Muslim countries and the town’s urban landscape is changing to reflect this reality; in its Islamic bookstores, its boutiques selling hijabs and long veils, in its halal butcher shops.
The change can also be seen on the streets of Roubaix – in the faces of the new population, many sporting the clothing and custom of Salafist Islam; bearded men in long garments of a type worn in Islamabad or Kabul, women veiled, some even dressed in the full-covering niqab banned in France.
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