VERSAILLES, France: A school in France will be named after Samuel Paty, a teacher who worked there until he was murdered by a militant for discussing Prophet Muhammad drawings in class, local authorities said after a unanimous vote in favor of the change.
Paty, a 47-year-old history and geography teacher, was stabbed and then beheaded near his secondary school in the Paris suburb of Conflans-Sainte-Honorine on October 16, 2020 in an attack that horrified France.
Paty’s attacker, 18-year-old Chechen refugee Abdoullakh Anzorov, was shot dead at the scene by police.
He murdered Paty after messages spread on social media that the teacher had shown his class cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad from the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo.
“By naming the Bois d’Aulne school Samuel Paty College, we incarnate the French ideal, the republican hope that knowledge brings progress, by giving it the face of a humble, devoted and enthusiastic man, the face of Samuel Paty,” said Pierre Bedier, president of the Yvelines department where the school is located.
New name plates would be put up in the course of the current school year, his office added.
Some parents’ associations had called for the name change to be delayed, arguing that children who were deeply shocked by the 2020 events could be traumatized all over again by revisiting those memories.
They wanted the change to be delayed until after mid-2025 when all pupils who knew Paty personally will have left the establishment, to no avail.
The children “had to live through something unimaginable,” they said in a message to the town’s mayor.
Paty had used the Charlie Hebdo magazine as part of an ethics class to discuss free speech laws in France, where blasphemy is legal and cartoons mocking religious figures have a long history.
His killing took place just weeks after Charlie Hebdo republished the Prophet Muhammad cartoons.
After the magazine used the images in 2015, Islamist gunmen stormed its offices, killing 12 people.
French school to be named after teacher beheaded by militant
https://arab.news/24ejq
French school to be named after teacher beheaded by militant
- “By naming the Bois d’Aulne school Samuel Paty College, we incarnate the French ideal,” said Pierre Bedier, president of the Yvelines department where the school is located
- New name plates would be put up in the course of the current school year
Only 4% women on ballot as Bangladesh prepares for post-Hasina vote
- Women PMs have ruled Bangladesh for over half of its independent history
- For 2026 vote, only 20 out of 51 political parties nominated female candidates
DHAKA: As Bangladesh prepares for the first election since the ouster of its long-serving ex-prime minister Sheikh Hasina, only 4 percent of the registered candidates are women, as more than half of the political parties did not field female candidates.
The vote on Feb. 12 will bring in new leadership after an 18-month rule of the caretaker administration that took control following the student-led uprising that ended 15 years in power of Hasina’s Awami League party.
Nearly 128 million Bangladeshis will head to the polls, but while more than 62 million of them are women, the percentage of female candidates in the race is incomparably lower, despite last year’s consensus reached by political parties to have at least 5 percent women on their lists.
According to the Election Commission, among 1,981 candidates only 81 are women, in a country that in its 54 years of independence had for 32 years been led by women prime ministers — Hasina and her late rival Khaleda Zia.
According to Dr. Rasheda Rawnak Khan from the Department of Anthropology at Dhaka University, women’s political participation was neither reflected by the rule of Hasina nor Zia.
“Bangladesh has had women rulers, not women’s rule,” Khan told Arab News. “The structure of party politics in Bangladesh is deeply patriarchal.”
Only 20 out of 51 political parties nominated female candidates for the 2026 vote. Percentage-wise, the Bangladesh Socialist Party was leading with nine women, or 34 percent of its candidates.
The election’s main contender, the Bangladesh Nationalist Party, whose former leader Zia in 1991 became the second woman prime minister of a predominantly Muslim nation — after Pakistan’s Benazir Bhutto — was the party that last year put forward the 5 percent quota for women.
For the upcoming vote, however, it ended up nominating only 10 women, or 3.5 percent of its 288 candidates.
The second-largest party, Jamaat-e-Islami, has not nominated a single woman.
The 4 percent participation is lower than in the previous election in 2024, when it was slightly above 5 percent, but there was no decreasing trend. In 2019, the rate was 5.9 percent, and 4 percent in 2014.
“We have not seen any independent women’s political movement or institutional activities earlier, from where women could now participate in the election independently,” Khan said.
“Real political participation is different and difficult as well in this patriarchal society, where we need to establish internal party democracy, protection from political violence, ensure direct election, and cultural shifts around female leadership.”
While the 2024 student-led uprising featured a prominent presence of women activists, Election Commission data shows that this has not translated into their political participation, with very few women contesting the upcoming polls.
“In the student movement, women were recruited because they were useful, presentable for rallies and protests both on campus and in the field of political legitimacy. Women were kept at the forefront for exhibiting some sort of ‘inclusive’ images to the media and the people,” Khan said.
“To become a candidate in the general election, one needs to have a powerful mentor, money, muscle power, control over party people, activists, and locals. Within the male-dominated networks, it’s very difficult for women to get all these things.”
