Whistles at Egypt's anthem, chants of “Muslim who doesn’t jump!”, insults to Pedro Sánchez and the essential “Spanish Gibraltar!”. What is this if not Torrente going to Cornellà-El Prat yesterday to cheer on the Spanish team?Bring, bring the Spanish team to Catalonia, so that all the Vox voters come out to make racist chants.Racist and stupid. Because, as an Ara reader says today in their comments, “you have to be an idiot to go to see a match of your team, start shouting racist cries and chants, and end up insulting the best player on your own team.” Because, of course, these patriots have forgotten that if there is a player who can decisively contribute to Spain winning the World Cup again one day, it is a player named Lamine Yamal and he is Muslim. Not to mention whistling the Barça goalkeeper and former Espanyol player Joan Garcia on his debut for the national team. And they were not minority chants. At the end of the match, when asked about racism and xenophobia, the coach Luis de la Fuente (the one who applauded Rubiales on the day of “I am not going to resign”) replied that these people, “the further away from society, the better.” Impossible for them to be far away, they are society. They are a fraction of society that has a voice and a vote (Vox in Spain) which is a vote that is very much in line with their voice.

Between twenty and thirty cars are stolen each week, and the same number of robberies occur daily in the Lleida region, "some very violent." Ninety percent of those arrested for these crimes are of North African origin. These are some of the figures published on Tuesday by the Catalan Alliance of the Lands of Lleida on social media. Silvia Orriols' party put numbers to the crimes committed in this area and, once again, targeted the Muslim community in its offensive against people from Morocco. The Lleida Municipal Police (Guardia Urbana) took less than an hour to deny these figures, which the far-right party claimed had been provided to them by sources within the force itself. "We categorically deny the data you are disseminating and that it is official information from the Lleida Municipal Police. What you are stating is not true in any case. We ask that you correct yourself and stop spreading falsehoods. Thank you," the Lleida local police responded from their official account.

She's a woman and an imam. A binomial that is a priori antagonistic. Seyran Ateş She was born in Turkey into a Muslim family but grew up in Germany. A lawyer by profession, she has lived under police protection since 2006. She began receiving death threats because she helped Muslim women who were being forced into marriage. Later, because she published the book Islam needs a sexual revolution (Islam needs a sexual revolution). And finally, because she opened a liberal mosque in Berlin, the Ibn Rushd-Goethe Mosque, where women and men pray together in the same space. The documentary Seyran Ateş: Sex, Revolution and Islam (Seyran Ateş: sex, revolution and Islam) tells her life story.

The Muslim community in Catalonia is significant: there are more than 300 places of worship and nearly 700,000 members, most of whom are practicing. Their presence is visible in many neighborhoods and cities. Young people don't attend synagogues as often, partly because many imams don't speak Catalan or Spanish, but they do follow sermons on social media.influencers Muslims, some of whom are linked to jihadism. The danger of radicalization is real and cannot be underestimated. Leaving its denunciation in the hands of an extreme right wing that spreads Islamophobic rhetoric—with solutions like bans or expulsions, which violate respect for individual and religious freedom—is also a worrying danger.

These are not low-quality videos, but the opposite. The set is meticulously prepared, the editing is impeccable, and the sound quality is high. The podcast is called Return to the truth and has 46,800 followers on Instagram. "A man needs his wife to be willing when he wants to be with her. And it is forbidden [in Islam] for her to refuse, unless she has a legitimate reason: menstruation, if she is going through a difficult time… (…) Even if she is cooking, she must stop cooking and go," says Sheikh Yusuf Soldado in one of the podcast's videos, talking with other Islamic influencer Aleksandar Petrov, that is even more popular. Petrov has 508,000 followers on Instagram.

What is happening in Spain and Catalonia is not an exception. All European countries face the same challenge: they don't know exactly what is happening in mosques and they have foreign imams with limited knowledge of the language and the country's social, cultural, and legal context. So far, no country has found a solution for this situation, but most have taken steps. These are some of the initiatives.

A thick curtain divides the carpeted room in two. In the smaller section, a couple of women are teaching a group of girls. The larger section, however, is reserved for boys, and the imam and his assistant are in charge of teaching them the Quran and Arabic. There's a bit of a commotion, nothing like the silence that reigns in the mosque during prayer.

Just as we have previously focused on changes within the Catholic Church or on crises of faith among young people, this Sunday we turn our attention to one of the religions with the most followers in Catalonia: Islam. It's not easy, because although there are 319 mosques in Catalonia, it's unknown how many imams there are, what countries they come from, or what their ideology is. The same is true in other European countries, but many governments have begun to take steps to better understand the situation in order to prevent radicalization and, above all, to facilitate a better understanding of the country's social and cultural reality. Journalist Mònica Bernabé has spent months investigating who the imams of Catalonia are and has spoken with countless experts. The conclusion is that Catalonia lags behind the rest of Europe in this regard.

At first glance, the Pla d'Almatà is a vast and desolate wasteland. It covers 27 hectares surrounded by the remains of a wall and 27 very deteriorated towers. From the road, only the Sant Crist de Balaguer fortress, a fire station, and a high school are visible. If you wander around, some clues emerge about the past life of the plateau overlooking the town of Balaguer: the remains of four 10th-century houses, when the capital of the Noguera River was Madina Balagí, and there were mosques, baths, markets, houses and streets that followed an orderly and planned layout, and a fortress. Practically everything is buried; only 2% of the site has been excavated, but, apart from hiding remains from the Andalusian past, the plateau, as it has hardly been urbanized, is a veritable source of knowledge. Excavations have been ongoing for forty years, but one of the problems is that it is not even recognizable as a site and is not protected.

Fatima Ouassak was born in Morocco, but moved to France when she was just one year old. A political scientist and activist, she presents the essay The power of mothers, written out of anger at racism and Islamophobia, and fear of the consequences this can have for their children. It defends the power mothers have if they are able to organize politically.

The French Ministry of the Interior published a few weeks ago a report called Muslim Brotherhood and Political Islam in France in which he warned about the dangerous penetration of this organization, whose values run counter to the principles of the Republic (and any democratic system based on individual freedoms and the separation of religion and state). One of the measures the French government has taken to counter the Brotherhood's influence has been the decision to promote the teaching of foreign languages, some of which are the mother tongues of the children of North African immigrants. What is striking is that Amazigh is not among these twelve languages to be offered. Regarding the issue, Rachid Raha, president of the World Amazigh Assembly, has written to Emmanuel Macron in which he warns against the error of mistaking Franco-Berbers for Arabs. "Discrimination against the children of immigrants," says Raha, "accentuates their cultural uprooting and reinforces their identity crisis, which facilitates their isolation and ultimately leads them to be drawn to Salafi Islamist ideology." Raha cites an anthropologist (Tassadit Yacine) and two historians (Pierre Vermeren and Omar Hamourit) to affirm that the second language of France is Amazigh, not Arabic.

Dounia's parents have lived their Muslim faith between Morocco and the suburbs of Paris all their lives. Coming from the Moroccan diaspora of the 1960s, the couple has three children in three different countries: the United Kingdom, Morocco and France. It is in the latter that Dounia, the youngest, was born and has lived there for more than thirty years. Contrary to her parents, she is not a believer, but she prefers not to talk about the draft law against "separatism" promoted by President Emmanuel Macron, which has caused controversy. Dounia exudes a certain exasperation towards the political class and the media. Dounia's refusal says a lot about this text that for months has been talked about in the country. "My parents are also disengaged", she concludes, with no option for the journalist to reply.