The banlieues — France's peripheral suburban housing estates — have an image problem that their residents are familiar with and exhausted by. The word itself, in French public discourse, has become shorthand for unemployment, crime, discrimination, and failure. The reality, as anyone who has spent time in these communities knows, is more complex: families working hard, children with ambitions, mosques that are full on Fridays, and a persistent, grinding sense that the barriers between here and the Paris that tourists see are higher than they should be.
The programme
In 2013, the board of the Grande Mosquée de Clichy-la-Garenne — one of the largest mosques in the Île-de-France region — faced a practical question: what to do with the mosque's classrooms and halls on the evenings and weekends when they were not being used for religious education? The answer, proposed by a young mosque board member named Karim, was simple: open them to the neighbourhood for free after-school tutoring. All children welcome. No conditions. No religious content during tutoring sessions.
The programme launched with twelve volunteer tutors — university students and young professionals from the mosque's community — and forty students from the surrounding primary and secondary schools. Within two years, there were eighty tutors and over 300 students. Today, the programme runs five evenings a week and on Saturday mornings, serving over 600 students from Clichy, Levallois, and Saint-Denis, in subjects ranging from primary school mathematics to baccalauréat examination preparation, including French literature, history, physics, and English.
Who comes
The students who come to the mosque for tutoring are not exclusively Muslim. In the first year, roughly 80 percent came from Muslim families in the neighbourhood. By the fifth year, as word spread through local schools and the programme's reputation for effectiveness grew, the proportion had shifted to around 55 percent Muslim, with significant numbers of children from Catholic, secular, Jewish, and no-religion backgrounds. The mosque deliberately does not track religious affiliation among students — 'we don't ask, it doesn't matter,' says Karim, now the programme's director — but the social mix of the tutoring rooms tells its own story.
For non-Muslim families sending their children to be tutored in a mosque, the decision represents a practical calculation that has also, often, changed perceptions. Several parents have spoken publicly about how the tutoring programme reversed the assumption they had absorbed — from the news, from political discourse — about what a mosque is and what it does. 'I was nervous the first time I brought my daughter,' admits Cécile, a non-Muslim French woman from Clichy. 'Now I volunteer there on Thursday evenings. It is the most normal place in the world.'
The results
Academic outcomes among programme participants, tracked since 2017, consistently outperform the Île-de-France average for students from similar socioeconomic backgrounds — with baccalauréat pass rates among long-term participants approaching the national average, compared to significantly below-average rates for their peers in the same schools who do not participate. University enrolment rates among programme alumni are three times higher than the banlieue average.
Whoever treads a path in search of knowledge, Allah will make easy for him a path to Paradise.
Beyond grades
The volunteers who run the programme say the numbers capture only part of what the tutoring sessions accomplish. 'When a fourteen-year-old from here writes a strong essay and believes they can succeed, that is not just a grade,' says Fatima, a volunteer who was herself tutored in the programme's first year and who is now completing a master's degree in economics. 'It is a different future.' France's banlieues are full of different futures waiting to happen. In Clichy, a mosque is helping them happen.