Leaders split over reforms
President Emmanuel Macron’s efforts to foster an ‘‘enlightened Islam’’ in France have run into trouble, with moderate Muslim leaders accusing fundamentalists of blocking a charter to curb extremists.
Chems-eddine Hafiz, rector of the Great Mosque of Paris, said he had taken an ‘‘irrevocable decision’’ to withdraw from efforts to create a national body for regulating imams, a project promoted by Macron, because it was being undermined by fundamentalists in the French Muslim Council, the faith’s umbrella body.
Macron issued a declaration in October against the ‘‘separatism’’ promoted by radical Islam. He called for a French structure for the faith to reject foreign influence and commit itself to the enlightened ‘‘republican’’ ideals of the nation. A key to this would be a charter of values that would commit French imams to accept the laws of the secular state and its gender and racial equality.
The subsequent beheading of teacher Samuel Paty by an Islamist extremist and the murder of three people in a knife attack at a church in Nice intensified government pressure for new regulation of the faith, which is followed by 6 million people in France. Police have also closed several radical mosques, prayer halls and Islamic associations.
The drive has been criticised by Pakistan and other Muslim countries as persecution of Muslims by the French state.
Work on the charter, led by the Muslim Council, hit a block after fundamentalist branches representing Salafism, Wahhabism, the Muslim Brotherhood and the Milli Gorus, a movement aligned with Turkey, objected to clauses committing to the principle of the freedom to change religion. They also objected to a clause saying ‘‘no religious authority may challenge teaching methods’’ in state schools.
Hafiz said ‘‘members of the Islamist movement’’ were trying to split Muslims from French society.
The council was set up in 2003 to group the country’s disparate Muslim branches in one body that would serve as official interlocutor with the French state. Mohammed Moussaoui, its leader, is often at loggerheads with Hafiz, a vicepresident, although both are moderates.