Author: Craig S. Smith
Publication: The New York Times
Date: April 30, 2004
This town's largest mosque is temporarily
leaderless, its chief cleric having been expelled from France last week
for advocating wife beating, stoning and other medieval Islamic views at
odds with the principles of the modern French state.
The cleric, Abdelkader Bouziane,
was the fifth cleric expelled from France this year on charges of spreading
a dangerously divisive brand of radical Islam. The country has kicked out
dozens since 2001.
"The government cannot tolerate
the public statement of views that are contrary to human rights, attack
the dignity of women and call for hate or violence," the country's new
interior minister, Dominique de Villepin, said recently.
France has long maintained one of
the strictest antiterrorism programs in Europe, in part because the country
was hit early by Islamist terror and because it has the largest Muslim
population on the Continent. Many other countries in Europe have been far
more tolerant in allowing radical discourse to flourish in their mosques.
But making such a hard-line stance
stick is difficult, even here in a country that has been more willing than
most of its European neighbors to limit free speech in the interest of
a calm and cohesive society.
Mr. Bouziane, 52, won an appeal
that would allow him to return from his native Algeria to France, despite
the Interior Ministry's presentation to the court of evidence that Mr.
Bouziane has links to groups that support terrorism.
[On Thursday, President Jacques
Chirac, who has been criticized by moderate Muslims for his handling of
the case, vowed to take further legal action if Mr. Bouziane returns from
Algeria. "If we have to change our law to avoid repeating this kind of
case, which is unacceptable for us, we will change the law so we can expel
people who say such things," he said at a news conference.]
The expulsion and possible return
of Mr. Bouziane highlight a thorny issue that most countries across Europe
are facing as they struggle to meet the needs of their growing Muslim populations
and protect traditional civil liberties while trying to curb the spread
of extremist Islamic thought.
Part of the problem is a dearth
of domestically trained clerics to lead congregations of European-born
Muslims. As a result, mosques like that in Vénissieux often have
to rely on imported imams or self-proclaimed clerics who espouse fundamentalist
beliefs that grate against Europe's more tolerant societies.
"The problem is that we have 1,500
imams, but the great majority of them don't have any knowledge of the land,"
said Azzedine Gaci, who heads the Muslim Council in the Rhône-Alps
region.
Only about 10 percent of the imams
preaching in France's mosques and prayer rooms are citizens, and half do
not speak French, according to the Interior Ministry.
The issue has become more pressing
in the 10 years since a wave of Islamist terrorism swept France and has
continued to spread around the world. The fundamentalist clerics provided
inspiration and support for Islamists returning from Afghanistan and Eastern
Europe jihads - among them the hijackers who attacked the United States
on Sept. 11, 2001. They have also helped prepare fresh recruits from among
Europe's frustrated, disenfranchised second-generation immigrant youths
now rediscovering their religious roots.
Mr. de Villepin said last week that
France would have to help Muslims to train moderate prayer leaders here
to encourage the emergence of a tolerant "French Islam." The country's
government-sponsored Muslim Council is working on a training program but
says it needs state aid. Any government move to support such a program,
however, faces huge obstacles because of France's strict laws barring the
state from meddling in religion.
The robed men streaming into the
mosque for Friday prayers this week angrily refused to answer questions
from outsiders, arguing that they have been misrepresented by the news
media. "Apparently, the government is giving away airplane tickets for
free," said a long-bearded man, referring to Mr. Bouziane's expulsion.
But extreme fundamentalist congregations
in Vénissieux and other working-class suburbs east of Lyon, France's
second-largest urban center, have produced violent militants in the past.
In September 1995, the police killed
an Algerian Islamist in a shootout near Lyon after recovering his fingerprints
from an unexploded bomb found on the tracks of the high-speed rail line
between Lyon and Paris. The man, believed to have been behind a spate of
bombings that terrorized Paris earlier that year, had attended a fundamentalist
mosque in Vaulx-en-Velin, Lyon's other principal working-class suburb with
a concentration of Muslims.
In January this year, the police
arrested six men from Vénissieux who were alleged to be part of
a terrorist group linked to Al Qaeda that had planned a chemical weapons
attack in Paris in 2002. One of the men taken into custody ran a small
radical prayer room in town, and another was leading an effort to expand
the mosque at which the now-expelled Mr. Bouziane preached.
Two Vénissieux men are among
people taken prisoner two years ago in Afghanistan and are now detained
at the United States naval station in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba.
France has tried to regulate its
five million Muslims by creating a national advisory body to address issues
like the training of clerics and to act as the Muslim representative in
dealing with the government. But the country's most extreme fundamentalists
have refused to take part.
"People like Mr. Bouziane live in
another world," said Mr. Gaci, who is part of a broader trend of young,
politically active second-generation Muslims here who are struggling to
establish a united front to give Europe's Muslims a stronger voice and
indisputable power. He worries that the scattered but spreading fundamentalist
movement is hurting that effort.
Mr. Bouziane has preached at several
mosques in and around Lyon since arriving in France from Algeria in 1979.
After a six-month stint in Saudi Arabia, he began preaching at the Vénissieux
mosque, an unassuming gray concrete box a block from the town's largest
housing development.
The imam's extreme views were well
known among Muslims in the region and drew the attention of the local authorities
last year after he reportedly issued a fatwa, or religious edict, calling
for jihad against American interests in France.
The Interior Ministry issued an
expulsion order in February, but did not immediately execute it. Then,
in early April, a local publication, Lyon Mag, published an interview with
Mr. Bouziane in which he spoke about his support for the Koran's teaching
that adulterous women should be stoned and that it was a man's right to
strike his wife if she was unfaithful.
"He shouldn't hit her in the face,
but aim lower, the legs or stomach," he said in the interview, adding that
a man can hit hard to instill fear in his wife.
France's national press picked up
the article, and within days the Interior Ministry executed the expulsion
order. Mr. Bouziane was put on a plane to Algiers, where he was apparently
detained for questioning.
But the expulsion drew sharp criticism
from many Muslims across France, who saw it as part of a broader attack
on Muslims by the French state. The country has recently issued a law banning
girls from wearing Muslim veils at school, for example.
In the housing projects near Mr.
Bouziane's mosque, a young man with a closely cropped beard said he thought
that the cleric had done nothing wrong. "If my wife cheats on me, I have
the right to correct her," he said, "and not just with a slap on the bottom,
but with a gunshot."
