To Shape Islam, Improve Security, French Government Teaches French to Imams

c. 2005 Religion News Service CLERMONT-FERRAND, France _ Hocine Elafghani has lived in France for more than half a century. He has watched his eight children grow up in the rolling hills of central France _ and their children as well. But in many ways, this gaunt 72-year-old imam from Casablanca remains an outsider in […]

c. 2005 Religion News Service

CLERMONT-FERRAND, France _ Hocine Elafghani has lived in France for more than half a century.

He has watched his eight children grow up in the rolling hills of central France _ and their children as well. But in many ways, this gaunt 72-year-old imam from Casablanca remains an outsider in his adopted land.


When he preaches to fellow Muslims in the village of St. Georges de Meaux, Elafghani speaks in the Arabic of his native Morocco.

“I would like to learn to speak and write a bit more in French,” he confessed in halting French during an interview at a community building for Moroccan Muslims in Clermont-Ferrand, the regional capital.

That’s also what the country’s center-right government would like _ which is why Elafghani recently joined hundreds of fellow preachers signing up for a new language training program for Islamic spiritual leaders in France.

Launched by Interior Minister Dominique de Villepin, the French language courses are to be twinned this fall with a separate program teaching imams about French history, civics and culture. Behind the effort are a raft of troubling facts about those preaching to France’s Muslim community _ the largest in Western Europe at 5 million strong.

Two-thirds of the country’s 1,200 imams are foreign born, according to the Interior Ministry. Of those, less than a half speak French.

French officials worry that the preachings of a minority of fiery, largely foreign-born clerics have inspired dozens of Muslim youths to toy with waging holy war _ at home, and overseas.

France has expelled dozens of foreign-born clerics since September 2001, and not only for preaching political violence. Last year, for example, Abdelkader Bouziane, an Algerian-born imam near Lyon, was kicked out of the country for advocating wife-beating and other retrograde practices.


“The only problem we have is with fundamentalism, it’s not with Islam,” Blandine Kriegel, head of the French government commission on integration, told the BBC.

“The question is,” Kriegel said, “can we have a moderate form of Islam? And the answer is, yes, of course.”

Problems of Islamic extremism are far rarer among the 31,000 Muslims living in Clermont-Ferrand and elsewhere in Auvergne than they are in the gritty suburbs of Paris and Lyon. Nonetheless, this bucolic region became the first this spring to offer the language training courses.

“We have very good relations with representatives of Muslim associations,” said Jean-Luc Tronco, cabinet director at the Auvergne prefecture, in Clermont-Ferrand. “We’re dealing with people who want to work constructively, who practice a peaceful Islam. I’m not saying that we don’t have a problem here or there, but it’s not common.”

Conversations with leaders of the Auvergne region’s diverse Muslim community also suggest that Islamic extremism is not a top worry here. Instead, they tick off a list of other concerns, from lack of funding and government permits to construct mosques, to a dearth of interest on the part of young Muslims to become imams.

“There’s a percentage of young men who receive clerical training, but they don’t see a future in becoming imams,” said Abdellah Assafiri, the Moroccan-born president of Auvergne’s Regional Council for the French Muslim Faith. “Imams here work pro bono. But that can’t last.”


Indeed, Elafghani’s own children have refused to follow his footsteps for lack of a salary. Two sons are truck drivers. Another is in the French army.

“It’s not easy being an imam here,” he said.

Elafghani studied the Quran in Fez, Morocco, before moving to France in 1957. Today, he dispenses advice about the Islamic religion to Muslims attending his village mosque. He says he is never asked questions about how to reconcile the Islamic religion with Western culture.

“Just about the Quran, and how to follow the right path,” Elafghani said. “I don’t know anything about French politics. Just the Quran and the Hadith (the prophet Mohammed’s sayings) _ that’s it.”

Melvut Yildirim, 38, is hardly better versed in the French way of life. Sent to Clermont-Ferrand by Ankara last year to preside over the local Turkish community, the imam had studied German as a foreign language.

“I’d be interested in learning French law, and the French language as well,” Yildirim said, speaking in Turkish through a translator, his two sons standing shyly by his side. “It’s important to integrate, since we’re almost Europeans.”

“But,” he added, “it’s better that the Turkish government sends imams to head the prayers here. They’re better qualified to explain daily life and norms in Turkey.”


French officials, however, want Muslims versed in the daily life and norms of France.

Indeed, the new imam training programs are part of a grander scheme to create a moderate, Western-oriented “Islam of France.” Among other plans, the French government wants to establish university training programs designed to school a new generation of native clerics.

France is hardly the only European country trying to put a national stamp on Islam. Spain, Italy and Britain have all cracked down on radical Islamic preachers and practitioners in recent years, while also trying to offer new assistance to those espousing moderate views.

Besides training imams, the French government is searching for ways to finance mosque construction domestically, thereby cutting the funding spigot from countries like Saudi Arabia.

In March, the Interior Ministry announced a new foundation would collect euros for mosque construction and other religious needs. But critics suggest the initiative is flawed _ in part because the national representative Muslim council, intended to run it, is paralyzed by political divisions.

A rival proposal, floated by Nicholas Sarkozy, head of the governing Union for a Popular Movement Party, calls for legislative changes that would allow the government to finance mosque construction. But politicians are reluctant to tinker with the 1905 law separating church and state.

In Clermont-Ferrand, regional council head Abdella Assafiri said Auvergne’s Muslim community does not really care where the money comes from.


“It doesn’t matter what method is used to finance mosques,” he said.

“Whatever method, it will be welcome.”

MO/RB END RNS

Editors: Search the RNS photo Web site at https://religionnews.com for a photo of Hocine Elafghani to accompany this story.

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