Paris attacks: Faction-ridden, leaderless mess of French Islam laid bare

Leaderless French Islam laid bare

French Islam, far from finding unity of purpose after the Paris terror attacks, perpetrated by homegrown Islamic State-inspired terrorists shouting “Allahu Akbar”, is more divided and lacking in spiritual and political leadership than ever.

Chronically split at the community level, crippled by a long-term power vacuum at the top, and torn apart by a bitter struggle over rising separatist neo-fundamentalism or Salafism, Europe’s largest Muslim community, an estimated six million, is unlikely to achieve its faltering goal of establishing a genuine Gallic Islam, or Islam of France, anytime soon.

The spectacularly incompetent, unrepresentative and widely distrusted authorities of the Grand Mosque of Paris and its rector Dalil Boubakeur were missing in action following the November 13 massacre of 130 people by Kalashnikov-toting killers and suicide bombers, all reared and radicalised on local soil.

Sensitive to the gravity of the catastrophe and the unanimity of French citizens and public figures in condemning the murders, Boubakeur did not make the same grave error of immediately suggesting the attacks were caused by racism and Islamophobia, like the Australian Grand Mufti Ibrahim Abu Mohamed.

Those ugly scenarios have already been played out time and again, after the January murders of the Charlie Hebdo editorial team and at the Jewish supermarket Hyper Cacher. When Mohammed Merah committed his serial murders in the Toulouse area at a Jewish school and of French Muslim soldiers in 2012, the killer became a posthumous hero to some extremists and delinquent kids in the French suburbs. They took to social media to celebrate the Merah murders. As recently as September, prominent imams such as the preacher of the Bagnolet mosque on the edge of Paris railed against demands that Muslims condemn and distance themselves from terrorist actions such as the beheading of French hostages by Islamic State.

Boubakeur, however, was sufficiently silent and inactive to shock and alarm city authorities in the days following the slayings of concertgoers at the Bataclan and Parisians and foreigners sitting on cafe terraces and in restaurants.

While the Catholic hierarchy quickly united to make official statements of mourning and organised memorials and masses in the days after the attacks, and Jewish figures gathered believers to offer prayers in synagogues, the spokesman for the oldest Islamic house of worship in France was strangely absent.

Boubakeur was conspicuous for not going swiftly to pay his respects in front of the Bataclan.

“What happened to the officials of the Muslim faith in Paris? The Grand Mosque of Paris only offered the minimum service,” fumed one senior aide to the city’s mayor, Anne Hidalgo.

“We were even more surprised, given that at Notre Dame and the Grand Synagogue gatherings were organised from the 15th of November,” said a Socialist from the Paris government.

The Grand Mosque finally responded on Tuesday November 17, calling on “all citizens of the Muslim confession and their friends”, to gather in front of the fabled Paris house of worship on the Left Bank near the Sorbonne University, after Friday prayers.

I became caught up in the confusion one week on from the attacks, having planned to report on the gathering, when on the eve of the much-anticipated and widely publicised gathering it was ­abruptly cancelled.

The official justification from the mosque was security issues related to the state of emergency. But it has since emerged, including in reporting by the reliably informed investigative and satirical weekly Le Canard Enchaine, that in fact the rector of the mosque himself forced the hand of the Paris prefecture of police, demanding a letter that would absolve him of all responsibility in the event of problems at the demonstration.

“In reality he never wanted this gathering and he did everything so it would not take place,” said a senior aide to the Paris police chief.

“If the most charitable evoke the ‘old age’ and ‘poor health’ of Boubakeur, others have accused him for a long time of ‘a deliberate ambiguity’ in his attempts to keep the peace between his growing ultra-orthodox flock and requirements to show French republican solidarity,” Herve Liffran said in the Canard Enchaine.

The only imams and leading Muslim figures present on the streets and paying homage outside the scenes of the attacks in eastern Paris in the first days were representatives from the suburbs and the provincial towns. It was left to the much disliked — by fundamentalists — but progressive imam of Drancy, outside Paris, Hassen Chalghoumi, to overtly condemn the attacks and say French Islam must stand firm against such terror, including by looking within. The Grand Mosque’s eminence grise belatedly spoke out against growing radicalism and violence being pushed by some Muslim faith leaders, considerably later however than the oldest Muslim students’ organisation in France.

The vacuum of power, and discord at the official level, and disconnect with angry Muslim youth suburban culture, reflects the internal trench warfare pitting the growing power of Salafists proclaiming a return to a “pure” and reactionary form of Islam, against more traditional conservatives and increasingly marginalised progressives. This mix has been tearing at the fabric of French Islam since the late 1980s.

Lacking a grand mufti, or even a handful of official organisations considered vaguely representative of the nation’s diverse Muslim communities, the community is now in a state of siege and open ideological and political warfare. Extremist Sunni-sympathising cultural groupings such as Barakacity from the Paris suburbs mock the calls for reform of Islam, and spread conspiracy theories about Muslims being harassed under the new police arrest and detention powers. The voices of Muslim reformists such as anthropologist Malek Chebel, or philosophers such as Abdennour Bidar, who says there is a cancer eating at the heart of modern Islam, barely register outside the elite media and mainstream political forums.

The situation has resonance for Australia because the issues are similar: weakness or lack of national spiritual leadership or religious and political direction, divisions over who should train and certify imams and failures by the secular political system.

The Hollande government has outsourced the job of imam education recently to Morocco, but Algeria still runs the show, a reality underscored this week when the Algerian foreign ministry confirmed it was taking official ownership of the Paris mosque, in a legal as well as spiritual sense.

Then there have been the celebrated infiltrations of Gulf State Salafists and Egyptian radical imams, some already expelled, and an inability of the Muslim community to identify even several voices who can speak publicly on behalf of different factions.

Now, post-November 13, as the French government cracks down on radical mosques, arresting or expelling extremist imams, imposing licensing for imams and even asking whether preaching in Arabic should be allowed, there is a fierce debate about so-called “quietist” Salafists.

Even if they do not advocate holy war, they say music is the work of the devil, they detest sexual equality, denounce infidels and fornicators, and spew anti-Semitism. Should they be allowed to continue creating an entirely separate population of French Muslims living in enclaves outside mainstream society — and not just because they are victims of racism or the ghetto mentality?

The Hollande government appears to be saying no. One of the most notorious Google imams ­targeted in this past week’s raids was the Sunni imam of Brest, Rachid Abou Houdeyfa. The YouTube sensation watched by hundreds of thousands was filmed saying on video that people who listened to music would be “crushed underground and transformed into monkeys and pigs”. The video was widely shared after the Bataclan bloodbath as a sign that Salafist preachers were spreading hate that could have led to the killings.

In reality, most neo-fundamentalist preachers are not signing young kids up for Islamic State. But there are disturbing crossovers.

Caroline Fourest, an essayist and documentary-maker who fights for a stricter interpretation of secularism in France, agrees that “the medievalist discourses of the Salafist preachers do not amount to an apology for terrorism or recruitment for jihad”.

“On the other hand it is not just by chance … that many weaker minds and trainee jihadists who join Islamic State also love the preaching of figures like the imam of Brest. These marketing videos are useful for closing the minds of those who believe in a highly literal way of thinking, as brutal as it is inadapted to our society, and to living with others in modernity.”

Creating such a suffocating fundamentalist environment evidently makes it easier for young ­jihadis to justify their extremism and violence, a point made by several academic experts and deradicalisation expert Dounia Bouzar.

‘‘All Muslims know that for at least 10 years there have been micro­phones in all the mosques,” says Bouzar, who runs workshops to try to deradicalise young girls drawn to jihadism.

“People who work in the field repeat incessantly to politicians that radicals are everywhere except in the mosques. But what is worrying in these places of worship are these imams who style themselves as Salafist, and who accustom young people to not asking questions about what they think of Islam — their Islam — and not asking what they think of the Koran.”

The current problem of radicalism stretches back to the late 1980s, when French civil authorities and Muslims themselves were relieved that some ultra-orthodox imams, some from the Muslim Brotherhood and later Sunni Wahhabist ultra-orthodox clerics, were coming in and diverting their delinquent sons away from burning cars and taking drugs to praying and living upright lives.

But the compromise has come back to bite because there is a blurred line between the extreme Salafism preached and practised in France and some jihadis, even if most of the young Islamic State recruits were not radicalised in these mosques and found Allah and each other online and in prison.

Rachid Benzine, an Islam specialist and researcher from Aix-en-Provence, says the issue of Arabic preaching is moot because ‘‘usually imams preach in Arabic and French at the request of the Muslim community. And if they don’t speak French well enough, someone translates.

“Most young people don’t learn about Islam at the mosque but on the internet when the videos of the Google imams are freely available on YouTube and translated by internet users in multiple languages. In addition, mosques have been under surveillance for years.”

Undoubtedly French authorities and Muslim leaders also collectively have failed on the prison radicalisation problem, only just now deciding the state should appoint certified chaplains to jails to try to offer spiritual guidance to young men at risk of egging each other to jihad while incarcerated, as most of the 2015 Paris attackers in January and November had done.

Olivier Roy, one of the most respected specialists of Islam, a French researcher and professor at the European University Institute in Florence, says there are big questions to be asked about imams being trained abroad, principally because they have little in common with the faithful, especially young people.

Roy has criticised the ownership of French Islam by Algeria and Morocco. “The government some months ago signed an agreement to train French imams in Morocco, which is a big problem because this country puts people in jail for homosexuality and blasphemy,” he says.

“There is a big contradiction.”

He says, however that it is too easy to blame the problem of radicalisation on the “virus” of Saudi Arabian preachers or foreign Salafist imports.

“Salafism is a societal problem because the Salafis don’t participate in collective life. But it’s not a terrorism issue as such.

“It is clear there is a problem with Salafism but the issue we must take in charge is how to have a European Islam or a Western Islam. Islam needs to be rehabilitated as a religion in France.”