The “republican charter of the National Council of Imams” is nearing completion.
This Thursday was to take place a last meeting between the various federations of Islam in France under the aegis of the French Council of Muslim Worship and the Ministry of the Interior, to finalize a text already very successful since it was discreetly and worked at length with the same interlocutors, Saturday 28 November.
Overloaded, the Minister of the Interior had, at the last moment, to postpone this meeting to Monday, December 7.
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It is therefore probable that this republican charter, which will regulate the activity of imams on French soil, can be presented to the President of the Republic within the time limit that Emmanuel Macron had set for all the federations of Islam in France, when of a working session on November 18.
According to an Elysée adviser, the president then specified what he expected from this framework text, the object of which is to fight against radical Islamism and its foreign influences:
"There will be those who sign and those who will not sign.
We will learn from it.
Either you are with the Republic, or you are not with the Republic. ”
Who controls the selection, training, accreditation, recruitment and management of imams partly controls the Islam of France
The republican charter is not yet known but it is moving forward, in parallel with another very important reform underway, the creation of a National Council of Imams
.
This idea has been circulating for years in the Islam of France but it had never yet taken shape due to internal quarrels still very strong against it.
Because who controls the selection, training, approval, recruitment and management of imams partially controls the Islam of France.
This new project was thus subjected, Tuesday, December 1, to a charge from the well-known imam of Bordeaux, Tareq Oubrou.
With a dozen colleagues, he published a column in
Le Monde
where he questions the legitimacy of the sponsorship of the CFCM on this Council of Imams because it should, according to him, be entrusted only to imams and not to Muslim federations.
Work is progressing
This is the last controversial episode - there have been many and there will be others - against this idea brought forward, since his arrival in January 2019, by the current president of the French Council of Muslim Worship, Mohammed Moussaoui.
Work is progressing in any case: the "framework documents" of this National Council of Imams, defining its object, its philosophy and its objectives, were validated by the Muslim authorities in mid-November, as were its "internal regulations".
More technical aspects remain to be finalized, such as the “job descriptions” of imams specifying their mission, as well as the “employment contracts” by the associations supporting the mosques.
Also to come, a highly anticipated piece of choice: "the moral, ethical and deontological code of the National Council of Imams".
Theological, it will complete what the republican charter wants to bring on the external, political level.
