Emmanuel Macron called on Thursday to "redouble efforts" to "get out of the interference", often foreign, which according to him harms the development of an "Islam of the Enlightenment" in France.
On the financing of the Muslim faith, the status of imams or the fight against propaganda, the Head of State estimated, during a meeting at the Elysee Palace marking the first anniversary of the Forum de l'islam de France (Forif ), that there were still "mountains to move".
Forif, a young body for dialogue with the State, was launched in February 2022 by the Minister of the Interior Gérald Darmanin in the wake of President Macron's speech in Les Mureaux, in the Yvelines, where he had set out his policy in 2020 against radical Islam.
Thursday, he acknowledged that "opaque mechanisms", "interference" and "influence games", "it still exists on the ground". "It is neither the speech of the Mureaux, nor the law, nor the Forif" which could "stop" this, "let's be completely honest", he added.
"We must clarify the financing", with "durability" and "transparency", in the "respect" of secularism, explained the head of state, without going into detail on the avenues of work. "We must redouble our efforts," he said.
The same goes for the project, also undertaken by Forif, for the training of imams and the creation of an ad hoc statute concerning them.
"If we somehow leave to others the task of training or exporting preachers to France, we can continue as we have been doing for 20 years, that is to say, to deplore the consequences of which we cherish the causes. It's not my temperament", launched Emmanuel Macron.
"We must approve university training, build a system of governance which means that people whose competence is in the field will be able to say this person is an imam, is not an imam", he listed. He pleaded for "a system whereby when people who preach say crazy things that threaten the Republic and flout the religion of Islam, we can tell them you will no longer have the right to do so".
The head of state also said he wanted "greater transparency" in the financing of the pilgrimage to Mecca and to fight against "manipulative discourse". Finally, he promised to "reinvest massively" in Islamic studies, by recreating chairs and doctoral positions.
02/16/2023 16:57:16 - Paris (AFP) - © 2023 AFP
