Posted on 03/09/2008 6:34:48 PM PDT by Doctor13
France has launched a groundbreaking program to educate future imams and Muslim chaplains about the country and its values. The goal: to put a French stamp on Islam, the second largest religion in France. Lisa Bryant has more from Paris.
The courses are being held in an unusual location - the Catholic Institute of Paris, an institution better known for training priests and Christian scholars than Muslim clerics. Established in collaboration with the French government and the Paris mosque, the program began in January with a largely male class of 25. It aims to give the students a broad understanding of France's legal, historical and social mores.
What the year-long program does not do, says Interior Ministry spokesman Gerard Gachet is offer theology training.
Gachet says religious training for the future clerics is the role of Muslim institutes. But the government believes the courses on France will help shape a French Islam that is perfectly in touch with society.
The students at the Catholic Institute course are largely foreign born, with many coming from North and sub-Saharan Africa. The program's director, Olivier Bobineau, says they are eager to learn.
Bobineau says he hopes the students end up with a better understanding of the relationship between politics and religion in France - and the values and rules that exist here.
Experts say the courses fill a critical gap. Most of France's five to seven million Muslims - the largest Muslim community in Western Europe - were born here. By contrast, roughly 80 percent of the 1,200 imams preaching in French mosques and prayer houses were born overseas. Some cannot converse with their own faithful, much less understand French laws and social customs.
Sociologist Franck Fregosi specializes in Islam at the National Center for Scientific Research, a French think tank.
Fregosi says foreign-born imams are often unprepared for their jobs in France. He syas many Turkish clerics, for example, do not know anything about French history, some preachers cannot speak French.
Djelloul Seddiki, the director of the Al Ghazali imam training program at the Paris mosque agrees.
For example, Seddiki says, the mosque's Koranic program can teach students that a man can have up to four wives - in accordance with Muslim tradition. But polygamy is illegal in France.
The Catholic Institute's training has another goal: To ensure a moderate, tolerant Islam flourishes in France, which has been the target of Islamist terrorist attacks.
For now, the students come only from the Paris mosque. Those affiliated with other French Muslim organizations, including the popular, more fundamentalist Union of Islamic Organizations of France, do not participate - reflecting larger, political divisions within France's Muslim community.
What is clear is that the clerics graduating from the program are desperately needed. Roughly half of all French mosques have no preachers. But the new graduates are not necessarily assured of jobs.
Djelloul Seddiki of the Paris mosque.
Seddiki says many Muslim communities in France simply cannot afford to pay the salaries of full-time imams. Some of those who do preach here, from Algeria or Turkey, are paid for by their governments. The rest preach part time and sometimes free of charge.
France's Muslim community is trying to come up with its own means of financing its clerics. Seddiki, for one, believes this will happen - in time.
That's like putting whipped cream on pig crap -- it's still crap. And it's poisonous -- fatally.
Fools.
Weren’t giving away their country fast enough before?
Though laudable, it's still whistling past the graveyard .
From this point on, in my opinion, whatever happens to the French, they deserve.
I am now waiting to see how long before it begins here.
14 April 2003
Culture, et cetera
La France, c'est morte
"I'm sorry to say it, but nothing good for the U.S. can come from France now . . .
"Economically speaking, France is decaying, full speed . . . Her population is growing old, and no money is available to take care of the large number of senior citizens in the years to come. The greater part of young people are Muslim, not integrated with French society, and almost illiterate . . .
"In fact, the only things that are growing in France right now are crime and Islamism. Some reads have been amazed by the fact that teenage girls and young women in many city districts have to wear the Islamic veil if they do not want to be harassed, but it gets worse. A few weeks ago, a young Arab burnt a teenager girl alive in the suburbs of Paris. He was convicted of murder, but he became a hero and an example for other young Arabs . . .
"I have written columns in the French press concerning what's happening. The response has been death threats, with color pictures of slit throats, anti-Semitic insults . . . Within 20 years, Muslims will be a majority in France. And if nothing changes, they will be radical Muslims . . .
"France is almost finished. The nightmare is almost here . . .
"For the next years, come to France if you want, visit old monuments, but do not expect to be understood or appreciated by the locals. Behave as you would in a third world country; soon France will be a third world country."
- Guy Milliere, writing on "France Is Almost Finished," La France, c'est morte
Think my namesake ever comes up in classroom discussion?
Only during the opening apologies and groveling.
A Catholic institute to sponsor this garbage?
They will reap what they sow.
A debate over the right of Muslim girls to wear headscarves to school is raging in France, with government ministers facing allegations of racism.
The arguments date back more than a decade, but were reignited last weekend by Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy, who insisted Muslim women remove their headscarves for identity card photographs.
He was booed by a 10,000-strong gathering of Muslims, the Union of Islamic Organisations in France (UIOF). A former UIOF leader, Abdallah Ben Mansour, responded by comparing government rules on ID card photographs to Nazi laws against Jews.
"A law forced Jews to wear a yellow star, and it was overturned," he said.
"As long as the law bans the veil, we will respect it, but we will demand that it is changed."
The next day a Muslim woman driving instructor interviewed by France-2 television described the 1999 ID card ruling as "a new form of racism".
But in two schools - one in Lyon, and one near Paris - teachers have made fresh protests against pupils wearing headscarves in class.
This prompted Prime Minister Jean-Pierre Raffarin to say that he was in favour of a ban.
Expulsions
While the Interior Ministry said there was no plan to change the law and Education Minister Luc Ferry said a ban could be unconstitutional, a range of politicians came down firmly in the anti-headscarf camp.
Socialist Party leader Francois Hollande said headscarves were "out of place in schools".
Listen: Sarkozy booed
An MP from President's Chirac's party, Jacques Myard, told La Chaine Info (LCI) TV there was a "big difference between discreetly wearing a cross, a hand of Fatima or Star of David round your neck" and a headscarf which is "incompatible with the neutrality of the school and the French Republic".
A 1994 instruction from the Education Minister says the "ostentatious display of religious allegiance" in state educational institutions should be prevented.
Since then there has been a series of expulsions and readmissions of Muslim girls from schools.
Teachers in the small town of Flers even went on strike when a 12-year-old pupil refused to remove her headscarf.
New law
Not all French Muslims are opposed to the government's line on identity cards and headscarves.
A moderate French Muslim group, the Muslim Co-ordinating Committee, defended Mr Sarkozy saying it was "shocked by the disgraceful behaviour of those who dared to defy the republic".
The rector of the Paris mosque, Dalil Boubakeur, for his part, urged French Muslims to "live with the times" in an interview with France Inter radio.
Hanifa Cherifi, who mediates between schools and families in headscarf disputes, said most Muslim women - whether in France or elsewhere - did not wear the headscarf.
"It's a minority tradition," she told LCI TV.
The row has prompted Education Minister Luc Ferry to pledge to introduce a new law next year that would reassert secular values in state schools. France has a 1905 law separating church and state, but Mr Ferry said existing legislation was not designed to deal with the increasing ethnic splintering of French society and what he called "the rise of racism and anti-Semitism".
BBC Monitoring , based in Caversham in southern England, selects and translates information from radio, television, press, news agencies and the Internet from 150 countries in more than 70 languages.
© BBC MMIII
I have a better idea for re-education: round them up and drop them in the sahara desert.
The logical outcome, Islam stamps out French secularism.
Hey, they're putting a French stamp on our military procurement, and strategic assets (and they want more).
Personally, I feel as you do for all the above, and more.
Yeah, that’ll keep ‘em from rioting, burning and murdering. Teach the Imams. They’re an open-minded 21st century bunch. /sarc
Seems like the British and French are in a race to see who can adopt sharia law the fastest.
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