An activist lawyer representing a mosque shut down by French authorities for “legitimizing jihad” and “glorifying acts of terrorism” is insisting that the imam was only quoting the Qur’an.
The Seine-Saint-Denis prefecture announced on July 27 that it had closed the Attaqwa mosque located in the Chanteloup neighborhood of Aulnay-sous-Bois for six months for “spreading a radical Islamist ideology that echoes the rhetoric of terrorist organizations, legitimizes jihad, and glorifies martyrdom.”
One cannot allow a place of prayer to become a place of hatred. One cannot use the name of Islam to preach violence, jihad, and martyrdom.
In a press release, the municipality’s authorities said that the Attaqwa mosque was spreading its hatred “through the sermons of its regular imams and their dissemination on social media, as well as through the speeches of the occasional speakers it invites.”
This closure order under Article L. 227-1 of the Internal Security Code followed repeated “statements, ideas, or theories disseminated in this mosque and on the imams’ social media accounts, which incite violence, hatred, or discrimination, glorify acts of terrorism, and encourage their commission,” the statement explained.
A video posted on X shows an imam encouraging Muslims to beat their children aged eleven and over if they did not pray. This imam had reportedly given at least one lecture at this mosque, Le Parisien reported.
Lawyer Insists It Was Scripture, Not Hate
In response, Rafik Chekkat, the lawyer for the association that manages the mosque, claimed that the authorities were punishing “an imam for having cited the sūrah al-Baqarah” in the mosque to justify its closure. “If the courts uphold the order, the Qur’an becomes, in and of itself, a reason for closure,” Chekkat, a pro-Palestinian activist of Algerian origin, warned.
Sūrah al-Baqarah (the Cow), the longest sūrah of the Qur’an, contains controversial verses regarding Jews. According to the Muslim Brotherhood theorist Sayyid Qutb, here Allah “invites the Israelites to join the Muslims in their religious practices, and to abandon their prejudices and ethnocentric tendencies.”
No mosque is closed for reciting the Qur’an. What is sanctioned is the deliberate choice to select, amplify and weaponise its harshest verses in order to incite hatred and legitimize violence.
Verse 65, along with Sūrah 5:59-60 and Sūrah 7:166, is the basis for Islamists to refer to Jews as apes or as both apes and pigs. In verse 88, Allah emphasizes that the Jews are accursed for rejecting Islam. Since verse 98 is stated in the context of a chastisement of the Jews for their disbelief, this is interpreted as referring to the Jews as enemies of Allah.
The “unbelievers among the people of the book” in verse 105 are the Jews and Christians who do not become Muslims. Verse 116 is the first of several Qur’anic injunctions of Islam’s rejection of the Christian belief in Jesus as the Son of God and the Holy Trinity.
Chekkat told AFP that the association running the mosque had removed “the two imams who are involved in 90 percent of the grievances against the mosque.” He complained that “the mosque officials had asked to be received at the prefecture, but the prefect of Seine-Saint-Denis refused to meet them.”
Objecting to the mosque’s closure, Chekkat said the authorities had shuttered the mosque even before the emergency judge could examine the case.
“After a first police visit yesterday at 11 pm, law enforcement returned at 5 am to carry out the closure. On a Friday. In such a situation, the administration usually waits for the judge’s decision. The prefect of Seine-Saint-Denis preferred to push through forcefully, to the detriment of the hundreds of worshippers affected,” he posted on X on July 31.
Florence Bergeaud-Blackler, eminent scholar and expert on the Muslim Brotherhood affirmed the closure.
“No mosque is closed for reciting the Qur’an. What is sanctioned is the deliberate choice to select, amplify and weaponise its harshest verses in order to incite hatred and legitimize violence,” she told Focus on Western Islamism. “Pleading ‘it is only scripture’ is the oldest move of legalist Islamism: it turns the inciter into a victim and puts the Republic on trial in place of the preacher. A text does not incite; a preacher who instrumentalizes it does,” she added.
Municipality Notorious as Hotbed of Jihadi Islam
Along these lines, Imam Hassen Chalghoumi of Drancy, President of the Conference of Imams of France, hailed the “courageous decision” of the prefect of Seine-Saint-Denis, Julien Charles, to close the Attaqwa mosque. “One cannot allow a place of prayer to become a place of hatred. One cannot use the name of Islam to preach violence, jihad, and martyrdom,” he emphasized.
This isn’t the first time that the authorities have closed the mosque. In 2019, the prefecture closed the Chanteloup mosque, which is located on the ground floor of an office building. According to the order issued, the closure followed an “unannounced” inspection, “demonstrating that the establishment does not meet the safety conditions for receiving the public.”
But Cédric Clémençon, then president of the Aulnay Sud Religious Association, said that the authorities had shut the mosque for “political reasons.” Recounting the history of the mosque, Clémençon explained: “This prayer room has existed for about eight years. Until I took over, it wasn’t managed, no work had been done, and it hadn’t been brought up to code… I arrived, we installed fire extinguishers, security doors, we renovated everything using my own funds!”
The municipality of Seine-Saint-Denis, which has an estimated Muslim population of 800,000 out of 1.8 million inhabitants (44.4 percent of the population) and around 116 mosques or prayer rooms out of the 243 in the Paris region, is known to be a hotbed of Islamic radicalism.
The book titled Inshallah: Islamization Unveiled and subtitled A Spotlight Investigation in Seine-Saint-Denis by journalists Gérard Davet and Fabrice Lhomme describes the transformation of the municipality into a jihadi hub. The duo unearths an Islamic university infiltrated by a jihadi network, a public transport depot where religious practice is the norm despite being officially banned, elected officials compromising with Islamism, and money flowing freely in secrecy.
The shuttering of the mosque in Chanteloup follows the passing of a bill by the French Senate in May targeting “Islamist infiltration.” The bill empowers authorities to shut down mosques “when there are serious reasons to believe that such construction or extension would constitute a particularly serious threat to public safety and order,” FWI reported.
The law includes harsher penalties for offenses against Republican ideals and the freezing of assets belonging to Islamist separatist entities. France’s Senate voted 208 to 124 to approve the bill to combat what former Interior Minister Bruno Retailleau described as a clandestine movement whose “ultimate objective” is the “establishment of an Islamic state” in France.
