PARIS, 4 May 2004 — French Prime Minister Jean-Pierre Raffarin yesterday sought to reassure Muslim leaders that a government pledge to expel radical imams was not a bid to attack the five-million-strong community as a whole.
After talks with Raffarin, Dalil Boubakeur, leader of the French Council for the Muslim Faith (CFCM), said the prime minister “wants to reassure the Muslim community” of “his willingness to treat it as he treats other faiths”.
“In his mind, there is no lumping together of the expulsion of imams and the Muslim community in general,” Boubakeur told reporters.
The meeting came as French authorities were mulling whether to expel Midhat Guler, a Turkish director of a Paris mosque accused of leading an extremist movement, and a month after the deportation of an Algeria imam.
Guler, who was detained late Saturday, “is the leader in France of an extremist Turkish Islamic movement that advocates resorting to the use of violence and terrorism,” the Interior Ministry said Sunday.
The 45-year-old Turkish national has since applied for political asylum in France, which temporarily blocks his expulsion. The request was expected to be reviewed and processed by week’s end, officials said.
French officials said Guler was the leader of the “Islamic Association in France,” but his son said that neither he nor his father belonged to “any Turkish extremist organization, or any organization for that matter”.
CFCM Secretary-General Haydar Demiryuek said the mosque was run by the “ultra-fundamentalist” Kaplanci movement, which “calls for the creation of an Islamic state in Turkey”. The movement is banned in Germany.
Last month, the French government suffered an embarrassing setback when a court ruled illegal the deportation to his native Algeria of a radical imam from the southeastern city of Lyon after he justified wife beating.
The imam, 52-year-old Abdelkader Bouziane, has since applied for a visa to return to France.
Boubakeur said it was essential that imams “not mix politics and religion”, adding that his council would work with the government to draw up a list of imams authorized to preach in France and set guidelines about training.
