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June 20, 2006

France: Islamic Leader Arrested On Suspicion Of Funding Extremists

So far not reported in the mainstream French press, Agence France Presse via Expatica reports that Dhaou Meskine, a prominent member of France's Muslim community, has been arrested. He is suspected of involvement in money-laundering activities, with links to extremist Muslim groups.

Meskine, also called Daw Meskine (pictured) is secretary general of the Council of Imams of France, and he is also the imam of the Clichy-Sous-Bois mosque in paris, the epicenter of the riots which spread through France last year for three weeks from the end of October.

He was arrested yesterday along with 20 members of his family. The arrest has come as a surprise to his supporters, as he had been consulted by Nicolas Sarkozy previously, and had started a dialogue between Jews, Christians and Muslims.

Most of the arrests, which had been ordered by French prosecutors, took place in the Seine-Maritime region of greater Paris. In 2001, he founded the first private Muslim high school, called "La Reussite", which is located in the northern Paris suburb of Aubervilliers. This is not a proper school, in that it only holds classes at evenings and weekends.

Despite having the ear of the French government in the past, there have been signs that Meskine is not the philanthropic and tolerant individuals has has chosen to present himself as being.

In August last year, Nicolas Sarkozy, the Interior Minister, decided to deport a dozen imams who were preaching an extreme form of Islam, known as Salafism. One of these was Zuhir Rizkullah, an imam in northern Paris.

Meskine said at the time: "We swung into action and managed to convince French police to stop expulsion procedures and denaturalization."

In July Sarkozy had expelled imams Reda Ameuroud and Abdelhamid Aissaoui for encouraging violence, and when Rizkullah was similarly threatened, Meskine pressured the government to reverse the decision. He also condemned the French Council of Muslim Faith (CFCM) for "collaborating" with the condemnation of Salafist imams.

By the end of the month, Sarkozy's plans for mass deportations of radical imams had been abandoned.

When the riots occurred in his patch of Clichy-Sous-Bois, we reported that Meskine had said: "Security forces have not implicated any pious Muslims in the rioting and violence, behind the clashes with the police." Even though many of these rioting Muslims in Clichy attended his mosque.

Meskine's own brand of Islam derives from his training in Tunisia in the school of Maliki ideology, states a report, pretentiously entitled: "Pluralism and Normativity. There are four schools of fiqh or Islamic jurisprudence within Sunni Islam. Maliki, based on the teachings of Imam Malik ibn Anas (715 to 796 AD) of Medina, is the second largest school of fiqh, but unlike the others, it also recognises the actions of the people of Medina (amal ahl al-medina) as a source of law.

Politically, when author and politician Philippe de Villiers revealed in his book The Mosques of Roissy that French frontier police had identified 50 baggage-handlers at Charles de Gaulle Airport ("Roissy") who held extremist Islamic views, Meskine refused to accept the fact, and called Villiers' statements a "political stunt".

According to Turkish Weekly, Meskine said: "When there are no real political programs, Islamophobia becomes an election issue to win much-needed votes."

This was said despite the fact that Nicolas Sarkozy had gone to Roissy to reassure people that the threat was not too bad. The Interior Minister had stated that instead of a mere 50 radicals being employed in the airport, there were 122 individuals who were "more or less suspect".

Posted by Giraldus Cambrensis at June 20, 2006 8:03 PM

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