[Reader-list] France's Model Muslim

[Pawan Durani]

http://www.spiegel.de/international/europe/0,1518,690303,00.html#ref=nlint

What happens when a Muslim cleric embraces the values of the West? In
France, President Sarkozy is using the teachings of one imam for his
own purposes. Hassen Chalghoumi, who has backed calls for a burqa ban,
now faces threats from his own community.

Hassen Chalghoumi is the best-known imam in France and easily the most
controversial, even though he preaches peace instead of hate. Police
cars are stationed in front of his mosque during Friday prayers, and
he has two bodyguards with him at all times when he goes out in
public. Sometimes, when it all becomes too much for him, he takes his
wife and their five children and goes away for a week or two, in the
hope that all the excitement over him and the ideas he preaches will
calm down again. But the tactic hasn't worked so far, because the
whole thing flares up again as soon as he returns home. Chalghoumi has
led a hectic life in recent weeks.

There are 5 million Muslims in France, although there could even be as
many as 8 million, no one knows for sure. Some have been there for a
long time while others are recent immigrants. Within this population,
there are believed to be 1,400 women who wear either the large
full-body veil, the burqa, in black or blue, or the niqab, the full
veil that covers the face apart from the eyes, although that number
could also be as low as 400. In any case, Chalghoumi dared to publicly
condemn the wearing of the full veil, and he welcomed the idea of
outlawing it -- something that may have been ill-advised.
Chalghoumi's is a man who doesn't reveal much about himself, while
others seem to think that they know everything about him. What is
indisputable is that he was born in Tunis in 1972, immigrated to
France in 1996 and became a French citizen in 2000, or perhaps it
wasn't until two years later. Sometimes Chalghoumi contradicts
himself, or he doesn't remember the details correctly, or he is quoted
out of context. It isn't easy to figure him out, but it is easy to
like him. He is a gentle person, a man with the grace of a
professional dancer.

Journey Into a Different World

The imam lives in Drancy, a northern suburb of Paris with a population
of 66,000, one of France's poorest municipalities. Although it's only
a half-hour drive from downtown Paris to Drancy, it is a journey into
a completely different world. The beauty of Paris ends on the
Boulevard périphérique, the beltway surrounding the French capital.
The drive soon passes through a completely different world of
industrial estates, wasteland and cemeteries, past abandoned factories
and railroad tracks covered with weeds. The first impression in Drancy
is of the long lines forming in front of soup kitchens at midday.

It is from here that Chalghoumi has gradually become a figure of
interest to the entire nation. The media, the government and even the
president at the Elysée Palace first became aware of him when, in May
2006, he began saying pretty radical things. But that wasn't because
he was preaching against the status quo, the republic and its values.
Instead, Chalghoumi was saying things that could have been copied from
right out of the French constitution, sentences that were in
conformity with the system and advocated peace.

At the time, he publicly acknowledged the horrors of the Holocaust, he
reached out to France's Jews, and he spoke of reconciliation and
rapprochement -- things that were unheard of for a Muslim cleric at
the time. Chalghoumi soon came to be known as the "imam of peace."
Meanwhile, there was growing unrest within his own congregation. The
tires of Chalghoumi's car were slashed, and strangers ransacked his
apartment. The imam of peace was sowing disagreement and reaping
violence -- in all likelihood from within his own community.

He had already completed his religious training when, in 1996, he
arrived at Charles de Gaulle Airport in nearby Roissy, an immigrant
like so many who had come before him and who would follow. At first,
he lived in Bobigny, in the Seine-Saint-Denis district, which has some
100 mosques. There was plenty of work for someone like Chalghoumi, who
had studied the Koran for four years at schools in Syria and Pakistan,
and had already made the pilgrimage to Mecca. Until 2002, he worked
half the day as an imam in Bobigny and the other half earning money as
a FedEx warehouse worker in the turmoil of Charles de Gaulle Airport.
This is where the contradictory versions of his life begin.

'Unusually Radical Positions'

At the time, French intelligence classified him as an Islamist to the
core, "who took unusually radical positions." Informers told the
authorities that Chalghoumi was calling on the faithful to engage in
jihad and, during Friday prayers, was announcing that anyone who died
in jihad would undoubtedly reach paradise. As if to prove these
conclusions, Chalghoumi's access card for Roissy Airport was
confiscated "for security reasons" in August 2003. But this can mean a
lot or nothing at all.

It was the time of the nascent Iraq war, not long after the attacks of
Sept. 11, 2001, a time when many of those who prayed to Allah were
considered vaguely suspicious. Many Paris airport workers lost their
access cards at the time, simply because they were Muslims, because
their beards were too long or because their passports contained Syrian
stamps or visas for Algeria.

Chalghoumi doesn't wear a beard, only a goatee. He denies the
accusations that relate to his past, and he says that he was confused
with other imams who delivered the hate sermons in Bobigny. He insists
that he never called upon people to engage in jihad, and if he did, it
was only in the way the concept was preached by the Prophet Muhammad:
that every devout Muslim is called upon "to engage in perpetual jihad
with himself." And what about Roissy and his airport access card?
"They took it away from me because I had traveled to Mecca several
times," says Chalghoumi, "but believe me: I have never had any
problems with the police since my arrival in France." Never? "Never."

A Gift from Drancy's Mayor

The meeting with Chalghoumi takes place on a cool working day at the
mosque in Drancy. The mosque, built in 2008, stands on the edge of a
large shopping mall called Avenir, the French word for "future." When
the faithful bow toward Mecca, there is a Carrefour hypermarket behind
them, the shopping center's large parking lot on one side and a
railroad embankment in front. On Fridays, there are such large numbers
of worshippers at the mosque, upwards of 1,500 people, wearing every
conceivable North African traditional costume, that the prayer room
becomes too small to contain the congregation. Volunteers place
carpets on the ground outside for the countless faithful, who then
worship under the open sky.

Inside the mosque, the floor in the large prayer room is covered with
red wall-to-wall carpeting. Without the bookshelves in some of the
corners and the mihrab, the prayer niche with its cheap arabesques,
the space could just as well be a gymnasium or the lobby of a German
administrative district office.

The building was a gift of sorts, from the new mayor of Drancy. He is
a man of the "new center," who accomplished the feat of driving the
Communists out of town hall after they had been in power for more than
40 years, a pragmatist who flatly ignored France's ironclad principle
of the separation of church and state when he had the €1.8 million
($2.39 million) mosque built for the many Muslims in his city. It was
also for the imam of peace, who had said that he wanted to shine a
light on "sinister Islam."

Chalghoumi meets with visitors in his small office on the upper floor
of the mosque, a room furnished with a desk and upholstered furniture,
its walls adorned with small rugs covered with surahs in gold
lettering. His staff serves sweetened tea. Chalghoumi, a man with
sad-looking eyes and wearing a white fez, shakes our hands and says:
"I don't have much time. Would you like to take a picture? If so, we
should do that right away."

Hardly waiting for an answer, he stands up, bounces out of the office
and walks down to the prayer room. He knows what photographers want.
Images are important to him -- images of himself. They can't be taken
out of context as easily as words. And Chalghoumi is aware of his
photogenic effect. He always appears in photos as a modest and
unthreatening man, a good Muslim, the imam France has been waiting
for.
'Imam of the Jews'

Chalghoumi has been in the news a lot lately, appearing on the front
pages of Le Parisien and Aujourd'hui en France, the country's largest
newspapers. There have been photos in Figaro and full-page portraits
in Le Monde, Libération and the magazines. Chalghoumi also appears
frequently on television, either as a subject on the evening news or
as a guest on Grand Journal, a talk show on the Canal Plus channel
that normally features cabinet ministers, Olympic medalists and
Hollywood actors. Chalghoumi has become a star in his own right, a
star of the republic: a good Muslim, one to be shown to the world and
not one who constantly accuses and demands and challenges everything.

His current fame peaked at the end of January, when he said in a
newspaper interview that he approved of a burqa ban. He and his small
congregation have had no peace since then. Within days of the
interview, 20, 30 or perhaps even 40 people loudly interrupted a
sermon in Drancy and jostled for the microphone so that they could
talk about the "imam of the Jews," as they called him, and about an
"imam who speaks in our name and betrays us," and they demanded
Chalghoumi's resignation.