Islam in Secular States

In an op-ed in the New York Times Algerian Kamel Daoud asks an important question? Why doesn’t France produce its own imams?

PARIS — What to do about Islam in France? Considering Islamist terrorist attacks, communalism and the international manipulation of Muslim communities, the matter is pressing. But it’s contentious, because managing Islam seems to go against laïcité, France’s staunch version of state secularism, and a 1905 law that mandates the separation of church and state.

Wouldn’t revising that law be an admission that secularism is bowing to Islamism? On the other hand, if the law isn’t revised, or if the French state cannot find other ways of monitoring and steering Islam, then Islam in France risks falling under the control of foreign states or the influence of radicals. That is already the case, actually: Since laïcité prohibits the French authorities from using public funds to build mosques or train imams, Algeria, Morocco, Turkey and Saudi Arabia have stepped in. According to the newsmagazine L’Express, 70 percent of imams practicing in France are not French.

In the United States it is estimated that 80% of imams are foreign-born and most of those are Wahhabis from Saudi Arabia. That suggests that the lack of native imams has nothing to do with U. S. or French policy but with Muslim preference. Indeed, in the U. S. polling has suggested that American Muslims don’t trust American-educated imams.

In order to be an effective imam you must speak Arabic, preferably the dialect of Arabic spoken in Saudi Arabia because that is closest to the classical Arabic of the Qur’an.

My answer will probably sound harsh to many. Modern Islam is, as it has always been, a stalking horse for Arab cultural imperialism. It does not thrive in contact with the secular Western world without being replenished from the source. That we tolerate the funding of mosques and imams by foreign governments is one of the unhinged things about our modern life.