Too radical for France, a muslim clergyman faces deportation

The government of President Emmanuel Macron appears poised to expel the preacher in one of the most striking examples of its hardening stance toward radical Islam. Macron has already used his huge majority in Parliament to inscribe into law some government tactics — searches and seizures, house arrests, shutting down mosques — that had been applied before only as part of the state of emergency put in place after terrorist attacks in Paris killed 130 people in November 2015.

The case of Doudi, 63, who was born in Algeria and is not a French citizen, is part of a high-profile effort by the Macron administration to intensify scrutiny of Muslim clerics and, in some cases, to deport them. Some analysts say that Macron is using it to display toughness, as European governments struggle for tools to battle radical Islam, and as he fends off political challenges from the far right.

“They want to make an example of him,” said Vincent Geisser, an Islam expert at the University of Aix-Marseille. “It’s got more to do with communicating firmness.”

The tough line is another example of the unique stance Macron has taken since winning office almost a year ago. He is hailed globally as a great defender of liberal democracy, a voice of reason in a Europe awash in angry populism. Yet he has also assumed great executive powers, alarming critics who have charged the Macron government with overreaching in areas like immigration and who now worry about his approach to fighting terrorism.

France was hardly passive toward extremism in the past; the Interior Ministry kicked out 40 Muslim clerics from 2012 to 2015, and another 52 people, including clerics, over the past 28 months. Not all of those recent expulsions have come during Macron’s time in office, yet his government seems determined to make clear that France now has a far lower tolerance for radical preaching.

“It’s not just the terrorist organizations, the armies of Daesh, the imams of hate and death that we are fighting,” Macron said, referring to the Islamic State, in a speech last week honoring Lt. Col. Arnaud Beltrame, a police officer who died in a terrorist attack at a supermarket in France after trading places with a hostage.

“What we are fighting,” he said, is also “this subterranean Islamism, which advances through social networks, which accomplishes its task invisibly, which works silently on the weak and the unstable, betraying even those it claims to represent, who, on our very soil, indoctrinate through proximity and daily corrupt”

The expulsion of Doudi was recommended by the Marseille authorities under a French law regarding “deliberate acts tending to provoke discrimination, hatred and violence toward an individual or a group.”

In a confidential investigative report seen by The New York Times, the authorities blamed Doudi’s “patient and insistent proselytizing” for helping to turn a quarter of Marseille’s practicing Muslims — the largest concentration in France — into practitioners of Salafism, an ultraconservative movement within Sunni Islam. For the country as a whole, the proportion of Muslims who are Salafists is much lower, about 5.5 percent.

Doudi’s influence, the report noted, extends all over France and even “goes well beyond the country’s frontiers” and throughout Europe, as other countries, in particular Germany, have had their own troubles with Salafist preachers and monitor them carefully.

Yet few seem as bewildered that the government would turn on the preacher now than Doudi himself, a slight, worried-looking man who pulled at his straggly beard occasionally in an interview at a pastry shop.

He was greeted without special ceremony as he strolled through his low-rise immigrant neighborhood north of the old port of Marseille, although everyone seemed to know him.

“Of course I know they were listening,” Doudi said, speaking in Arabic through an interpreter. “I’ve got nothing to hide.”

“The relationship that I’ve had with the population and the authorities has always been clear and correct,” he insisted.

“And suddenly they are saying that Salafism is a danger for France,” he said indignantly. “Obviously, I challenge that idea.”

Marseille — France’s second-largest city, one-fifth Muslim — is not especially radicalized. Other cities in the south of France, like Nice, have had higher numbers of young people leave to fight in Syria, and a greater proportion of Muslim residents on the government’s terrorism watch list.

But virtually all of the fines in Marseille for wearing a face-covering, head-to-toe veil — which is illegal in France — have been imposed in the vicinity of Doudi’s mosque, the police say. The authorities are growing increasingly concerned about the potential for radicalization — especially since two young women were killed in a knife attack at the city’s main train station in October.

The Sounna mosque where Doudi preached, on the Boulevard National in the 3rd Arrondissement of Marseille, was closed by officials in December. They cited Doudi’s sermons, saying they could “provoke acts of terrorism.”

Here and elsewhere in France, Salafism is increasingly seen as the enemy, a menacing way station to terrorism. Five members of Doudi’s flock left to fight jihad in Syria, the police say, although the imam denies knowing them.

His sermons are “exactly contrary to the values of the Republic,” Marseille’s prefect of police, Olivier de Mazières, a terrorism specialist who has led the case against the cleric, said in an interview in his office. “We think he’s preaching hatred, discrimination, violence.”

“That neighborhood is the epicenter of Salafism,” de Mazières added. Yet on the streets it feels calm, like any other working-class immigrant neighborhood in Marseille, with its fruit stalls, garages, subsidized housing blocks, multihued citizenry, and pastry shops where both men and women are customers.

Scholars see a more ambiguous relationship between Salafism and jihad than the police do. “The source of radicalization is not Salafism,” Olivier Roy writes in the book “Jihad and Death.” “There is a common matrix but not a causal relationship.”

Similarly, Mohamed-Ali Adraoui, an expert at Georgetown on the French Salafists, notes that Salafism and jihadism do not neatly equate. “Scholars will tell you that Salafism does not lead to jihadism, sociologically,” he said. “You can get to jihadism without having passed through a Salafist mosque.”

Those distinctions are being lost in a renewed wave of public anxiety in France. “We must forbid the spread of Salafism, because it’s the enemy,” former prime minister Manuel Valls said in a radio interview last week. The newspaper Le Figaro said in a front-page editorial that “our country must launch a vast operation to eradicate Salafism.”

The government cited numerous sermons in its lengthy investigation of Doudi. Jews are “unclean, the brothers of monkeys and pigs,” he said. Adulterers “must be punished by stoning to death or decapitation,” while women “must not leave the home without authorization.” The apostate “needs to be eliminated by the death penalty, to protect Muslims.”

Most damning, the government report said, Doudi “explicitly” justified jihad. Yet the texts it highlights, in bold in its report, are ambiguous — not in their content but in their context.

“That defeat be visited on unbelievers and the unjust,” Doudi said in one of them. “Oh God! Decree defeat, humiliation and unbelief to the unbelievers. Oh God! Send to the fires of hell all the envious and the plotters who wish, and do, harm to Islam and Muslims!”

While Doudi acknowledges having once been a follower of Osama bin Laden and radical Algerian leader Ali Belhadj, the preacher denied that he, or Salafism, was extremist.

“Salafism is merely the reasonable middle ground between extremism and negligence. There are sects that pretend to be Salafist — al-Qaida, Daesh — but are not,” Doudi said. “These are extremists, and in our preaching we are opposed to them.”

Doudi insists that many of his preachings are merely stock phrases taken directly from Islam’s sacred texts and are not meant to be taken literally.

“In the Quran, you’ll find verses justifying lapidation” — death by stoning — “and jihad,” Doudi said. “Sooner or later, I’ll read them.”

His lawyer, Nabil Boudi, supported the assertion. “It’s a formula you’ll hear in every sermon,” Boudi said. None of the phrases cited by the government explicitly justify terrorist attacks. Doudi said he is resolutely against such assaults.

Some scholars beyond their tight circle agree that his teachings are not exceptional. “These are sermons that can easily be heard from Casablanca to Cairo,” said Romain Caillet, an expert on French Salafism. “In the Arab world, his discourse is totally banal.”

“The government has understood that to expel a Salafist Imam, that is a plus for them,” Caillet said.

Geisser, the Islam expert, is among those who say that, if anything, Doudi was known as a government stooge.

“He was best known for having good relations with the security services,” Geisser said.

“He thought that to collaborate was to be protected,” Geisser added. “He’s someone who stuck out his hand, and it ended up getting burned.”

Sitting with him at the pastry shop, three of Doudi’s flock, bearded and wearing loose robes, were downcast over his possible expulsion.

“It could be dangerous for France,” said Fayçal Mansari, a mason, who called Doudi " a barrier” against Islamic radicals.

“Very few people truly know Islam,” Mansari said. “If they get rid of a truly learned professor, people will find themselves disarmed.”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

Too radical for France, a muslim clergyman faces deportation

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