Hussein Darwish: “We’ve lost the sympathy of the French”

The President of the Council of Imams of France, Hussein Darwish, said that there is a shared responsibility between the successive French governments and some imams in Europe, particularly in France, in the spreading of the nefarious phenomenon of extremism, with one of its hideous facets being the bloody terrorist attacks experienced by Paris last Friday.

According to Dr. Darwish, one has only to see how the French governments, right and left ones, deal with residents of the neglected French suburbs, most of them inhabited by Muslims to have a clear idea about the rise of this deleterious phenomenon in France itself.

Dr Darwish asserted in an interview with “Echorouk” that the officialdom in France did not offer much to the people of the suburbs and left them in the lurch, the result is that young people there have become an easy prey to extremist ideas, he explained.

As a consequence, the Muslim community, being rejected, found great difficult to integrate smoothly into French society, in addition to a misunderstanding of the true Islam, that of tolerance on the part of many young French Muslims.

To this effect and as part of remedial measures,, Mr Darwish said he had asked the French Interior Minister, Bernard Cazeneuve, at a meeting, to anticipate problems of the Muslim community with the support of scientists and specialists in psychology and sociology and civil society, stressing that it’s well known that French society is basically tolerant with all communities.

But this time, in comparison to the events of Charlie Hebdo, last January, the reaction of the French to the Muslim community after  last Friday’s Paris ill-fated attacks is now  more hostile, because they don’t understand the meaning of these unnecessary killings in the name of God!

These tragic events have further alienated the Muslim community and added grist to all extremist, racist and xenophobic parties, he said.

Regarding the activities of the Council of Imams of France, Dr Hussein Darwish underscored that the latter had played its role appropriately for many years, but recently it has rather failed in its guiding mission, mostly because of lingering internal conflicts among the North Africans themselves and with the Turks as well.

He finally hailed Algeria’s commendable initiative to send imams to France with the aim of spreading the virtuous word to our community settled there, while insisting that they must master the French language in order to get the message across to Muslim youngsters of the second and third generation, given that around 70% of them do not speak Arabic.