The Conseil d’Etat has ruled against the regional government led by Xavier Bertrand, which refused to pay a subsidy for a private Muslim high school in Lille suspected of being partly financed by Qatar.
This is a defeat for the Hauts-de-France region in its fight against the private Muslim school Averroès in Lille (Nord). The Conseil d’Etat has just rejected an appeal by the region against a decision by the Lille Administrative Court last March. This decision obliged the Hauts-de-France Region to pay a subsidy of almost 300,000 euros to this private high school, which is suspected of being partly financed by an NGO from Qatar.
Xavier Bertrand, the region’s president and candidate for the LR presidential candidacy, refused to pay this sum, which is due for the 2019-2020 year. The amount is the same as the subsidy that the region normally pays to private high schools under contracts. However, the Region is legally obliged to pay this contribution as it is an institution established under an association contract with the public education system of the private high school of which it is the sponsoring association,” said the Lille Administrative Court in a decision upheld by the Council of State on October 12.
Xavier Bertrand and the Averroès School have been at dispute since the publication of the book “Qatar Papers” by journalists Georges Malbrunot and Christian Chesnot. It emerged that the school had received funding from a Qatari non-governmental organisation. This was confirmed by a report of the Inspectorate General of Education, Sports and Research (IGESR), led by Xavier Bertrand, which stated “that the school had received a loan of 800,000 euros from the Mosque of Mulhouse, which was repaid thanks to a donation of 850,000 euros from the NGO Qatar Charity in 2014”.
The exclusion of about twenty female high school students from public schools in Lille against the backdrop of cases of Islamic veiling in the mid-1990s prompted the introduction of the “Averroès project” in 2003, which allows young girls to wear the veil at school. This public school, based on the model of Catholic schools, was promoted by the Union of Islamic Organisations in France (UOIF), which is close to the Muslim Brotherhood. Averroes High School, named after the famous Arab philosopher who tried to reconcile Plato’s thought with the Islamic faith in the 12th century, has long been an educational model. The school ranked first in France in 2013.
The school sparked controversy in 2015 following the Charlie Hebdo attack, after Soufiane Zitouni, a teacher, resigned. He accused his former school of “propagating Islamism” and referred to the “quasi-cultural anti-Semitism of many students” and “an unhealthy and dangerous mix of religion and politics”. He also accused the school administration, which is said to be close to the Muslim Brotherhood, of using a two-faced discourse, of being “polite” in the media and of ” sneakily spreading a view of Islam that is nothing other than Islamism”.
