It all started with a video posted on the mosque’s Facebook page in July 2021, reports the newspaper 20 Minutes. Mmadi Ahamada spoke in Arabic and French to several hundred men who had gathered for the Eid-El-Kebir festival. “You Muslim women who want to enter paradise,” he said, “stay in your homes and do not display yourselves in the way women did in pre-Islamic times,” before urging women not to submit to the ” practice of depravity and vice.
This speech was denounced by the regional councillor of the Rassemblement National, Isabelle Surply, and prompted the prefect of the Loire department to question the extension of the imam’s residence permit from the Comoros in France “in accordance with the instructions of the Minister of the Interior”. Thus, the imam of the Attakwa mosque in Saint-Chamond was “suspended from his functions” because of “discriminatory statements directed against the equality of women and men”.
While the imam is to be sent back to the Comoros with his wife and three young children, the head of the department’s Council of the Muslim Religious Community (CDCM) says that “it is a purely political matter that has little to do with religion”. Salim Agoudjil asserts that the content of the speech was “purely religious, with no discriminatory aspects” and denounces “an appalling attempt to interfere in religious discourse”.
