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ISLAM

French police swoop on ‘Islamic extremists’

French police arrested about 20 suspected Islamists in dawn raids on Friday, most of them in the hometown of an extremist who was shot dead by police last week after a killing spree.

Agents from France’s DCRI domestic intelligence agency swooped in to carry out the arrests, most of them in the southern city of Toulouse a day after Al-Qaeda-inspired gunman Mohamed Merah was buried there, sources close to the investigation said.

The arrests were “not directly linked” to the Merah investigation, but were aimed at dismantling Islamist networks, one source said. 

Some of the arrests also targetted people in the western city of Nantes.

The arrests came a day after Merah, who was shot dead by a police sniper on March 22 at the end of a 32-hour siege at his flat in Toulouse, was buried in the city under heavy police watch.

The 23-year-old had shot dead three soldiers, and three children and a teacher at a Jewish school in a killing spree that shocked the country.

The man branded a “monster” by French leaders was laid to rest in Toulouse’s Cornebarrieu cemetery after his family’s homeland Algeria refused to accept the body, citing security concerns.

French authorities have charged Merah’s brother Abdelkader with complicity in the attacks and said they were looking for other accomplices.

Abdelkader Merah was charged with helping his sibling steal the powerful Yamaha scooter used in the shootings and police have said they were seeking a third person who may have been involved in the theft.

Merah recorded his killings with a camera strapped to his body and police have said an accomplice may have been involved in mailing a montage of the videos to Al-Jazeera.

The video was reportedly sent to the channel’s Paris bureau from outside Toulouse while Merah was already besieged in his flat by police.

French President Nicolas Sarkozy vowed a crackdown on Islamist extremists in the wake of the killings, saying earlier this week that he had ordered the domestic intelligence agency to “check in detail the situation in our country of all persons identified as a potential risk to national security”.

On Thursday France banned four Muslim preachers from entering the country to attend an Islamic conference, saying their “calls for hatred and violence” were a threat to public order.

Saudi clerics Ayed Bin Abdallah al-Qarni and Abdallah Basfar, Egyptian cleric Safwat al-Hijazi and a former mufti of Jerusalem Akrama Sabri are banned from entering France, a statement said.

“These people’s positions and statements calling for hatred and violence seriously damage republican principles and, in the current context, represent a serious threat to public order,” said the statement from Foreign Minister Alain Juppé and Interior Minister Claude Guéant.

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ISLAM

Mosques in Cologne to start broadcasting the call to prayer every Friday

The mayor of Cologne has announced a two-year pilot project that will allow mosques to broadcast the call to prayer on the Muslim day of rest each week.

Mosques in Cologne to start broadcasting the call to prayer every Friday
The DITIP mosque in Cologne. Photo: dpa | Henning Kaiser

Mosques in the city of the banks of the Rhine will be allowed to call worshippers to prayer on Fridays for five minutes between midday and 3pm.

“Many residents of Cologne are Muslims. In my view it is a mark of respect to allow the muezzin’s call,” city mayor Henriette Reker wrote on Twitter.

In Muslim-majority countries, a muezzin calls worshippers to prayer five times a day to remind people that one of the daily prayers is about to take place.

Traditionally the muezzins would call out from the minaret of the mosque but these days the call is generally broadcast over loudspeakers.

Cologne’s pilot project would permit such broadcasts to coincide with the main weekly prayer, which takes place on a Friday afternoon.

Reker pointed out that Christian calls to prayer were already a central feature of a city famous for its medieval cathedral.

“Whoever arrives at Cologne central station is welcomed by the cathedral and the sound of its church bells,” she said.

Reker said that the call of a muezzin filling the skies alongside church bells “shows that diversity is both appreciated and enacted in Cologne”.

Mosques that are interested in taking part will have to conform to guidelines on sound volume that are set depending on where the building is situated. Local residents will also be informed beforehand.

The pilot project has come in for criticism from some quarters.

Bild journalist Daniel Kremer said that several of the mosques in Cologne were financed by Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, “a man who opposes the liberal values of our democracy”, he said.

Kremer added that “it’s wrong to equate church bells with the call to prayer. The bells are a signal without words that also helps tell the time. But the muezzin calls out ‘Allah is great!’ and ‘I testify that there is no God but Allah.’ That is a big difference.”

Cologne is not the first city in North Rhine-Westphalia to allow mosques to broadcast the call to prayer.

In a region with a large Turkish immigrant community, mosques in Gelsenkirchen and Düren have been broadcasting the religious call since as long ago as the 1990s.

SEE ALSO: Imams ‘made in Germany’: country’s first Islamic training college opens its doors

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