Emmanuel Macron announced Tuesday that France will gradually stop welcoming "seconded imams" sent by other countries. According to the Interior Ministry, 301 imams are paid by foreign countries to practice in France. They come mainly from Turkey but also from Algeria and Morocco, thanks to agreements of these countries with the French state. But today, these imams are accused of not conveying a discourse consistent with republican values. For Tareq Oubrou, imam of the Bordeaux mosque interviewed on Wednesday morning on Europe 1, the end of these detached imams is “excellent news”.
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"We have a lot of imams who are very well trained"
"If we remove them, the associations will be forced to recruit imams and they will be unemployed! We have a lot of imams who are very well trained, with bac +5, bac + 7, but who cannot find jobs because many associations prefer ease: detached imams. The problem is the speech, and the speech does not depend on the Frenchness of the imam but on his training and his psychological profile. We have imams in France who speak Latin, Javanese ... and a little French, but who convey a discourse of rupture with French society ”.