France Postpones Conference on Islamic Leadership Training

"The training of imams, chaplains and Islamologists: state of play, issues and prospects". This is the theme of the colloquium initiated by the National School of Religious Cadres and Chaplains Training and the French Academy of Islamic Thoughts (AFPI), in partnership with the Institute of Science and Theology of Religions (ICP Paris) and the Protestant Faculty of the University of Strasbourg, reports the site Mizane.info.

In his speech on the fight against Muslim separatisms, delivered on October 2, 2020, Emmanuel Macron had expressed his intention to relaunch a plan to train imams in France. In the wake of the assassination of teacher Samuel Paty, the French president expressly asked the CFCM federations to create without delay the National Council of Imams (CNI) which will have the mission of "labeling" the imams of France. He also demanded the signing, by the latter, of a charter of republican values.

These decisions have sparked heated debates. In form, Tareq Oubrou does not approve of them, for the simple reason that imams must be appointed by their peers and not by Muslim federations linked to foreign countries. "Islam, as a training project or a project for the institutionalization of the training of the clergy of Islam, is first and foremost a political object uncoupled into so many public decisions, ’historical’ speeches and ’founding choices’. "It is then a question of a kind of narrative arc where the context (the terrorist attacks of 2015), the theological-political structures (CFCM), the supervisory structures (Muslim chaplaincies) and the mobilizations of university expertise (mission of reflection on the training of imams and Muslim religious leaders, March 2017) are deployed," he explains.

Taking stock of the situation, he observes that very few debates are organized between academics, confessionals and the many researchers in Islamology. This is why this colloquium aims to reflect on the "complexity of the issue of training and that of the actors on the legal, ideological, political, economic and human levels", to "study the issues around the division of labor carried out between the teaching of Muslim theology by Islamic institutes and the teaching of human sciences provided by the Universities" and to "identify new perspectives and hopes for the implementation of ambitious, creative and unifying training and research projects".