Paris, France - BEARDED Muslim activists have been wading into the night-time mayhem of the housing estates, megaphone in hand, and addressing the rioters “in the name of Allah”.
Far from inciting the violence, they have been urging the rioting teenagers to stop destroying property and go home. For the Government, the Muslim mediators have been playing a useful role calming youngsters from the mainly Arab estates who respect their authority far more than that of the police and local officials.
However, the Muslim mentors, who style themselves “big brothers”, are also causing unease in France because they symbolise what many see as a root of the unrest: the isolation of the ethnic Arab and black minorities into ghettos where Muslim law and outlook prevails. There is also a widespread belief — denied by the authorities — that the unrest is being fostered by the Islamists.
The mediators were bolstered yesterday by a fatwa issued by one of the main Muslim organisations, the Union of Islamic Organisations of France, quoting the Koran as saying that “God abhors destruction and disorder and rejects those who inflict it”.
The fatwa sparked a dispute with the mainstream Muslim Council, which said that the edict equated Islam with the current vandalism.
Some on Left and Right were angered when police withdrew one evening last week from Clichy-sous-Bois, where the rioting started, in order to let Muslims keep the peace. “The supposed mediation of big brothers crying out Allahu Akbar (God is Greatest) is one sign among many of the capitulation of the legitimate authorities,” said Bruno Gollnisch, a senior figure in Jean-Marie Le Pen’s National Front party.
Non-Muslim mediators who are active on the estates also disapprove of the presence of the Islamic brothers as peace-keepers. Magid Tabouri, 29, who leads a team of municipal, secular, big brothers at Bondy, in the troubled Seine-Saint-Denis département, said: “It is a scandal that they have asked imams to calm down the kids. You can’t apply a religious response to a social revolt.”
The authorities are also concerned because many of the estate militants are part of the radical networks who preach the extremist cause and recruit potential jihadists, according to police.
A street version of radical Islam permeates the youth culture of the estates, where Osama bin Laden is a hero, George Bush and Israel are evil and President Chirac’s State wants to stifle their religion and identity by banning Muslim headscarves in schools.
The young wreckers refer to one another as brothers and they cite the “disrespect” of the State for their religion as part of the origin of their revolt.
The chief target is Nicolas Sarkozy, the tough-talking Interior Minister, who has so far refused to apologise for an incident in which a police teargas grenade was thrown into a Clichy mosque.
However, the radicals are not behind the present violence, say experts such as the Renseignements Généraux, the police intelligence service that keeps close tabs on the prayer rooms and mosques on the estates. Yves Bot, the Paris chief prosecutor, said that the attacks were co-ordinated locally among the young wreckers using mobile telephones and text messages but there was no central command.
The Muslim mediators are exploiting the unrest to enhance their authority among the alienated youths who go out to smash at night, say the police. “They are playing a clever game,” one police officer said. “They are preaching peace but profiting out of the mess to promote their ideology.”