Paris, France - Mustapha Tougui says he has the Quran in his blood. The Moroccan-born, Saudi-educated lecturer at the Muslim theological institute at the Paris Grand Mosque uses earthy language as he tries to preserve what he calls his students’ “spiritual hygiene.” His enthusiasm is infectious.
"If you eat always your mother's cooking, what a pity. I like other cooking, and Islam invites me (to appreciate) that. Islam shows me that," Tougui said as his students laughed. "The situation is a bit difficult now because (terrorists) give us an image and it's too difficult to clean … this dirt from the image of Islam."
The government hopes that moderates like Tougui at this Algerian government-funded mosque will play a leading role as this country tries to forge a so-called French Islam — one that is not only compatible with Islamic tradition but also palatable to the French government, mainstream society and, not least of all, Muslims themselves.
The mosque is serving as a kind of incubator for a moderate strain of France's second religion, which the government hopes will head off any drift toward radicalism within Europe's largest Muslim minority.
"We are an open Islam," Dr. Djelloul Seddiki, the head of the theological institute at the mosque, said. "But there are other Islams in France," including fundamentalists and radicals, he said.
The Paris Grand Mosque oversees the affairs of around 400 of the 1,800 facilities described as mosques throughout France, which can include simple one-room structures. The head of the mosque, Dr. Dalil Boubakeur, described by the Le Monde newspaper as "the ideal Muslim," is the most prominent Muslim in France and a friend of President Jacques Chirac.
"We prefer that [the radicals] are inside than outside, because it keeps them close," Seddiki said. "The best defense is education."
That's where Tougui comes in.
Scholar, editor and lecturer Mustapha Tougui
The 56-year-old's courses are open to all, Muslims and non-Muslims alike. The mosque's theological institute also runs courses that it hopes will train a new generation of French-born imams, which is a hot topic in France.
"I hope to bestow the right religion so that they can educate themselves. I want to preserve them from spiritual pollution," Tougui said.
"Unfortunately you have very few teacher-lecturers who know how to lecture. They have gold in their hands, but they don't know how to manage it," he said.
France, along with other countries across Europe, is eager to limit its dependence on foreign imams.
"In the mosque, if the imam is not a French citizen and if he does not speak French, you can not speak about a 'French Islam'," Seddiki said.
Imams expelled
In 2004, at a time when the Interior Ministry estimated that perhaps two-thirds of France's imams were not citizens, the government began expelling foreign clerics judged to be preaching hate.
All students enrolled at the government-sanctioned courses at the Paris mosque who ultimately want to become imams must prove proficiency in French. The mosque is working with secular universities to allow Muslims also to study French history, civics and culture alongside other students, Seddiki said.
"The demand is growing because the new generation, they don't want to be preached by a poorly educated guy coming from Pakistan or Egypt, and who speaks bad French. They are not interested," said Dr. Olivier Roy, professor at the School for Advanced Studies in Social Sciences in Paris and the author of "Globalized Islam."
But Roy is skeptical about how wide an impact this effort could have, particularly in the poor suburbs, where experts like him have warned of the possibility that radical strains of Islam could take hold.
"You can have a well-trained and relatively well-paid imam only when you have a huge constituency and, by definition, in the suburbs they have no huge constituency. But you can find some of these large constituencies in Bordeaux, in Lille, in Lyon, in Paris … (there) you have a bourgeoisie, or a growing Muslim middle class. But in the suburbs it's a different story," he said.
The government financed the construction of the mosque in 1926 as a gesture of thanks to "harkis," Muslims from France's colonies who fought for the then-colonial power in World War I. The complex, just across the street from the Jardin des Plantes in southeast Paris, is the oldest mosque in France.