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Brussels no longer wants Imam Mohamed Toujgani

20 March 2022 News   773  

The imam of the famous al-Khalil mosque in Molenbeek, Mohamed Toujgani, is now banned from Belgium for 10 years. He was on holiday in Morocco when the official announcement was made that he was not allowed to return to Belgium.
The local press widely reported the tug of war between him and the Belgian Secretary of State for Asylum and Migration, Sammy Mahdi, who initiated the procedure for banning the Molenbeek imam, following a report by the Belgian State Security Service describing him as “a danger to national security”.

By Malika Madi

A troubled and controversial personality, Imam Toujgani is accused of disseminating measured opinions in public but much more violent ones in his restricted circles. And if his lack of knowledge of one of the three Belgian national languages was mentioned at length to justify his undesirability in the kingdom of Belgium, it is above all some of his “friendships” that are problematic.

Toujgani is said to have contacts with personalities considered to be extremists, some of whom have been convicted of terrorist acts. Several Belgian media report close contacts with Abu Qotada, alias Abu Omar. In 1995, he issued a fatwa urging the killing of women and children of Algerian soldiers during the black decade. Another sulphurous character, whose close friendship with Toujgani is suspected by the Belgian secret services: Mohamed Fizazi, who is among the most radical preachers in Morocco. About twenty years ago, he was sentenced, after the Casablanca attacks, to 30 years in prison for having ideologically influenced the terrorists who committed the attacks of 16 May 2003, and then pardoned by King Mohammed VI.

A Belgian resident for 40 years, and a religious reference for several generations of Muslims, Imam Toujgani comes from the north of Morocco, where Islamic discourse hardened, as in the rest of the Maghreb in the 1970s. He therefore immersed himself very early in a religious conservatism close to Salafo-Wahhabism, which influenced his early years of training.

In the 1980s, when he arrived in Belgium, all his rhetoric was based on this past in the exercise of a function for which he was still a neophyte. In other words, he is the archetypal traditional imam. Even today, in the Maghreb as in Europe, in the absence of a magisterium or a religious authority of reference, the simple memorization of the Koranic text in its entirety is enough to make any individual a potential imam.

Toujgani is therefore a self-proclaimed religious representative. And we can affirm, from reliable sources, that he has never been admitted or even recognised within the major Muslim and religious bodies at the international level. He is not a religious scholar. In the history of Muslim thought, an influential imam is only recognized by his written productions validated by his peers, which is not his case.

His Arab-centric discourse around the Maghreb communities was accentuated by his linguistic deficiencies in French and Dutch. But Toujgani has a way with words in his mother tongue. His al-Khalil mosque in Molenbeek attracted up to 3,000 worshippers during Friday prayers. And his “training centre” attracted hundreds of adults and children. This led to Imam Toujgani being invited to preach all over Europe, giving him both confidence and a form of legitimacy. An aura and a charisma that were useful to him, to climb the ladder of a significant number of Belgian Muslim corporations, up to the League of Imams of Belgium, of which he was elected president in May 2016.

In addition to accusations of radicalism and double talk, the Belgian services suspect Imam Toujgani of spying for his country of origin. According to sources within the Belgian intelligence service, quoted by RTBF, the banishment of the Molenbeek imam would also be a signal to the Moroccan authorities to “put a stop to the interference of their secret services on Muslim worship in Belgium”.