Right-wing French Interior Minister Gerald Darmanin has a new target in his ongoing crusade against the country’s Muslims.

The latest anti-Muslim controversy sparked by Darmanin concerns an ongoing mosque construction project in northwestern France.

On Monday this week, municipal officials in the city of Strasbourg, led by Green Mayor Jeanne Barseghian, approved a grant of nearly $ 3 million to the Islamic Confederation of Milli Gorus (CMIG), a pan-European Islamic charity.

This was enough for Frenchman Darmanin to taunt on Twitter that the city’s mayor supported what he called “political Islam” and worse, that the CMIG had refused to sign the controversial Imams Charter.

The charter, a document that French President Emmanuel Macron wants the Muslim community to adopt, has been very controversial.

When the charter was first created published in January several Muslim organizations refused to sign, one of those organizations was CMIG. As a result, a crisis of legitimacy has clouded the implementation of the charter.

Today, Macron’s government and his interior minister are trying to put pressure on the Muslim community by publicly threatening those who have criticized the charter.

A French human rights activist accused the interior minister of having engaged in a “campaign of intimidation to block the project”.

CMIG said any charter that regulates the actions of imams should be developed in consultation with the country’s Muslim community, and not imposed by the Macron government.

The charter aims, among other things, to prevent imams from speaking about social justice issues in France and abroad that are important to the Muslim community in the country.

In Article 9, the charter declares that “denouncing alleged state racism” will be considered an act of “defamation”. The document even says that talking about state racism “exacerbates both anti-Muslim hatred and anti-France hatred.”

France’s normally rigid and extreme secularism, also known as secularism, regulates a strict separation of church and state, however, in the Strasbourg area things work a little differently.

Under the Alsace-Moselle Concordat, the region is governed by a set of laws dating from 1801 which allows regional authorities to finance religious activities and makes religious education compulsory in schools.

While the rest of France abrogated the Concordat in 1905, originally signed during the Napoleonic period, the Strasbourg area was then under German control.

When the region became part of France after World War I, these unique laws remained in effect.

The latest controversy is therefore less about secularism in France than about the government, which is taking the opportunity to polish its anti-Islam messages before the presidential elections of 2022.

French far-right leader Marine Le Pen leads the polls for the presidential elections of 2022, and almost 60 percent of French people disapprove of Macron’s work.

In February, Darmanin, elected on a centrist platform, raised his eyebrows by accusing Le Pen – who made a career of being anti-Islam – of be gentle with religion and probably its followers.

Source: TRT World