the imam of the great mosque of Toulouse sentenced to 4 months in prison suspended
Almost five years after his sulphurous sermon on the “final fight” between Jews and Muslims, the imam of the Great Mosque of Toulouse, Mohamed Tataiat (or Tataï), was sentenced to 4 months in prison suspended by the Toulouse justice system.
Thus the Toulouse Court of Appeal returned on Wednesday August 31 to the acquittal pronounced at first instance: in its judgment, it judges that the 59-year-old Algerian theologian was indeed guilty of“incitement to racial hatred”. According to the text translated during the preliminary investigation, Mohammed Tataiat, 59, had quoted during a sermon in Arabic on December 15, 2017, a hadith – a statement attributed to the Prophet Muhammad – proclaiming a “decisive final battle” between Muslims and Jews: “The day of judgment will only come when the Muslims fight the Jews. The Jews will hide behind the stones and the trees, and the stones and the trees will say: ‘O Muslim, O servant of Allah, a Jew is hiding behind me, come and kill him’ – except from the Gharqad tree, which is one of the trees of the Jews”had recited by heart the imam, in traditional habit in front of a few hundred faithful in a Toulouse prayer room, without knowing that he was being filmed.
controversial hadith
This sermon did not cause a scandal until seven months later, when the website of the Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI) broadcast a short extract of 2 minutes (out of half an hour in total) July 26, 2018. Just a few days after the inauguration of the Empalot mosque, where this imam, reputed to be moderate, appeared in the company of several figures of the Jewish community. Taken everywhere, the shocked extract. And the reactions rained down: the mayor of Toulouse, Jean-Luc Moudenc, seized the prefect; the Minister of the Interior, Gérard Collomb, denounces “proposals that incite hatred”.
Their belligerent tenor hit even the rector of the great mosque of Paris, Dalil Boubakeur, who supported the imam for a while before letting go: “We strongly condemn his proposals relating to a hadith by a traditionalist author (Abu Horaira) himself rejected by the Muslim Umayyad dynasty”a hadith “which had no reason to be exhumed from oblivion”, he thunders. Even among Muslim theologians, the authenticity of this hadith on the end of times sometimes, although quoted in the sermons, remains controversial.
At the time, Mohamed Tataiat defended himself from any form of provocation in The Midi Dispatch. This holder of a doctorate in theology from the University of Cairo (Egypt), appointed as imam by the Algerian Ministry of Religious Affairs, proved on the contrary to have commented with a “appropriately” this prophecy, judging that his words had been “decontextualized and diverted from their meaning”. For him, this anxiety-provoking text is not a “order” but rather a ” Warning ” of Muhammad. His message would in fact be the exact opposite of what he would have been made to say: Muslims should not participate in this extermination, because it would be a harbinger of the Apocalypse.
Not enough to convince the prosecution, which blames him for this lack of clarity in front of his followers. “At no time in his prayer is it said or explained that it is a question of avoiding the realization of this prophecy”contradicted the Attorney General, Franck Rastoul, on the benches of the Court of Appeal, on May 30, in his indictment of which Marianne viewed a written copy. Besides this hadith, the prosecution isolated other tendentious phrases in Tataiat’s lengthy sermon. Later in his sermon, he thus speaks of the “morality of corruption” of the “Israelites” (a term that designates people of the Jewish faith) to whom God would have “gave once again the strength, the money, the channels, the international news channels and the power to control political and economic life”. Tataiat continued with remarks that evoked the end of the State of Israel and the dismissed Prime Minister.
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At the hearing, Franck Rastoul long castigated this speech “likely to arouse impulses to take action” at “fragile minds”. “You are at the helm not because you are an imam, or because you have quoted a sacred text, but because you did so under conditions that engender hatred”he added. “Toulouse can’t take it anymore, doesn’t want it anymore, for this hatred”he again slashed in reference to the attack perpetrated by Mohammed Merah against the Toulouse Jewish school Ozar Hatorah in 2012. Faced with this “lack of caution” in front of a “influenceable audience”the public prosecutor’s office demanded a 6-month suspended prison sentence and a 10,000 euro fine against the preacher.
The imam’s lawyers read this prayer quite differently. “A judicial expertise requested by the investigating judge concluded that the hadith, taken out of context, could be interpreted as incitement to hatred. However, the sermon as a whole makes it possible to understand that the imam is not talking about Judaism, but about the State of Israel. The remarks must be analyzed in the context of the prerequisite and the precedents.arguments My William Bourdon and Vincent Brenghart, joined by Marianne. Who are wondering: “Is it up to the judge to say whether this or that hadith can be used or not by an imam? » On the offense of incitement to hatred, “there is no evidence that anyone who mentioned the mosque was guilty of any wrongdoing” after listening to this sermon, they add. The latter was pronounced shortly after the move of the American embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem. The imam justified himself during the trial by explaining that he had pronounced himself precisely for fear that the situation between the beneficiaries and the Israelis would not embrace each other. A precision that did not appear in his sermon.