Source: Reuters

Mosques across France held their weekly services on Friday in the shadow of last week’s Paris massacre by Islamist militants, with sermons rejecting violence and asking how some radical French Muslims could support it.

Before dawn, the government’s announced crackdown on radical preachers led to a search of a mosque in the west coast city of Brest, known for its imam’s hardline views, but police found no evidence of anything illegal.

The Grand Mosque of Paris called off a planned rally against terrorism there, due to be held after midday prayers and attended by the city’s mayor Anne Hidalgo, because police said they could not assure its security.

In an unusual step, the French Council of the Muslim Faith (CFCM) – the main umbrella group for mosque associations – and several of its member groups urged their imams to denounce the attacks in their sermons and distributed suggested texts.

Militants from the Islamic State movement, most of them French or Belgian nationals, killed 129 people on Friday evening. France’s five million-strong Muslim minority is the largest in Europe and about eight percent of the population.

“These criminal acts were perpetrated by children of France who claim to follow Islam and consider themselves martyrs in a jihadist enterprise,” said the “khutba” (sermon) in French distributed by the CFCM to be read in all affiliated mosques.

“We must never tire of saying and repeating that authentic Islam is light years away from the hateful ideology of these terrorist criminals,” it said.

“They are the ‘khawarij’ of modern times,” it added, comparing the killers to violent extremists in early Islam who fought against the faith’s recognized leaders.

The CFCM sermon said French Muslims “proclaim our full support for the values of the Republic” and prayed to God “to preserve and bless France”.

In the eastern city of Strasbourg, local Catholic, Protestant and Jewish leaders joined the service at the Grand Mosque and addressed the congregation under a large French flag.

At the Paris Grand Mosque, a man named Kaddour said French Muslims “don’t have to make excuses” for the massacre. “We lost people in those attacks too,” he said.

“GOOD WILL IS NOT ENOUGH”

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