at the Grand Mosque of Paris, Muslims judge the Boualem Sansal affair

In the fifth arrondissement of Paris, between the red brick social buildings dating from the 1930s and the Jardin des Plantes, the Great Mosque of Paris and its 33 meter high minaret have stood for almost 100 years. This Hispano-Moorish style mosque that its initiator, Édouard Herriot, deputy mayor of Lyon, a great secular and republican figure of the Third Republic, conceived as “a place of religious and intellectual independence” of a truly French Islam, could only be built, thanks to public funds, by circumventing the 1905 law.

Although it has been well integrated into the Parisian landscape for a century, the building first hit the headlines when it was founded. At the time, the Communist Party expressed its opposition. In 1923, the communist activist and journalist Victor Spielmann even described this construction as « fixed bluff » by which the “Western rulers and their Eastern allies – subsidized – sanction the exploitation of the Muslim masses. “, in a word, support “the opium of the people”. As for the founder of Algerian nationalism Messali Hadj, he denounced the construction of a “mosque advertising” which also aims to showcase France as a Muslim power due to its colonies. However, in recent days the building has echoed a completely different controversy: that arising from the arrest at Algiers airport on November 16 and the detention of the Franco-Algerian writer Boualem Sansal. . It must be said that the Great Mosque occupies a unique position: central in the chaotic bilateral relations between France and Algeria, it is especially close to the Algerian government from which it receives subsidies.