“Nour mosque is in danger. She is over twenty years old, has seen some of us born, and others die. She is threatened. She who was the mosque of our mothers, she who saw the beards of our fathers whiten, could disappear.”
For several days, an alert has been shaking the Moulins district, to the west of the city. And arouses a lot of emotion. A petition was launched by young people from the city, according to the imam of this prayer room, Zoubir Zahioua.
“Côte d’Azur habitat [CAh] refuses to renew the lease without any explanation”say the authors of the text, which collected more than a thousand signatures in two days on Change.org.
Except that the problem is not new. The standoff has been going on for four years between the social landlord, owner of this premises of almost 300m2 on the ground floor of building 40, and its tenant, the Organization of Muslims of the Côte d'Azur, a close structure of the En-Nour mosque, affiliated with the Riviera federation of mosques and Islamic institutes (Fami).
In December 2020, CAh decided not to renew the lease of Attaqwa, which welcomes more than 350 faithful per service every Friday, an essential day of prayer in Muslim worship, and which, due to lack of space, overflows during Christmas holidays. 'Aid.
“We fight the dealers and they break us”
No suspicion of radicalization in this case. The social landlord cites an illegal extension to justify its decision. Zoubir Zahioua agrees that “Things were done poorly during Covid but everything is back to normal. The safety commissions have validated. We don’t understand… “
Attaqwa's lawyer, Me Ouassini Mebarek, attacked the leave given by CAh. He lost at first instance. Then on appeal on November 6.
He is bitter: “Everything is in order, everything is regulatory. But it's a mosque… If it were another institution, we wouldn't have bothered it. But in Nice, mosques are obviously a problem…”
De facto, the mosque is therefore evictable. To do this, the City would need to request the assistance of the public force, via the prefect. “No one, two years before the municipal elections, has any interest in this in this hypersensitive neighborhood already plagued by drug trafficking”assures a source close to the matter.
“We are fighting the drug dealers and CAh is breaking us. They don’t want street prayers but this decision will automatically create them”defends, for his part, the imam.
The situation is tense. And the dialogue, broken for years. But that could change. The town hall, “concerned that the Muslim community, like all religious communities, can practice its worship”proposed a meeting with representatives of the association tomorrow.
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