LIKE much else in Belgium, the administration of the country’s second-largest religion is in a rather chaotic state, and things could get worse.
In a kingdom of 11m people, Islam claims the loyalty of about 800,000 souls, of whom the vast majority originate either from Morocco or Turkey. Most of the country’s 300-plus mosques are Turkish or Moroccan in flavour, and imams who serve them usually come from those countries. In Brussels, which is the country’s capital as well as hub of Europe’s main institutions, the Muslim share of the population is about 25%.
.... The investigative panel, representing politicians across the linguistic and ideological spectrum, has come up with a bold proposal: the Great Mosque should be removed from Saudi oversight and instead placed under a panel representing Belgian Islam as a whole. Meanwhile the country’s (Flemish) migration minister, Theo Francken, has declared his intention to expel the mosque’s main imam on grounds that he belongs to the purist Salafi school of Islam. (Its director was expelled in similar circumstances in 2012.) [The Economist] Read more
