France shuts mosque over Quran verses and classical Islamic texts, rights groups raise alarm

PARIS (MNTV) — A French court has upheld the six-month closure of a mosque outside Paris in a case that lays bare how far the French state has extended its policing of Muslim worship — to the point where quoting the Quran and citing classical works of Islamic scholarship can feature in the government’s case for shutting a place of prayer.

The Montreuil Administrative Court on Friday rejected an emergency appeal by the association that runs the Attaqwa mosque, known as the Chanteloup mosque, in Aulnay-sous-Bois, a working-class suburb northeast of the capital in the Seine-Saint-Denis department. 

The mosque, ordered shut in the last week of July by the local prefect, Julien Charles, will now remain closed until January. The association says it will take the case to the Council of State, France’s highest administrative court.

What state objected to

The prefect justified the closure under a provision of France’s internal security code, accusing the mosque of spreading what authorities described as a radical Islamist ideology that echoes the rhetoric of terrorist organisations, legitimises jihad, and glorifies martyrdom.

But the specifics of the case — as laid out by the mosque’s lawyer and confirmed in French court reporting — are what have alarmed observers. 

According to a summary of the prefect’s file, the evidence included an imam citing seven passages from the Quran during sermons, along with references to two canonical works of the Islamic tradition: The Garden of the Righteous (Riyad al-Salihin) and The Forty Hadiths, both compiled by Imam al-Nawawi, the 13th-century Damascene scholar regarded across the Sunni Muslim world as one of its most important and mainstream thinkers. 

His collections are standard devotional texts studied and recited in mosques and homes from Morocco to Indonesia.

Rafik Chekkat, the human rights lawyer representing the mosque, distilled the problem into a single question: “In France, can an imam still quote the Quran in the mosque where he preaches?” He noted that the prefect had faulted an imam for citing Surah al-Baqara — the Quran’s longest chapter — and warned that if the courts upheld such reasoning, “the Quran itself becomes grounds for closure.”

The authorities also objected to sermons that evoked “hell” and the “punishments of the grave” awaiting “unbelievers” — imagery that is, as experts quickly pointed out, a routine feature of eschatological preaching in Christian churches and other faiths without ever drawing the attention of the state.

Government’s fuller case and its weaknesses

In fairness to the prefecture, its file was not confined to scripture. 

French reporting indicates the authorities also pointed to more serious material: a video circulating on social media in which an imam who had lectured at the mosque reportedly encouraged Muslims to strike children aged 11 or older if they did not pray, and the claim that the mosque hosted guest speakers who promoted extremist ideas.

But even here, the case invites scrutiny rather than deference. The mosque’s managing association, the Association Culturelle d’Aulnay Sud, insists it has not contested wrongdoing so much as the state’s distorted reading of it, arguing the grievances rest on “decontextualised and partial” quotations and stressing that no criminal conviction has ever been handed down against the mosque or its imams. 

Crucially, the association had already removed the two imams responsible for what it said amounted to 90 percent of the complaints — sidelining them on July 3, immediately after receiving the prefect’s warning letter. 

The mosque’s leaders also asked to meet the prefect before the closure; they were refused.

The court brushed all of that aside. It ruled that the corrective measures taken by the association were “not sufficient to prevent the risk” of such statements recurring, and noted that the mosque was frequented by outsiders espousing the same ideas. 

In doing so, it accepted the prefect’s logic that a congregation can be punished not only for what its appointed imams say, but for the views of people who happen to attend — a standard that would be difficult to meet for almost any large, open place of worship.

Ruling “more political than legal”

The judges held that the prefect had “not committed a serious and manifestly illegal infringement of either the freedom of worship or the freedom of expression.” Chekkat was scathing. 

“We are very disappointed by the decision and very surprised by its content,” he told AFP, describing parts of the ruling as running “totally against religious freedom.”

He was asked about why the mosque lost. “I understand that the administrative judge did not want to contradict the prefect of Seine-Saint-Denis,” he said. “Now I think that before the Council of State we will have a little more chance — it will be a little more legal and a little less political.”

It was a direct accusation that a local court had deferred to the political preferences of the executive rather than weighing the law dispassionately — and, given how expansively the closure order was framed, not an unreasonable one.

The mosque is fighting on other fronts too: its bank accounts were frozen by government decree on July 2, and there is a separate move to dissolve the managing association entirely — a triple squeeze that would leave the congregation without a place to pray, without funds, and without the legal entity that represents it.

Pattern, not an incident

The Chanteloup closure is not an aberration but the latest expression of a policy that has steadily narrowed the space for Muslim institutional life in France. 

By April 2022, French authorities had closed 22 mosques and prayer halls in the space of 18 months, frequently relying on intelligence memos whose sources remained secret — meaning targeted congregations often could not see, let alone contest, the evidence against them.

The state has gone further, dissolving Muslim civil society organisations by decree, among them the Collective Against Islamophobia in France (CCIF) — one of the country’s main anti-discrimination watchdogs — and the humanitarian charity BarakaCity. Both dissolutions drew condemnation from human rights groups, who warned that France was using the machinery of counter-terrorism to dismantle the very organisations Muslims relied on to document and challenge discrimination.

That machinery operates against a backdrop of measurable and worsening hostility. France recorded the highest rate of anti-Muslim discrimination of any country in the EU’s most recent survey, and its own interior ministry documented an 88 percent surge in anti-Muslim acts in 2025. 

Muslim women have been pushed out of professions over the headscarf, schoolgirls’ religious dress has been legislated against, and the government has spent much of the past two years debating the boundaries of acceptable Muslim expression in public life.

What is really on trial

The deeper question raised by the Chanteloup case is where the line now falls between combating genuine incitement — a legitimate aim no serious observer disputes — and policing ordinary religious belief. 

A state that can shut a mosque partly on the basis of Quranic recitation and references to al-Nawawi, that holds a congregation responsible for the views of its visitors, and that refuses to credit the removal of the imams actually complained about, has set that line in a place that looks less like security policy than like the supervision of a faith.

France presents these measures as the defence of secularism — laïcité, the principle meant to guarantee that the state treats all beliefs even-handedly. Yet the practical effect, as the Chanteloup case illustrates, has been the opposite: a secularism invoked overwhelmingly against one religion, applied to sermons and scriptures that would pass without comment in any other house of worship. 

For France’s Muslims — the largest such community in Western Europe — the message of the Montreuil ruling is difficult to mistake. The appeal to the Council of State will test whether France’s highest court sees the danger its lower court did not.