“The decision was taken because the man refused to swear on the constitution before taking up Italian citizenship, arguing that his ultra-conservative Salafist Islam beliefs were “fully incompatible” with Italy’s fundamental laws.”
This imam’s assertion needs to be investigated more generally, in Italy and all of Europe and North America. If Sharia is indeed “fully incompatible” with Western law, is it really wise to keep importing large numbers of people who believe in it?
“Italy expels Muslim cleric who refused to accept gender parity,” DPA, September 8, 2016:
A Moroccan man who served as a “stand-in imam” in a mosque in northern Italy was forcibly repatriated home because he refused to accept Italian constitutional rights such as gender parity, Interior Minister Angelino Alfano said Thursday….
The latest case concerns a 33-year-old who acted as secretary of the Muslim Community of Treviso, an industrial town in north-east Italy about 40 kilometres north of Venice. He was put on a plane to Casablanca late on Wednesday, the minister said.
The decision was taken because the man refused to swear on the constitution before taking up Italian citizenship, arguing that his ultra-conservative Salafist Islam beliefs were “fully incompatible” with Italy’s fundamental laws.
He denounced Italian laws as “‘a collection of sins upon sins’ such as, for example, parity between men and women,” Alfano said.
The minister has for weeks been publicizing an anti-radicalization campaign for Muslim preachers, which should lead to new rules requiring them to study Italian rules and customs and deliver their sermons in Italian.
“We are working to create a new model of imam, which we could call ‘Italian imam,'” Alfano told the Libero newspaper in July, expressing concern that current Muslim clerics in Italy are all foreign-trained “and therefore have different values from us and sometimes radical inclinations.”
This won’t work. But at least the Italians are coming closer to recognizing the problem.