Imams must be 'up to speed' with modernity

Many Muslim prayer leaders in the Islamic world and the West need urgent training in modern issues to bring them up to speed with the changing world around them, Morocco's Islamic Affairs Minister said yesterday.

Ahmad Toufiq said a lack of modern knowledge among imams, an issue many European governments singled out as a security risk after the September 11 attacks and last year's Madrid train bombing, was a problem Islamic countries also had to face.

Toufiq was at a conference on Islam in the Netherlands, where the murder by a suspected Islamist of Theo van Gogh, a filmmaker and outspoken critic of Islam, prompted the government to subsidise training courses to help integrate imams into liberal Dutch society.

France, Germany and Belgium are also considering ways to promote faster integration of imams, believing the fact many do not understand the local language and society makes them isolated and prone to manipulation by radical Islamist movements.

Toufiq said Morocco, the country of origin for many Muslims now living in Spain, France and the Netherlands, has begun its own drive to upgrade the education of its imams.

"We've made all sorts of structural adjustments but we forgot to do this in the religious field," Toufiq said. "We realise now there is a necessity, even an urgency, to do this."

Morocco had imams with differing levels of education, he said, whose religious thinking had "not evolved in step with the many changes seen in our socio-economic reality ... A lot of them need to be recycled, some maybe even replaced".

He welcomed efforts by European governments to boost the education level of imams, but was reserved about some politicians' calls to develop a "European Islam".