This Monday, August 1 at noon, Hassan Iquioussen, under the threat of an expulsion order from French territory for having made “hate remarks” and developed “anti-Semitic theses”, was still in France, according to his lawyer, Me Lucie Simon, joined by L’Express. It is from the beginning of the month that the measure targeting the Muslim preacher, taken by the prefect of the North and validated by an ad hoc commission, on June 22, at the Lille judicial court, could theoretically come into force, without the possibility of suspensive appeal.
“It’s amazement, the cold shower”, reports Me Simon. His client, aged 58, father of five children, grandfather of fifteen grandchildren, whose ten-year residence permit, which expired, has not been renewed, did not expect “absolutely not” to have to leave France under duress. He who was born in 1964 in Denain, in Valenciennes, where his father, who came from Morocco in 1936, worked in the mine.
Withdrawal of nationality
Strangely, Hassan Iquioussen does not have French nationality. Or rather, he no longer has it. Decision of the father, who, wanting to keep his son’s Moroccan and Muslim identity immaculate, withdrew from him this French part acquired by the right of the soil and which suddenly escaped him at his majority. On at least two occasions, Hassan Iquioussen tried to recover his French nationality, notably when he was 30, according to a well-informed source. But France, each time, opposed it. There was a reason for this: very early Hassan Iquioussen poured into Islamism. That of the Muslim Brotherhood.
Testimonies collected by L’Express make it possible to reconstruct the genesis of the “preacher of the cities”, the name under which Hassan Iquioussen made himself known and spread his vision of Islam to a young audience, from the mid-1980s. Almost forty years ago, Hassan Iquioussen was the little prince of Islam. A former fellow traveler says about him: “He started preaching roughly at the age of 17, when he was still a high school student, developing an ostensible religious practice. He first sought to influence his friends who were around him. He then moved on to the speeches in the mosques. He and Hani Ramadan [NDLR : l’actuel directeur du Centre islamique de Genève, interdit de séjour en France depuis 2017] were the first two leading preachers in the French language. Hassan Iquioussen enjoyed in his early days a certain notoriety among Muslims, thanks to his father. This one contributed to make fit out the first mosques of Valenciennes in barracks, rather modest buildings.
For our interlocutor, “Hassan Iquioussen is a reflection of what the Muslim Brotherhood is [NDLR : la confrérie fondée par l’Egyptien Hassan al-Banna, grand-père maternel des frères Tariq et Hani Ramadan]. Their trademark is the religious discourse placed at the service of a political strategy. Either a speech encouraging Muslims to vote, to be close to their neighbors, but with the underlying objective of organizing on a community basis.
Self-taught, Hassan Iquioussen will be taken care of by cardiologist Mohamed Jammal. Originally from Syria, the latter is “the initiator of the Muslim Brotherhood” in the Lille region. His task accomplished, he will settle in Saudi Arabia. “It was Dr Jammal who structured the Lille Brotherhood hard core, including Amar Lasfar, the future president of the Union of Islamic Organizations of France, the UOIF, the current rector of the Lille-Sud mosque and president of the private Muslim high school Averroès, then a young man, becomes the leader”, reports a source close to the file.
Still within the Brotherhood, the year 1993 saw the creation of Young Muslims of France (JMF), a branch of the UOIF, which became Muslims of France in 2017. “The terms “organizations” and “Islamic” can give rise to apprehensions “, explained at the time Amar Lasfar. Twenty young people, including Hassan Iquioussen, joined in the creation of JMF – “not all of them will become Muslim Brotherhood, even if everyone is invited to pledge allegiance to the brotherhood”, relates a witness. It is on this occasion that the “theory of spots” is presented, “spots” as “lights”. “In Brotherhood thought, explains one of those who have gone through this training, Muslims must be supervised from their birth to their death, by means of a whole panoply of religious and specialized associations. This corresponds to the strategy of the Muslim Brotherhood who privilege educational, social and humanitarian action when they do not have the possibility of accessing political power. The world was divided between lies and truth. Islam held the truth and the West lived in lies We did push-ups at 6 a.m., we were divided into katibas, a language of military inspiration, in vogue at the time among the Brotherhood. Our trainers were in a utopian register more than anything else. This marked at least two to three generations of young activists.”
“Jews are so ungrateful”
Hassan Iquioussen develops there the ideology that he will expose in his sermons for nearly thirty years. On Twitter, on July 29, the Interministerial Committee for the Prevention of Delinquency and Radicalization (CIPDR) provided an overview of what the French government blames the imam for. Anti-Semitic remarks in 2003, for which he later apologized: “The Jews are so ungrateful, [… ]they are so miserly [… ]. The pinnacle of treason and felony. [… ] The Jews will not stop plotting against Islam and Muslims”. He also denies the Armenian genocide, even the Holocaust, accusing the “Zionists” of being “in collusion with Hitler”. He challenges the 2004 law on signs In 2011, he appeared with the far-right essayist Alain Soral, a former FN executive and candidate on the “anti-Zionist list” in the 2009 European elections. causes the terrorist attacks including those of September 11, 2001 as well as those which occurred in Toulouse and Montauban, committed in the name of radical Islam”, that is to say the killings of Mohammed Merah, qualifying them as “pseudo-attacks” directed against Muslims, underlines the secretary general of the CIPDR. “I condemn homosexuality, we consider it a sin”, he declared again in 2013.
The attacks of 2015 and the following ones – the killings of Mohammed Merah having not had this effect – mark a break with the Islamist hubris, this ideological “everything is permitted”. The discourse changes, moderates, pacifies or redeploys, especially on questions of the veil. Hassan Iquioussen, historical promoter of the veil among girls and piety among boys, puts “water in his tea”, one of his favorite expressions. He pays more attention to how he says things, he makes amends. He who advocated the separation of the sexes from adolescence, he who affirmed that the Muslims had known how to hold the Jews in respect, he who quoted a dream attributed to the Prophet Muhammad, according to which the Ottoman armies would take Constantinople, then Rome, that is to say the whole of Christendom, he who sorted among homosexuals, the “effeminate” who could not do anything about it and “those who did not let anything show”, described as perverse, he who frightened people with the flames of hell, changed his speech over the past seven years.
Of the hadiths, those thousands of sayings attributed to Muhammad in Sunni Islam, some of which are violent, he asserts that only those imbued with kindness are “authentic”. A way to redeem yourself? All the same, he flew to the aid of the CCIF at the time of its dissolution.
“Ideological tinkering”
Former president of Young Muslims of France, author, in 2015, of the book Why I stopped being an Islamist, Farid Abdelkrim has “no sympathy for Hassan Iquioussen”, of whom he was also the traveling companion and with whom he broke all ties ten years ago, after having adhered to the “charisma of this small man by the size” in the 1980s-1990s. “He spoke Arabic, I who did not speak it when I started, that impressed me,” recalls Farid Abdelkrim.
“We found ourselves in summer camps, continues the one who has become a theater actor and prison visitor. The star preacher of the Muslim Brotherhood, Youssef al-Qaradawi [NDLR : interdit de visite au congrès de l’UOIF de 2012 après avoir dit de Hitler qu’il avait “fini le travail” avec les juifs], had come to one of them, in the 1990s. In retrospect, I tell myself that all this was based on a great ideological tinkering. It was nonsense.”
Since the assassination of history and geography professor Samuel Paty in October 2020, the government has been fighting ideologically, fighting back. By announcing the expulsion of Hassan Iquioussen, who could be thought to be more or less tidy from the cars, he sends a message: Islamism, never again, make way for a renewed Islam.
Meanwhile, Me Lucie Simon, Hassan Iquioussen’s lawyer, is preparing an interim release with the aim of suspending the dismissal decision. Once filed, justice has forty-eight hours to render an opinion. The lawyer assures her: she has many messages of support for the preacher of Denain, including “those of religious Christians and Jews”. Will that be enough?