In Aulnay-sous-Bois, in the northeastern suburbs of Paris, a recent court decision to uphold the six-month closure of a mosque for inciting violence and terrorism has caused a stir.

The Montreuil Administrative Court rejected earlier this month an attempt to suspend the July prefecture order against the Attaqwa Mosque, also known as the Chanteloup Mosque, named after a neighbourhood in the south of the city with a large immigrant population.

Chekkat, who announced his intention to appeal to the Council of State, France’s highest administrative court, believes that the principle of secularism has not been respected in this case.

He denounced a decision which, according to him, amounts to making the sacred text itself an indicator of radicalism, saying that the authorities based part of their case on imams “quoting…seven passages from the Quran and references to major works of the Islamic tradition, such as The Garden of the Righteous and The Forty Hadiths”.

The works cited belong to the corpus of the 13th‑century Syrian scholar Imam al‑Nawawi, widely viewed as one of the foremost thinkers in the Muslim tradition.