Muslim Group in France Is Fertile Soil for Militancy(by Pakistani group Tablighi Jamaat)

Muslim Group in France Is Fertile Soil for Militancy

By CRAIG S. SMITH

T.-DENIS, France - Raouf Ben Halima, 39, sleeps on his side, never on his stomach. He enters the bathroom leading with his left foot but puts his pants on leading with his right. Instead of using a fork when he eats, he uses his index finger, middle finger and thumb.

Mr. Halima is a member of the Tablighi Jamaat, or Preaching Party, a global army of Muslim missionaries helping to expand their religion and reinforce their faith. They believe that emulating the habits of the Prophet Muhammad is the surest way to restore Islam to its intended path.

So Mr. Halima and his associates shave their upper lips but let their beards grow. They wear their pants or robes above the ankle because the prophet said letting clothes drag on the ground is a sign of arrogance.

His comments, made recently to a reporter during conversations about the growth of militant Islam, offered a rare window on the beliefs of a group that is unsettling to many here. The Tablighi are one of the primary forces spreading Islamic fundamentalism in Europe today, and many young Muslim men pass through the group on the way toward an extreme, militant interpretation of the religion.

Beyond that, little about the group is known.

Zacarias Moussaoui, the only person to be charged in the United States in connection with the Sept. 11 attacks, was once a Tablighi adherent in France. Hervé Djamel Loiseau, a young Frenchman who died fleeing the 2001 American bombardment of Tora Bora in Afghanistan was, too. Djamel Beghal, an Algerian-born Frenchman and confessed Qaeda member recently convicted in Paris for plotting to blow up the American Embassy, was a Tablighi follower in the French town of Corbeil a decade ago.

The movement got its start in the mid-1920's when a man named Mawlana Muhammad Ilyas, disturbed by distortions of Islam in the face of India's predominant Hinduism, began preaching in the poor neighborhoods of Delhi. It is now considered the largest Muslim missionary movement in the world. Its yearly November gathering in Raiwind, Pakistan, may be second only to the hajj in drawing Muslims.

The Tablighi's obligation includes proselytizing 3 days every month and 40 days once a year. Every devoted Tablighi is also expected to make one four-month trip to Pakistan to study at the organization's central mosque.

"The Tablighi only care about bringing people back to Islam," Mr. Halima insisted. "We are not political." But he said Tablighi-sponsored trips to Pakistan put young men in contact with fundamentalists of many stripes, including adherents of Salafism, a fundamentalist school of Islam whose radical fringe advocates war against non-Muslims.

Abandoning the Tablighi during such trips is discouraged, he said, but there is no stigma for those who wished to leave for more radical groups later.

He acknowledged that young men wishing to migrate from the Tablighi to more militant forms of Islam had no trouble finding their way. "Everyone knows which mosques attract Salafists, and if you go and ask, it's easy to get into the jihadi network," he said.