By The closure occurred in a context of growing political debates around the challenges posed by the expansion of Islam in the country.
French authorities on July 27 ordered the closure of a mosque in the Paris region for six months, citing sermons and social media posts by its imams that officials say glorified terrorism, legitimized jihad, and incited violence, hatred, and discrimination.
The closure occurred in the context of growing political debates around the challenges posed by the expansion of Islam in the country.
The order targeted the “Chanteloup” mosque in Aulnay-sous-Bois, a suburb northeast of the capital in the Seine-Saint-Denis department. It was announced by the local prefecture, the regional arm of the French state administration.
The closure was ordered under a provision enacted in October 2017 that allows prefects to shut down places of worship where preaching is found to “incite violence or hatred, promote terrorism, or provoke acts of terrorism.”
A communique by the local prefect claimed that both the mosque’s regular imams and the guest speakers it hosted spread a “radical Islamist ideology” that “echoes the rhetoric of terrorist organizations, legitimizes jihad, and glorifies death as a martyr.” The administration added that the closure was warranted given the gravity and repetition of statements it judged “capable of inciting terrorist acts.”
The French news agency AFP reported that a video circulating on the social platform X earlier in the year showed an imam who had lectured at least once at the mosque urged Muslims to strike their children aged 11 and older if they failed to pray.
The mosque’s management has contested the order. Its attorney, Rafik Chekkat, announced on social media that the association had filed an emergency appeal with the Montreuil administrative court, arguing the case rested on insufficient, imprecise, and unsubstantiated evidence involving faulty interpretations of Quranic verses.
“The prefect of Seine-Saint-Denis faults an imam for having cited the Surah Al-Baqara at the Chanteloup mosque in Aulnay-sous-Bois, in order to justify its administrative closure,” Chekkat said in a tweet. “If the order is upheld by the courts, the Quran itself becomes grounds for closure.”
He said the mosque had already removed the two imams responsible for what he described as roughly 90% of the complaints against it and that mosque leaders had asked to meet with the prefect beforehand but were refused.
Regional outlet Ici Paris Île-de-France reported the association is also contesting a freeze on its bank accounts and a separate move to dissolve the managing association itself.
A hearing before the Montreuil court was held on Aug. 4; the mosque remained open pending the ruling that should be made public in the coming days.
This is the second time the mosque has faced a shutdown. In 2019, the prefecture ordered its closure after an inspection found the premises did not meet public safety requirements.
Another mosque in the department, in Pantin, closed for six months in 2020 for publicly criticizing history teacher Samuel Paty, who was beheaded that year after showing pupils caricatures of Mohammed, the central figure of the Islamic faith.
Since 2017, the French Senate has ordered seven houses of worship closed under the same provision in its first two years alone, following 19 mosque and prayer-hall closures carried out under France’s 2015–2017 state of emergency after the Paris terrorist attacks in 2015. A further wave followed France’s 2021 law against Islamist “separatism.”
The closure lands amid an ongoing, and polarizing, public conversation in France about the growth of Islam. Government figures put the number of Muslim places of worship nationwide — mosques and smaller prayer rooms combined — at roughly 2,600 in 2024, up from about eight mosques in 1975.
Estimates of France’s Muslim population vary by methodology; INSEE-linked survey data suggest Muslims make up roughly 10% of the metropolitan population, or 6 to 7 million people. A widely covered November 2025 survey by the polling institute IFOP put the adult Muslim share at 7% in 2025, up from 0.5% in 1985.
The closure of the Chanteloup mosque came just one day after the 10th anniversary of the murder of 85-year-old parish priest Jacques Hamel by two Islamic State-inspired attackers inside his own church during Mass on July 26, 2016.
It was the first time in France a terrorist attack had targeted worshippers during a religious service. The local Diocese of Rouen and the town of Saint-Étienne-du-Rouvray — where Hamel was slaughtered — held two days of commemorations July 25 and 26.
A Mass was celebrated by the president of the French bishops’ conference, Cardinal Jean-Marc Aveline, with the homily delivered by Rouen’s Archbishop Dominique Lebrun, built explicitly around interreligious dialogue rather than security concerns.
Saturday’s program featured a roundtable titled “Muslims and Catholics: Educating Young People to Encounter One Another.” Organizers highlighted the public friendship between Roseline Hamel, the slain priest’s sister, and Nassera Kermiche, the mother of one of his killers, as the defining symbol of the decade since the attack.
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We read: “The closure occurred in the context of growing political debates around the challenges posed by the expansion of Islam in the country.”
About which:
“Probably quoting the late journalist Ariani Fallaci, Bernard Lewis suggests that the third encounter with Islam [the first repulsed in France at Tours in A.D. 722 and the second in Austria at Vienna in A.D. 1683] involves the likely choice whether the Europe of the future we will be a ‘Europeanized Islam or an Islamicized Europe.’ Fallaci quoted earlier Bassam Tibi, a ‘moderate’ Muslim in Germany: ‘The problem is not to establish whether in 2100 the greatest majority of the totality of Europeans will be Muslim: one way or another they will. The problem is whether (the) Islam destined to dominate Europe will be a Euro-Islam or the Islam of Shari’a.’ Fallaci did not believe in dialogue with Islam. She added that dialogue with Islam is ‘a monologue, a soliloquy nourished by our naïveté or unconfessed despair’ [Ariani Fallaci, ‘The Force of Reason,’ Rizzoli, 2004]” (from Beaulieu, “Beyond Secularism and Jihad: A Triangular Inquiry into the Mosque, the Manger & Modernity,” University Press of America, 2012, chapter 5).
“Fallaci did not believe in dialogue with Islam.” (Beaulieu above, 8:12 a.m.)
Expand, please.
As a SHORT ANSWER, I would propose that coherent “dialogue” among persons posits a relational (Triune) God and, therefore, a Christian Anthropology—as contrasted with even a monotheism when it still asserts a totally inscrutable and unknowable God. Because of the inborn and universal natural law (a clarification within Christian Anthropology and even discoverable by “reason”), “persons” can still dialogue with each other. But Islam, as a package-deal and yet hyper-sectarian “religion,” seems impenetrable.
The philosophical first principle of non-contradiction is replaced by the Qur’anic principle of arbitrary “abrogation.”
As a LONGER ANSWER (be careful what you ask for!), I excerpt the following about Fallaci from my cited book:
[….] The defense of natural law—and resistance to the assimilation of Christianity into the presumptive faith community of Islam—even includes insights from an avowed atheist, the late Ariana Fallaci. Fallaci chastises the Catholic Church for winking at the “ideological robberies” of Islam throughout history, the unchallenged Muslim presumption that “Christianity is an abortion of Islam,” and for not raising clearly the banner of Western self-defense [see footnote, below]. Fallaci’s critique came before Pope Benedict XVI’s very clear “Regensburg Lecture” in 2006 (my Chapter 1). Fallaci calls herself a “Christian atheist” because for all of its mythology, in her judgment, “Christianity truly is an irresistible provocation, a sensational bet that Man makes himself . . . ” We have a catastrophe, she says, “Because before invading our territory and destroying our culture, before canceling our identity, Islam aims to extinguish that irresistible provocation.”
As an atheist, Fallaci opines that man created God, not the other way around, and that man does this out of despair . . . but, (she continues) that Christ even as only a man demands liberty and freedom. Phoenix-like, He is ever rising up to renew these claims and in this way to “seduce” even her (Fallaci) into belief. As a “Christian atheist . . . (she finds that) Life always resurrects, Life is eternal . . . That most seduces me. Because in it I see the rejection of Death, the refusal of Death, the apotheosis of Life which can be evil: yes. Which is also evil, which eats itself. But its alternative is Nothingness. And let’s face it: such is the principle which leads and feeds our civilization.” Of Europe’s reported flaccid convictions, its self-hatred and sickness and “moral and intellectual cancer,” Fallaci observes, “If a Pope and an atheist say the same thing, in that thing there must be something tremendously true.”
Given this core sameness with the late Pope John Paul II, a remaining difference between Fallaci and the papacy is that she believes radically that man makes himself. Where Christianity rejects this view as a half-truth, Islam probably rejects it as totally false. And the current Pope Benedict hands on the living fact of Christ who in His disclosure of God as Father, also more fully reveals man to himself [Second Vatican Council, Gaudium et Spes, n. 22]. The fact of Christ reveals each of us as a transcendent person, so much more than a self-made construct. Ultimately, it is God who creates and reveals man as a recipient of divine hope and victory over any impending and worldly despair. To meet the current crisis of the West the Church proposes a commitment to the coherence of faithful reasoning and reasoning faith, in the person of Christ. It is in Christ that the Spirit is given to us. In the unity of a triune God these are never separate [….].
FOOTNOTE: Ariani Fallaci, “The Force of Reason,” (Rizzoli, 2004, pp. 194-6). While Fallaci mostly faults the Left for forming a natural alliance against the West after the collapse of Communism (p. 210), she also cites a pattern of specific failings by Church officials in the selling of convents and churches, in support in Paris for the Islamic Cultural Institute, in remaining silent when crucifixes are removed from hospitals, in assisting in the locating of a mosque in Lyon, and for saying nothing about polygamy, wife-repudiation, and about slavery which still exists in Sudan, Mauritania, and other parts of Muslim Africa.
Bravo to the French for seeing the light well enough to shut them down. Groups that espouse terrorism, threats and violence should not be able to use “freedom of religion” as a cover for their evil. Its time to stop mass numbers of these people entering Europe and the US. Like someone said, continuing to do so is nothing more than empathetic suicide.
Islam is a cult of terrorism. How much proof does the world need?
The French need another hero like Saint Louis IX, a warrior king and Catholic Saint, or another Jeanne d’Arc. or a Godfrey of Bouillon or any of the great Christian heroes of the past:
—Godfrey of Bouillon, Skanderbeg, King Saint Louis IX of France, King Saint Ferdinand III of Castile, El Cid, Don John of Austria and his fellow soldiers at Lepanto, King Richard the Lionhearted of England, John Hunyadi, Vlad Tepes, the monk Knights Hospitaller, the monk Knights Templar, and so many other Christian heroes who still had THE ANCIENT GREEK VIRTUE OF ARETE (EXCELLENCE, VIRTUE, AS WARRIORS IN THEIR CASE) and who through these virtues of courageous war-making effectiveness—Arete—BY DEFENDING CHRISTIANITY ACHIEVED THE ANCIENT GREEK VIRTUE OF KLEOS—RENOWN, GLORY—AND TIME—RESPECT, SOCIAL WORTH–BECAUSE WE STILL REMEMBER THEM AND HONOR THEM AS GREAT CHRISTIAN HEROES—WHO SHOWED THAT FOLLOWING CHRIST DOES NOT MEAN BECOMING A DOORMAT AND A WIMP AND LETTING ENEMIES TRAMPLE AND WORSE ON ONE’S WIVES, CHILDREN, FAMILY, CHURCHES, NATION, NEIGHBORS, FRIENDS, RELIGION AND CULTURE.
—For King Saint Ferdinand III of Castile see
SAINT FERDINAND III OF CASTILE: WARRIOR KING AND CATHOLIC SAINT
https://www.tfp.org/king-saint-ferdinand-iii-and-his-conquests-for-christ/
—For the famous Don John of Austria and the other famous heroes of Lepanto read G.K. CHESTERTON’S FAMOUS AND GLORIOUS POEM LEPANTO
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/47917/lepanto
—For many others famous and glorious Christian heroes READ THIS BOOK WHICH HAS ACHIEVED FAME—KLEOS– as a No. 1 Best Seller at amazon
DEFENDERS OF THE WEST: THE CHRISTIAN HEROES WHO STOOD AGAINST ISLAM
https://www.amazon.com/Defenders-West-Christian-Heroes-Against/dp/1642938203#averageCustomerReviewsAnchor
Anti-Muslim hate is unChristian.
I hate Islamism, especially the violent, bloody, and destructive sort. As it turns out, it is practiced only by Muslims. So it’s not about “anti-Muslim hate”; it’s about the hatred of evil.