The Muslim community in Catalonia is significant: there are more than 300 places of worship and nearly 700,000 members, most of whom are practicing. Their presence is visible in many neighborhoods and cities. Young people don't attend synagogues as often, partly because many imams don't speak Catalan or Spanish, but they do follow sermons on social media.influencers Muslims, some of whom are linked to jihadism. The danger of radicalization is real and cannot be underestimated. Leaving its denunciation in the hands of an extreme right wing that spreads Islamophobic rhetoric—with solutions like bans or expulsions, which violate respect for individual and religious freedom—is also a worrying danger.
To confront religious radicalism, police control is necessary, but not sufficient. It is also necessary to update legislation and implement a specific approach to Muslim communities through educational and social institutions. Unlike other European countries, in Catalonia, and throughout Spain, there is very little public intervention to truly understand this religious reality, a task that is far from easy given its organizational structure, which is very different from that of the majority Catholic Church. While the latter follows a centralized and hierarchical model, in the Muslim case each small mosque operates independently and literally hires (as if he were an employee) an imam, who doesn't need formal training beyond demonstrating knowledge of the Quran. Most come from abroad. There is nothing in Catalonia or Spain resembling a school for imams, and therefore no reference point regarding ideology and training. In any case, it's impossible not to think of the imam who recruited the young men from Ripoll who carried out the attacks of August 17, 2017.
Interaction with the Muslim community, highly fragmented into small communities and diverse associations, is as complicated as it is essential if the danger of radicalization is to be avoided. There is clearly a lack of more everyday and permeable mechanisms for understanding. Only in a few exceptional cases have the faithful themselves alerted the authorities when they considered that an imam had overstepped certain boundaries.
We must learn from what is being done in other parts of Europe. In Germany, for example, public universities have had a dozen centers of Islamic theology for over a decade with the aim of training religion teachers, and, in parallel, local and regional governments (Lands) offer German language courses for imams. In Belgium, if a mosque agrees to be recognized by the state, the state pays the imam's salary, who agrees to supervision. In Switzerland, imams from outside the EU are required to have a special certificate. France is strengthening its legislation for the control of imams and mosques. And in the United Kingdom, training has been a major focus for decades. In all these countries, the language requirement is a first filter toward a broader objective: to prevent the danger of radicalization and to bring Muslim religious leaders closer to the values of a pluralistic and democratic society, with particular emphasis on gender equality. This is the way forward. Public authorities must take the initiative.
