France to double number of Islamic university courses

French Prime Minister Manuel Valls on Tuesday announced that the state would finance double the number of university courses on Islam in a bid to stop the influence of foreign funding of training of French imams.
In a speech in the eastern French city of Strasbourg, Valls said that improving home-grown Islamic education was essential to defeating the ignorance that makes “Islamist extremism and the far right feed off each other”.
His speech follows January’s Charlie Hebdo terrorist attacks and comes amid concern about the influence of radical foreign imams on Muslims in France, which has Western Europe’s biggest Muslim community. More...