Ministry of Religious AffairsÂ’ Scientific Boards summoned over 80 imams in 2005 for breaching morality, misappropriation of donations, absenteeism, delivering inciting sermons and serving political partiesÂ’ interests. Ten of the 80 imams have been discharged. Others have been punished by warnings, subtraction from wages or withdrawal of licences for voluntary imams. Official sources disclosed that the implicated imams have been summoned to appear before the Ministry of Religious AffairsÂ’ Scientific Boards following complaints sent by citizens, reports by Religious AffairsÂ’ Directors, and police charge sheets. Imams are banned from preaching in mosques when the mistakes they commit are grave as when an imam caused the death of two girls by a Roqia (healing with QurÂ’an). The same sanction is imposed on imam is caught in flagrant act of breach of morality.
To call in 80 imams out of the existing 22 thousand means that the misdemeanours they have been accused of are intolerable since it concerns an important institution, namely the mosque, said the same sources adding that 80 to 90 imams are summoned each year. However, the number of the fired imams after investigations is reducing year after year. They were 18 imams to be laid off in 2004, and were just 10 the next year, same sources point out.
Note worthy that some imams has been submitted to pressure and even to physical attacks from political parties to force them to take positions serving the concerned parties and not the mosque. A few imams had refused to perform funeral prayer when the two Algerian diplomats were killed by al-Qaida in Iraq, when they were summoned by the Ministry of Religious AffairsÂ’ Scientific Boards and questioned they justified their attitudes by social and family reasons.