PARIS - France barred four Islamic preachers from entering the country yesterday after banning prominent preacher Sheikh Youssef el-Qaradawi and another Egyptian cleric who wanted to attend a Muslim conference in Paris. Foreign Minister Alain Juppe and Interior Minister Claude Gueant said in a joint statement the four preachers "call for hate and violence ... and, in the current context, present a strong risk of upsetting public order". President Nicolas Sarkozy, who ordered a crackdown on radical Islamists after the Toulouse killings by an al Qaeda-inspired gunman last week, said on Monday that Qaradawi and Mahmoud al-Masri were not welcome in France. The Union of French Islamic Organisations (UOIF), which invited the clerics to an April 6-9 conference, said it was surprised and hurt by the government's "manifest determination to prolong a polemic ... based on total ignorance". The four preachers - a Palestinian, an Egyptian and two Saudis - were due to take part in an annual conference in Paris hosted by the UOIF, which is close to the Muslim Brotherhood. They are Ikrima al-Sabri, former Grand Mufti of Jerusalem and the Palestinian territories, Egyptian preacher Safwat Hegazy, Saudi self-help preacher Ayedh al-Qarni and Saudi imam and Koran reciter Abdallah Basfar. The UOIF said none of them advocated violence. The ministers regretted the UOIF had invited Swiss-born Tariq Ramadan, who teaches at Britain's Oxford University, but they did not bar him. They said his views "are contrary to the republican spirit and do no service to French Muslims". Ramadan has a following among young French Muslims, whom he encourages to insist on their right to practice their faith despite official bans on religious symbols in state schools and in the public service. France's five million Muslims are the largest Islamic minority in Europe. Qaradawi, well-known in the Arabic-speaking world thanks to his weekly programme on Al Jazeera television, was barred from Britain in 2008 after defending Palestinian suicide bombers in Israel and attacks on US-led coalition forces in Iraq. Sabri addressed a conference in Evry, near Paris, last year. But that was before Mohamed Merah, a French-born petty criminal known to have visited Afghanistan twice, shot dead seven people in a 10-day rampage in southwest France before police killed him after a 30-hour siege at his flat.
