Spain considering plan to subsidize mosques

MADRID The Spanish government has begun formal discussions on a proposal to subsidize mosques in an effort to make them less dependent on financing from extremist groups abroad, according to government officials.

The proposal, which legal scholars say is likely to test the limits of Spain's separation of church and state, reflects a widespread belief among counterterrorism officials here that Spanish mosques are vulnerable to the influences of extremist groups because they feel the need to turn to them for financing.

Publicly, the proposal is being presented mainly as an egalitarian measure intended to offer all of Spain's major religions the same treatment given the Catholic Church, which has received state funding under a supposedly temporary agreement reached with the Vatican in 1979.

But officials in the interior and justice ministries say the proposal is also motivated by a desire to seal off Spanish mosques from the influence of extremists in other countries.

“It's about keeping them from having to look outside for financing because the state does not, in a way, support their activities,” said Antonio Camacho, the secretary of state security.

Spanish investigators say the terrorists who blew up trains in Madrid on March 11, killing 191 people, attended mosques that had ties to Wahhabism, a puritanical form of Islam that is the predominate doctrine in Saudi Arabia.

Several experts in terrorism have warned recently about the threat posed by Wahhabi influence in Spain. Jesús Nuñez Villaverde, director of the Institute for the Study of Conflicts and Humanitarian Action, told Parliament two weeks ago that Spain had “closed its eyes to the implications of Wahhabism as a doctrine, which I insist is fundamentalist, which violates human rights.”

The state, he said, must do more to dilute the presence of “fundamentalist religious expression that is financed through its own channels, and for which we have not one single instrument of influence, contact, or association.”

A Justice official said significant financing for Spanish mosques comes from Saudi Arabia and Morocco, but he added that the money trails are difficult to track. “Often, we don't know. And that's the problem,” he said.

Riay Tatary, secretary general of the Islamic Commission of Spain, questioned whether mosques relied on money from extremist groups abroad. “Normally, they are financed by the worshipers,” he said.

A spokeswoman for the Saudi Embassy, Brigitte Scheffer, said that Saudi Arabia had financed the construction of some of the mosques in Spain, but that it no longer provided them with money.

The Socialist government, elected in March just three days after the Madrid bombings, has been cautious in discussing its proposal. In May, it stirred a storm of criticism from Islamic leaders and civil liberties groups by suggesting that Spanish laws needed to be altered to allow the government to monitor the sermons being delivered inside mosques.

It quickly backed away from the idea, and officials are now careful to avoid describing any proposals as an effort to control the mosques.

But the government seems to have a wish list. “As we are in Spain, it would be recommendable that they preach in Spanish,” a Justice official said. “Not the prayers, which should be in Arabic in accordance with the norms of the religion,” he said. “But the sermons, yes.”

Despite Spain's history of giving financial support to the Catholic Church, it is by no means clear that the constitution permits state financing of religion, according to legal experts.

"The financing is constitutional," Abraham Barrero Ortega, professor of constitutional law at the University of Seville, "but many authors say it is not because it goes against the provision that says the state will be nondenominational.”

But Barrero, in an analysis shared by the government, said that the constitution also includes a “cooperation clause” that allows the government to actively support the religious life of its people.

The funding of the Catholic Church has sidestepped constitutional controversy, legal scholars say, because it is theoretically temporary, originally designed to help the church only until it could support itself.

But because that day is still far off, government officials say, extensions have been repeatedly granted to keep the money flowing. The current extension expires at the end of 2005. Last year, the church received about $170 million from the government.