PARIS, Dec 30: Marseilles Mayor Jean-Claude Gaudin is up in arms against leaders of his city’s Muslim population who he accuses of not wanting to overcome their differences in order to give the Mediterranean port city its first grand mosque.

At the moment, Marseilles’ Muslim community is forced to attend religious services in the several hundred small mosques and prayer rooms that abound in the city, the country’s third largest.

Gaudin, who had previously been opposed to the building of a grand mosque for his city very proudly said earlier this year that Marseilles would at last have a major Muslim edifice of its own, and that it would match in size and grandeur the grand mosques in Paris and Lyons.