Mahmoud Dicko (; born around 1954) is a Malian Salafi imam from the Tombouctou Region who chaired the High Islamic Council of Mali (Haut Conseil islamique malien, HCIM) from January 2008 to April 2019. A politico-religious leader considered in 2020 one of the most influential people in Mali, though he has never run for public office, Dicko served as mediator between the Malian government and jihadist groups in the north of the country. After supporting Ibrahim Boubacar Keïta in the 2013 election, he started supporting the opposition in 2017. On 7 September 2019, he started his own movement called Coordination of Movements, Associations and Sympathizers (Coordination des Mouvements, Associations et Sympathisants, CMAS). In 2019 and 2020, he called for several important demonstrations against President Keïta. Biography Dicko is Fulani. A former Arabic professor, trained in Saudi Arabia and Mauritania, Dicko became imam of the Salam mosque of Badalabougou in the early 1980s. A quietist Salafi, he considers himself a Sunni and not a Wahhabite. He was secretary general of the Malian Association for the Unity and Progress of Islam (Association Malienne pour l’Unité et la Progrès de l’Islam; AMUPI). Dicko rejects jihad and the most violent rules of Sharia law. He also views as important Mali's pre-Islamic traditions. In 2009, he opposed the draft personal and family code proposed by the government and with the mobilization of his followers succeeded in eliminating provisions of the code that were favorable to women's rights. In 2012, during the Mali War, he took a stand in favor of dialogue with Islamists and met with Iyad Ag Ghali, the leader of Ansar Dine. In 2013, he stated that the intervention of the French army in Mali, in support of the Malian army against armed jihadist groups, was not an aggression against Islam, saying that France had come to the aid of a people in distress, who had been abandoned by Muslim countries to their own fate. During the 2013 Malian presidential election, he supported the candidacy of Ibrahim Boubacar Keïta. In November 2015, after a terrorist attack on a Bamako hotel, Dicko stated on VOA that the terrorists were sent by God to punish Mali for the promotion of homosexuality, which had been imported from the West. In December 2015, at the Grand Mosque of Bamako, he stated that jihadism was a creation of the West and of France with the goal of "recolonizing