Five years after it was set up by Nicolas Sarkozy, France's official Muslim council has hit a wall: hamstrung by infighting, critics accuse it of failing the country's five million Muslims while giving fundamentalists a stronghold in French public life.President Sarkozy created the French Council for the Muslim Religion (CFCM) when he was interior minister to bring together the rival currents in French Islam and give an official voice to the country's second largest faith. Charged with hands-on duties -- organising the pilgrimage to Mecca, appointing prison chaplains -- it was also intended to discourage what Sarkozy called the "Islam of basements and garages", sever French Islam from foreign influences and keep tabs on Islamic fundamentalists by including them.
But five years on, its track record is "zero", says Olivier Roy, a French specialist on Islam. "It's just not working," he said. "On the training of imams, nothing, on appointing chaplains, nothing. On contributing to public debates, nothing." "We've failed in our mission," admits Chems-eddine Hafiz, lawyer for the Great Mosque of Paris and a board member of the CFCM. "Our work has been crippled by conflict and rivalries between different camps."
Experts point the finger at interference by France's former colonies in north Africa, the original homeland of the overwhelming majority of French Muslims, that prevents the different communities from working together. "This is a conflict between Morocco and Algeria for the control of France's Muslims," Roy said.
But according to Abdelwahab Meddeb, a Tunisian-born poet and Islamic scholar, the council's troubles also reflect the wider battle gripping the Muslim world, "between traditional Islam, official or state brands of Islam, and Islam as a militant ideology -- i.e. Islamism." He believes the Paris mosque -- though it will not say it outright -- fears losing ground to the radical Union of Islamic Organisations in France (UOIF), the third major force in the CFCM with 10 of the board's 43 seats.
More than 100,000 people are expected this week near Paris for the annual congress of the UOIF, considered part of the global Muslim Brotherhood movement which seeks to introduce elements of Islamic law by political means. "The fact the UOIF is so present in the council gives it a very powerful and dangerous means of applying pressure," Meddeb argues. "It gave them an extraordinary amplifier." Hafiz admits that "of course" the growing influence of radical Islam is a problem for the Paris mosque, which promotes a traditional, republican view of Islam, in sync with secular French values. "But there are some issues on which you need to be diplomatic," he said.
For Meddeb, "the Paris mosque doesn't know where it stands, just like the whole of traditional Islam. They are are petrified, they don't dare confront Islamism." Intelligence reports suggest only a few dozen French mosques are under the influence of hardline radicals, but Meddeb says it is a "fact" that many more mosques are warming to the UOIF's tougher brand of Islam. Meddeb also believes the council is missing a key component: "secular" Muslims who believe in a clear separation between religion and politics and who are thought to make up the vast majority of France's Muslims.
The French interior ministry this week repeated its "attachment to the longevity of the CFCM" and called on "all trends" to take part in next month's election, but several commentators suggested the CFCM was on the verge of collapse. "It wouldn't be a bad thing if it did," Meddeb said. "The whole structure is lop-sided, it was a rush job. I see no other solution but to start all over again."