French Islam. In the tent or out?

When French Muslims quarrel, the establishment argues too

WHEN two French newsmen were seized in Iraq in late August, and their captors demanded that France repeal its ban on Islamic headscarves in state schools, it seemed a defining moment for French Islam. Shoulder to shoulder, the country's quarrelsome Muslim groups told their co-religionists in other places that the headscarf ban was purely a domestic matter. Official French Islam, it appeared, had come of age.

Barely two months later, the cracks are being torn open again. A power struggle is raging ahead of next April's elections to the French Council of the Muslim Faith (CFCM), the official body set up by the French government in 2003. Its president, Dalil Boubakeur, the moderate rector of the Paris Mosque, was appointed to the job after negotiations with Nicolas Sarkozy, then interior minister. So were his two deputies, respectively from the Union of Islamic Organisations of France (UOIF), and the National Federation of French Muslims (FNMF), both harder-talking groups. This carve-up of posts was considered a way of bringing all parties on board, under a cautious leadership.

This time, however, the elections are supposed to be open. The electors are some 4,000 representatives of over 900 mosques or places of prayer. Of the 41 elected officials in the CFCM's current governing council, 70% represent either the UOIF or the FNMF, while just 15% come from Mr Boubakeur's camp. The two tougher movements also triumphed in elections to the council's regional branches. In other words, under existing rules, Mr Boubakeur could well be swept aside in favour of more militant groups.

Mr Boubakeur has threatened not to stand for election if the rules are not changed. Voting weight is based on a mosque's surface area. This, he says, unfairly treats new buildings and established holy places equally. His Paris Mosque dates from the 1920s. Naturally, the other groups want the rules to stand. This battle is complicated by national rivalries. Mr Boubakeur, with Algerian links, was enraged when the FNMF's Mohamed Bechari, whose support is Moroccan, made a recent visit to an exiled Algerian Islamist.

Some are alarmed by the prospect of a hard-line takeover of the CFCM. Under Mr Boubakeur the council has ducked controversy, urging French Muslims to respect the headscarf law. (Only a handful of schoolgirls have so far been expelled for defying it.) By contrast, before the hostage crisis tempered such calls, the UOIF was telling schoolgirls to wear what they liked.

Though it denies any formal link, the UOIF is inspired by the Muslim Brotherhood, an international movement which calls for the “Islamicisation” of society. Some of its demands, such as separate hours at public swimming pools for girls, may sound innocuous. Yet in France, which is home to Europe's biggest Muslim population, some 5m strong, they clash with a staunchly secular tradition.

No wonder, then, that the argument over French Islam is not merely a quarrel between Muslims; it also divides France's politicians, who disagree over how far militant Islam can be co-opted. For critics of Mr Sarkozy (including moderate Muslims) the emergence of a tougher CFCM would be proof that he was nave in establishing the institution and believing it could bring on board most shades of Muslim opinion.

Among French politicians, too, there are shades of opinion. Last year, Mr Sarkozy attended the UOIF'S annual congress, even though he was booed for saying girls must bare their hair on ID photographs. His successor as interior minister, Dominique de Villepin, kept away. Mr de Villepin, while accepting the usefulness of the CFCM, has focused more on expelling imams guilty for hate crimes. Mr Sarkozy puts a greater emphasis on bringing Islamist voices into the open.

Indeed, Mr Sarkozy - technically finance minister but keen to pronounce on wider matters ahead of taking up the leadership of the ruling UMP party in November - goes further. In a new book, he says France should amend the 1905 law which separates religion and state. If the state helps finance cultural and sporting groups, why not faith groups? He says this could separate French Islam from foreign sponsors, who now finance most mosques and religious schools. Such talk would seem natural in countries with a multicultural tradition. In France, it is dynamite.

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