There were no surprises in the election of the President of the French Council for the Muslim Religion (CFCM), the most important institution representing French Muslim communities, which elected with 40 votes out of 54 the one and only candidate running for this position, Mohammed Moussaoui, a 44 year old Moroccan professor, Vice-President of the RFM (Ressemblement des musulmans de France), who had obtained 43.2% of votes in the first ballot. 72% of the Board of Directors voted for the single list, which included Moussaoui and his three Vice-Presidents, representing the main schools of thought in French Muslim communities, voted in the course of a significantly challenging election. These men are Fouad Alaoui, Vice-President and Secretary General of the UOIF (Union of French Islamic Organisations and close to the Muslim Brotherhood, who obtained a total of 30.2% in the first ballot), Chems-eddine Hafiz, a lawyer and the person responsible for the Great Mosque in Paris, and Haydar Nemiryurek, President of the Coordinating Committee for Turkish Muslims in France (CCMTF), who obtained 12.7% of the votes.
The CFCM’s outgoing President and rector of Paris’ Great Mosque, Dalil Boubakeur, had invited people to boycott these elections, since they were considered to be non-representative and even anti-democratic. In reality, while the second ballot that led to Moussaoui’s election was simply a formality for the CFCM’s Board of Directors, only 4900 people from one of the largest communities in Europe – with almost five million members – voted in the first ballot, which was meant to provide a specific guideline for French Islam’s most important representatives. Hence one can legitimately question whether the CFCM’s elections were truly democratic and whether this institution really represents French Islam. Furthermore, what is even more perplexing, is the archaic method used for appointing voters who are supposed to represent all French Muslims, and that consists in measuring the square metres of the surface area of the mosques.
The underground battle between Algeria and Morocco
This method allows the large mosques (such as the one in Paris for example) to have more voters, although they are less attended than smaller mosques often packed with believers. Mohamed Colin, editor of the daily newspaper Saphirnews, had already warned people that the result of these elections would be a “consular” and governmental Islam, and that the elections were in fact covering-up an underlying battle between Algeria and Morocco to secure direct influence over French Muslim communities. The Federation of the Great Mosque in Paris (FGMP), supported by Algeria, and the Lyons Mosque therefore decided to follow instructions provided by Boubakeur, refusing to take part in the first ballot. But Boubakeur’s strategy was also very unclear. According to his detractors, the choice to boycott these elections was not dictated by a specific wish to demand greater representation in the CFCM, but exclusively by the fact that he was well aware that he could no longer rely on support from the French government. Withdrawing his candidature meant avoiding certain defeat.
Moussaoui’s victory
This was a refrain the outgoing President had already experienced in 2005, when the FGMP had not achieved a quorum, and in spite of this, the then Minister of the Interior, Nicolas Sarkozy, had ensured he was elected. A dangerous policy, the one implemented by the former Minister of the Interior, and current French President, since in an abstruse attempt to respect alternation and balance between the two most influential countries (Algeria and Morocco), he effectively greatly increased the gap between institutional Islam and Muslim communities in the country (protesting because they do not consider themselves remotely represented). A brilliant university professor in Avignon, and awaiting French citizenship, Moussaoui is respected by the authorities and considered the advocate of an Islam that respects the founding texts and above all a “contextualised” Islam.
He speaks French, Arabic, Berber and English and really is the representative of an enlightened Islam. But choosing Moussaoui, just like Boubakeur in the past, reflects the political strategies of the French authorities, whose main concern has always and only been on one hand to reassure French public opinion, choosing high profile candidates, and on the other, bringing into play the UOIF (the minority in the country but considered dangerous due to its extremist positions), to catalyse and neutralise French Islam’s more extreme schools of thought. The rather weak and self-defeating result is obvious. The CFCM seems increasingly an empty institution and one distant from the Muslim population. And above all, the election so clearly “imposed from high above” is an extremely heavy burden. With these premises, will Moussaoui manage to ‘govern’, guaranteeing the rights and duties of French Muslims? It is hard to provide a positive answer. It is to him that the French Minister of the Interior, Michel Alliot-Marie, has entrusted the task of keeping alive the “spirit of unity and harmony of all French Muslims”, but above all the task of solving the management of sensitive issues such as the organisation of the pilgrimage to the Mecca, controlling the quality of halal meat and the building of mosques. Moussaoui, instead, would like to provide the CFCM with a new breath of life, to rationalise the organisation of religious festivities, but, above all, to address the unsolved issue involving the training of imams. However, at this point, the problem is another. Moussaoui too must in fact deal with the UOIF, which has suddenly become the second most powerful institution after the CFCM. And it is precisely this that worries French public opinion.
The role played by Sarkozy
Fiammetta Venner, a French journalist of Lebanese origin, who has written a book on this issue (OPA sur l’islam de France : les ambitions de l’UOIF), seems to blame Sarkozy’s atrocious policies as the main reason for the current state of affairs in French Islam. “All the governments that have tried to institutionalise certain elements of Islam – she said to Resetdoc.org – have had to surrender when faced with the evidence that organising in institutions certain elements of Islam meant giving cause to religious extremism and new power to groups with a radical perspective of Islam. In all the ministries addressing these issues, Muslim intellectuals themselves, and even the Conservatives, warned politicians regards to the institutionalisation of such groups. The last ministry to deal with this issue was the one led by Nicolas Sarkozy, who determinedly wished to succeed where others had failed, and he consistently ignored those attempting to warn him. Consequently he made two serious mistakes. The first was to consider it necessary to hold elections”.
“Why not create instead a council with intellectuals and experts from the Muslim world to address the more delicate issues? – asks Venner – When one speaks of elections, representativeness is implicit. To call an election means making people believe that they really will be represented, knowing however perfectly well that they are not at all. The second mistake was to choose the method involving the number of square metres occupied by mosques as the measure for representativeness. This method has resulted in state-financed small extremists groups building large but empty mosques outside the cities, that thanks to their size influence the outcome of elections. Those elected by the Muslims of France are not therefore the representative of French Islam, but the representatives of the number of square metres of the mosques”.
The UOIF and the Muslim Brotherhood
According to Venner, and to most of the experts on this subject, the UOIF is a movement considered to be dangerous, due to its closeness to the positions assumed by the Muslim Brotherhood. A reportage recently published by the French weekly magazine L’Express, entitled “The hidden side of the UOIF”, addresses the shadowy history of a small group of Islamic extremists that, inevitably, has become one of French Islam’s most important movements in spite of having a very small following among the Muslim communities. Another paradox in the Sarkozy management (when he was the Minister of the Interior) consisted in the fact that, in a vain attempt to neutralise a small group of activists, he effectively promoted it to one of the French state’s privileged interlocutors. The first to point a finger at the UOIF was the Simon Wiesenthal Centre, which in a study emphasised on various occasions its links with the Muslim Brotherhood and with Sheik Youssef al-Qaradawi, the spiritual leader of the UOIF and an ideologue considered close to Hamas.
According to the Wiesenthal centre, the UOIF finances Hamas through the CBSP (Palestinian Charitable and Relief Committee). Furthermore, Qaradawi is said to be the inspirer of a strategy for the Islamisation of Europe. In addition to being the President of the European Council for Fatwa and Research (inaugurated in London in 1997), he is also the President of the Scientific Council of the European Institute of Human Sciences (EIHS), an educational centre for European imams that seems to be a branch of the FIOE, Federation of European Islamic Organisations. What is even more disquieting about this person, are the links established between Qaradawi and Al-Taqwa, the bank that finances terrorist operations linked to Al-Qaida and whose funds were frozen by the American government on November 7th 2001. Following this event, Qaradawi was declared persona non grata in the USA. But not in Europe. And above all not in France, where he has been repeatedly invited to attend the UOIF annual conference in Le Bourget by its directors.
Today, the UOIF, with its 30.2% of votes obtained in the first ballot, ‘represents’ at an elective level one third of the French Muslim population (hence almost 1.5 million people), while its “real” followers consist in fewer than 20.000 people. Paradoxes of a iniquitous and centralist management of a country that continues to manage the integration phenomenon like a colonial state.
Translation by Francesca Simmons