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Politics : PRESIDENT GEORGE W. BUSH -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Richard Chowning who wrote (391069)	4/12/2003 8:09:54 PM
From: JEB	Respond to of 769670

French Muslims vote first national body PARIS, April 11 (AFP) - France's estimated five million Muslims are set to get their first ever officially-recognised national body following elections Sunday to the French Council for the Muslim Religion (CFCM). Representatives from nearly a thousand mosques are choosing members of the new council's general assembly and central committee, as well as 25 regional bodies. The elections are staggered, with around 20 percent of the country voting last Sunday. The vote is the fulfilment of an accord reached in December between Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy and leaders of France's main Muslim organisations, who agreed on the need for a unified representative body similar to those that exist for the other main religions. Sarkozy has spelled out his hope that the CFCM will encourage greater understanding of the country's second largest faith, as well as the integration of Muslims into national life and the development of a liberal, homegrown version of Islam. "It is the Islam of cellars and garages that has fed extremism and the language of violence ... and cast suspicion by association on the whole of the Muslim community which only wants to live in peace," he said before worshippers at a Lyon mosque before the first round of voting. "What we are doing is being watched everywhere in Europe. I believe we are setting an important example. What I want is a training-college for imams who speak French, who know our culture and respect our customs," he said on French television. But some liberal Muslims have said the election process is undemocratic and that the new body will give undue influence to traditionalists. Only some 4,000 appointed electors are authorised to vote, and the leadership of the CFCM has already been divided up between France's main Muslim bodies: the Union of Islamic Organisations in France (UOIF), the National Federation of of Muslims in France (FNMF) and the Paris mosque. A third of the new general assembly has also been directly appointed and there will be only a handful of woman representatives. The president of the CFCM will be Dalil Boubakeur, a 62 year-old Algerian doctor who is the rector of the Paris mosque and has been the favoured interlocutor of successive governments. He will be backed by two vice-presidents from the UOIF and FNMF. Liberals say the UOIF has close links with the Muslim Brotherhood, the originally Egyptian movement which calls for Islamic rule via personal purification and political action, and should have no official place in a secular country like France. "Have we imported the totalitarian methods of some third world countries to regulate the Muslim community in France?" asked Zinedine Berrima of the association UAM-93. However UOIF president Lahj Thami Breze said his organisation "fully respects the principles of secularism and the laws of the republic." The war in Iraq and concern over Islamic terrorism are seen as important arguments for a direct line of contact with French Muslims. The government was troubled when recent demonstrations against the war were joined by radical Arabs proclaiming support for Saddam Hussein and hatred of Jews. However the exact role of the CFCM has yet to be established. While Boubakeur hopes it will act as a consultative body for the government, others say it must restrict itself to matters such as mosque-building, burial plots and the appointment of Muslim chaplains in prisons and hospitals. A poll this week said that 56 percent of French Muslims practice their faith and 55 percent are against the ban on veils for girls at school. Only 29 percent had heard of the elections for the CFCM. France is a rigidly secular state and regulates its relations with the other main religions through bodies such as the Jewish Consistory which was set up by Napoleon in 1806. But as the product of successive waves of immigration - mainly from North Africa - France's Muslim community has developed in haphazard fashion, and part of the government's aim is to wean it from the foreign countries and institutions which provide most of its funding. expatica.com