FRENCH MUSLIMS TO GET SINGLE REPRESENTATIVE BODY
HUGH SCHOFIELD, Agence France Presse, 12/10/02
France's five million Muslims are for the first time to be organised within
a single representative body authorised to press their interests before the
government, under an agreement signed Monday by the country's three main
Muslim groups.
The deal was revealed in a television interview Monday evening by Interior
Minister Nicolas Sarkozy, who said it would give "our compatriots of the
Muslim confession the right to live out their faith just like Catholics,
like Jews and like Protestants."
According to the minister, the structure of the new body will be finalised
by the end of the year. It will include women, but all influence from
foreign countries or governments will be strictly prohibited, he said. The
announcement is the culmination of several years of efforts to establish a
proper line of contact between successive governments and the country's
second largest religious community, with the clear if unspoken aim of
encouraging a homegrown, liberal version of Islam…
France is a rigidly secular state, and it regulates its relations with the
other main religions through official bodies of the type it now wants to
create for Islam.
Monday's agreement was signed by what Sarkozy described as the "three major
groupings of Muslims in France": the Paris mosque, the National Federation
of Muslims in France and the Union of Islamic Organisations in France.
However the representatives of five mosques, including the main mosques in
France's second and third cities Lyon and Marseille, said they had been cut
out of the arrangement in secret talks conducted "in order to allow Sarkozy
a quick success."
The minister said the new body's statutes would "conform to the rules of
the republic," and its leadership would be part elected and part appointed.
This is to ensure that minorities, and especially Muslim women, are fully
represented.
"What we should be afraid of is Islam gone astray, garage Islam, basement
Islam, underground Islam. Not the Islam of the mosques, open to the light
of day," the minister said…
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