CART BEFORE THE HORSE

Inside the Muslim Council Elections (The New Republic Online, 04.30.03)

Counciling Moderation by Reihan Salam

The French press is abuzz over the establishment of the French Council for the Muslim Religion (CFCM), a body that will consult with the French government over Muslim dietary regulations, the construction of mosques, training foreign-born imams in French language and customs, and other issues. Most reports have, with good reason, focused on the results of elections to the Council, which yielded major victories for religious conservatives in the National Federation of Muslims in France (FNMF) and the real hardliners in the Union of Islamic Organizations in France (UOIF).

While this may have been a newsflash to Muslim moderates like Dalil Boubakeur, head of the Paris Mosque and the French government's handpicked president of the CFCM, it's a predictable consequence of the alienation of French Muslims. (One can only assume that worshippers at the 20 percent of mosques that refused to participate in the elections feel at least as alienated as their more compliant counterparts.) The real question is why the French have pursued this Ottoman path of creating an institutional voice designed to mollify dissent. Considering how utterly unsuccessful the Ottoman approach has been in managing ethno-religious tensions this side of 1900, it's a disaster waiting to happen.

The most obvious explanation is that those behind the effort, led by the hard-boiled interior minister and presidential aspirant Nicolas Sarkozy, see the CFCM less as Ottomanism at work than as an assimilationist gesture. Frances's Roman Catholics, after all, have a similar council, as do the country's Jews and Protestants. That all of these bodies represent increasingly secular-minded constituencies that are well integrated, and are thus largely irrelevant anachronisms, is, one presumes, unimportant.

You can't secularize the Church until after the Reformation. On the other hand, Islam may be the best chance for a revivified France, with a moral core and a transcendent vision of what the society could be. Posted by Orrin Judd at May 2, 2003 6:27 PM