France tries to soften local style of Islam

While the Algerian government (which funds the Grand Mosque) sends 80 imams to France, and the Moroccan government sends dozens more, most prayer leaders are chosen by local groups that run their own mosques, often in the run-down, big-city suburbs where most of France's five million Muslims live.

Very few of them are paid for their services. Most live on welfare, supplemented by donations from the faithful.

The imams of the 250 mosques affiliated with the UOIF must meet certain criteria, says Breze.

"Our preachers must speak French,they must have been here for many years if they are not French citizens, and their sermons must strengthen social peace," he insists. "We don't want imams who rouse their congregations against their country or a government."

Breze would like to see the French Council for the Muslim Religion (CFCM) - set up last year at the urging of the government to provide the authorities with a representative Islamic body they could deal with - set similar conditions in drawing up a list of approved imams.

Dr. Boubaker, head of the CFCM, proposed such a scheme in a meeting Monday with Prime Minister Jean Pierre Raffarin. "We must distinguish between real imams and subversives who call themselves imams," he says. "Imams in France should absolutely stop talking politics."

The CFCM, riven by internal divisions between different branches of Islam, would probably not able to draw up a credible list of "authorized" imams, however, and some members doubt it should try. "It might look like police-style management," worries Ms. Bouzar. "A lot of Muslims already think the government is trying to control them through the council, and this could revive the anxieties."

Some Muslim leaders look to the training of French-born young men as imams as the solution, hoping that they would be more moderate and nonpolitical, and better attuned to the realities of life in a secular Western nation.

The UOIF runs a small college in the French countryside that turns out about 10 new imams a year, but officials acknowledge that this is nowhere near enough to meet the demand. The problem is not only to find enough young Frenchmen attracted by the life of an imam; equally difficult is the question of financing a training institute.

In Muslim countries, governments generally subsidize such institutions. In secular France, with its strict separation of church and state, such an idea is anathema. "This is precisely the CFCM's mission and task. The ball is in their court," says Interior Ministry spokeswoman Veronique Guillermo. "The French state will have nothing to do with how a religion organizes itself."

But the Muslim community in France does not have the resources to fund four-year imam training courses, Muslim leaders say, and they are reluctant to turn to traditional donors, such as wealthy patrons in Gulf countries, for fear of the influence that would give them.

"The question of money is key," says Bouzar. "But the whole imam situation is a reflection of the state of relations between French society and Islam. Islam used to be seen as a foreigner's religion. Today we have a generation which wants to be Muslim and French. Before we can decide what we want from our imams we have to reflect on what it means to be a Muslim in a secular society, and we have a long way to go in that reflection."

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