One Faith Divided

A studious quiet pervades the cool, intricately tiled courtyards of the Mosque of Paris in the heart of the Latin Quarter. Its rector, the portly and dignified physician Dalil Boubakeur, considers himself the avatar of Islam à la française, despite receiving official funding from his native Algeria. Before him his father, Hamza, was rector for 25 years in this edifice inspired by the Alhambra, completed in 1926 to honor the 25,000 Muslim North African soldiers who died for la patrie in World War I, many of them holding off the German siege of Verdun.

Now it is Boubakeur who feels besieged — "like Rome by the barbarians," as he puts it — by a more fundamentalist strain of Islam. The insurgents' camp is at the far reaches of the metropolis, amid the industrial detritus and soulless housing projects of La Courneuve, north of Paris. In an unmarked boxlike building there, above an expansive prayer hall with industrial carpeting, the Union of Islamic Organizations of France (UOIF) has its modest offices. Its congenial president, Lhaj Thami Brèze, acknowledges that his organization is thought to be close to the Muslim Brotherhood (some parts of which have used terrorism) and that it gets some funds from "benevolent associations" in Saudi Arabia and the Gulf. But he insists that UOIF imams embrace "a moderate reading" of the Koran and are faithful to the principles of the French Republic. "We're the new generation of French Islam," says the Moroccan-born political scientist. "Boubakeur doesn't defend Islam here; we do."

This week those conflicting currents — along with a few others — will somehow flow together at the inaugural meeting of the French Council for the Muslim Religion (CFCM, in its French acronym) at unesco headquarters in Paris. Members are striving for a dignified launch. After all, France's estimated 5 million Muslims, who make up the country's second-largest religion after Catholicism, have waited some 20 years to be accorded an official body like those that serve majority Catholics as well as Jews and Protestants. But after a genesis fraught with controversy, the council could present as many problems as it solves. "Everybody wants to make it look like it's working," says Fouad Imarraine, 39, spokesman of the Collective of Muslims of France, an advocacy group. "But for me the big question is, Who is going to quit first?"

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