PARIS, April 13 (IslamOnline.net & News Agencies) - France's estimated five million Muslims are set to get their first single representative national body following elections Sunday, April 13, 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 already voting, on April 6, Agence France-Presse (AFP) reported.

The vote is the fulfillment of an accord reached in December 2002 between Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy and leaders of France's main Muslim organizations, 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.

The election comes after years of efforts to establish a proper line of contact between successive governments and the country's second largest religious community.

But the task has been previously hampered by the diversity of the Muslim community and the haphazard way in which it has grown up through successive waves of immigration.

Sarkozy earlier said the establishment of the Council would give "our compatriots of the Muslim confession the right to live out their faith just like Catholics, like Jews and like Protestants".

Only some 4,000 appointed electors are authorized to vote, and the leadership of the CFCM has already been divided up between France's main Muslim bodies: the Union of Islamic Organizations in France (UOIF), the National Federation of Muslims in France (FNMF) and the Paris mosque.

The Muslim bodies involved in the elections stressed that the principle of balance should be applied as to the representation in the elected council.

"The issue is rather related to approving a reconciliatory system that would guarantee tipping the balance for the common interests that would lead the first council for Muslims here into success," the UOIF chairman told IslamOnline.net.

"The voting comes at a very critical juncture in the Arab and Islamic worlds," he said, adding that France's Muslims "look at their future in a hopeful perspective".

"The Council is the first French recognition of involving the Muslims in the process of defining this country's future," he added.

The Interior Minister said in an earlier interview that 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 are fully represented.

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 favored interlocutor of successive governments. He will be backed by two vice-presidents from the UOIF and FNMF.

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.