PARIS,
December 10 (IslamOnline & News Agencies) - France's five million
Muslims are for the first time to be organized within a single
representative body authorized to press their interests before the
government, under an agreement signed Monday, December 9, 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," reported Agence
France-Presse (AFP).
According
to the minister, the structure of the new body will be finalized 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 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 what AFP described as the
diversity of the Muslim community and the haphazard way in which it has
grown up through successive waves of immigration.
France
is a rigidly secular state, and it regulates its relations with the
other main religions through official bodies of the type it is finally
creating 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 Organizations
in France, said AFP.
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Despite
the size of its Muslim population,
France
has only eight large-scale mosques
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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 are fully represented.
Despite
the size of its Muslim population, France has only eight large-scale
mosques, and most worshippers make do with small and sometimes
inconvenient prayer rooms, leading to widespread complaints by Muslims
about discrimination.
The
urgency to formalize relations stems from the government’s aim to
exercise a sort of official supervision of Islamic prayer halls and
meetings, according to AFP.
In
setting its relationship with the Muslim community on an even footing,
another part of the government's aim is to wean it from the foreign
governments and institutions which have until now subsidized many
mosques and prayer rooms, and which ministers claim exercise undue
influence.
Algeria,
says AFP, funds about 200 religious centers, while Saudi Arabia provided
90 percent of the money for the Grand mosque in Lyon.
If
the issue of mosque building can be easily resolved by a more positive
response by local authorities, the government says it is not comfortable
with the vast majority of imams who preach in French mosques and prayer
halls - more than 90 percent - being foreigners.
World
Islamic institutions, like Egypt’s renowned Al-Azhar University, take
the responsibility of dispatching scholars and imams to foreign
countries to help educate Muslim communities there on their faith
