PARIS, 6 January 2005 — The only woman member of France’s official Muslim council has resigned, saying the board meant to represent the country’s second religion wastes its time with power struggles and procedural questions.
Anthropologist Dounia Bouzar, an expert on French-born Muslims, said in an interview published yesterday that the French Council of the Muslim Faith (CFCM) did nothing to tackle the discrimination these young Muslims faced here.
CFCM President Dalil Boubakeur, rector of the Grand Mosque of Paris, regretted her decision and defended his focus over the past two years on keeping the fragile new council from collapse.
“There was never any discussion of the problems faced by French of immigrant origin,” said Bouzar, who was born in France to a mixed French-North African family. France has five million Muslims, about half of whom were born there.
“At the CFCM, they only talk about procedures, about posts for this person or that person and about the modalities of the elections in June,” she told the daily Le Parisien.
France launched the CFCM two years amid concern over growing Islamist influence here. It was conceived as the official body to represent Islam and mediate issues causing friction between the minority and the strictly secular state.
But it has long teetered on the brink of collapse. It overcame internal tensions last September to lobby for the release of two kidnapped French journalists in Iraq, only to resume squabbling over preparations for its next election.
Bouzar was one of several independent experts on the 17-seat CFCM board dominated by rival associations backed by Algeria, Morocco or groups close to the Muslim Brotherhood. They were supposed to represent civil society but have had little impact. She said the fact that immigrants ran the CFCM meant that young Muslims felt unrepresented there and got no guidance on how to live as Muslims in a secular western state.
“As long as there is not a majority of French-born Muslims on the board, the CFCM will suffer from rivalries that divide its members according to their countries of origin,” she said.
