PARIS, Dec 20: In a major step forward for France’s five million Muslims, the government and community leaders on Friday agreed to set up the first-ever unified representative body authorized to press the community’s interests.

Agreement came at a two-day conclave at a secluded chateau outside Paris presided over by Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy, who succeeded in persuading rival Muslim groups to overcome their differences and divide up positions on a “French council for the Muslim religion”.

The breakthrough represents the conclusion of several years of efforts to set up a proper line of contact between the government and the country’s second largest religious group, with the unspoken aim of encouraging a homegrown, liberal version of Islam.

Under Friday’s deal the three major Muslim bodies in France — the Union of Islamic Organisations in France (UOIF), the National Federation of Muslims in France (FNMF) and the Paris mosque — agreed to share out top posts on the council’s 20-member central committee.

The council’s president is to be Dalil Boubaker, a 62-year-old Algerian doctor, who is rector of the Paris mosque and has been the favoured interlocutor of successive French governments.

France is a rigidly secular state and it regulates its relations with the other main religions through similar official bodies. The Jewish consistory, for example, was set up under Napoleon in 1806.

The day-to-day tasks of the new council will be providing religious scholars to minister to Muslims in the army, universities and prisons, acquiring burial sites, delivering “halal” meat certificates, organizing the Haj and building new mosques and prayer-halls.

Agreement came despite the doubts of some Muslim liberals, who fear that it will be dominated by traditionalists with ties of allegiance to foreign governments and institutions, with only a tiny voice for modernizers, secularists and women.

The only woman to take part in the conclave, Betoul Fekkar-Lambiotte, said on Thursday she feared there would be too much power in the hands of bodies such as the UOIF, which has links to the Muslim Brotherhood and supports what she described as a “sectarian Islam”.

However, Fekkar-Lambiotte and another leading liberal, the mufti of the main Marseille mosque Soheib Ben Sheikh, both agreed to take up places on the council’s central committee.

According to Sarkozy, an officially recognized and accountable Muslim body is essential to dispel nascent hostility to Islam that emerged as a result of the Sept 11 attacks and the continuing climate of fear over the Al Qaeda.

“What we should be afraid of is Islam gone astray, garage Islam, basement Islam, underground Islam. It is not the Islam of the mosques, open to the light of day,” Sarkozy said last week.—AFP