PARIS, Nov. 25 (UPI) -- The tiny Omar mosque was packed on a recent Ramadan night. In the curtained-off women's section, drops of condensation trickled down dirty green walls, as Tunisians and Malians, grandmothers and headscarf-bedecked toddlers chanted suras and bowed toward Mecca during the stifling, three-hour service.
"Welcome," a smiling, bearded man told a reporter, visiting the working-class Paris mosque during this Muslim holy month of fasting. But, he added, declining a request for an interview, "we're not interested in talking about politics."
Unwittingly or not, however, the Omar mosque, preaching a missionary Tabligh strain of Islam, has been dragged into the very political fight of establishing a representative council of Muslims in France.
Disagreements among Muslim leaders have simmered for years over selecting a representative body to lobby the government on matters ranging from establishing a Koranic curriculum, to boosting the number of clerics taking care of the spiritual needs of Muslim convicts, to thorny questions of constructing new mosques. Jews, Catholics and Protestants here all have representative councils, but France's 5 million Muslims do not.
Now, with a government drive to establish a Muslim council, religious rivalries have flared into a full-fledged brawl -- pitting liberal against orthodox leaders and exposing deep differences among the ethnic Turks, Arabs and sub-Saharan Africans who make up the country's second-largest faith.
Further entangling the debate is another power struggle with the government openly supporting "moderate" Muslim leaders, and critics who argue Paris is violating a 1905 French law, separating church and state.
"What we're seeing is a rift between an Islam regulated by Paris -- a 'salon' Islam of 'good families' -- and a grass-roots Islam which is allegedly fundamentalist, sectarian and radical," said Franck Fregosi, a French sociologist who specializes in Islam at the University of Strasbourg. "Splitting the two is very dangerous. These two dimensions of Islam must live together."
In October, France's new Interior Minister, Nicolas Sarkozy, urged Muslim leaders to put aside their differences and hold council elections, which have already been put back several times this year. Sarkozy has also outlined a proposal to appoint 55 percent of the council members and to have elections within the religious community for the other 45 percent.
"It's not my business to decide in the place of Muslim faithful what's right to do," Sarkozy said during a speech at the Paris Mosque, even as he eliminated clerics preaching hate, violence and extremism from the debate.
But critics argue the Interior Minister has already interfered -- partly by drafting the selection process and partly by openly backing the powerful rector of the Paris Mosque to head a future council.
"It's unhelpful for the French government to separate so-called moderates from so-called extremists," said Lhajthami Breze, president of the Union of Islamic
Organizations in France, a popular, national group linked to Egypt's Islamic Brotherhood movement. "The state has no right to intervene in the elections."
The religious split deepened this month, when leaders of Breze's Union, the Algerian-dominated Paris Mosque, and the Tabligh's Omar mosque each separately announced the beginning of Ramadan.
The Tabligh's Tunisian leader, Sheikh Hammami, also said he would boycott elections for a Muslim council as outlined in the government's draft plan. But in interviews after Ramadan services, a few mosque members quietly backed such a council.
"Of course it would be good," said Khadija Bouazza, clad in a traditional North African gown, as she bundled her children up against the chilly Paris night. "We Muslims aren't listened to in this country. There are differences between us, but at the end, we're all brothers."
Sharing street space with a handful of Muslim bookstores and a Catholic school in Paris' 11th district, the Omar mosque preaches a moderate strain of Tabligh Islam. Founded in India, the missionary movement ostensibly shuns politics. But the Tabligh are particularly active in recruiting new faithful in poor, immigrant-heavy neighborhoods like the 11th.
Whether Tabligh mosques like Omar are among the dozens closely surveyed by French police is unclear. Fears of radical Islam first surfaced with a spate of terrorist attacks in France during the 1990s. Since Sept. 11, 2001, French authorities have arrested dozens of suspected extremists and reportedly foiled several plots hatched by groups loosely linked to al Qaida, including one to blow up the American Embassy in Paris.
Nonetheless, police estimate roughly 500, disenfranchised ethnic Arab youths are ready to train in Islamic camps in Pakistan and elsewhere, according to the French investigative newspaper, Le Canard Enchaine. Fueling them, critics say, are the fiery preachings of radical, often foreign-born imams.
"We need a council that reflects most French Muslims, who lean more to secular life," said Kamel ben Amra, head of UNIR, a group trying to get French Arabs involved in political life. Like many Muslims in France, Algerian-born ben Amra -- who is married to a Catholic -- rarely goes to mosque.
"Without a council," he added, "French Muslims will continue to be marginalized and ignored."
Such sentiments are shared by Dalil Boubakeur. The energetic, articulate rector of the Paris Mosque regularly preaches for a tolerant, "Europeanized" Islam -- and blames the impasse over a Muslim council on his more conservative rivals.
"The fundamentalists don't want to allow a leading place to liberal Islam," Boubakeur argued in an interview. "They're part of an international movement which stirs up Muslim youth and masses, and wants to dominate Muslims in France and in Europe."
Boubakeur's remarks to the media -- including suggestions young French Muslims were heading from "the housing projects to Peshawar," the Pakistani city, near Afghanistan, where there is strong support for the Taliban -- have infuriated more orthodox clergy.
"Infantile and irresponsible propositions," shot back Youssef Mammeri, head of the Al-Islah mosque in Marseille, in an interview published in Le Monde newspaper.
Others doubt Boubakeur's prediction that in a free and fair vote he would "absolutely" be elected leader of a representative council.
"Boubakeur knows if there were an election tomorrow he wouldn't be president," said Fregosi, the Islamic specialist, who believes Breze's more fundamentalist Islamic Union is more popular among devout Muslims. "The Paris Mosque is fairly important, but it is not at all representative of the majority of believers."
Critics like Fregosi also accuse French authorities of preaching a double religious standard. Interior Minister Sarkozy has denounced the creeping influence of foreign preachers and funding, often sent from Saudi Arabia and other rich, conservative Persian Gulf countries.
Yet the Paris mosque is partly funded by Algeria's military-backed government, which has waged a brutal campaign against radical Islam. Last year, Algiers also sent religious leaders to the mosque, to help launch an imam training program.
Perhaps not coincidentally, the French government's pick of Algerian-born Boubakeur to head a Muslim council, coincides with the launch of a special "year of Algeria" in France. Some French media speculate Paris may be offering a diplomatic carrot of sorts to its former, North African colony.
