The campaign has also fuelled the ethnic tensions crippling French Islam, which is split among factions backed by Algeria, Morocco and Turkey and others who oppose any meddling from the Muslim countries that they or their forefathers left behind.
“This CFCM will start off an empty shell and continue to run on empty,” Kamel Kabtane, rector of the Grand Mosque of Lyon, told Lyon Capitale magazine after announcing he was boycotting the election. “It risks dying a quiet death.”
The curious voting method used, which allocates electoral college delegates to each federation according to the total floor space of its mosques around the country, was the reason Moussaoui's rivals gave for the boycott.
“Faith has never been measured by the square meter,” declared Dalil Boubakeur, leader of the Algerian-backed Grand Mosque of Paris (GMP) federation and head of the French Council of the Muslim Faith (CFCM) from its start in 2003 until 2008.
The third major federation, the Union of French Islamic Organizations (UOIF) which is close to the Muslim Brotherhood, urged a delay in the vote until the system could be reformed. But the government insisted it go ahead, so they also pulled out.
The broader reason for the boycott is that French Muslims of Moroccan origin, although fewer than those with an Algerian background, are generally more devout and -- with encouragement from Rabat and Moussaoui's RMF -- are building more mosques. That extra floor space means more voting delegates for the RMF and an automatic majority for the Moroccans -- something Algiers wants to avoid. The UOIF, with no single sponsor abroad, has long opposed what it calls this foreign interference.
Despite the boycott, Moussaoui went ahead with a June 5 vote in which his group swept 30 of the 41 administrative council seats -- an outcome that ensures his victory in the second stage of the process, when the council elects its head today.
He said the fact that several small groups and a few GMP dissenters had participated “expresses a will to reinforce the unity of French Muslims through collegial work.”
The election marked a new low point for the CFCM, which the then Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy, now France's president, launched in 2003 to represent the interests of the country's five million-strong Muslim minority, the largest in Europe.
Touted as a model way to organize Muslim communities in European countries worried about radicals in their midst, the CFCM soon fell into squabbling among the rival groups Sarkozy had pressured into joining a single council.
Sarkozy imposed Boubakeur as its first head, even though his Algerian-backed GMP group was not the biggest -- a privilege the two other main federations resented. The RMF won in 2008 when Paris opted not to impose Boubakeur for a third term.
The CFCM was supposed to help finance mosque construction, arrange training for imams, organize the halal meat market and represent Muslim community concerns to the government.
But what little has been achieved on these issues has been accomplished by regional councils working more pragmatically with local officials while the Paris leaders squabbled. As a result of the election crisis, dissatisfied Muslim leaders have started to drift away from the CFCM.
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