The issue of the organisation of Muslim worship in Europe is not new. It is linked to many aspects, including cultural, national and linguistic ones. Since the end of the 1980s, public authorities in several European countries have been urging Muslim leaders to manage their faith. But the institutions designed to organise the Muslim faith remain unstable and unrepresentative.

As a result, thirty years later, the development of quality theological curricula to train imams capable of building “this local Islam” is struggling to be put in place. Added to this – and this is the crux of the problem – is the inability to move away from a form of allegiance to the countries of origin of the European Muslim populations resulting from immigration. Not to mention the obstinate refusal to recognise and legitimise theologians trained elsewhere than in “Islamic lands”.

Thus, the French Council of the Muslim Cult (CFCM), which is supposed to be the reference authority for Muslims in France, and the Executive of Muslims in Belgium (EMB), whose task is exclusively to manage the temporality of the Muslim cult, have reached a state of decay and exhaustion that has rendered them almost obsolete.

So much so that the French Minister of the Interior, Gérald Darmanin, declared last December the “death” of the CFCM, although it had been the exclusive interlocutor of the public authorities since 2003. In Belgium, the EMB has been in a state of hibernation or even brain death for several months. The authorities and the representatives of the Muslims of Belgium are working hard to renew it, through a new election that will be held in early 2022.

The Belgian press has denounced foreign influences, and more particularly Turkish and Moroccan interference, which are exercised through a body linked to the EMB: the Coordination Council of Islamic Institutions of Belgium (CIIB). Worse still, the real worm in the apple of this council is the Diyanet, the official Turkish religious administration, directly linked to the government in Ankara. The Diyanet has put its balls in the air alongside those of the Millî Görüs, a fraternal association very close to Erdogan’s AKP party. In addition, there is another influential group: the Rassemblement des Musulmans de Belgique (RMB), a Moroccan Islamic interface openly financed by the Cherifian kingdom.

In France as in Belgium, the observation is the same: Islam in Europe is only at the beginning of a long journey strewn with obstacles, which can only be overcome by cutting the umbilical cord with the countries of origin. For, as stated in a European Union report entitled “Islam in the European Union, what is at stake for the future?”, the Muslim presence in Europe is “a non-homogenous and incomplete process. It is an evolutionary process, as are all social facts. The internal organisation of European Islam is not complete; the leaders are few in number; the leadership class is in the process of being constituted; the populations have not yet finished taking full possession of their rights in the European public space.”

The objective of the Belgian and French public authorities is to free the Muslim religious bodies from all foreign interference, in a declared desire to Europeanise the Muslim religion, in order to bring it to an appropriate compatibility with the Western way of life.

If the task is complex for governments, it is no less so for the representatives of the Muslim faith, who are most often elected because they are the most consensual, but whose actions, such as leading to a convergence of Muslim communities, remain laborious or even non-existent.

The designation of chaplaincies, the training of imams, religious leaders or teachers of Islamic religion (in the case of schools in Belgium) cannot be carried out, under the desired conditions, without the establishment of new mechanisms of representation of the Muslim faith recognised by the public authorities and enjoying a stable and well-established base within the Muslim populations.