With the launch of the French Islam Forum (FORIF), whose first session was held on 5 February at the Economic, Social and Environmental Council in Paris, a calamitous parenthesis of nearly 20 years has just closed. By recording the “death” of the French Council of the Muslim Faith (CFCM) last December, the Ministry of the Interior, which is responsible for religious affairs, finally realised that this Council had become an obstacle to the fight against Islamist separatism, which had been wiped out by the entryism of the Muslim Brotherhood and the internal quarrels known as “consular Islam”, linked to the allegiances of the different federations of French Islam to the countries of origin of their members.

When the CFCM was created in 2003, Nicolas Sarkozy, then Minister of the Interior, decided to include the Muslim Brotherhood, with the argument (naïve or malicious?) that “by framing radicals, you bring them to moderation”.

Two decades later, the lively polemics that broke out within the CFCM, in January 2021, during the elaboration of the “charter of principles”, required by the public authorities to commit the Islamic organisations of France to the respect of secular and republican values, proved that the proponents of political Islamism had not lost their radicalism!

Last November, political Islamism joined forces with consular Islam in the Muslim Brotherhood’s attempt to infiltrate the National Council of Imams by exploiting the animosities, exacerbated by the Algerian-Moroccan diplomatic crisis, between the Grand Mosque of Paris (financed by Algeria) and the CFCM (whose president is Moroccan).

With the dissolution of the CFCM and the creation of the FORIF, the whole software of representation of Muslim cults in France is called into question. Inspired by the German model of the Deutsche Islam Conferenz, the FORIF will not be composed of elected officials designated according to the electoral weight of their federations, but of competences, chosen for their know-how, to accomplish precise missions related to their fields of competence.