NEW IMAMS

It's easy to see why Dalil Boubakeur is the go-to guy for Islamic issues in France. In his wood-paneled study at Paris's Great Mosque, the head of the French Council of the Muslim Faith switches fluidly from French to English to German. He enthuses about his visit to Abraham Lincoln's log cabin in Kentucky. And he's frank about the short and troubled history of his council, set up by the French government in 2003 to give Islam "a seat at the table of the Republic," in the words of then Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy. Would he prefer radical fundamentalists to be inside or outside his tent? "I would rather not have them inside or outside," says the Algerian-born Boubakeur. Then, in a faux Bond villain accent: "They have to disappear." How, exactly? He laughs. "I don't know. Maybe a virus?"

Across Europe, governments are scrambling to find people like Boubakeur: moderate Muslims, in sync with Western media and mores--and harboring scant sympathy for the radicals in their midst. Call them the new Muslim establishment. Fearing that fundamentalist imams (often imported from abroad) are filling young Muslim ears with poisonous interpretations of Islam, everyone from Swiss bishops to Danish ministers are calling for Europe to invent its own brand of modernized, Europeanized Islam. Governments should train their own imams, many say. Spain's Interior minister has called for the regulation of mosques--and the sermons given inside of them. Muslims, too, know they need more of an official imprint, a matter that's growing more urgent as European Islamophobia grows. The November murder of Dutch filmmaker Theo van Gogh by a Dutch-born Islamic radical triggered 174 racially motivated attacks in the following month, according to the Anne Frank Center in Amsterdam. In 60 percent of the cases, Muslims were the target.

Yet creating a Muslim establishment has proved as tough as boxing moon--beams. Time and again, European governments seem to pick the wrong champions. Often, they end up favoring more-conservative groups over moderate Muslims or independent thinkers. The French Council of the Muslim Faith, for example, is drawn from associations that run the country's mosques. But since only 5 percent of French Muslims attend mosque weekly, the remaining 95 percent of Muslims have no say in who officially speaks for them. Last week one of the council's two women resigned, saying the group was too influenced by foreign-born Muslims to properly serve French-born ones. At best, many Muslims complain, the new imams are unrepresentative of the larger population. At worst, they're seen as state flunkies. Traditionally, the British and Dutch governments relied on "village strongmen" to control and represent their communities, says Gilles Kepel, author of "The War for Muslim Minds." "But the village strongman has disappeared because young people don't give a s--t about them anymore."

Demographics make the job even harder. Europe's 15 million Muslims range from the secular to hard-core fundamentalists, from jet-set Gulf billionaires to semiliterate Afghan and Moroccan migrants. Unlike Christianity, Sunni Islam lacks a clerical hierarchy. A Muslim "leader" can thus be anyone who declares himself such. Even a mosque is hard to define, requiring not minarets but merely a few faithful at prayer. Governments often mistakenly assume that educated, European-born Muslims will necessarily be moderate, notes Olivier Roy, the French author of "Global Islam." They're wrong. "In Holland," says Roy, "the guy who killed Van Gogh was Dutch."

Within this bedlam, the loudest voices are often those of suspected Islamists. Take Nadeem Elyas, head of the Central Council of Muslims in Germany, tapped by politicians from Gerhard Schroder on down as the official face of German Islam. No official meeting, talk show or Muslim-Christian dialogue seems complete without him. Yet the council represents only 2 to 3 percent of the country's 3.5 million Muslims. Moreover, half its member mosque associations are under observation by German intelligence for known Islamist activities. "The government is speaking to the Islamists instead of the silent majority of moderate or secular Muslims," says Ursula Spuler-Stegemann, a professor of religious history at the University of Marburg. "The government is always looking for organizations to talk to, and the Islamists are the ones coming forward."

The result: all too often, European governments end up bolstering the very extremists they hope to marginalize. When a German court recently awarded Muslims the same right to public-school religious instruction as Christians, the Berlin city government had to find a partner to organize classes on Islam. Who stepped forward? Only the ultraorthodox Islamic Federation, which now runs Turkish-language Islam classes for 4,300 children at three dozen Berlin schools. In France, the picture is similar. When the Council of the Muslim Faith launched in 2003, a third of the organization's seats were grabbed by foreign-backed, old-guard fundamentalists. Despite the council's conservative cast, the moderate Boubakeur became its president--but only because of an agreement hammered out by the government months before the elections. New elections are set to take place this June, but critics say the council has already lost any attraction for the Muslims the French government says it needs most--the younger generation, the Muslim middle class and those who separate their mosque from politics.