COLUMN ONE : A Place for Islam in Europe : Nearly 25 million Muslims now live on the Continent. An institute in rural France seeks to offer them a center of learning--and becomes a center of controversy.

On a wooded, mist-covered hillside here in rural Burgundy, a controversial new European religious university is taking shape. But unlike the first European universities eight centuries ago, this new school is not the offshoot of intellectual Christian clergy.

Instead of from Rome, the new European Institute of Human Sciences gets its inspiration from the Muslim holy cities of Mecca and Medina and the mosques of North Africa. Its potential students are the working-class sons and daughters of Muslim immigrants and the recently liberated Muslim populations of Eastern Europe.

So far, the school has only 13 full-time students and two full-time faculty members. Administrators say that another 37 students, mainly from Eastern Europe, have been accepted for enrollment but have not been granted visas by French immigration authorities. For its part, the French government seems unsure whether to praise the new school, condemn it or copy it.

On a recent afternoon, however, teams of building contractors were busy converting the 33-acre grounds of the Chateau Bouteloin, until recently a summer resort for a French oil company, into an academic campus. The modest 19th-Century provincial residence now houses classrooms and an administration office. A former barn was in the process of being transformed into a modern library with French and Arabic texts. Former summer resort accommodations have been renovated as dormitories and prayer rooms.

Despite its modest start, the institute’s sponsors, including wealthy contributors from Saudi Arabia and the Persian Gulf oil states, hope that eventually the school will have 200 elite students and serve as one of the main centers of learning for Europe’s 25 million Muslims, including those living in such countries as Albania, Bulgaria and Yugoslavia.

An estimated 8 million Muslims live in Western Europe, including 3 million in France. Islam is Europe’s second religion. There are more Muslims in France, for example, than there are Protestants.

“With the complexity of life today,” said Zuhair Mahmoud, 39, the institute’s director, “we need a place to teach and explain Islam in a European context.”

Given a neutral, non-religious name by its founders in an effort to avoid controversy, the institute is an example of how Muslim religious and business organizations are groping for a way to make a place for Islam in European culture. Concerned about growing alienation among young Muslims in Europe, even some governments are experimenting with ways to connect with the Muslim minority, mostly offspring of the waves of immigrant workers from North Africa, Turkey, Pakistan and India who came to the Continent and to Britain in the 1960s and ‘70s during times of labor shortages.

In France, the Interior Ministry has convened a Muslim religious advisory board and has even considered opening a state-funded Muslim religious academy as a way of shaping Muslim thought and aligning it with European traditions. In the Netherlands, Islamic seats have been added to universities, drawing overflow crowds of students.

Beginning in 1988, the Dutch began providing state-funded Islamic primary schools for the large Moroccan and Turkish Muslim populations. The schools, which separate girls and boys in physical education classes, now have 2,280 students. Muslim leaders in the Netherlands have called for the creation of an Islamic high school.

But these efforts toward integration of the Muslim population come at the same time that anti-Muslim and anti-immigrant sentiments appear to be building in Europe, reflected by the strong showing of extreme right-wing, anti-immigrant political parties in recent elections and by physical attacks against immigrant minorities, primarily in Germany.

“Unhappily for us Muslims,” said Mahmoud, an Iraqi-born physics professor on leave from a French university, “just as our process of integration was taking off, the movement of intolerance is growing.” Even before it opened Jan. 6, the institute had been the target of several demonstrations staged in neighboring towns by the extreme right-wing National Front political party, led by Jean-Marie Le Pen.

The National Front, which polls show has the support of about 15% of the French population, charges that the school is a veiled attempt to import Islamic fundamentalism to France.

The institute was founded by the Union of French Islamic Organizations, an umbrella group representing 150 Muslim religious and secular organizations in France. Along with the National Federation of French Muslims, the group is generally considered a moderate representative of France’s Muslim population.

However, critics of the institute, including government officials such as Kofi Yamgnane, French state secretary for integration, charge that the school has links with Muslim fundamentalist groups such as the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt and the Islamic Salvation Front in Algeria.

“The ideological affinity of certain backers of this institute with the Muslim Brotherhood and its funding by countries far removed from French republican values,” said Yamgnane in a scathing attack on the new school, “raises questions about the ability of this establishment to spread the values of secularism and the separation of church and state that are at the center of political and social organizations.”

Mahmoud, meanwhile, contends that the main purpose of the school is to integrate Islam with European values.

“We admire the civil traditions of Europe--its great principles of democracy, freedom and reason,” he said during an interview in an office featuring an Apple computer workstation capable of printing out texts in both Roman and Arabic characters.

“We would like the chance to show that we practice an Islam that is open and tolerant. We will give Islam an interpretation that is most adaptive to European society,” Mahmoud said. “For example, polygamy, sanctioned in the Koran and practiced in some Muslim societies, would be discouraged at the institute because it conflicts with European traditions of monogamy.”

Despite the kind of talk that should reassure Europeans who are worried about the dilution of their Judeo-Christian culture, not everyone is a believer in Mahmoud or his school.

“T hey declare that their pur pose is to educate religious leaders close to the Muslim populations living in Europe,” said Gille Kepel, a leading French scholar and author on the French Muslim community. “But this is nothing but a pretext to calm public opinion. It is actually an Islamic movement linked to Saudi Arabia that wants to isolate the Muslims in their own community. They seek to be the leaders of the Muslim population in France.”

Other scholars, such as Mohamed Arkoun, a professor of Islamic thought at the University of Paris-Sorbonne, are less critical of the Muslim institute. Arkoun, who also teaches a new course entitled “Islam in Europe” at the University of Amsterdam, prefers the idea of a state-funded Islamic study center in Strasbourg. Under an old treaty agreement, the Strasbourg region of Alsace is the only one in France that permits state funding of religious education. Alsace Catholics, Jews and Protestants also benefit from state funds.

Such a Muslim education center, which Arkoun would be a logical choice to head, is under study by the French government. Meanwhile, Arkoun said he is open-minded about the institute in Burgundy. “For the moment,” he said, “I refuse to make a judgment about the creation of this institute. We need to look at what they do.” According to its organizers, the institute is designed to meet a crying need of Europe’s Muslim community by turning out religious leaders who are as well versed in European culture and values as they are in the Koran.

Even today, most religious leaders are imported from Arab Muslim countries.

The “imported” influence over European Islam was evident recently when Tedjimi Haddam, the imam, or prayer leader, of the large central Paris mosque was called back to Algeria to participate as one of the five members of the provisional state committee ruling that North African country. The right of Algeria to name the religious leader of France’s most important mosque dates from 1922, when Algeria was still a French colony and very few Muslims had immigrated to the Continent. At the demand of the Algerian government, which contended that the mosque leadership was an important way of keeping tabs on its citizens living abroad, the arrangement was maintained even after Algeria gained independence in 1962.

In light of recent fundamentalist gains by the Islamic Salvation Front in Algeria, the French Interior Ministry, charged with the supervision of religious sects in the country, is reviewing the arrangement.

The problem of finding and providing Muslim religious leadership goes far beyond the big Paris mosque. According to Mahmoud, there are today more than 1,500 mosques and Muslim prayer centers in France, compared to only 10 in 1965.

Big new mosques are planned for the major cities of Lille and Lyon. According to Mahmoud, however, only 400 imams live in France to serve these places of worship.

Situated in a corn-growing area next to one of the most famous wine regions of France, the institute requires students to speak French as well as Arabic. Before entering the school, they must have obtained their baccalaureat --the equivalent of two years at an American college. Courses include theology studies in Christianity and Judaism as well as European political science.

Mahmoud said he had contacted the offices of the bishop of Nevers, the Roman Catholic religious leader in the area, to provide a scholar to teach Christian tradition to the students. Lay professors, he said, will instruct in political institutions.

Judaism, he said, will be used as an inspiration for the Muslim students. “We feel that our Jewish friends once faced the same intolerance we see today,” said Mahmoud. “Today the Jews are accepted. We think that in 20 to 30 years, Islam will be as accepted in France as Judaism.”

The 13 students already at the school include 10 French, mostly of North African Arab origin, two Poles (Muslims from a Tatar region) and an Italian.

Typical is Jusef Baudouin, 28, a Syrian-born French citizen. Until recently, Baudouin was a graduate student in physics and a substitute teacher in nearby Dijon. Then he had a serious motorcycle accident that made him think about the religion of his forefathers.

He saw an announcement for the institute in a newspaper catering to the Arab population. “After the accident I started thinking about death, I started thinking about Islam,” he said. “My goal is to learn about my religion as it should be learned. Before my accident I had done a lot for my body. Now I wanted to do something for my soul.”