In 2015, Turkey had over 1800 imams serving in foreign countries. The vast majority of these state-employed religious officials are appointed to mosques in Western Europe to provide religious services to local Turkish communities. The same year, Morocco not only sent hundreds of imams abroad during the month of Ramadan for its diaspora communities, but also provided over 10 million euros in funding to Moroccan mosques and religious associations across the continent. Governing Islam abroad is nothing new for either state; in fact, it has become an increasingly common practice since the 1970s. These overseas religious activities take place especially in Germany and France, respectively, the two countries where the majority of both home states â citizens reside, but also in many other countries in Western Europe and further afield. The purpose of this book is to understand how this phenomenon has arisen, the reasons for its longevity, and the implications it holds for the development of Islam in Western Europe.
Since I first began studying this subject in Paris in 2007, the involvement of home states in funding, organizing, and controlling religious activities abroad has seemed to me a fundamental missing element in the debates on Islam that has remained hidden in broad daylight. Public opinion in France, Germany, and other Western European countries has taken little notice of it; popular essays on âintegrating Islamâ rarely mention it; and the few scholars who have touched on the subject have not explored its implications or delved into the political and diplomatic details that make it possible. Conversely, when I began my field work this situation changed. What had come across to my colleagues and friends as an esoteric approach to the question of âIslam in the Westâ found an echo in every consulate, embassy, and ministry that I visited. While media commentators focused on Qurâan verses to explain terrorist acts or the ostensible failures of immigrant integration, state officials and diplomats quietly made decisions that truly had an impact on the development of Islam in Western Europe.
Over the last decades, the governance of Islamic affairs has become an issue of public debate in Western Europe; however, these debates have responded more to each countryâs internal struggles over national identity than have actually sought to dialogue with Muslim actors (cf. Marzouki 2017). At the same time, Islam has emerged as an essentialized explanatory category that discursively simplifies complex social, cultural, and economic issues that involve migrant populations and their descendants and randomly associates them with geopolitical conflicts the world over. The unfortunate irony of this development in popular discourse has been that local Muslims are held accountable for supremely unrelated foreign events, while little attention is given to the problematic issues that actually do exist in governing religious affairs and involve delicate questions of international affairs.
My intention with this book is thus not to support any one position, but rather to challenge the terms of the debate. In the following pages, I do not present a normative argument: home state involvement in foreign countries is not fundamentally good or bad; it is, however, a reality of Islam in countries such as France and Germany . Furthermore, it would be disingenuous to propose a meaningful discussion on âintegrating Islamâ without first truly analyzing the genesis and consequences of how Islam has been governed by state actors up until now. The first step in this analysis is to refocus attention on the main national groups that comprise Muslim diaspora communities in Western Europe, along with the home and receiving state actors involved in supervising their religious activities.
Turkish and Moroccan communities have come to constitute two of the largest Muslim diaspora groups in Western Europe. They are spread across multiple countries, while the social, political, economic, and cultural transnational ties between them go beyond the national boundaries of the states where they live and connect them with the evolving realities of the countries from which they or their parents came. As a result, the religious affairs of these communities cannot be understood independently of the national traditions and specificities that define them. For instance, the governance of Islam in both Turkey and Morocco is institutionalized at the level of the state, as is the case in practically all Muslim countries. In Turkey, the main state actor of the religious field is the Diyanet Ä°Ćleri BaĆkanlıÄı (Presidency of Religious Affairs, hereafter Diyanet); in Morocco, the king is considered the top religious authority in the country while the public management of Islam is carried out by the MinistĂšre des Habous et des Affaires Islamiques (Ministry of Habous and Islamic Affairs, hereafter Habous ministry). These state institutions have been in charge of overseeing the religious affairs of their citizens abroad since the first guest workers arrived in Western Europe in the 1960s and 1970s.
By the beginning of the 2000s, âintegratingâ and âinstitutionalizingâ Islam had become catchwords in both France and Germany , as councils and committees of Muslim representatives were assembled by state authorities with the goal of establishing a single interlocutor from the large diversity of mosque associations and Islamic organizations that had emerged over time (Laurence 2012). However, these and other measures have in no way led to a decline in the involvement of home states in French and German Islamic affairs. Quite to the contrary, Turkey and Morocco have both substantially increased their activities abroad since the beginning of the twenty-first century and are today more than ever indispensable actors to the governance of Islamic affairs in France and Germany . The goal of this book is to understand why.
1 Research Questions and Muslim Fields
The central questions addressed in this study can be expressed as follows: how and why do home states govern Islam outside of their national boundaries? Moreover, what are the consequences of home state religious policies for the development of Islam abroad?
By understanding the interests that motivate interstate cooperation in governing Islamic affairs and ascertaining the impact of this form of governance for Muslim actors on the ground, I hope to contribute to refocusing the parameters of the debate so that they correspond more judiciously to the real challenges that actors on all sides must face. Consequently, the primary focus of this book is on state actors and policies on both sides of the Mediterranean in order to examine how Islam has become an object of international relations between Turkey and Morocco , and France and Germany . In addition, I analyze the dialectic that these actors maintain with non-state religious movements that are transnational, in that they are active across multiple state borders. My approach challenges the classical division between internal and external politics and adopts a theoretical perspective wary of what Wimmer and Glick-Schiller call âmethodological nationalism â (2002), which has caused scholars to âsee like states,â in the sense of âidentifying with the interests of a nation-state and view[ing] social processes from that perspectiveâ (Glick Schiller and Levitt 2006, 12). Studies on migratory phenomena are particularly prone to this tendency when they focus exclusively on either immigration or emigration, which typically reflect the interests of receiving or sending states. In addition, such perspectives are rarely able to provide more than a truncated view of transnational actorsâ activities and interests given their self-imposed theoretical boundaries.
Much literature on âIslam in the Westâ has presented this latter problem. For instance, the political opportunity structures of receiving countries (Soper and Fetzer 2005), their âmodelsâ of religious governance (Bader 2007), or even the construction of gendered forms of European Muslim piety (Jouili 2015) are all valid and fascinating subjects of study; however, I argue that these issues cannot ignore the impact of home state institutions and transnational actors in their interpretive frameworks. Even several of the best studies that draw attention to the evolving power hierarchies and transnational realities of Islam in Western Europe (Bowen 2004; Peter 2006) neglect to take into account home state religious authorities and their influence on Islam abroad. Other than Laurence (2006, 2012), whose work has been an inspiration for my research, the few scholars who have approached the subject have done so from the particular viewpoint of a home country (Ăitak 2010, 2011 for Turkey; Tozy 2009 for Morocco ).
In order to better understand the dynamics of transnational religious governance between Turkey and Morocco , and France and Germany , I privilege the concept of âreligious fieldâ as part of a more holistic theoretical framework for this study.1 The religious field is ârelatively autonomousâ and is characterized by âthe constitution of specific instances that are conceived for the production, reproduction or distribution of religious goods,â which can become the object of competition , conflict, or cooperation between different actors (Bourdieu 1971). Despite frequent cases of overlap, religious institutions and actors base their authority on sources of legitimacy that can differ from those used by actors active in other fields. Following Weberâs (1968) classification of types of authority, state religious actors tend to rely on traditional and legal-rational forms of authority, while they remain deeply wary of non-state charismatic religious figures, whom they perceive as potential dangers to the established order.
Consequently, I postulate that religious actors active across state borders can be understood as operating within transnational religious fields, which can be delimited due to a certain internal coherence based on shared practices, beliefs, and references. Moreover, I contend that there are multiple transnational Muslim fields and that they can be distinguished from each other on the basis of linguistic, national, or ethnic criteria. In other words, I begin this book with the following premises: that there is a Turkish Muslim field and a Moroccan Muslim field; that both form part of larger global Muslim fields to different degrees, especially for historical and linguistic reasons; and that both have become transnational Muslim fields as a result of the large-scale migration and settlement abroad. Finally, as I explain in greater detail in Chapter 4, religion constitutes a potent policy instrument of diaspora politics for both Turkey and Morocco , which seek to maintain ties with citizens and their descendants abroad for a host of social, cultural, economic, and political reasons.
Assuming that a religious field can be delimited by ethno-national boundaries comes with its own difficulties. Not only does it raise the danger of resuscitating methodological nationalism , but it may also underestimate religionâs capacity to transcend other social and political boundaries. It may also run the risk of assuming an overly large homogeneity within the population of one country and glossing over internal ethnic or linguistics distinctions (especially Kurds in Turkey and Amazigh in Morocco ) that can have implications for differences in religious practice. Nevertheless, and with all these caveats in mind, I employ the concept for two ma...