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 ’ 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 “integrating Islam” 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 “Islam in the West” found an echo in every consulate, embassy, and ministry that I visited. While media commentators focused on Qur’an 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 country’s 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 “integrating Islam” 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 İşleri Başkanlığı (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 Ministère 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, “integrating” and “institutionalizing” 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 “methodological nationalism ” (2002), which has caused scholars to “see like states,” in the sense of “identifying with the interests of a nation-state and view[ing] social processes from that perspective” (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 actors’ activities and interests given their self-imposed theoretical boundaries.
Much literature on “Islam in the West” has presented this latter problem. For instance, the political opportunity structures of receiving countries (Soper and Fetzer 2005), their “models” 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 (Çitak 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 “religious field” as part of a more holistic theoretical framework for this study. 1 The religious field is “relatively autonomous” and is characterized by “the constitution of specific instances that are conceived for the production, reproduction or distribution of religious goods,” 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 Weber’s (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 religion’s 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 main reasons.
The first is in order to reflect the reality that in both countries the Muslim field is structured by historically derived forms of religious governance that are based on the central role of state religious institutions and the ambiguous relationship the state maintains with “unofficial” (non-state) religious currents, whether they be sects, associations, or political parties. The existence of a national Muslim field thus makes reference to the totality of state and non-state actors that promote their understanding of Islam within the limits of specific state-defined borders and take national imaginaries and state structures as frames of reference for the development of their activities. The second is that it serves to explain the persistence of certain ethno-national cleavages within Muslim fields abroad, even amongst the second and third generations.
If nationally delimited Muslim fields can be said to exist in Morocco and Turkey, where Islam has been practised for centuries, what about France and Germany ? Peter’s (2006) work on the concept of “Muslim field” in the context of France has been influential to my approach, notably with regard to the shifting value of different kinds of capital (especially religious and cultural ) as sources of power for religious actors in a post-migratory religious field. Speaking of a Muslim field is thus a way to contextualize the actions of Islamic organizations, acknowledging the specificities inherent to the religious field while examining the areas of overlap with other fields (political, economic, etc.) and thus the convertibility of forms of capital. Frégosi (2004) has similarly demonstrated how the emergence of new figures of Islamic leadership in the French Muslim field has given rise to competition between the very sources of capital on which they base their authority. In this book, I argue that the persistence of ethnic cleavages in the religious field can best be understood by the convertibility of different forms of cultural capital. Cultural capital here refers to those customs (habitus), symbols, and institutions which are specific to a given society, knowledge of which is acquired through processes of socialization and education; it differs from religious capital in that it is not equally valued, known, or even recognized by Muslims who come from different cultural backgrounds.
Since field boundaries can be fluid and flexible, the difficulty lies in determining if and when a term such as the “French Muslim Field” may be misleading. Given that migration has been the main reason for the growth of Islam in Western Europe, and the fact that many of these immigrants and their descendants have maintained ties to their countries of origin, the borders of states such as France and Germany can be far more porous than the divisions that exist between different immigrant groups within each country’s religious field. Pushed to an extreme, these ethnic and linguistic divisions may at times seem so well-entrenched that the only thing “French” or “German” about the Muslim field in each country is the particular mix of transnational Muslim fields (Moroccan, Turkish, Pakistani, etc.). Nevertheless, I follow Peter’s assertion that it is possible to speak of a French Muslim field since the late 1980s, and I would argue a German Muslim field since the 1990s, in the sense that the limits of a field correspond to whether “the objective relations between a group of actors generate effects that impact the functioning of each of them” (2006, 711). At the same time, due to the interpenetration and overlapping with transnational home state Muslim fields, the value of different forms of religious and cultural capital has become even more contingent on changing internal dynamics and the evolving vision of new generations of French and German Muslims.
At the same time, the French and German Muslim fields are characterized above all by a lack of resources, in terms of financial as well as religious capital. Home state religious authorities, as well as transnational non-state religious movements, are keenly aware of this situation, and accordingly propose an evolving offer of religious services that plays a key role in shaping the demands and vision of legitimate religious authority in France and Germany . Indeed, home states are conscious of their own interest in extending their governance over the religious affairs of their citizens abroad for internal as well as foreign political reasons. Consequently, both allocate significant resources in order to secure symbolic as well as structurally important positions for themselves within their own transnational religious fields with the concurrent result that they obtain similar positions within Muslim fields abroad.
2 Religious Governance in Turkey and Morocco
Since independence, Turkey and Morocco have both been countries in which a great degree of diversity has been overshadowed by a militant, at times oppressive, nationalistic discourse emphasizing unity and homogeneity. Religion, tied to nationalism , has been seen by generations of state leaders as a primary means of affirming this unity, to the point that being Turkish or Moroccan is considered synonymous with being Muslim.
While Muslims may constitute the overwhelming majority of the populations of both countries, this tells us very little about the organization of their religious fields. The ostensible homogeneity that Islam seems to represent masks not only a great degree of ethnic, social, and individual difference, but also a religious field in which countless different actors and tendencies compete for religious legitimacy. This competition has frequently overlapped with political considerations, rendering the question of religious governance of utmost importance to the state. Due to the lack of an institutionalized church in Islam, in the sense of an recognized religious organization such as the Catholic church, as well as the lack of the accompanying notion of a clergy (at least in Sunni Islam), there is no one universal standard for religious governance in Muslim countries. Even apart from the distinction between Sunnis and Shias, the four schools of Sunni Islamic jurisprudence (maḍhab), 2 and the numerous Sufi-inspired Islamic currents (tarīqa), the role of the state in Islamic religious governance varies a great deal across the Muslim world. Moreover, the state’s role in the religious field is also conditioned by its perception of local religious movements, especially if and when such movements use religion in order to mobilize opposition to the ruling regime.
In Sunni contexts, the transversal elements that do exist are often the result of early historical legacies. The rise of Islamic theologians (ʿulamā˒, hereafter “ulema”) as élites from the ninth century onwards established a precedent that “made the ulama, and not the caliph, the arbiters of religious authority” (Berkey 2003, 128). These religious élites used their religious knowledge “as a kind of cultural capital that became a source of religious authority,” giving them the ability to control “entry into the academic and legal establishment” (Hatina 2010, 2). In the tenth century, the madrasa spread across the Islamic world as the primary site of Islamic education, especially for instruction in Islamic law (fiqh), and became a key component of the state’s administrative and legal systems by training the next generations of preachers and Islamic scholars. The madrasa, as well as many other important institutions of Islamic civilization (mosques, travellers’ inns, hospitals, etc.), were financed by pious endowments called waqf (vakıf in Turkish).
The Turkish and Moroccan systems of religious governance all underwent significant changes as both became modern states; nevertheless many traditional elements have survived within the state apparatus. Together, these institutions represent “official Islam,” referring to the kind of Islam that is promoted and sanctioned by the state. As part of the state apparatus, the Diyanet and the Habous ministry—along with other actors of official Islam—are already ensured to occupy a position of authority within the national religious fields of both countries. It would be mistaken, however, to assume that the content of official Islam is static: on the contrary, what is deemed official corresponds to the prevailing interests of the state at a specific moment, which in turn means that it is contingent on the changing interests of political actors over time. The representatives of official Islam are presented as the most legitimate religious authorities in the country and are contrasted with the religious actors of “unofficial” or “parallel” Islam.
The similarities between Turkey and Morocco can thus be summarized by two fundamental factors that permit a large-scale comparison: the first is the existence of an “official Islam” and powerful state religious institutions; the second is the presence of a diaspora that covers a large number of Western European countries. By contrast, other Muslim countries with significant diasporas in Western Europe do not display the same comparable characteristics, though they remain interesting cases for further research. For instance, the religious affairs ministries in Pakistan and Bangladesh have much more limited competencies than those of Turkey and Morocco . They are also not nearly as involved with their diasporas abroad, which is also the case of Tunisia. As for Algeria, the focus of its religious diaspora policies remains almost exclusively oriented towards France , though it has expanded its network of religious officials abroad in recent years.
3 Field Research
This book draws on a corpus of over 120 in-depth qualitative interviews with diplomats, politicians, religious bureaucrats, imams, association leaders, and mosque members. These interviews were conducted between 2009 and 2017 in France, Germany, Morocco , Turkey, and Canada, and generally lasted between one and three hours. In addition, I have analyzed thousands of pages of official documents in Turkish and Arabic published by the Diyanet, the Habous ministry, and other state institutions, not all of which are available to the public.
The interviews were conducted in French, German, Turkish, and English, and the majority were recorded with the consent of the interviewee using a digital voice recorder. During the course of my field work, I was confronted with individuals concerned that I may in fact be a journalist, part of a far-right organization, or a member of the police or secret services; however, in the vast majority of cases I was well received by my interviewees and was invited to numerous cups of Turkish çay or “Moroccan Whisky” (mint tea) as the conversation went on. In general, my interlocutors were males between 35 and 60 years of age, though not exclusively: I also spoke with German, Moroccan, and French diplomats, as well as Turkish mosque association leaders, who were women.
My interviewees’ perception of me often depended on the frequency with which they themselves gave interviews. For many I was first and foremost a student or researcher, which was perceived much more positively than being a journalist, which says a great deal about how Muslim religious actors in France and Germany perceive the media. Several reminded me of my responsibility as a social scientist to dispel stereotypes concerning Muslims and present an objective picture of reality. Since I was a Canadian-German male in my late 20s, my interviewees occasionally commented that they had children my age, and depending on the country I was assumed to be French or German until asked. Many of the religious actors were more interested in my religious beliefs than nationality and assumed that I was Christian. In other interviews, I had to take care to demonstrate some prior knowledge of Muslim beliefs or run the risk of receiving a lengthy introductory lecture on the five pillars of Islam.
During my visits to religious institutions and mosque associations I was also able to participate in a number of events, ranging from religious services in local mosques to official dinners organized by the Diyanet in Turkey . These events have constituted privileged moments during which I was able to speak with a variety of actors in more informal settings and observe the everyday reality of what “providing religious services” to diaspora populations concretely means. Though not the central focus of this book, these informal interactions have exerted a subtle yet undeniable influence over the perspective I develop in the following pages.
4 Outline of Chapters
Chapter 2 provides an overview of the religious field in Turkey and its evolution since the founding of the Turkish republic in 1923. Unlike most studies on Islam and politics in modern Turkey, this chapter focuses on the role of the Diyanet and its relationship to unofficial Islamic currents in the Turkish religious field. I introduce and describe the historically complex relationships between state and non-state actors within the Turkish religious field at home and advance the argument that the categories of “official Islam” and “unofficial Islam” are and have always been contingent on the changing political interests of state actors. At the same time, I provide a detailed picture of the Diyanet as an administrative institution and explain how the Turkish state governs Islam at home before beginning my analysis of how it governs Islam abroad.
Chapter 3 takes up the question of the public management of Islam in the context of Morocco . I argue that modern religious governance in Morocco has developed from the institutionalization of traditional Islamic structures during the French protectorate and that these structures have been closely controlled by the king and the Moroccan state ever since. The chapter similarly focuses on state religious institutions, following the evolution of the Habous ministry and other state bodies that have been given the mission of governing the religious field. Once again, I demonstrate the ambiguous nature of official Islam, while emphasizing the effectiveness of the state’s strategy of co-opting potential challengers to the king’s political and religious authority.
After these first chapters have described and analyzed the mechanisms of religious governance at home, Chapter 4 charts the extension of Turkish and Moroccan religious governance to include Islamic affairs in both France and Germany. I show how the historical development of these home state religious activities abroad followed the waves of labour migrants that left for Western Europe and how Turkish and Moroccan diaspora policies were influenced by the interests of receiving states and the tense political climate at home. In particular, I detail how home state religious activities abroad arose as a reaction to the expansion of non-state religious actors to the countries of the diaspora, which collapsed the distinction between internal and foreign politics by anchoring the perception of the religious field abroad as part of a single transnational religious field. The chapter finally argues that the specific way by which Turkey and Morocco have institutionalized religious governance abroad has had a structural effect on how Islam has developed in the French and German Muslim fields.
In Chapter 5, I develop a conceptual model that explains the different modes of religious governance employed by receiving states and home states through the lens of public policy studies. By considering religious governance as a policy instrument , I contend that France and Germany are only capable of partially governing the Muslim fields that exist within their borders. I employ this conceptual model in the analysis of receiving state initiatives at the national level in the form of the French Council for the Muslim Faith (CFCM) and the German Islam Conference and thereafter consider examples at other levels of governance. In doing so, I argue that there are both structural and political reasons that favour the expansion of home state religious governance over the Muslim fields in both countries and introduce the concept of cultural capital in explaining local tensions in the field.
The focus of Chapter 6 is exclusively on one instrument of religious public policy: the exporting of imams abroad. I explore the diplomatic and administrative processes related to the sending of Moroccan and Turkish imams to foreign countries while explaining the similarities and differences in both states’ approaches in order to highlight the importance of specific policy instruments in determining their strategies overseas. A major contribution of this chapter is providing a clear picture of the stages and actors that regulate this activity, which simultaneously serves as evidence for my argument that the rationalization of religious affairs as part of the state administration facilitates its transformation into a standardized object of bilateral diplomatic cooperation.
Chapter 7 returns to the potential for tension between home states and receiving states in cases where national interests diverge. First, I contend that the securitization of Islam in Western Europe is instrumentalized by home states to delegitimize non-state religious actors while analyzing recent interstate agreements on imams sent by Turkey and Morocco to France. Second, I examine home state initiatives to establish a new set of religious authorities abroad and argue that, despite signs to the contrary, partial governance continues to hamper France and Germany’s attempts to govern the Muslim fields in their territory. Finally, the chapter shows how home state political events and cultural capital both continue to exert a direct influence over religious fields abroad, underscoring the structural consequences of nationally bounded transnational Muslim fields for the development of Islam in France and Germany . Finally, Chapter 8 concludes by presenting a summary of the main findings of this book.
Notes
- 1.
Given my focus on Islam in this book, I will use “religious field” and “Muslim field” as synonyms.
- 2.
The four main Sunni schools are the Ḥanafī, Shāfiʿī, Mālikī, and Ḥanbalī. As mentioned, the Mālikī maḍhab is the dominant school in North Africa while the Ḥanafī maḍhab is the main school in Turkey.