Following World War II, Western Europe experienced rapid economic growth, which has since achieved legendary status as the Trente Glorieuses in France and the Wirtschaftswunder in Germany. As this growth continued, many Western European countries faced significant labour shortages, especially in the industrial sector, and turned to importing workers from abroad.
While countries such as France, the Netherlands, and the UK had already seen migration from their colonies at the beginning of the twentieth century, following the war migration occurred within the framework of official labour recruitment agreements, as in the case of Morocco and France in 1963. The scope of post-war labour migration extended far beyond colonial ties: Morocco signed a similar agreement the same year with Germany, followed by Belgium in 1965 and the Netherlands in 1969. For Turkey, which had never been colonized by any European power, the first such agreement was signed with Germany in 1961. Germany already had experience in this domain, as it had been receiving Gastarbeiter (“guest workers”) since 1955, thanks to agreements concluded with Italy, Spain, and Greece. Turkey’s agreement with Germany was followed by similar agreements with Austria, Belgium, and the Netherlands in 1964, France in 1965, and Switzerland in 1967.
However, the global economic downturn caused by the oil crisis of 1973 pushed Western European states to unilaterally impose visa restrictions and bring a stop to their foreign labour recruitment programmes in 1974. After this point, migration to Western Europe from countries such as Turkey and Morocco continued as illegal immigration, or within the framework of family reunification programmes. This latter development eventually led to the permanent settlement of labour migrants and their families in Western European countries.
Once signed, the interstate recruitment programmes met with a resounding success. By 1971, Turks had become the largest group of foreign nationals in Germany, which has continued to be the case to this day. There are at least 3 million people of Turkish descent in Germany today, of whom 1.5 million are Turkish citizens (Bundesamt für Migration und Flüchtlinge 2016; Statistisches Bundesamt 2016). The vast majority of these German-Turks live in the Länder of former West Germany, such as the state of North Rhine-Westphalia , while certain cities such as Berlin and Cologne are known for their large Turkish communities.
In the case of France, it was not until the 1970s that the number of Turks began to rise significantly. France has the third largest community of Turks living abroad, after Germany and the Netherlands. Today, there are around 248,000 Turkish foreigners in the country (INSEE 2016), which rises to upwards of 650,000 when dual citizens are included (Féret, Goulet, and Reichardt 2016). Most Franco-Turks are to be found in and around big cities such as Paris , Lyon, and Strasbourg . Across Western Europe, and especially in Germany and France, a sizeable part of the Turkish diaspora is of Kurdish origin.
Moroccan migration to France before the 1960s had been limited to education for élites and small-scale labour migration, a situation that changed greatly after the signing of the 1963 labour agreement. However, Moroccans in France (along with Tunisians) have long been subsumed within the general category of “Maghrébins” (North Africans), which is dominated in the French imaginary by the numerically superior Algerians. Though there are still less Moroccans than Algerians in France, the former have grown to constitute the second largest group of foreigners in France: Moroccans and their descendants number 1.3 million in 2016, of whom 693,000 are foreigners, while French statistics show that Moroccan citizens are present in all major French cities, and in regions such as the North, Alsace -Lorraine, and along the Mediterranean coast (INSEE 2016).
In Germany, the Moroccan population was and remains relatively quite small when compared with other migrant groups. There are over 170,000 Moroccans in Germany today, of which over 75,000 are foreigners (Statistisches Bundesamt 2016). Nevertheless, up until the migrant crisis of 2015, Moroccans represented the largest group from an Arab country and the fourth largest nationality amongst Muslims in Germany , after Turks, Bosnians, and Iranians (Bundesamt für Migration und Flüchtlinge 2016). 1 One distinctive feature of the Moroccan community in Germany, and similar to the cases of Moroccans in Belgium and the Netherlands, is that the vast majority of early immigrants were Amazigh from the northeastern Rif region who had grown up under the Spanish protectorate. As a result, few spoke French (or even Arabic at times) or had any connections to France . Moroccans in Germany generally live in the states of North Rhine-Westphalia and Hessen , followed by Bavaria and Baden-Württemberg.
Labour migration from both Turkey and Morocco was similar, in that neither workers, home state , nor receiving state authorities believed that it would become a permanent phenomenon. In both cases, these international forms of migration were in fact extensions of internal migration processes due to precarious economic conditions and substantial demographic growth, which had led to a rural exodus and rapid urbanization. The workers who arrived in France and Germany from both countries were for the most part unskilled labourers and specialized workers who came from the poorer regions of each country. These large waves of migration have been at the heart of the creation of new diasporas, a term which itself has changed significantly in meaning over the last decades.
Having long referred to a shared traumatic experience and forced migration, such as in the Jewish or Armenian cases, today the use of the term “ethno-national diasporas” has become much more widespread. As Gamlen highlights, the “current consensus” on this term seems to be: “dispersion to two or more locations; ongoing orientation towards a ‘homeland’; and group boundary maintenance over time” (2008, 3–4). Nevertheless, the use of the term diaspora by states is by no means innocuous. Instead of being a descriptive term, its use has political implications that reflect the interests of states to imagine the totality of their citizens living abroad as if belonging to one community (Dufoix et al. 2010).
The decision to conceive of the “community abroad” in this fashion creates the appearance of shared group identity and a degree of organizational unity, both for those who are ostensibly within the group and those outside it. Not surprisingly, the political tension concerning this question often revolves around the definitions used in order to include or exclude individuals from membership. In keeping with Benedict Anderson’s characterization of nationalism as an “imagined community” (1991), the debate in this context is over who is doing the imagining and for what purpose.
The postmodern novelty is that the discursive and administrative creation of diasporas has accompanied new transnational possibilities. Globalization and its technological advances in transport and communications have made possible different forms of transnationalized belonging, which reinforce and preserve nationalism outside of the nation-state’s borders. At the same time, speaking in terms of diaspora enables state institutions to formulate policies through the creation of an administrative category. For both Turkey and Morocco , the diaspora in question has been driven by the globalization of the world economy and not solely by historical frameworks related to earlier international ties or colonial pasts. Despite their very different histories, Turkey and Morocco are similarly faced with an extremely diverse set of foreign countries in which their citizens and their descendants now live.
Diaspora policies require a unique crossing of foreign politics and internal policy. The preponderance of certain interests over others depends on the degree of diversity within diaspora populations as well as the diversity of the countries in which they reside. Though the diaspora might exist as a discursive object of state action, the policies directed towards it necessarily emanate from specific state ministries that otherwise may not engage in activities beyond the country’s borders. In particular, this caveat relates to the potential friction between foreign affairs ministries, interior ministries, and in the case of governing Islam abroad, religious affairs ministries in the formulation of diaspora engagement policies .
In Turkey and Morocco , the construction of the diaspora as a distinct object of state policy occurred with the beginning of the labour migration waves in the 1960s. Accordingly, one initial perspective adopted in both Turkey and Morocco considered this group of international labour migrants as a boon in terms of potential economic gain, specifically in the form of remittances and returning experienced workers. Numerous home state institutions were thus created in order to coordinate the transfer of funds, the organization of practical issues for workers (visas, official documents, etc.), and potentially facilitate their return to the national labour force after a period of time abroad.
On the other hand, the diaspora could represent a danger. It constituted an uncontrolled space in which dissent could be organized and through which all manner of “foreign ideologies” might be introduced into the homeland. This meant a wholly different set of institutions was needed, such as security and intelligence services, in coordination with the corresponding home state ministries, which were given the task of keeping an eye on the activities of the workers abroad. As shown in the previous two chapters, the 1970s and 1980s marked a period of heightened security concerns for the state in Turkey and Morocco , which moved to coopt, stifle, or outright eliminate groups that were considered threats. The general context of the Cold War, the Iranian Islamic Revolution, and the mujahidin movement during the Soviet War in Afghanistan, all played a role in convincing state leaders that civil society movements could not be left to operate outside the purview of state surveillance. Indeed, such movements, whether taking their roots in ethnic identitarian claims (Amazigh , Kurds ), Marxist ideology, or Islamic scripture—or a mix thereof—were rarely seen as genuinely emanating from some kind of civil society abroad. Rather, they were cast as foreign agents operating on behalf of malevolent external powers so that state authorities could invalidate their demands and strip them of legitimacy.
The Turkish and Moroccan state perception of Islam within the diaspora replicated this conflicting vision. As a result, evolutions in the state’s religious diaspora policy over time have reflected both changes in the perceived composition of the diaspora and larger developments in internal politics and foreign policy in both countries. The development of an official Islam employed by the state for political purposes in both countries had been used to anchor the legitimacy of those in power, especially in Morocco , and define a specific idea of national identity, especially in Turkey. Both states have attempted to control the religious field by setting rules and boundaries that enable them to define what constitutes legitimate religious authority and the place it should occupy in society. Consequently, I define religious diaspora policy as the set of policies adopted by home state institutions with the aim of determining what constitutes legitimate religious authority within the Muslim field of the diaspora.
The above definition draws attention to the competition that emerged as labour migrants found themselves in new Western European contexts where their religious practices were not determined in advance by prevailing social or institutional norms. The utter lack of Islamic religious infrastructure in the great majority of cases meant great difficulties for those who wished to continue practising their religion, but it also offered opportunities for groups who saw the potential for growth within a captive market. The extension of the Turkish and Moroccan Muslim Fields to other countries meant the “transplantation” abroad of many unofficial Islamic movements and currents (Dassetto and Bastenier 1984), a number of which became well organized within the diaspora years before home state -linked mosque associations grew in number. Indeed, though religion—in the form of official Islam—has become an important element in the diaspora policies of Turkey and Morocco , in most cases the development of these religious services abroad was in fact a reaction to the spread of unofficial Islamic currents.
The demographic shifts in Turkish and Moroccan migration had important implications for the development of religious fields abroad. Initially, the labour migrants were single men who only planned to stay temporarily and thus sought to attend to only their most basic religious needs. Concretely, this meant informal groups meeting for prayers in makeshift spaces that had not been intended for religious use. Whether in garages, hallways, or converted apartments, these prayer spaces were practical answers to the most immediate religious requirements of the local Muslim community and were frequently located in the same industrial or outlying urban zones in which Muslim migrants lived and worked. Often invisible from the outside, they served as meeting points for local immigrants as well as a prayer spaces and came to be derisively known as Hinterhofmoscheen (“backyard mosques”) in Germany and l’islam des caves (“basement cellar Islam”) in France .
The symbolic role of the mosque began to change once family reunification programmes altered the demographic profile of migrants in the late 1970s and early 1980s. The mosque now became a place to preserve morals and cultural values, especially with the need to raise children in a foreign environment and the uncertainty over whether there would be a return home one day. The symbolic and strategic value of these religious community spaces was not lost on movements with political and religious agendas, meaning that the mosque also became a site for confrontation between opposing factions and individuals vying for prominence in the local community.
Migrant workers initially seldom voiced demands concerning religion, such as for prayer spaces. However, especially in the case of France religion would come to be instrumentalized by receiving state officials and private actors for two main reasons. First, religious demands were amongst the least costly to address, as they did not require any changes in pay, benefits, or workers’ rights. Moreover, similar to back home, Islam was considered to be conservative and hostile to leftist and communist ideas (Jouanneau 2013, 46–48). Second, responding positively to religious demands had the triple advantage of pleasing home states , encouraging and facilitating return migration, as well as “favouring social peace by shielding migrants from”—once again—“political and union activities à la française” (Weil 1991, 96). This policy was exemplified by a memorandum sent by the State Secretary for Immigrant Workers Paul Dijoud to the French préfets in 1976, which outlined a number of measures aimed at supporting religious activities, and which were to be studied by French authorities “in liaison with the government of the countries from which Muslim immigrants originate” (Kepel 1991, 142–43).
Morocco and Turkey both began sending small groups of religious personnel abroad at the beginning of the 1970s. Nevertheless, religious issues were initially considered of marginal importance as economic and security interests generally guided both states’ promotion of international labour migration. This perspective would change over time as conflicts between contestatory Islamic currents and home state authorities were exported into diaspora communities and state officials came to recognize the effectiveness of Islam as a means to influence communities abroad. Indeed, Turkish and Moroccan religious diaspora policy underwent a lengthy learning curve before consolidating the position both home states occupy in the French and German Muslim fields today.
1 Turkish Labour Migration and the Turkish Muslim Field Abroad
Though the Turkish state was directly involved in administering Islamic religious affairs in Turkey, the issue of the Islamic religious needs of its citizens abroad was by and large overlooked when guest worker programmes began in the 1960s. Though the Turkish labour ministry’s international office was founded in 1967 (de Tapia 2002), it would not be until over a decade later that the Diyanet spearheaded the establishment of its network of foreign branches in Western Europe.
Given this context, the religious vacuum that had existed initially amongst the Turkish worker communities did not last long. Religious communities of unofficial Islam from Turkey quickly filled the void, given that the creation of branches abroad was of great strategic interest for them. On the one hand, contestatory Islamic movements, which faced continuous scrutiny and intermittent crackdowns from Turkish state authorities, found that they could operate with greater freedom in Western European countries than at home. On the other hand, the Turkish migratory field also represented a potential source of new funds and recruits with no competition from the Diyanet in sight. Such a combination of push and pull factors made this international expansion an obvious strategic move for many groups opposed to the Turkish state. This characterization applies not only to oppositional Islamic movements, but also to oppositional movements in general: from Marxist-Leninists to Kurdish separatists, and from Alevis to right-wing nationalists, the Turkish population abroad “reconstituted all the political, religious, and ethnic cleavages of the homeland” (Manço 1997, 14).
An important development in Turkey that hastened this process was the military intervention of 1971. After the military outlawed the recently founded National Order Party (Milli Nizam Partisi, MNP), its leader, Necmettin Erbakan , fled briefly to Switzerland and Germany , marking the beginning of the implantation of Milli Görüş amongst the Turkish communities in Western Europe. The Süleymancılar had already started to organize themselves in Germany by the end of the 1960s and expanded their network of associations throughout the early 1970s. Nevertheless, the most decisive developments would occur in the middle of the 1970s, when Western European states decided to end their temporary workers programmes. As a result, family reunification programmes soon became the main motor of immigration and the percentage of women steadily rose until reaching near parity today.
The demographic change that occurred during the 1970s resulted in a fundamental change for the Turkish Muslim field in Western Europe. The religious demands of Turkish migrants underwent a major evolution: Islam came to be seen as an integral element in transmitting Turkish identity, culture, morals, and values, all of which had now become exceedingly important given that a new generation of Turkish children was going to grow up outside of their homeland. The new necessity for Qur’an courses, summer schools, prayer spaces, and cultural centres—spaces where not just Islam, but cultural practices and the Turkish language would be perpetuated—resulted in an increasingly active network of associations attempting to respond to the demand during the second half of the 1970s.
By the end of the decade, a wide variety of other groups had also become more organized, from the ultra-nationalist Turkish Federation (ADÜTDF), close to the far-right Turkish Nationalist Movement Party (MHP ) and founded in 1978, to the mystical and Sufi-inspired Nurcu movement, which founded an association in Cologne in 1979 (Lemmen 2000). A common thread amongst these associations was that they continued to share a “homeland perspective” (Mügge 2012), meaning that they were primarily motivated by events in Turkey and reproduced conflicts from home in their new contexts. Despite the progressive move towards property acquisition and settlement abroad, the mirage of a potential return in the future continued to influence the decisions of migrants and policymakers alike. The development of the Diyanet’s activities abroad, especially following the 1980 coup d’état , shows how the conflicts imported from the homeland initially structured the Turkish Muslim field abroad, though on a new playing field with different rules and opportunities.
1.1 The Development of the Diyanet’s Foreign Activities
The Diyanet’s overseas religious services began in 1971 in the form of temporary imams sent abroad for the month of Ramadan, while the Diyanet’s network of organizations abroad (yurtdışı teşkilatları) began in earnest in 1978 (Yılmaz 1999). During this early stage, it was not the Diyanet that sent the religious officials abroad, but rather the Ministry of Labour, which appointed them as “social assistants” after being proposed by the Diyanet. According to a former Diyanet president, the labour ministry had only eight to ten of these religious officials for all of Western Europe during the 1970s (Altıkulaç 2011, 378).
The father of one of my interviewees served as one of these religious officials sent by the Ministry of Labour and worked as an imam in Germany from 1974 to 1983. Given he had been appointed by the labour ministry, my interviewee’s father’s place of work was not in a mosque, but rather in the office of the Turkish labour attaché in Cologne . At the same time, the nature of his work meant that he travelled a great deal and visited Turkish communities through the state of North Rhine-Westphalia . For Turkish communities abroad, then as now, these official imams are amongst the first people to contact when something happens, even before the consulate or the embassy, because they are seen as “state employees , but who can serve as prayer leaders, have had theological training, and thus can bring the two together. That’s why the institution is very important” (Interview, Son of Diyanet Official, 14 November 2011, Ankara). For many Turkish migrants, the imams’ ties to both the Turkish state and their religious competence complement each other and reinforce their position as legitimate figures of authority.
As a former head of foreign affairs for the Diyanet writes, “at the beginning, the number of religious staff members demanded and employed for religious services was only symbolic and their stay at work temporary” (Dere 2008, 292). Though the Diyanet began to pay more attention to the Turkish communities in Western Europe by the end of the decade, until the beginning of the 1980s the sending of religious personnel abroad was primarily undertaken on a case-by-case basis and was the result of requests by individual mosque associations. This process is to be contrasted with the larger, more coordinated effort that would come in the years to follow.
The case of the Sultan Ahmet mosque in Zaandam, the Netherlands , reflects the pre-1980 state of affairs. The first Diyanet official to arrive at the mosque was a müftü from the Turkish province of Burdur, who came to provide services for the month of Ramadan in 1978. Thereafter, during a visit by then Diyanet President Tayyar Altıkulaç, the Sultan Ahmet mosque association along with others requested that imams be sent to them from Turkey. As a result, in 1979, their “first official” imam arrived for a period of four years. Thereafter, the Sultan Ahmet mosque continued to receive a new imam every four years from the Diyanet, while a local volunteer imam would fill in whenever the former was unavailable or being replaced (Sultan Ahmet Camii HDV, n.d.).
The first mention of a “Directorate of Foreign Services” within the Diyanet came as the result of a cabinet decision in 1971 (Gözaydın 2009). This administrative department later appears in the official government journal (Resmi Gazete) as the “Directorate of Foreign Relations” in 1976, and two years later, the centre-left Prime Minister Bülent Ecevit approved the appointment of ten “foreign religious services counsellors” to the Diyanet’s personnel. Nevertheless, the official framework for long-term imams abroad was not fully established until the mid-1980s, especially with regard to the payment of the imams’ salaries. Mosque associations could, however, hire imams on their own, such as retired imams of the Diyanet, or those who had finished their service in Germany. This is precisely what occurred in the case of my interviewee, whose father resigned from his position as state employee and decided to stay in Germany with his family in order to avoid returning to the chaotic and dangerous situation prevailing in Turkey at the end of the 1970s.
Conversely, the exportation of those very same conflicts from Turkey to the diaspora led Turkish authorities to increasingly view the communities abroad as a potential source of danger. In 1978, newly appointed Diyanet President Tayyar Altıkulaç travelled to Western Europe during the month of Ramadan and visited the worship places of Turkish workers living abroad. In his extensive memoirs, Altıkulaç (2011, 364) asserts that such places had become “centres of discord and dispute” due to the profusion of unqualified individuals who pursued political activities in opposition to the Turkish state and the Diyanet under the pretense of providing religious services. The “ruthless criticism of the Diyanet” came from the Süleymancılar and from the members of the Milli Görüş movement, both of whom Altıkulaç saw as a “source of fitne” (strife or sedition).
Though Altıkulaç met with Milli Görüş representatives during his trip, relations increasingly deteriorated by the end of the 1970s as Milli Görüş grew in size and number, aided in no small part by financial support from Saudi Arabia . Milli Görüş’s increasing strength abroad led to a heightened politicization of the Turkish Islamic field, which has been described to me by members of Turkish Islamic communities in numerous countries. One of the main characteristics was a particularly rigid separation between groups, which divided themselves into different camps (Interview, Pape Mosque President, 14 April 2014, Toronto). The early Diyanet official’s son explained to me that “before they were just mosques. If one mosque […] leaned more towards MHP , or leaned more towards Erbakan , that wasn’t a real problem, it was no grounds for a cleavage. But the stronger Milli Görüş became, [the more] the Turkish Islamic community in Germany gradually split between those that went over to Milli Görüş, and those that didn’t.” Even more problematically, the mosques that did not join Milli Görüş were criticized for having “imams sent from the Turkish state, who preached the Kemalist system to them. They called them Kemalist imams (Atatürkçü imamları)” (Interview, Son of Diyanet official). The tensions progressed to the point that some mosques in Germany approached local authorities to file restraining orders to bar certain individuals from entering.
The conflicts in the Turkish Muslim field grew even more aggressive when Cemaleddin Kaplan, a Milli Görüş imam and former Diyanet müftü of Adana, broke off to found his own separate group in 1983. The split Kaplan provoked within Milli Görüş had far-reaching consequences for the latter, which saw it as an early traumatism (Schiffauer 2010). Nicknamed the “black voice” (kara ses) in Turkish media due to his radical positions, Kaplan was inspired by the Iranian Revolution and called for the restoration of the Caliphate in Turkey. He even proclaimed himself Caliph in 1994—in Cologne .
Unsurprisingly, when Altıkulaç returned from his trip, the overall assessment was grim: he writes in his memoirs “we had to try and put out the fire raging in Europe” and met with Prime Minister Ecevit immediately after his return. Following the meeting, Ecevit instructed the foreign affairs ministry’s social affairs department to coordinate activities with the Diyanet and new religious counsellor positions were created in Brussels, Bonn, the Haag, and Sydney. They joined the handful of religious officials under the authority of the Ministry of Labour and a small number of religious instructors who had been sent to Belgium by the education ministry’s religious education department to teach Islam in schools. Under Altıkulaç, the Diyanet became responsible for the sending of these religious instructors, who also worked as imams in local mosques. Given that they were paid directly by the Belgian municipalities to which they were sent, this arrangement proved to be quite convenient for the Diyanet (Altıkulaç 2011, 383–84).
Funding considerations were particularly complicated given that the Diyanet initially had no real budget with which to pay its personnel in foreign countries. In order to deal with the financial costs, by the end of 1979, the Diyanet began cooperating with individual associations, sending imams if the association agreed to pay a salary equivalent to 1000 German marks a month. Around the same time, seemingly by chance a former Diyanet president, Tevfik Gerçeker, informed Altıkulaç that the foreign affairs ministry had a special fund that could be used to promote religious activities abroad. According to Gerçeker, it had been Atatürk himself who had included religious personnel within the ministry’s “Funds for the Protection of Turkish Cultural Heritage” (Türk Kültür Varlığını Koruma Giderleri) (Uslu in Altıkulaç 2011, 382–83).
The Diyanet promptly contacted the foreign affairs ministry following this discovery, but needed no time to perceive the reticence of the latter to help promote religious activities abroad. One Diyanet official stated that when he confronted his counterpart about the existence of these funds, the career diplomat “could not hide his discomfort” and exclaimed, “we use that provision to send artists abroad and organize cultural events. Now we’re going to send imams?” (Bursa Büyükşehir Belediyesi 2012). The friction between officials of the foreign affairs ministry and the Diyanet is a telling sign of the different organizational cultures that existed and continue to exist in both state bodies. It also serves to nuance blanket statements concerning Turkish state action abroad and shows that the Diyanet and its members were at the origin of Turkey’s religious activities in Western Europe, even before the military coup of 1980, and despite resistance from other sectors of the state.
A final example that demonstrates this point is what came to be known as the “Rabita affair” at the end of the 1980s (Mumcu 1993). In early 1980, Altıkulaç met twice with the secretary-general of the Saudi Arabian Muslim World League (Rābiṭa al-ʿālam al-islāmī, hereafter League) and came to the agreement that the League would pay 1000 US dollars a month per imam sent abroad and thereby contribute financially to the Diyanet’s foreign activities. These magnanimous petrodollars were still a relatively recent phenomenon at the time. Saudi Arabia , a conservative Islamic monarchy, had been engaged since the 1960s in an ideological conflict with Egypt and Syria, which were proponents of pan-Arab nationalism . Religion was a central element in this rivalry: the League had been founded in 1962 in order to promote Saudi Wahhabism , while Egypt’s Nasser made ample use of fatwas from the famous Islamic university Al-Azhar to support his “regime’s increasingly socialist policies” (Moustafa 2000, 7). Defeat against Israel in 1967 had prompted the decline of Arab nationalism , while the 1973 oil crisis had greatly enriched Saudi Arabia . Thanks to this new affluence in the 1970s, Saudi Arabia’s ability to diffuse Wahhabism at the international level was greatly increased, as already seen in the case of Morocco in Chapter 3, as well as in Western Europe. At the same time, the success of the Iranian Revolution in 1979 had greatly heightened the standing of Shiism across the Muslim world, giving the League yet another reason to shore up partnerships with other Sunni actors in order to counter its regional rival.
Altıkulaç (2011) claims that the selection and surveillance of these imams remained entirely in the hands of the Diyanet and the League merely provided the financial support for four out of the 28 imams sent by the Turkish state to Western European countries in 1980. Regardless, the point here is that under Altıkulaç’s presidency the Diyanet pursued a variety of foreign initiatives in the religious field and succeeded in securing sources of financing and partnerships with actors as varied as Belgian municipalities, Turkish workers’ associations, and the Saudi Muslim World League . While these developments all necessitated the approval of the Turkish state’s upper authorities, they were nevertheless the result of independent actions that had been planned and executed by the Diyanet itself.
The role of Turkish central state authorities in the religious activities of its citizens abroad underwent a major evolution as a result of the military coup of 1980. It was during this time that the Diyanet became part of the regime’s plan to promote the “Turkish-Islamic Synthesis ” and was given the constitutional duty to promote “national solidarity and integrity.” Nevertheless, despite the Diyanet’s engagement abroad, it had only managed to send 26 imams to Western European countries in 1979, which remained far below the Süleymancılar (150 imams), the Milli Görüş movement (150 imams), and the nationalist MHP (100 imams) (Mumcu 1993, 132). For the leaders of Turkey’s new military government, it seemed that the enemies they were targeting inside Turkey were running rampant within the diaspora abroad where, far outside the state’s direct control, they could find refuge, recruits, and financial support.
Whereas prior governments had focused on the economic benefits of labour migration, the leaders of the military regime saw potential enemies and reoriented the priorities of the state towards questions of national security. This shift in diaspora policy was coupled with a certain paternalism characteristic of Turkish state policy in general, leading the state to adopt a perspective at once suspicious and protective of its own population abroad. Moreover, since Turks abroad were perceived as being more exposed to potential dangers, these military leaders believed that “the supervision of Turks in Europe ought to be even more efficient than that of Turks in Turkey” (Akgönül 2005, 125–26).
The state shall take the necessary measures in order to ensure family unity, children’s education, cultural needs, and social security of Turkish citizens working in foreign countries, as well as to protect their ties with the motherland (anavatan) and to help in their return home. (Türkiye Cumhuriyeti 1982)
The domains of intervention evoked in this article are potentially quite vast and include responsibilities that necessarily require the cooperation of the receiving state authorities. Religion figures indirectly in this article, given that it is tacitly filed under “cultural needs,” which was also more easily accepted by French and German authorities.
A “secret” internal report on religion, put together by the top ministers of the military regime in 1981 and made public by Nokta magazine in 1989, highlights the “confused situation” abroad and called for numerous actions to be taken. One of the first was to prevent unauthorized individuals from going abroad to give religious classes, along with the need for the Diyanet to take greater control by sending temporary religious personnel for religious holidays and Ramadan “from Western Europe to Australia” to serve the Turkish workers’ communities (Arslan et al. 1989, 16). The report states that religious educational activities overseas ought to be given more attention and paid for by the foreign ministry’s “Funds for the Preservation of Turkish Cultural Heritage” and recommends that the state become involved in providing Qur’an courses to the children of its citizens abroad, thereby taking on the Süleymancılar’s domain of predilection. State representatives are called upon to keep track of Turkish citizens engaged in “harmful activities” (zararlı faaliyet) abroad and either make them return to Turkey or strip them of their citizenship . The journalists who made the report public summarized that its principal goal was to “protect secularism and bring religion once again under the control of the state” (Arslan et al. 1989, 18).
After having realized the extent to which the Turkish Muslim field abroad had been neglected by the state, the military regime moved to address the problem. In the first year following the coup, the number of religious personnel abroad skyrocketed from a mere 20 in 1980 to 115 in 1981, and the numbers would continue to rise significantly in the years to follow: 179 in 1982; 270 in 1983; 430 in 1986; and 797 in 1990 (Çakır and Bozan 2005, 92). The near-constant rise in Diyanet personnel abroad is remarkable when compared with the informal and sporadic sending of imams during the preceding decade. Once it had been made a political priority by the military government, this rapid growth was logistically made possible thanks to a new strategy based on creating federative structures in each country with a significant Turkish population. While the local demand for religious personnel was an ongoing reality, the extensive organizational structures that emerged as a means of coordinating these religious services were not the result of grass-roots mobilization. Rather, the individuals tasked with creating these new federative structures on the ground were the Diyanet’s religious counsellors and attachés abroad, who would now take on a second role as the head of locally registered associations.
1.2 The DITIBs and Diyanet Foundations: Consolidating a Transnational Network
In order to ensure the successful management of these religious services, the Diyanet had from the beginning envisioned the creation of branches in each country where a large enough number of Turkish citizens resided. The original plan was to replicate the model of the Turkey Diyanet Foundation (TDV), which had been created in 1975 and thereafter became an exceedingly important source of institutional and financial support for the Diyanet (Altıkulaç 2011). In other words, these branches were originally envisioned to function as local foundations. A few months after the military coup in 1980, Altıkulaç travelled to Germany and Belgium with the goal of establishing these Diyanet foundations abroad. Upon arrival, he met with representatives of the West Berlin cultural affairs department who discussed with him the possibility of creating a Diyanet-led organization, but as a registered association (eingetragener Verein) instead of a foundation (Stiftung). However, there were two important problems to surmount. The first concerned the Turkish foreign affairs ministry , while the second came from the local authorities in Germany.
In 1980, neither the Diyanet nor the TDV had any legal basis that would have permitted them to expand their organization to foreign countries; any such evolution necessarily had to pass through the foreign affairs ministry . Unfortunately for the Diyanet, the diplomats were generally not well disposed towards promoting religious activities abroad and Altıkulaç complains frequently about the reticence of the ministry and its members to cooperate (2011, 395–97). Progress was made in 1981 when the Diyanet and the foreign affairs ministry signed a memorandum concerning their joint cooperation with the goal of founding “Turkish Diyanet Foundations in the Western European countries in which workers are located.” The language shows the reactive nature of the Turkish state’s actions: these initiatives were intended to “fill the void,” “prevent exploitation and factionalism,” and “eliminate the disorder that has emerged” in the religious field (Altıkulaç 2011, 1331).
The memorandum also stipulates that the Diyanet foundations are to operate under the authority of the Turkish ambassador, pointing to the continuous power struggle between the Diyanet and the foreign affairs ministry . The clash between home state institutions constitutes one of the major differences in the development of Turkish religious governance abroad when compared with the case of Morocco . A similar tension manifested itself with regard to the statutes of these foundations, a model for which had been drawn up by Altıkulaç and the three European religious counsellors. Despite having been approved by the Turkish government, the foreign affairs ministry attempted to modify the model and secure greater control over the yet-to-be-created foundations, for instance proposing that the supervisory board be composed of the Turkish ambassador, the consul-general, and even the local mayor.
I wanted to tell them “Because of your work you’re at a different cocktail party every day, raising your glass. Some of you don’t even know the direction for Mecca. The mosque community doesn’t want to see someone at the head of a religious organization who [regularly] has alcoholic drinks in his hand and doesn’t even come pray during holidays.” (2011, 396)
Ultimately, the Diyanet managed to resist many of these incursions. Nevertheless, these examples illustrate well the interministerial conflict that took place behind the scenes for years, with important implications for the development of Turkish religious diaspora policies in the decades thereafter.
The first of the Diyanet’s overseas branches was founded in Berlin in 1982, taking the name Diyanet İşleri Türk İslam Birliği (Turkish-Islamic Union for Religious Affairs, DITIB) and bringing together 15 different local mosque associations (Perşembe 1996). A religious attaché (din ataşesi) had been sent to Berlin one year earlier and after much discussion the top Diyanet authorities decided to found the organization as an association as had been originally suggested by the local German authorities (Altıkulaç 2011). The same year, the Belgian and Dutch Diyanet Foundations were also created.
A second DITIB association was founded in Cologne in 1984 and became the central federative organization thereafter. The move towards a more centralized associative structure in Germany was part of a larger trend that aimed at creating an overarching transnational network in Western Europe and linking it back to the Diyanet in Turkey . For instance, the original statutes of DITIB-Cologne stipulate that the advisory council is to be composed solely of the Diyanet’s religious personnel abroad and presided over by the president of the Diyanet . Accordingly, when DITIB-Cologne was originally founded, the council consisted of the president of the Diyanet, the Turkish consul-general in Cologne , the religious counsellor for Belgium, the religious counsellor for the Netherlands , the vice-president of the Diyanet, and another member of the Diyanet’s religious personnel in the Netherlands (DITIB, n.d., 10, 14).
Local Turkish mosque members were of course involved from the very beginning: the original list of founding members of DITIB-Cologne indicates profession, and aside from the three “officials” (Beamter), including the religious affairs counsellor, the remaining 15 members were mostly local workers. Diyanet officials typically over-exaggerate this involvement and maintain that DITIB and similar associations are independent grass-roots organizations that were created by members of the local Turkish community. These assertions belie the fact that the drive to federate Turkish mosque associations in Western Europe as part of a formalized transnational network came directly from the Diyanet and the Turkish state.
At the same time, the expansion of Diyanet’s activities abroad led to a remarkable development: the management of migrants’ religious affairs gradually became a routine issue in bilateral talks between Turkish and foreign state representatives, converting religious governance into a chip in diplomatic negotiations. The German interior ministry had already issued a memorandum in 1981 setting out the procedure for a Turkish imam to enter the country (Amiraux 2001), and Altıkulaç’s memoirs have shown how German authorities in West Berlin were to be thanked for the Diyanet’s decision to create its first branch abroad as a locally registered association. Conversely, the Diyanet’s desire to create a foundation in Cologne provoked a less accommodating reaction from the authorities of the Land of North Rhine-Westphalia , who declared in 1983 that permission for the creation of a Turkish foundation would only be given on the condition that Germans would be given the same right in Turkey.
The issue was brought up during the visit of German Interior Minister Friedrich Zimmermann to Turkey in 1983, when the German Press Agency reported that he had reached an agreement whereby the German government would support “the Turkish wish for a foundation (Stiftung), which will establish and maintain mosques and Qur’an schools in the Federal Republic of Germany” in exchange for the creation of foundations for the Catholic and Protestant German churches in Turkey (cited in Binswanger and Sipahioğlu 1988, 76). However, due to legal complications this reciprocal agreement was not possible on the Turkish side, consequently forcing Diyanet officials in Germany to abandon their goal as well.
The internationalization of the Diyanet became official in October of 1984, when its Department of Foreign Affairs was created by a cabinet decision. From this point forward, the official governmental journal has included the Diyanet’s “foreign branch” (yurtdışı teşkilatı) in its breakdown of state personnel, while the foreign affairs department has remained a stable and ever-growing part of the Diyanet to present day. The major issue of funding for the imams sent abroad was resolved in 1985, when the foreign affairs ministry became responsible for paying the salaries of religious personnel in foreign countries and the finance ministry allocated resources for an initial contingent of 320 imams (Baş et al. 2003). Across Western Europe, the number of new Diyanet organizations grew rapidly after this point: the Swedish Diyanet Foundation was founded in 1984; the Danish Turkish Diyanet Foundation in 1985; DITIB -France in 1986; and the Turkish Diyanet Foundation in Switzerland in 1987. Unsurprisingly, the nomination of a religious counsellor to the country usually preceded the creation of these organizations. In the years thereafter, Diyanet-linked organizations were founded in Austria, England, Italy, Norway, and Finland in Europe, and Japan, Australia, Canada, and the USA.
By the end of the 1980s, a well-organized and interconnected network of Diyanet-linked Islamic associations had been founded across Western Europe. In barely one decade, the Turkish state had managed to establish the infrastructure necessary to catch up on almost two decades of neglect and position itself as one of the most important actors in the developing Muslim religious fields of Western Europe. The DITIB organizations were greatly aided by the Western European state perception that they represented an “apolitical” and “moderate” Islam thanks to their ties to the Turkish state. Similarly, these ties and the DITIB’s use of home state -promoted religious and cultural capital constituted an advantage over rival Islamic groups in the eyes of many members of the Turkish diaspora. As one Milli Görüş leader admitted, DITIB was “the competitor bar none” given that it found an audience amongst all Turks, especially those who were “somewhat religious, but who didn’t have any political or other cultural concerns. DITIB came with a very simple concept: only the preservation of traditions, and that, well, ‘we-won’t-get-mixed-up-in-anything’ policy (wir-mischen-uns-nicht-ein-Politik)” (Mehmet Sabri Erbakan in Schiffauer 2010, 99).
The establishment of the Diyanet’s branches abroad shows how a mix of home state internal politics and foreign policy considerations influenced the institutional development of Turkish Islam in Western Europe from an early stage on. While Western European states were initially happy to “outsource” the question of religious governance, starting in the 1990s and gaining force in the 2000s, politicians and bureaucrats began to advocate for the “nationalization” of Islam (Laurence 2006). These new policies towards Islam not only challenged the perception that Muslims were foreigners but also called into question the desirability of foreign intervention in local Islamic affairs. Nevertheless, despite calls in both countries for an “integrated” Islam “free from foreign influences,” the DITIB and Diyanet Federation organizations have successfully established themselves as the main Turkish Islamic federation in national contexts across Western Europe, while cooperation between receiving state authorities with the Diyanet has only grown stronger with time.
2 Religious Diaspora Policies and Moroccan Workers Abroad
The Moroccan state had many reasons to pay close attention to its diaspora. Both in terms of economic importance as well as in terms of brute numbers, the weight of the Moroccan diaspora compared to the overall population of the country is relatively much greater than in the Turkish case. Already in 1979, approximately 2% of the population lived abroad (530,000 individuals) and contributed more to the economy through their remittances (3.2 billion dirhams) than the phosphate industry (2.1 billion dirhams) or tourism (1.65 billion dirhams) (Belguendouz in Adam 1980). Since then, the number of Moroccans living abroad has continued rising in a spectacular fashion; as of 2013, there are an estimated four million citizens in foreign countries—that is to say, well over 10% of the country’s population—who provide roughly 7% of the country’s total gross domestic product through their remittances (de Haas 2014).
However, the Moroccan state’s involvement in the religious affairs of its citizens abroad initially did not occur with the same structural formality or to the same degree when compared to Turkey. Despite certain antecedents, Morocco ’s direct involvement began later (during the mid-to-late 1980s) and has seen a greater role played by the foreign affairs ministry , while the Habous ministry has not been anywhere near as proactive as the Diyanet. The participation of other ministries, such as the Ministry of the Moroccan Community Residing Abroad (MCMRE ) and the Makhzen-linked Hassan II Foundation (Fondation Hassan II, FHII), also contributes to rendering the institutional landscape more opaque.
Moroccan migrants abroad are less easily divided into specific religious currents and political party affiliations than in the Turkish case. In general, oppositional religious movements amongst Moroccan migrants were less widespread, and leftist workers’ associations played a much greater role in structuring the associative landscape than for Turks. When it came to religious practice, many Moroccans joined up with other French or Arabic-speaking migrants to form Muslim associations, something that also occurred much less frequently amongst Turks due to cultural and linguistic differences. Nevertheless, national identity continued to play an important role. According to statistics cited by Daoud, the majority of Moroccans in Western European countries today continue to “live amongst themselves, just as they most often marry amongst themselves” (2011, 107–8). In the political or religious associations that adopted a home state -oriented perspective, the dividing line for many years was between supporters and opponents of the monarchy, a tension that has greatly decreased since the 1990s.
2.1 The Amicales and the Early Diaspora Policies
Following the signing of the first labour migration agreements with Germany and France in 1963, the Moroccan government followed an “excessively emigrationist policy” with the aim of sending the largest possible number of workers to Europe “so as to receive in return the maximum amount of [foreign] currency” (Belguendouz 2006, 3). As in the Turkish case, Moroccans abroad were treated simultaneously as valued sources of income as well as potential threats, given that groups opposed to the state could operate with much more ease within the diaspora abroad.
In France, the organization that symbolized this potential threat was the Association of Moroccans in France (Association des Marocains en France, AMF), founded by Mehdi Ben Barka and other left-wing Moroccan leaders in 1960. The AMF initially maintained close ties to left-wing parties in Morocco , but later became more independent and served as a rallying point for the exiled opponents of the Moroccan regime (Dumont 2007). However, the AMF’s success was limited to a “fraction of Moroccan workers, almost exclusively in and around Paris ,” and by 1973, a rival association close to the Moroccan state had been founded: the Federation of Moroccan Workers’ and Merchants’ Friendship Societies in France (Fédération des amicales de travailleurs et de commerçants marocains en France, hereafter amicales) (Belbahri 1989, 74). The Moroccan amicales (or widdadiyat in Arabic) took after the model established by the Algerian government in 1966 to watch over its citizens abroad, and the rivalry between the AMF and the amicales throughout the 1970s reproduced the political struggles going on at home. The murder of Ben Barka in Paris in 1965, apparently on the orders of the Moroccan interior minister, set the tone as to the risks incurred by those who openly opposed Hassan II’s regime, no matter where they might be.
In the context of this conflict, Islam was periodically seen by state authorities on both sides of the Mediterranean as a remedy to the danger posed by oppositional leftist movements; nevertheless, on the whole the religious affairs of Moroccans abroad did not constitute a priority. There is little information concerning the Moroccan state’s first religious activities abroad, and the first example that I have found dates from 1971, when a group of ulema was sent to “France, Belgium, the Netherlands , and [Germany] in order to assist Moroccan emigrants during the month of Ramadan” (Adam 1972, 412). Though my interviewees in different Moroccan state institutions could not tell me the precise year that these overseas activities began, they confirmed that the practice of sending imams, preachers, and ulema abroad has continued unabated since the first migrant worker communities left for Western Europe in the 1970s.
Sending religious personal abroad was supervised by the Habous ministry, which has “always had a division in charge of religious affairs outside of Morocco , in one form or another” (Interview, Habous Cabinet Member I, 30 May 2011, Rabat). After their arrival in France, the ulema and imams were looked over by the consulates and the amicales , which were in charge of organizing religious events and deciding which mosques they would visit. These activities were carried out with the full knowledge of French officials, in particular the Central Office for Religions (Bureau Central des Cultes, BCC) of the interior ministry, which kept tabs on the relations between the consulates, the amicales , and the mosque associations (Jouanneau 2013). The amicales were not predisposed for any particular reason to be involved in religious issues; indeed, it was but an extension of their main duty: keeping a watchful eye over Moroccan workers on behalf of Moroccan state authorities.
During the 1970s, in the rare moments when Moroccan authorities were attentive to the question of Islam in Western Europe, it was often with regard to developments at the Great Mosque of Paris (Grande Mosquée de Paris, GMP). The mosque was built during the first half of the 1920s in the heart of Paris and was presented by French authorities as a way of rendering homage to the thousands of Muslim colonial soldiers who had fought and died for France during World War I. The mosque’s history shows the paradoxes of how official laïcité coexisted with France’s colonial self-image as a “Muslim power” during the Fourth Republic , as well as France’s long history in governing Islamic affairs. The funding had come directly from the French state and the City of Paris, while the mosque itself was run by an organization founded in Algiers in 1917 (Kepel 1991).
At the same time, the Sultan of Morocco Moulay Youssef had donated a substantial sum for the construction of the mosque, which he inaugurated in 1926; moreover, it was his personal counsellor, Si Kaddour Benghabrit, who became the mosque’s first president (recteur). 2 Despite the fact that the GMP later became the bastion of the Algerian state, this initial connection has not been forgotten: during my field interviews, the majority of my Moroccan interlocutors made allusion at some point in our conversation to the Moroccan origins of the mosque, and over the decades, Morocco has made numerous attempts to gain greater control over it.
During the 1970s, many prayer spaces run by Moroccans came under the influence of the transnational Tabligh movement. Founded in 1926 in India by Muhammed Ilyas al-Kandhalwi, the speciality of this movement is in “reislamizing” Muslims who have lapsed in their religious practice through a form of communitarian proselytization. The Tabligh movement in France began in earnest in 1968 and had a very important influence on the French Muslim field. Many Muslims in France “rediscovered” their faith after coming into contact with the Tablighis and became engaged in Islamic associations, and for many it served as a stepping-stone towards other Islamic groups. This was especially the case for those who were frustrated by the Tabligh’s refusal to become involved in politics, or others who were disappointed by its lack of intellectual depth (Kepel 1991). As the years have gone by, the ranks of the Tabligh in France have counted an increasingly high number of Moroccans, which has led to cooperation with the main Moroccan associations and home state authorities on numerous occasions (Godard and Taussig 2007). Those who sought a more politicized or intellectual Islam gravitated around the Association of Islamic Students in France (Association des Étudiants Islamiques en France (Association of Islamic Students in France, AEIF), close to the Syrian branch of the Muslim Brotherhood , which had an important influence on a number of Moroccan Muslim leaders.
While the GMP, the Tabligh , and the AEIF were well established by the end of the 1970s, the practice of Islam in France remained a very local affair. Aside from the Great Mosque of Paris , there were no other real mosques in the country and very few Muslim groups were officially organized in the form of associations. Changes in both internal and international politics were to have a direct impact on this situation. In 1981, the French law on associations was modified and the requirement for associations founded by foreigners to be approved by the interior ministry was repealed. At the international level, the influx of petrodollars from Saudi Arabia , Libya, and Gulf states such as Kuwait was followed by the Iranian Revolution of 1979. The involvement of these states in the religious affairs of Muslims in Western Europe resulted in new possibilities for the development of Islam, but also attracted suspicion from local authorities and the public. On the other hand, these new actors also had the potential to upstage (and upset) home states such as Algeria , Morocco , or Turkey, which had a vested interest in maintaining control over their citizens’ activities abroad.
The translation of foreign rivalries to local contexts had unexpected consequences. For instance, leadership struggles within mosque associations could encompass a wide variety of political, ideological, and personal differences. Nevertheless, until the mid-to-late 1980s, the Moroccan state continued to deal only indirectly with the religious affairs of its citizens abroad, despite the important measures that had been taken to reinforce the state’s control over the religious field in Morocco itself. The reason for this is simple enough: the Moroccan state was first and foremost concerned with potential sources of political opposition and very few were to be found in the religious field. As Dumont highlights for the case of France, during the first half of the 1980s, “the two poles that consistently structured the mobilization of Moroccan migrants in France were the secular left and the amicales ” (Dumont 2007, 297). The potential of Islam to do the same would be apparent by the end of the decade.
As settlement became permanent, the Moroccan monarchy did not hide its hostility towards the integration of its citizens in Western European countries. Obtaining a new citizenship was seen as forsaking one’s homeland, while more practically for the state it also meant the potential loss of financial remittances. When the Dutch granted foreigners local voting rights in 1986, Hassan II expressed his “displeasure,” and in 1989, he stated that participating in French elections would be “in a sense, a betrayal of one’s origins” (de Haas 2007, 19–20). In order to protect the cultural identity of its citizens abroad, Morocco signed a series a bilateral agreements with the main countries of emigration concerning the instruction of the Arabic language and Moroccan culture (with Spain in 1980, the Netherlands and France in 1983, Belgium in 1986, and Germany in 1991) (Belguendouz 2006). In France, these courses became institutionalized under the name Language and Culture of Origin Courses (Enseignements de Langues et de Cultures d’Origine, ELCO) and involved eight different countries. Despite their low number of hours and high rate of absenteeism, the ELCOs were criticized as a Trojan Horse that propagated foreign nationalism and Islamic religious education under the guise of language and culture classes (Lorcerie 1994).
The ELCOs represent an interesting point of comparison for the outsourcing of religious governance given that they became the main vehicle for Algeria to send its imams to France at the end of 1980s and throughout the 1990s, though they were rarely used by Morocco or Turkey for this purpose. French officials created the category of the so-called ELCO imams in order to ensure greater control over religious officials coming from abroad during the Algerian civil war. However, the ELCO imam model was never broadened to include Turkish Diyanet imams, while such an idea was even less relevant for Morocco , where imams, preachers, and other religious personnel were not institutionalized to the same degree until recently. The practice of using the ELCO programme to import Algerian imams was discontinued by the early 2000s largely due to its ambiguous legal status (Interview, BCC Counsellor, 17 September 2010, Paris ).
Until the late 1980s, the Moroccan state’s implication in the religious affairs of its citizens abroad was thus limited to sending small groups of imams during Ramadan. In the meantime, other foreign states had started courting Muslim associations in Western Europe, which were generally all in need of funding for mosque construction and religious activities. The Saudi Muslim World League founded the European branch of its World Supreme Council for Mosques in Brussels in 1975 and its Paris branch followed in 1977. The mosque of Mantes-la-Jolie , one of earliest “mosquées cathédrales” 3 to be built in France , is closely associated with the League; however, a brief look at its genesis reveals the degree to which foreign political rivalries render local Muslim fields complex.
The mosque was founded by an association that included a number of different nationalities, though the main group, led by Ali Berka, consisted of Moroccans who were “members or supporters of the amicales ” (Kepel 1991, 287–89). The primary donor for the construction of the mosque was Libya (along with Kuwait and Saudi Arabia ), which at the beginning of the 1980s had hoped to gain influence amongst French Muslims thanks to its petrodollars (Godard and Taussig 2007). When the mosque was inaugurated in 1981, the president of the GMP and 26 ambassadors were in attendance. However, after refusing Libya’s request for the mosque to be named after Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi, the leaders of the association increasingly distanced themselves from Libyan authorities (de Galembert 2005).
After lending his support to a Moroccan opposition figure, Berka lost control of the mosque in 1987 to another Moroccan, Driss Ichchou. The latter was said to be close to Moroccan state representatives as well as an Islamist group that had come out in support of the female high school students who had been expelled for wearing their hijab during the first “headscarf affair” (affaire du foulard) in 1989 (Auffray 1995). The conflict made even more newspaper headlines due to the controversial figure of Tayeb Bentizi, an imam at the mosque who was deported in 1994 and was later implicated in the 2003 Casablanca attacks (Robert-Diard 2007). In order to settle the leadership struggle, an election for control of the mosque association’s administrative council was organized in 1995 under the watchful eye of French authorities. Berka’s electoral list had the support of both the French interior ministry and the Moroccan consulate and swept the election (Cesari 1998). Two years later, Berka received a visit from Saudi Prince Abdul Aziz bin Fahd, after which the mosque began receiving yearly funding and extra preachers for Ramadan from the League (though the head imam remained Moroccan) and officially became its property in 1999 (Abdi 1997; Laurence and Vaïsse 2007).
The case of Mantes-la-Jolie underscores the necessity of understanding local Islamic affairs in Western Europe as part of larger transnational fields in which foreign politics and interests frequently play a key role. It also demonstrates that alliances can change quickly and that conflicts within mosque associations may have nothing to do with religion, but rather political or personal rivalries. As Cesari points out, the clash between Berka and Ichchou was not due to “ideological differences concerning Islam,” but rather to “personal conflicts exasperated by the Moroccan political game” (1998, 31). Nevertheless, despite the importance of the local context, it is rare for frontline actors to possess enough resources, in terms of organizational capabilities, financial backing, and religious authority, to be able to impose themselves without resorting to the support of an outside actor. The lack of pre-established religious infrastructure and sources of authority in Western Europe thus brings on competition between a variety of foreign states that have an interest in imposing their definition of who or what constitutes legitimate religious authority.
These “reinventions of religious authority in a migratory context” (Jouanneau 2013) pose a double challenge for home states such as Morocco and Turkey. On the one hand, there is an administrative policy element that requires home states to adapt their own structures of institutionalized religious affairs to new contexts and demands. On the other hand, competition between foreign states as seen above transforms local religious affairs into highly politicized issues that inevitably implicate foreign policy interests that extend beyond the religious field.
Religion increasingly became a part of Moroccan diaspora policy as a result of this competition , but also because Islam became a more potent means by which to mobilize Moroccan migrants at the end of the 1980s and during the 1990s. By 1985, a French federation of Muslims had emerged with the goal of taking on the Algerian-dominated GMP, something that caught the attention of Moroccan authorities. At the same time, a new Moroccan-led “cathedral mosque” project eventually succeeded in receiving the first direct funding from the Moroccan state. This turn of events was facilitated by institutional developments in Morocco , as the country slowly emerged from the années de plomb, introduced democratic reforms, and redirected its diaspora policies to the religious field abroad.
2.2 Establishing a Religious Base Abroad
The institutional landscape for diaspora policies in Morocco underwent a number of significant changes in the 1980s and 1990s. One initiative led to the creation of electoral districts in 1984 covering the main countries of Moroccan emigration, thanks to which the community abroad was represented in the Moroccan parliament for almost a decade until these districts were discontinued in 1992.
The next important step was the creation of the MCMRE and the Hassan II Foundation for Moroccans Residing Abroad (FHII), both in 1990. The creation of these two diaspora institutions undercut the role played by the labour ministry and the foreign affairs ministry , which had been the main bodies of the Moroccan state responsible for Moroccans abroad up until that point. The advent of the MCMRE particularly irritated the foreign affairs ministry , which succeeded in progressively undermining it until absorbing it entirely in 1997 (Brand 2006). In contrast, the FHII has gone on to become an important actor of the Moroccan religious field abroad, in particular with regard to mosque funding and the sending of imams.
By the end of the 1980s, many first- and second-generation migrant activists in Western Europe began to replace their communist-inspired discourse with the language of Islam (Kepel 1991). In the case of France, where 100,000 people had participated in the famous marche des beurs in 1983, the shift from “beur” (Arab, in French slang) to “Muslim” in the reference identity of migrants and their descendants was especially striking (Mouriaux and Wihtol de Wenden 1988; Laurence and Vaïsse 2007). The growing importance of Islam was also noticeable through the staggering rise in the number of Muslim associations and prayer spaces during the 1980s: from 100 in 1970, to 500 in 1985, and to 1279 in 1992 (Godard and Taussig 2007). These new mosques and prayer spaces were no longer located in factories and workers’ residences, but rather in the working-class residential areas where immigrant Muslim families lived. This change reflected the demographic evolution that had taken place within the ranks of the Muslim population in France , as elsewhere in Western Europe, from the solitary male workers of the 1960–1970s to the increasingly settled families of the 1980s.
In the countries of the diaspora, the amicales remained the main instrument by which the Moroccan state watched over the diaspora in Western Europe. However, as Islam increasingly proved to be a significant force for mobilization amongst migrants and their descendants, home state authorities adapted their policies. Beyond the suspicion the amicales elicited for many Moroccans abroad, these organizations simply had no potential to become full-fledged actors in the religious field. The Moroccan state’s involvement in the French Muslim field eventually took shape around two separate yet interconnected religious actors: the Mosque of Évry-Courcouronnes and the National Federation of French Muslims (Fédération Nationale des Musulmans de France , FNMF).
2.2.1 The Mosque of Évry-Courcouronnes: Changing Alliances and International Rivalries
The Évry mosque is one of the most representative mosques of Moroccan Islam in France—a large picture of the mosque even hung in the main meeting room of the European Council of Moroccan Ulema (CEOM ) in Rabat during my visits there in 2011 and 2012. At the same time, the mosque and its history are emblematic of Morocco ’s long-standing tendency to favour cooperation with Saudi Arabia in order to destabilize the dominant position occupied by Algeria in the French Muslim field.
The story of the mosque begins with the creation of an Islamic association in 1981 by two Moroccans, Khalil Merroun and Abderrahmane Ammari. A few years earlier, Merroun, a technician at a French aeronautics company, had submitted a petition for a prayer space and received the authorization from the local planning and development authority to purchase a site. The case of Évry is distinct, in that it was one of five sites chosen for “new cities” (villes nouvelles) that were constructed around Paris starting in the mid-1960s. Merroun went searching for funds thereafter, knocking at the doors of the Tabligh and the GMP, and even managed to meet with the Moroccan Habous ministry, but he left empty handed each time (Aïnouche 1990; Merroun and Lévy 2010).
The association was able to purchase the land largely thanks to Saudi donors and local fund-raising; however, the construction of the mosque, which began in 1984 and finished in 1990, necessitated many millions more. As a result, Merroun reached an agreement with the Saudi Muslim World League in 1986, whereby the League became the official owner of the mosque in exchange for a loan of 1.25 million US dollars from the Saudi Islamic Bank of Development, as well as the guarantee that the League would find the funds necessary to finish the mosque if more were needed. Additional contributions came from the Kuwaiti Ministry of Religious Affairs, as well as individual Middle Eastern donors.
However, once construction of the mosque was completed in 1990, the League reneged on its promise to find additional funding for the interior decorations. Consequently, Merroun and his association approached the new Moroccan MCMRE , which officially accepted responsibility for the mosque in 1992 and secured the necessary funding from the FHII. Not long thereafter, the Moroccan ambassador to France began talks with the League in order to transfer the ownership of the mosque to Morocco “in order to preserve the mosque’s Moroccan character” (Tossa 1996). These talks were complicated when a group of Algerians led by a Muslim prison chaplain occupied the mosque in 1996 and accused Merroun of financial mismanagement. The occupation of the mosque led to both a physical confrontation and numerous legal battles, all of which were lost by the Algerian prison chaplain’s group, and a month and a half later Merroun was back in control (Abdi 1996; Bertrand 1996).
The clash between these two groups was perceived as a wake-up call by Moroccan authorities concerning the Muslim field abroad and pushed Ambassador Mohamed Berrada to write directly to the Moroccan prime minister on the subject of “sav[ing] Moroccan Islam in France .” Despite numerous factors that pointed to more complicated scenario involving both personal antagonisms and local financial issues concerning the halal market, Moroccan authorities overwhelming privileged the paradigm of Algerian-Moroccan rivalry in their interpretation of events. Ambassador Berrada wrote that the conflict served to show “the fragility of our community in this domain [Islam in France ]” when faced with the “pressure of different religious tendencies – harkis, Muslim brothers, and others.” Consequently, he took it upon himself to contact the French foreign affairs ministry and the interior ministry to alert them of the “gravity of this situation, which presents the risk of developing into an inter-ethnic conflict (conflit inter-communautaire)” (quoted in Tossa 1996). Meanwhile, the Moroccan Habous minister M’Daghri dispatched two delegations, one to Mecca and another to Paris , in order to discuss the future of the Évry mosque directly with the League. This moment marked the beginning of a lengthy legal battle which finally ended in 2009, whereupon the Évry mosque officially became the property of the Moroccan Habous ministry (Merroun and Lévy 2010).
The story of the Évry mosque provides yet another example of how international, national, and local level politics criss-cross in the governance of Islamic affairs in France. As Godard and Taussig write, the mosque’s “turbulent history displays the complexity of the financial circuits of such large-scale establishments” (2007, 104), which is largely understandable given the lack of financial, organizational, and symbolic resources in the French Muslim field. However, it is also an example of what happens when such a complex situation is interpreted through the lens of foreign policy. The Moroccan state’s diplomats are naturally trained to focus on questions of national interest, and their vision is all the more understandable when examples such as the mosques of Mantes-la-Jolie and Évry clearly show how the French Muslim field has involved competing international and transnational actors from the start. Nevertheless, this perspective has a formative effect, simplifying complex situations to the parameters employed by foreign policy analysts, who see evolutions in the French Muslim field in terms of ongoing international rivalries. If nothing else, this attitude has contributed to rendering ethno-national divisions within the religious field more permanent than they may have been otherwise, as seen in the following case of the FNMF .
2.2.2 The National Federation of French Muslims (FNMF): Reorienting Diaspora Policies Towards the Religious Field
The FNMF was not originally close to the Moroccan state. In the beginning, its main purpose was to provide a unified opposition to the dominance of the Algerian interests in the French Muslim field. Thanks to this very general criterion it was able to unite highly different groups, from the Tabligh to the French branches of Milli Görüş, and from French converts to the Moroccan amicales , all with the financial and moral support of the Saudi Muslim World League . Even rivals such as the Union of French Islamic Organizations (Union des organisations islamiques de France , UOIF ), founded in 1983 and close to the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood, and the AEIF , close to the Syrian branch of the Muslim Brotherhood, were both founding members.
The emblematic figure of this new association was a French convert named Daniel Youssef Leclercq. Leclercq had come to Islam by way of the Tabligh and the AEIF , and in 1983, he had founded an association with the goal of establishing a state-recognized commission for the regulation of halal meat and products. After being turned down by the interior ministry due to “lack of representativeness,” Leclercq decided to spearhead a movement to federate Muslims in France and counter the GMP’s privileged position: over one hundred Islamic associations sent representatives to two congresses organized under the auspices of the League and in late 1985 the FNMF came into being (Kepel 1991).
The FNMF’s initial connection to Morocco existed indirectly in the form of one of its most important members: the Évry mosque. Merroun goes so far as to say that “it’s [the mosque of] Évry that founded the FNMF !” (Telhine 2010, 232), while the president of the Great Mosque of Paris declared in 1986 that it knew “that this initiative [the founding of the FNMF] was the work of the Moroccans” (Kepel 1991, 364). Yet again, the paradigm of Algerian-Moroccan rivalry was at the centre of preoccupations concerning Islam in France.
However, despite such characterizations, Morocco continued to remain aloof from direct involvement. One Moroccan imam I interviewed explained that upon his arrival in France in 1986, the Moroccan religious field was still quite unstructured. In contrast to the model of interstate cooperation and long-distance control that was being put in place by the Turkish authorities at precisely the same moment, informal kinship networks did most of the work for Moroccan imams who went abroad. In the case of my interviewee, a family member living in France had contacted him and told him that a local association was looking for an imam, and he had decided to migrate “due primarily to financial considerations” (Interview, Moroccan Imam, 12 April 2012, Paris ). This case supports Dumont’s argument that in the religious field Moroccan associations “remained essentially local until 1985–1986,” because “Moroccans had no national structure to organize the practice of Islam” (2007, 287).
A change was in the works, however. During a speech in France in 1985, Hassan II had already made known his displeasure with the “favoritism and nepotism” that reigned within the amicales , and admitted that they “had not done their job in serving the needs of the community” (Brand 2006, 73–74). The amicales were criticized openly again in 1991 by the new MCMRE Minister, Rafiq Haddaoui, who stated that they were “no longer adapted to the situation” (Belguendouz 2006, 9). Though the amicales did not all disappear thereafter, they were gradually displaced as the main relay of Moroccan state influence in the religious field abroad and amongst the diaspora by a new network of religious associations.
In France, the FNMF and the Évry mosque were at the centre of this new strategy, as was the Taqwa mosque association in Germany, founded in 1989 in Frankfurt. The “Moroccanization” of the FNMF took place at the beginning of the 1990s, and became a central element of Morocco ’s evolving diaspora strategies. After the initial enthusiasm had passed, many associations left the FNMF in the years following its creation. As a result, the path was open for a young Moroccan, Mohamed Bechari, to become the president of the FNMF , with the backing of Merroun’s group at the Évry mosque, the Muslim World League , and members of the amicales in the north of the country. Above all, Bechari had the support of the Moroccan interior minister and the Habous minister and could thus count on the network that was being established between the FHII, the amicales, and Moroccan Muslim associations (El Ghissassi 2005).
The institutional support from the new MCMRE and the FHII facilitated this change in orientation. Brand speculates that one reason for the FHII’s creation was to “vaccinate” Moroccans abroad against militant Islam, especially in light of the rapid rise of the Islamic Salvation Front (Front Islamique de Salut, FIS) in Algeria (2006, 81). Furthermore, during the 1980s, Moroccan groups such as Muṭīʿ’s Islamic Youth , Benkirane’s Al-Jamāʿa, and Yassine’s ʿ Adl wal Ihsān began appearing in mosques in France (Telhine 2010), while in 1994 a terrorist attack in Marrakech was found to have been carried out by a group of Franco-Moroccans and Franco-Algerians. By 1992, the FHII began “bringing its support to the organization of the religious life of Moroccans living abroad” by sending religious personnel and theology professors abroad during Ramadan (Fondation Hassan II, n.d.). Moreover, over the next three years “ties were established between former amicales members, representatives of the FHII, and new associative leaders,” and many amicales “converted themselves into cultural, religious, or migrants’ rights associations” (Dumont 2007, 338). Indeed, when I asked about cooperation with local associations at the Moroccan consulate in Marseille , I was told: “Yes, on request, we attend their events sometimes, or we give them books. But listen, it’s been a long time now that there aren’t any amicales anymore!” (Interview, Moroccan Vice-Consul, 15 March 2012, Marseille).
The change in Moroccan diaspora policies was also part of a general move towards greater civil liberties in Morocco at the beginning of the 1990s. As the atmosphere in Morocco changed, the repercussions for those living abroad were numerous: instead of a political threat, migrants were now seen as a political tool; integration and dual citizenship were encouraged; and even the official vocabulary changed, as the former “Moroccan Workers Abroad” (Travailleurs Marocains à l’Étranger, TME) was replaced by the new “Moroccan Residing Abroad” (Marocains Résidant à l’Étranger, MRE) (de Haas 2007). At the same time, the international controversy surrounding Salmon Rushdie’s book The Satanic Verses and the first French “headscarf affair” in 1989 increasingly put Muslim issues under the spotlight in many Western European countries. The timing of these two events was a boon for sensationalist tendencies in the French mass media, which “allowed commentators to link Iran, the chador, and book-burning to the plight of the three girls at the middle school” (Bowen 2007, 84). The “headscarf affair” also became a Moroccan issue, because two of the three girls who refused to remove their headscarf in the classroom were of Moroccan origin.
Later the same year, journalists interviewed King Hassan II on French television and requested his opinion as a religious authority given his status of amīr al-mu’minīn. During the interview, Hassan II states how he “personally requested […] through the intermediary of my ambassador, that the girls put an end to this affair that they had unintentionally caused” (Antenne 2 1989). The two Moroccan girls complied and returned to school, while the third girl, of Tunisian background, continued to wear her headscarf and was expelled (Bowen 2007). The direct intervention of the king in this matter is significant, not only in that it contradicted the position taken by the FNMF, which had come out in support of the three girls, but because Hassan II was able to effectively exert his influence as a religious and political authority in another country. The king’s authority was not limited by state borders; rather it operated within the transnational Moroccan religious field that included these two high school students (or perhaps more appropriately, their parents). Moreover, the fact that the king was able to influence the two students of Moroccan origin, but not the student of Tunisian background, constitutes a telling example of the factors that truly constitute boundaries within the transnational Muslim fields in France .
Morocco ’s approach to religious governance abroad was, however, still far from the institutionalized and structured strategy deployed by the Turkish state. Moroccan authorities had a great deal of influence over the FNMF and the Évry mosque, but they did not control either of these organizations directly. As opposed to the Turkish case, no members of the Habous ministry were dispatched to France or elsewhere to take the helm of religious associations. Moreover, until the terrorist attacks in New York in 2001 and in Casablanca in 2003, the Moroccan state was not hostile to fundamentalist Islamic currents as long as they were thought to be apolitical. Despite the reorientation of Morocco’s diaspora policies towards the religious field in the 1980s and 1990s, it would take another decade before the Makhzen truly developed the means and the political will to promote an official vision of Moroccan Islam for its citizens abroad.
3 Conclusion
From the late 1970s to the early 1990s, Turkish and Moroccan migrants in Western Europe went from being guest workers to settled immigrants. The challenges brought on by this unexpected development confronted actors on all sides: receiving state authorities, home state authorities, as well as the migrants themselves. Due to the lack of Islamic religious services abroad, numerous non-state religious movements and foreign states saw an opportunity to fill the void, in turn leading Turkish and Moroccan authorities to re-evaluate their diaspora policies and begin focusing more specifically on issues of religious governance abroad.
Given the restrictions imposed by distance and state sovereignty, the religious field emerged as a space of unparalleled opportunities for home state institutions. It is perhaps the sole domain in which receiving states have no claim to legitimacy and generally lack the infrastructure and legal tools to take any direct action. While Muslim migrants may comment favourably on practising their religion in Western European countries because of greater civil liberties, they do not look to Western Europe for legitimate religious authorities. Indeed, Islamic sciences are perhaps the only domain in which the educational institutions of the Muslim world are invariably held in higher esteem than their counterparts in receiving states .
The differences in how Turkey and Morocco have gone about fashioning their religious diaspora policies have been the result of which actors have been involved. The most striking difference between the two cases is that in the Turkish case, the Diyanet and its religious bureaucracy have proved to be a quasi-independent entity, operating at times fully on its own initiative. The Diyanet is of course a part of the Turkish state, and its activities abroad have been increasingly supported by central authorities since the 1980 coup d’état ; however, the Turkish state’s success in establishing a transnational network of religious associations can be best explained by the fact that the Diyanet has been at the forefront of Turkish religious policy abroad since the late 1970s.
There is one mistake that is frequently made in the literature, which, though seemingly innocuous, points directly to a central difference between Turkish and Moroccan religious diaspora policies . Many sources on Muslim associations in Western Europe state that the head of the Diyanet’s branches abroad is a diplomat, which is false. It is true that the Diyanet’s top personnel abroad have, depending on their status and the country, certain diplomatic privileges. However, and without exception, they all share the same profile: they are educated theologians who have gone through Turkey’s imam hatip schools and theology faculties , many of whom have had prior experience as a Diyanet imam abroad. In other words, from the beginnings until the present day, the overwhelming majority of the Turkish state’s personnel involved in the Turkish religious field abroad are to be considered first and foremost religious actors.
In contrast, in the case of Morocco it truly has been a diplomat, that is to say a member of the foreign affairs ministry, who has been given the task of overseeing the religious affairs of the Moroccan diaspora in the consulates and embassies abroad. The shift from the amicales network to Muslim associations at the beginning of the 1990s constitutes a fundamental change in the way Moroccan authorities manage diaspora affairs. However, this evolution did little to displace the centrality of the Moroccan foreign affairs ministry , an institutional actor whose interests are firmly situated in the political field. For Moroccan diplomats, the religious affairs of the Moroccans living abroad were seen through a prism of foreign policy interests and international rivalries—if they attracted any attention at all—and it is only recently that the Habous ministry has become more directly involved.
Before analyzing further the development of home state religious policies abroad, the following chapter will focus on receiving state institutions in France and Germany and offer a conceptual view of the partial governance structures that explains their limited involvement in the religious field.
Notes
- 1.
Since 2015, the situation has changed radically and Moroccans have since been greatly surpassed by Syrians and Iraqis.
- 2.
I translate the term recteur as “(mosque) president.” The position is interesting considering that there is no real equivalent in Muslim countries: while the recteur is usually the president of the association that runs the mosque or prayer space, the term does not necessarily imply a background in Islamic theology.
- 3.
Literally “cathedral mosque,” this colourful French expression refers to large-scale mosques with a high degree of visibility, often including a minaret.