In 2017, I went to visit the DITIB central office in the Parisian suburb of Bagnolet. It was Ramadan, but unlike the bustling activity in the streets of Belleville and Barbès-Rochechouart as locals made preparations for iftar, the neighbourhood gave off a quiet, lethargic ambience. The centre, a multi-story reddish building surrounded by large apartment complexes, housed a surprisingly empty mosque, along with the offices for DITIB’s social, travel, and funeral services. In one department, I came across a graduate of the Diyanet’s international theology programme who had recently returned from Turkey with the hope of becoming a religious official; however, after not having been hired she was now contemplating returning to Turkey to study for a master’s in theology. After an interview with the local Diyanet imam, which became considerably more interesting once the recorder had been switched off, I wandered back to Paris while thinking of how normal this transnational reality was for the actors involved in the religious field.
Not a week thereafter, I was contacted by French journalists as a debate began concerning the new president of the French Council of the Muslim Faith (CFCM ), who was the head of the Coordination Committee of French Turkish Muslims (CCMTF), close to the Turkish state, and moreover was the former president of the Union of European Turkish Democrats (UETD), a lobby for the Turkish Justice and Development Party (AKP ). While the discussions continued on whether this individual was suited to be CFCM president, I was struck by the sizeable gulf separating the largely inconsequential debates on “French Islam” as opposed to the normality of Turkey’s governance of Islamic affairs abroad for actors on the ground.
The confusion over the normative implications of home state involvement is today as present as ever: two months earlier, the Union of French Mosques (UMF) had announced its intention to start training imams in France at the Évry mosque with instructors sent from and paid for by the Mohamed VI Institute in Rabat, which was presented as “good news” for the French government (Hoffner 2017). Meanwhile, on the other side of the Rhine, just a few weeks before my visit to the DITIB office in Paris , the monumental DITIB central mosque of Cologne finally opened its main prayer space amidst continuing debates over the espionage affair as recounted in Chapter 7 (one of the mosque’s minarets is on the front cover of this book). And of course, Diyanet imams continued to arrive throughout the year to serve the community abroad as usual, despite the electoral bombast of Social Democratic Party (SPD) leader Martin Schultz, who declared that if elected chancellor he would put a definitive end to the practice.
As stated in the introduction, the objective of this book has not been to endorse any normative arguments about whether these forms of religious diaspora policies are ultimately “good” or “bad,” but rather to shed light on a relatively little known and misunderstood factor that contributes greatly to the development of Islam in Western Europe. My focus has been on explaining how and analyzing why this form of religious governance has become a common feature of the international relations between the states under study since the waves of labour migration first began in the 1960s. Moreover, I have sought to examine the consequences of home state religious policies for the development of Islam in France and Germany. My primary conclusions are as follows.
1 Governing Islam Abroad
1.1 Institutional Frameworks
There are clear differences between Morocco and Turkey’s religious policies abroad that are the result of how religious governance is institutionalized at home. On the one hand, Morocco finances mosque projects and Muslim associations in foreign countries, relativizing the centrality of sending imams abroad as its most important policy instrument. The prevailing religious institutional framework in Morocco is influential in this respect, considering that the Moroccan state has not traditionally integrated imams into the state apparatus as public servants. On the other hand, it has never hesitated to use the state’s financial resources or coercive force to exert its control over the religious field. These structural and institutional elements manifest themselves abroad in the continuing importance of the foreign affairs ministry and Moroccan diplomats; the extremely low number of long-term imams sent to foreign countries; and the facility with which the state changes its alliances with mosque associations abroad. Given that the Habous ministry has not institutionally expanded its structures abroad, the Moroccan state works primarily by co-optation. In other words, it establishes hierarchical relationships with compliant partners in the main countries of the Moroccan diaspora, which it can just as easily change when it suits the state’s interests.
Turkish religious governance has a different history and framework. While mosque construction is not financed by the state, religious services are considered a domain of public policy and religious officials are formal state employees. The Diyanet’s greater autonomy is also a factor to take into account in explaining the dense transnational web of associations it has come to coordinate in Western Europe, North America, and further afield. The smooth coordination between partner organizations abroad and the successful management of close to 2000 religious officials across the world is thanks to the on-the-ground presence of religious bureaucrats, who can rely on a vast administration with extensive resources. The much greater level of organization reflects the ties between the Turkish academic world and religious affairs, as well as the importance of governing Islam abroad for members of the Turkish parliament and successive Turkish governments.
Both Morocco and Turkey consider the organization, oversight, and provision of religious services to be a responsibility of the state. The close ties between Islam and national identity in both countries are reflected in both states’ perception that promoting religion abroad corresponds to the constitutional obligation of the state to protect the cultural identity of its expatriates. Moreover, both Turkey and Morocco perceive the religious field as an administrative category, delimited in terms of public policy objectives that are measured and analyzed in institutional progress reports. It is for this reason that I claim that they are able to specifically target religious affairs as a policy domain for state action aimed at securing the state monopoly over the religious field; of course, the ability to do so does not guarantee the state’s success.
By contrast, I contend that France and Germany are unable to see religion as a category of state public policy and are thus structurally limited in their attempts to govern Muslim fields. This “partial governance” of religious affairs represents a situation in which religion is treated as an issue derivative of other public policy areas that the state has institutionalized as an administrative category, such as immigration law, national security, or public education. As a result, the internal components of the French and German states only “see” Islam when it becomes an issue within one of these policy domains or when local Islamic affairs are perceived as a question of foreign policy. Due to the compartmentalized nature of how Islam is approached in both countries, there are also important differences that exist in the practices of different state institutions. For instance, this book has considered the institutionalization of Islam at the national and regional levels, imam training, mosque construction, and religious education. These are not the sole examples of state interaction with Islamic affairs. The very fact that the French military organizes the pilgrimage to Mecca for its Muslim soldiers shows that specific institutions may approach these issues in different ways.
Nevertheless, the policy domains that I have concentrated on in this book are precisely those in which the inability of the French and German states to act has created transnational political opportunities for home states to become involved. Consequently, I argue that the home state perception of the religious field as an administrative category of state public policy, along with the constraints imposed by the partial governance of Islam in receiving states , constitute the structural explanations for how and why Turkey and Morocco have been able to govern their transnational religious field in France and Germany .
1.2 Interstate Cooperation
At the same time, my focus on interstate cooperation as an explanation for the home state governance of Islam abroad implies that this particular arrangement suits the political interests of all state actors involved. The structural explanation outlined above constitutes an important starting point and shows how religious affairs can become depoliticized when treated as a purely administrative process within bilateral relations. However, there is nothing routine about how decisions of foreign policy are made and the prospect of conflicting national interests can lead to interstate tensions that cast doubts on the desirability of interstate cooperation.
National security concerns regarding Islamic affairs top the list of national interests for all four states; however, not all states perceive the question of security the same way. Receiving states may decide to cooperate with home states because they similarly consider non-state Islamic groups to be dangerous and difficult to control. In cases of Islamic terrorism, there is little hesitation to cooperate as both home and receiving states share clear common interests and neither has anything to gain from seeing their partners destabilized as a result of terrorist attacks. However, non-violent Islamic groups fall into a more ambiguous category. Receiving states may be coaxed into complying with requests from home states to favour certain Muslim groups over others within the framework of their friendly bilateral relations. In this case, the governance of the internal Muslim field becomes as much an object of foreign policy as internal politics. Nevertheless, receiving states must be convinced that the competing unofficial Muslim groups threaten their own interests as well—namely, that the groups in question represent an obstacle to “integration” and the development of “moderate” Islam. For instance, as analyzed in Chapter 7, the conflict between the Turkish AKP government and the Gülen movement has not met with the favour of German authorities, while the much less virulent divorce between the Makhzen and the ostensibly Islamist Rally did not overly concern French officials.
The reasons for cooperation between home and receiving states can also be understood in more systemic terms. Despite the political discourse calling for a national “French” or “German” Islam, receiving states are still more likely to favour cooperation with Muslim groups that come with the home state stamp of approval than with transnational non-state movements, or even non-state local groups. This contradiction between discourse and practice was perceived by the majority of actors interviewed as the result of “politics”; in other words, public criticism of cooperation with home state authorities by receiving state politicians was perceived as a tactic to gain votes or score political points. At the same time, the vision presented by state religious and diplomatic actors in this book reveals a deep-set suspicion of non-state religious actors, which denies them legitimacy as authorities in the religious field for the very reason that they are not tied to the state.
For state actors in all four countries, control over non-state religious actors and transnational religious fields is best achieved by reinforcing interstate cooperation concerning religious affairs. The framing of Islam as a security problem in France and Germany means that for many receiving state actors, it is more important to maintain a degree of leverage over Muslim groups in the country than to treat them as any other citizens. It is for this reason that it is ingenuous to believe that receiving states have no control over the “interference” of home states in their religious fields. As shown throughout this analysis, France and Germany have not just tolerated, but have actively facilitated and even encouraged home state involvement in religious affairs. Indeed, the capacity to have a troublesome imam deported through quiet diplomatic channels is unsurprisingly preferred to having to resort to lengthy legal procedures or the even more complicated situations should the imam be a French or German citizen. Conversely, it would be exceedingly strange for a government official to ask the Vatican to reprimand a priest for his political opinions on highly charged social issues such as abortion or gay marriage.
The persistent perception of Islam as both foreign and a threat in France and Germany has served to reinforce receiving state interests in maintaining control over the field by favouring interstate cooperation and generally treating religious affairs within the scope of foreign policy. By contrast, the Turkish and Moroccan state authorities interviewed in the book generally believed that they were doing their French and German counterparts a favour, while also responding to a state duty to provide religious services to citizens both at home and abroad. Nevertheless, just as home state politics find a direct echo in the transnational religious field and amongst the diaspora, state authorities in Turkey and Morocco realize that what happens abroad may have repercussions for the Muslim field at home. This reason alone explains why both Turkey and Morocco continue to have a vested political interest in governing Islam in France and Germany .
2 Consequences for Muslim Fields in France and Germany
2.1 Legitimate Religious Authorities
Religious authority concerns leaders of religious associations as well as religious personnel, in other words imams, preachers, religion instructors, and Islamic scholars. Both Turkey and Morocco make use of specific policy instruments that aim at establishing the forms of religious and cultural capital required to be recognized as a legitimate religious authority by state actors and mosque members in religious fields abroad.
The Moroccan state has staked out a clear intellectual and theological position that differentiates itself from other Islamic currents with its insistence on a specific Moroccan understanding of Islam. This nationalist vision, promoted extensively since King Mohammed VI launched the official reform of the religious field in 2004, combines the Maliki School, the Ashʿari doctrine, and elements of Moroccan Sufism, all the while emphasizing the central role of the Moroccan king as “Commander of the Faithful.” The state has since become much more implicated in the governance of Islam, from the training of religious personnel (including female preachers or murshidats) to the production of Qur’ans “made in Morocco .” The reform of the religious field has also discursively excluded those whom the state does not consider as belonging to Moroccan national Islam: from Wahhabists and Salafists to other “deviant” groups such as Shiites and Baha’is, while casting suspicion on home-grown Moroccan Islamist movements like the Justice and Development Party (PJD ) and the Movement for Unification and Reform (MUR), and especially ʿ Adl wal Iḥsān . Finally, the normative texts concerning the religious field that have been elaborated in recent years, from the “Guide of the Imam” to the decree prohibiting imams from being a member of political parties, have come to constitute an official illustration of the Moroccan state conception of legitimate religious authority.
However, the ability of the state to extend this model to the transnational Moroccan Muslim field is no foregone conclusion. For instance, the European Council of Moroccan Ulema (CEOM ) lacks both the financial and human resources to established itself as a veritable source of religious reference. On the other hand, the 30 long-term imams sent by the Habous ministry to Moroccan mosques in France in 2008, the training of French imams in Morocco , and the announcement of a new imam training programme in France all hold the potential to better spread the Moroccan model of religious authority abroad, similar to the current initiatives of the Diyanet.
Indeed, though Turkish authorities lack direct funding as a potential policy tool, their institutional framework ensures a much more coherent and systematic approach to the religious field abroad. The state is present at every level of religious governance: from the grass-roots level of the individual imams to the regional oversight of the consular attachés, and from the Diyanet religious counsellor at the head of the national DITIB association all the way to the institution’s foreign affairs directorate and even higher top officials in Ankara. This integrated and organized institutional structure provides resources in the form of personnel, publications, know-how, and symbolic capital. The promise of a state-paid imam has been enough to convince cash-strapped mosque associations in Western Europe to become DITIB members in the past, and this is still the case today; in this sense, the sending of imams abroad can be considered a form of indirect funding.
Moreover, the discourse portraying Islam as a public service and the Turkish state as a neutral actor reflects not only the prevailing legal and constitutional framework in Turkey, but finds an echo amongst thousands of Muslims of Turkish origin. There are those who perceive DITIB to be the less “politicized” of Turkish-Islamic currents, while others are more practical, and consider that being a DITIB member will lead to fewer problems with local authorities. Thanks to home state diplomatic support, the DITIBs and Diyanet Foundations have grown to become the largest Turkish religious associations in the Muslim fields abroad and the most trusted by receiving state authorities. At the same time, the rise of the AKP as the dominant political force in Turkey has not only led to a rapprochement between DITIB and Milli Görüş, but also the acrimonious rupture with the Gülen movement. The fallout from the failed coup in 2016 and the conflict with the Fethullahçı has far from run its course and has already led to heightened tensions with German authorities, though not yet enough to actually destabilize interstate cooperation.
Despite the complications posed by home state politics in the religious field abroad, the principal figure of legitimate religious authority in the Turkish Muslim field has increasingly come to coincide with the figure of the Diyanet religious official—that is to say a home state -employed imam or preacher who has graduated from a state-run imam hatip school or Turkish theology faculty. These individuals are presented as religious “professionals” capable of “enlightening society on religious issues with correct and up-to-date (doğru ve güncel) information based on the fundamental sources of the Islamic faith” (Diyanet İşleri Başkanlığı 2014, 5). Turkish authorities thus emphasize a particular kind of religious capital as the defining distinction between state-employed religious authorities and the archetypal “self-declared ” imam or leaders of non-state religious associations with no formal training in Islamic theology.
This distinction largely corresponds to Weber’s (1968, 1164) categories of “legal-rational authority” as opposed to “charismatic authority,” while equally evoking the notion of “office charisma” (Amtscharisma). Given that the employees of the Diyanet are “professionals” of Islam, they are portrayed as religious actors who understand the limits of Turkish Sunni Hanafi Islam with regard to politics; conversely, non-state actors without proper theological education are seen as more than capable of unpredictable, if not outright dangerous behaviour. A relatively coherent and self-enclosed model thus emerges: for the Turkish state, legitimate religious authority is attained through theological education as dispensed in Turkish educational institutions and following the recognition as conferred by the state religious institutions.
The Diyanet has already put this model into practice through initiatives such as the Strasbourg Theology Faculty , which, despite running into difficulties with French officials, was able to take advantage of the Diyanet’s transnational network and relay the students to the Turkey-based International Theology Programme . The success of the latter programme demonstrates the capacity of the Diyanet to appeal to the new generations of young diaspora Turkish Muslims, many of whom after graduating will go on to become religious teachers, imams, preachers, or theologians in their new “countries of origin.” These individuals will be able to bridge cultural and linguistic gaps in a way few religious actors currently can, while simultaneously replicating the prevailing model of state-promoted religious authority in transnational settings. In doing so, this new generation of transnational imams will join over a thousand other Turkish religious officials in ensuring the Diyanet’s continued centrality to Muslim fields abroad as a respected and influential source of legitimate religious capital.
2.2 The Place of Cultural Capital
A distinguishing feature of the Moroccan and Turkish Muslim fields abroad is that there is a greater degree of competition : just as some Muslims may ask for home state support, others are equally free to attend the mosques of opposing Islamic currents. Indeed, even if they so desired, home state authorities cannot shut down mosques abroad or attempt to impose a monopoly over the religious field abroad as they can at home.
The influence of Turkey and Morocco in the religious field abroad is thus not to be understood as a coercive force, but rather as one that succeeds by persuasion and seduction. Allen (2003) provides an interesting comparison concerning the “cultural domination” of the US film industry abroad and the criticism of French politicians who view it as a threat to French culture. Just as French moviegoers can choose to avoid Hollywood movies, French and German Muslims can turn their back on mosques staffed or financed by home state religious authorities. For their part, state authorities can find ways to support the local film industry or limit the number of foreign imports, thus conditioning the possibilities that exist in a given market.
Turkish and Moroccan religious authorities are similarly forced to adapt to the demands and expectations of Muslims in France and Germany , all the while exerting an influence over the kinds of religious goods that are available within Muslim fields abroad. Cultural capital plays a key role in these dynamics and represents a factor that is not to be found in the religious activities of either state in other geographic contexts. To be sure, Turkey and Morocco employ religious policy instruments such as mosque funding, the training of religious personnel, and the sending of imams abroad in other countries with which they maintain important historical ties. For Turkey, this encompasses Central Asia, the Caucasus, and the Balkans, whereas for Morocco, these foreign religious activities are mainly directed towards West African countries. However, by contrast, it is only with regard to diaspora communities that cultural capital plays such an important role in the religious field.
“Cultural capital” in the religious field abroad is distinguished from “religious capital” in terms of customs, symbols, and institutions that are specific to a given society and which have been exported along with international migratory movements. More specifically, cultural capital raises the question of the value attached to using certain languages within the religious field; celebrating specific events and festivals; or observing rituals that differentiate ethno-national groups of Muslims from one another instead of emphasizing their shared religious identity as part of the global Islamic community (ummah). Actors who hold nationalist sentiments and promote diasporic allegiances to a given “homeland” privilege cultural capital in the religious field in order to preserve the ethno-national character of a given group of Muslims. In this sense, cultural capital represents the principal factor that maintains the boundaries between different transnational Muslim fields in countries such as France and Germany .
For home state actors who attribute greater value to cultural capital in the religious field, the goal may be to counter the perceived dangers of assimilation into receiving societies. However, during the research for this book the general rationale given to me for encouraging a “homeland” cultural and national identity for young Muslims was that it helped in preventing radicalism amongst wayward youth in the midst of an identity crisis. For the religious officials and diplomats who supported this idea, the danger of Islamic terrorism was perceived as stemming from an excessive identification with the global ummah, meaning that the antidote was to be found in the reinforcement of a home state -approved vision of national identity. Nevertheless, such a strategy raises the possibility for conflict, on the one hand, between home states and religious actors seeking to bridge ethno-national divides in the French and German Muslim fields, and on the other hand, with receiving state actors who promote the idea of a national “French” or “German” Islam, in which home state cultural capital is replaced by that of receiving states.
For Morocco , cultural capital in the religious field abroad has been promoted as part of a national “Moroccan Islam,” which is mobilized to differentiate it from other national or transnational visions of Islam. Though religious services provided by the state to Moroccans abroad are presented as a policy for the “community abroad,” these and other diaspora policies in fact construct the “community abroad” as an object of state policy by identifying certain mosque associations as Moroccan and then tying them together in larger networks thanks to the state’s religious policy instruments. Furthermore, the Makhzen remains exceedingly adept at co-opting the individuals it needs in order to maintain its influence over the religious field, while the reform of the religious field has led to an unprecedented level of formal institutionalization for the state’s religious activities both at home and abroad. Islam has come to constitute a fundamental element of diaspora policies aimed at preserving ties with Moroccan communities in foreign countries, whose financial remittances continue to represent one of the main motors of the Moroccan economy. The enduring importance of these diaspora communities for economic, political, and social developments in Morocco, along with the perceived threat posed by violent and non-violent Moroccan religious groups based abroad, ensure that home state interests concerning the transnational Moroccan Muslim field are not about to decline.
In the case of Turkey, cultural capital is an essential element of the state’s model for legitimate religious authority, especially under the current AKP government. The Turkish-Islamic synthesis provides an important intellectual matrix that combines national and religious identities, while the celebration of Turkish national holidays reinforces the mosque’s role as a purveyor of Turkish culture and heritage within diaspora communities abroad. From the commemoration of the Battle of Gallipoli to the competitions for the recitation of the national anthem, and from Turkish language classes to the organization of kermes festivals, nationalism and cultural capital are on evident display in DITIB mosques. The continued importance given to Turkish nationalism and cultural capital nevertheless serves to reinforce group cohesion at the expense of excluding others, as shown by recent conflicts with Kurdish groups following the Turkish army’s involvement in the Syrian civil war. It similarly bolsters the perception amongst Muslims of other ethno-national backgrounds in France and Germany that DITIB mosques are only for Turks.
Turkish state religious authorities do not seek to appeal to Muslims of other backgrounds in Western Europe, and their interest in governing Islam in France and Germany is tied directly to their diaspora policies . Furthermore, in tandem with the “deterritorialized transnational nationalism ” of Turks abroad (Kastoryano 2006), my research on the Diyanet’s most recent set of religious initiatives demonstrates the state’s support for a conception of “Turkishness” that transcends citizenship and in the process redefines the nation as including “Turks abroad” (Bruce 2012). As discussed in Chapter 7, the Diyanet’s International Theology Programme actually requires applicants to hold foreign or dual citizenship.
The most overt consequences of Turkish and Moroccan religious diaspora policies for Muslim fields in France and Germany have thus been the preservation of ethno-national boundaries in the organization of Islam in both countries, as well as the promotion of a legal-rational model of religious authority that ultimately reinforces the position of home state religious institutions in religious fields abroad. Nevertheless, as I have indicated in this book, both French and German authorities have consciously permitted or even actively solicited this home state involvement. In other words, the governance of Islam abroad by Turkey and Morocco has rarely if ever been a question of “foreign interference” in internal affairs and has rather taken the form of interstate cooperation within the framework of bilateral diplomatic relations. In this sense, my research emphasizes the need to give due consideration to state actors within studies on transnational fields and spaces (cf. Waldinger and Fitzgerald 2004), as well as to their mutual interests in cooperating in order to better control non-state actors.
At the same time, I do not believe that the continuing prominence of home state religious policies should be considered an obstacle to the social and political integration of Muslims in Western Europe. Muslims in France and Germany, like other European Muslims, are engaged today in wide-ranging reinterpretations of the religious and cultural traditions that they have inherited from their families and their surrounding environments, giving rise to locally based understandings of Islam expressed in French, German, and other European languages. This process will undoubtedly continue to lead to tensions and compromises between different generations of Muslims, as well as with home and receiving state authorities, especially with regard to the evolving role of cultural capital in the religious field. However, in order to engage in constructive discussions on Islam in France and Germany , policymakers, scholars, and the media must take into consideration the actual practices and lived realities of the actors involved in the day-to-day governance of religious affairs. An essential aspect of such a perspective includes a conscious understanding of the political interests that motivate interstate cooperation in religious affairs as well as the lasting effects of home state governance over Islam abroad.