Governing Islam Abroad

From sending imams abroad to financing mosques and Islamic associations, home states play a key role in governing Islam in Western Europe. Drawing on over one hundred interviews and years of fieldwork, this book employs a comparative perspective that analyzes the foreign religious activities of the two home states with the largest diaspora populations in Europe: Turkey and Morocco. The research shows how these states use religion to promote ties with their citizens and their descendants abroad while also seeking to maintain control over the forms of Islam that develop within the diaspora. The author identifies and explains the internal and foreign political interests that have motivated state actors on both sides of the Mediterranean, ultimately arguing that interstate cooperation in religious affairs has and will continue to have a structural influence on the evolution of Islam in Western Europe.

Over the last fifty years, Turks and Moroccans have come to form the two largest diaspora groups in Western Europe, with the largest numbers in Germany and France respectively. The states of origin of these populations have developed a wide variety of policies aimed at their citizens abroad, amongst which Islam has figured prominently. For decades, the official institutions of state religious governance in Turkey and Morocco, the Presidency of Religious Affairs (Diyanet İşleri Başkanlığı) and the Ministry of Habous and Islamic Affairs, have actively engaged in providing support to Muslim groups in France and Germany, from sending imams to directly financing mosques and the associations that run them. This doctoral thesis seeks to respond to the following questions: how and why are Turkey and Morocco able to govern Islam outside of their national boundaries, and what are the consequences for the development of Muslim fields in France and Germany? Based on over one hundred interviews carried out with diplomats, state religious officials, and non-state religious actors in all four countries, this study argues that in contrast to France and Germany, the Turkish and Moroccan states consider religious governance as a distinct domain of public policy. Thanks to diplomatic cooperation and converging interstate interests, both home states have been able to expand their religious activities within transnational Muslim fields. In particular, Turkey and Morocco seek to promote a legal-rational model of religious authority and a national form of Islam, ultimately reinforcing both the position of home state religious institutions and ethno-national boundaries in religious fields abroad.

Will Islam be able to adapt to France's secularity and its strict separation of public and private spheres? Can France accommodate Muslims? In this book, Frank Peter argues that the debate about “Islam” and “Muslims” is not simply caused by ignorance or Islamophobia. Rather, it is an integral part of how secularism is reasoned. Islam and the Governing of Muslims in France shows that understanding religion as separate from other aspects of life, such as politics, economy, and culture, disregards the ways religion has operated and been managed in “secular” societies such as France. This book uncovers the varying rationalities of the secular that have developed over the past few decades in France to “govern Islam,” in order to examine how Muslims engage with the secular regime and contribute to its transformation. This book offers a close analysis of French secularism as it has been debated by Islamic intellectuals and activists from the 1990s until the present. It will influence the study of secularism as well as the study of Islam in the French Republic, and reveal new connections between Islamic traditions and secular rationalities.

Stephens argues that encounters between Islam and British colonial rule in South Asia were fundamental to the evolution of modern secularism.

This book advances an Islamic political philosophy based on the concept of Ihsan, which means to do beautiful things. The author moves beyond the dominant model of Islamic governance advanced by modern day Islamists. The political philosophy of Ihsan privileges process over structure, deeds over identity, love over law and mercy and forgiveness over retribution. The work invites Muslims to move away from thinking about the form of Islamic government and to strive to create a self-critical society that defends national virtue and generates institutions and practices that provide good governance.

This book analyses Morocco's unique response to counter-terrorism through the development of a religious bureaucracy to define and disseminate Islam. It will appeal to those interested in Middle Eastern politics and state-society relations in the Arab world, as well as policymakers interested in security studies and counter-terrorism policies.

A former U.S. ambassador and author of The End of the Cold War? takes readers on a tour of Islamic history, reconstructing the complex historical and geopolitical trends that have created modern Islam. Simultaneous. (Islam)

Colonial and post-colonial governance of Islam" is een heldere weergave van de kansen en belemmeringen voor de islam vanuit een bestuurlijke benadering met speciale aandacht voor de voortdurende strijd rond de codificatie van islamitisch onderwijs, religieuze autoriteit, wetgeving en praktijk. De auteurs onderzoeken de overeenkomsten en verschillen van de islam in het Britse, Franse en Portugese koloniale bestuur. Zij maken gebruik van hun expertise om de aard van de regelgeving in verschillende historische periodes en geografische gebieden te analyseren. Deze studie opent nieuwe mogelijkheden voor mondiaal onderzoek naar studies van de islam.