The 21 st -century impact of European Muslim minorities on ‘Official Islam’ in the Muslim-majority world

Dismantling the Islam state?

The electoral victories of Islamist parties in Turkey’s ‘silent Islamic reformation’ and across North Africa following the recent ‘Arab awakening’ represent the most serious challenge to civilian control over religion in 50 years. Since the early 1960s, a range of avowedly ‘secular’ and self-declared ‘Islamic’ nation-states consolidated their rule by enshrining regime-friendly, taxpayer-sponsored religious services in national constitutions. ¹ Across the southern Mediterranean, bureaucracies dedicated to religious affairs expanded so much as to rival the largest ministries and to account for over 1% of the national budget. By monopolizing the resources for prayer and education, ruling what is religiously permissible and what is not, adding specific rituals and omitting others, a network of norms and services has built up an ‘Islam state’ that paves the believer’s path to the ummah and the divine.

What will become of the enormous Islamic Affairs ministries that Islamist parties have inherited – the hundreds of thousands of public servants of state Islam across the region, the hundreds of religious schools and the tens of thousands of mosques? Liberals demand the abolition of the ‘Islam state’ because it violates the separation of religion and state; Islamists detest it for its repressive qualities. The departure of secularist strong men from the region and the decline of Baa’thism and Kemalism therefore mark a critical juncture for institutionalized Islam. Its fate reopens the question of an independent role for shariah courts and religious sages from North Africa to Turkey and the greater Middle East. For the first time since falling under Ottoman and then western tutelage, there is the realistic prospect that traditional religious institutions might shake off the bureaucratic harness and reassume some of their erstwhile roles – independent from political oversight and reporting to no ministry at all. In view of the desire expressed in polls and elections for more ‘Islamic’ government, one might assume the imminent dismantling of an oppressive official Islamic apparatus often characterized as a ‘western ally’. ² While it would be unreasonable to expect privatization of these public services to take place overnight, the general anticipation is that disestablishment will follow political liberalization. This would be consistent with many although not all western cases, and it would fit the argument of Amal Jamal (2009) that ‘democratization obliges the easing of the integration of religion and state and the deinstitutionalization of the official religion of the state’. ³ Moreover, the unmooring of religion from the purposes of state and the dispersal of state-centered religious authority would be a significant step towards Islamist utopia: ‘realization of a pan-Islamic state governed by the shar’ia in which Ulama interpret the law, and the caliphs administer the affairs of that state, raise taxes, and organize the army and the justice system’. ⁴

In reality, institutional developments in the past decade have gone in the opposite direction: contrary to expectations, and despite greater political participation and political liberalization, popularly elected governments have assumed an ever more prominent role in state-run religion. In other words, it is the state that administers the affairs of the caliphs, interprets the shariah, and is governed by law, not the other way around. As Vatikiotis argued, even though the ‘territorial nation-state … is rejected by Islamic doctrine … one is impressed by the tenacity of the state institutions in Islam as a structure of temporal … power’ (1987: 99).

The activities of Turkish, Moroccan, Egyptian and Tunisian religious affairs officials suggest that governments elected in the past 2 to 10 years have no immediate intention to change this. Not only have they made no serious attempt to increase the independence of national religious authorities; on the contrary, they have been strengthening the apparatus – and not only by stacking it with political allies. From 2002 to 2012, it is possible to observe the increasingly rigorous enforcement of the state’s religious monopoly, e.g. closing bookstores, dismissing disobedient imams, arresting unlicensed preachers, shutting down illegal Qur’an courses and opening state-run courses. But the years that have transpired since these countries’ respective ‘Spring’ are most of all distinguished by the positive steps taken to grow these bureaucracies beyond all earlier limits. The Moroccan Ministry of Habous and Islamic Affairs, for example, had the fastest-growing budget of all ministries last year, making it as large as that of the royal household; it recently received a 1,130% increase for imam education. The budget of the Turkish Presidency for Religious Affairs is equivalent to four ministries, and is as large as that of the Transportation Ministry. Since 2008 its budget and personnel have spiked upwards, now numbering over 120,000 civil servants. Across all cases, we have witnessed the growth of state-run mandatory and voluntary religious education as well as steps taken to consolidate governance of national network of publicly owned mosques reform and modernization of the recruitment and training of both the Imamat and the Ulema.

Although these represent the largest such figures to date – both relative to population size and as a proportion of the budget – this lavishing of attention signals continuity, not rupture, for the state’s ongoing monopoly over religious affairs. Even where political alternation has taken place – for example, in Turkey between 1998 and 2002 – the apparatus kept growing in a consensual, cross-party fashion. The last decade of democratization experienced a slightly accelerated rate but maintained the overall upward trend since the early 1960s.

Why are Islamists wholeheartedly embracing an apparatus they found so repugnant just a few years ago? Governing has given them a new perspective: they now have their own revolution to defend. In Egypt, Tunisia and Libya today’s Islamist parties now pose as the guarantors against radical Salafists – some of whom have declared outright war on even the most conservative elements in the new regimes. Morsi thus regularly paid his respects to the state’s front-line figures in the intra-Sunni battle: the Grand Imam of Al Azhar, the Mufti of the Republic and the Ministry of Religious Associations – some of whom were holdovers from the ancien régime. Former President Morsi was right to worry about his right-hand flank: sitting on the stage in Cairo with the new military leadership were his arch-enemies, the Salafists from the Nour Party; but it appears that he could have paid more respect to the religious establishment as well.

The governing Islamist parties in Turkey, Tunisia and (until 2013) Egypt did not engineer the state sponsorship of Islam. They inherited a sprawling complex of institutions and services from their military-backed predecessors. Over the past 60 years, the civilian control of religion was used to reinforce national identity and counter the influence of brotherhoods, missionaries and political groups that were considered seditious. This often meant the ideological forebears of today’s governing Islamist parties. Around one-quarter of Turkey’s 93,000 mosques, for example, were built since the 1980s. Prime Minister Erdogan’s Justice and Development Party has overseen only the last 17,000. In the early 1970s only 15% of Egypt’s mosques were under government control. By the time Mubarak left, 45% of the country’s 55,000 mosques were overseen by the state; and many of the rest were built thanks to public financial assistance. In 2013, half of the Egyptian mosques were summarily fired when an Al Azhar diploma was made a prerequisite. Similar to an established national Church, an ‘Islam state’ in Turkey and across most of North Africa aims to structure all formal aspects of citizens’ spirituality. A large caste of public servants runs the mosques, prayers, sermons, life-cycle services, religious education, theology faculties and religious interpretation by councils of sheikhs.

The persistence of state Islam confounds expectations. After the long-awaited ascension to government of the ‘people’s’ legitimate representatives, how does the ‘Second Estate’ survive without being discredited from its complicity with the ‘First Estate’ under the ancien régime? Why hasn’t centralized, surveillant state Islam been cast aside, if that is the presumed preference of both liberals and Islamists?

This Islamist entanglement with official religion also fits the case of power-sharing arrangements, such as in Morocco, where Islamic Affairs remains one of the king’s ‘sovereign ministries’. Its 52,000 employees have the fastest-growing budget in government, a sum now equal to that of the royal household itself. The budget for training Moroccan imams was increased tenfold in the last three years. Neighboring Algeria’s fear of Salafist encroachment has led the Religious Affairs Ministry there to hire thousands of new employees annually and to try to keep political parties out of mosques.

Some of this ideological turf war is necessary for national security. Salafists and Al-Qaeda-linked extremists carried out physical attacks and acts of terrorism in all of these countries in 2012 and 2013. But the religious monopoly that post-Arab Spring governments jealously guard also forces non-violent religious movements outside of institutional life and weakens the state’s own legitimacy. The result is that some of today’s most influential brotherhoods exert power in a domain completely separate from the rule of law. Because they do not register as either religious organizations or political parties, they remain unaccountable to democratic institutions.

Is Islam exceptional?

Several competing arguments may shed light on this apparent decoupling of democratization and disestablishment. The first is that this outcome is determined by the relationship of religion and politics in Islam. These spheres’ vaunted unity makes any Muslim state especially attentive to claim a monopoly on that union just as energetically as it does, say, over the use of violence. The overlay of political and religious domains in Islam – a principal Muslim innovation over preceding monotheisms – would fulfill one of the Muslim Brotherhood maxims, al Qur’an dusturna [The Qur’an is our constitution].

This over-determinism is part of what makes the study of Islamic politics the dismal science of our time. Today’s anti-Malthusian theorists, however, including Nader Hashemi (2012), have argued for a variation of these views, offering a subtler approach to contemporary sentiments towards the balance of religion and politics in the Arab world, at least. Hashemi writes that many Arab societies were so ‘deeply shaped by the negative experiences of post-colonial authoritarianism and the forms of secularism associated with these regimes … For a generation of Arabs, “secularism” is associated with dictatorship, repression, and nepotism.’ ⁵ Still other scholars have made well-supported claims regarding the legitimacy of religious authorities having served as a counterweight to secular rulers’ power. ⁶

A second explanation that also goes a long way is: inertia. ⁷ Because of the scale of resources dedicated to official Islam, any attempt to throw things into reverse will encounter enormous bureaucratic resistance. Pierson’s examination of Margaret Thatcher’s bid to dismantle the Welfare State in the United Kingdom provides some insight on this. Even a party elected specifically on a platform promising to cut certain state services will face the opposition of numerous constituencies well beyond the concerned public employees.

Other scholars of the study of religion and democracy in relation to diaspora politics have examined outreach policies and models (Mügge, 2010, 2011, 2012, 2013). Lyons and Mandaville draw attention in their recent paper to ‘How politics in the country of origin has been transformed by the current upsurge in the political activism of increasingly mobile, transnational populations’ (cf. Koslowski, ed., 2005). Others have shown how Alevis affected state Islam at home (Özyürek, 2008). ⁸ The scholarly literature generally leads one to expect religious outreach and control to decrease as migrants become citizens and as host societies create domestic institutions. As Levitt and Waters recently wrote: ‘homeland politics are too distant in both time and space … so that second and subsequent generations attachments become weaker and more generalized’ (see Lyons and Mandaville, 2008: 19).

These arguments, however, cannot sufficiently account for the contemporary survival – indeed thriving – of state Islam under Islamist governments, who instead set new goals for growth and coverage of the national territory. There is more to this story than either Muslim exceptionalism or institutional ‘stickiness’. Rather, the ideological and practical features of state Islam as the ‘hard edge’ of the state home and a tool of ‘soft power’ abroad must be taken seriously to understand what is taking place. Externally, the export of state Islam has traditionally allowed governments to enhance their geo-political status and influence abroad. It serves an international mission by way of its religious leadership and soft power: think of Diyanet’s traditional role in Central Asia and the Balkans; the role of the Moroccan Emir al Mouamine and Habous ministry’s role among neighboring Malakite populations in Africa; or Al Azhar’s training of Sunni religious scholars worldwide.

Domestically, controlling the conditions for public prayer and religious education have been instruments brought to bear on filling voids in governance and homogenizing the state’s authority, as described by scholars of secular and religious nation-building over the territory – and this has carried on into the 2010s. Official religion has been wielded against political and religious extremisms, regionalisms and other splinter movements. State Islam accomplishes its domestic mission, at least in theory, ‘by monopolizing the public use of religion and demarking a political status quo that is labeled “Islamic,” strips the public sphere of “religious politics” that could challenge the status quo’ (Wyrtzen, 2011: 6). In addition, this effectively denies religion a private sphere. State exercise of this repressive role has sometimes been portrayed as an over-reaction not just to the danger of religious extremism but also to other forms of political opposition.

As states have fulfilled their dual missions in the past several decades, however, they face an unexpected twist on earlier nation-building experiences: namely, the existence of a large Muslim diaspora in western Europe. The modern Muslim state’s ‘territory’ includes a chunk of extra-territorial territory and constituents comprise a diaspora that includes millions of EU citizens abroad.

The European crucible

The European experience of Muslim minorities has influenced the Islam state’s development in unexpected ways, ultimately by stimulating it to expand quantitatively and qualitatively. For Muslim governments, large diasporas raised hard questions: those abroad could do in relative freedom what was banned at home. The growth in religious service provisions for these groups abroad was linked to growth in the Islam state at home; and experiments in greater pluralism abroad have led to experiments in greater pluralism at home.

Western Europe has inadvertently served as the host to millions of Muslims during two volatile stages of nation-building in the Muslim world. In the first stage, these countries absorbed the externalities of nation-building, a potent mixture of political exiles and economic migrants from regions on poor terms with the central state. The diaspora grew during a period of state consolidation in the Muslim world (1955–65), and politicians and preachers from persecuted movements or parties frequently found a safe haven and an audience from France and Germany to Spain and Italy. European governments generally ignored this minority for the next several decades. In the second stage, European states undertook their own nation-building projects by seeking to integrate the Muslim minority, and this took place during a phase of democratization in the Muslim world (2002–12). It is possible to see the push and pull of coopting and repressing political Islam at home spill over into Europe. There are significant institutional thrusts after each coup and wave of repression in the 1970s, 1980s, 1990s, with the arrival of Jam’at I Islami (India/Pakistan-based brotherhood), Muslim Brotherhood and Milli Görüs (the Political Islam group known as ‘National Vision’), among others.

I do not have space to present my cases in-depth here and will only briefly mention some aspects of the Turkish case: in particular, the 1950 end of single party rule by the Republican People’s Party (CHP in Turkish) and the introduction of a multiparty system and competitive elections. Under a subsequent decade-long Democrat Party rule, initial relations with the diaspora are developed, and the Turkish governance of Islam at home is closely tied to growth of this diaspora abroad, and culminates in the 1960 coup (Landau, 2010: 22). This was particularly true for Turkey because economic migration to Europe predominantly originated in the south and east, where Islamist parties drew political support – sometimes as much the expression of center–periphery tensions as clerical–anti-clerical divides. The rise of the Milli Görüs movement and associated parties through the 1970s – headquartered in the environs of the German capital city of Bonn – culminate in the 1980 coup. Because of the punishing approach towards dissidents at home –extreme nationalists and Islamists alike – many radical leaders chose self-exile among the growing Turkish diaspora in Europe (ibid.). These new arrivals were initially met with surveillance and repression. It is not by chance that it was in the year 1982 that one of the first acts of the Presidency for Religious Affairs (known as Diyanet) was to send state representatives to Europe and to open a full department and budgetary line devoted to Turks Abroad within Diyanet.

Similar dynamics are at work, at different points in the cycle, in Morocco, Tunisia, Algeria and Pakistan. From the 1970s through the 2000s, these countries’ diaspora posed security and stability issues. For decades, the diaspora’s large size (up to 10% of national populations, respectively) lay beyond the reach of new political and religious institutions in the Muslim world and under the radar of local governments in Europe. Religious actors were governed by a set of foreign laws where restrictions on religious and political behavior are far fewer. A full generation of European governments hesitated to define and tackle challenges of immigrant integration and religious pluralism. In that period, the minority was targeted by predominantly pan-Islamist movements. The vacuum was filled by Wahhabism (Landau, 2010), and the Muslim World League who poured tens of millions annually into construction of mosques in Europe, and who became official interlocutors in Belgium, Spain, Italy (Vidino, 2010). Each decade brought reminders of governments’ lack of control over the situation in Europe, leading to internal and external pressures to clean up the act abroad. In the 1980s and the 1990s, revolutionary Shi’ism, PKK, GIA and reactionary Wahhabism; in the 2000s, al Qaeda affiliates; the concrete meaning of this was made plain when terrorists with Moroccan roots attacked in Amsterdam, Madrid and Casablanca. Observe the perverse situation that in 2000s Europe, more Moroccan imams work for the Saudi king than for the Moroccan king!

This growing pressure contributed to demands for a large increase in resources and means targeting citizens abroad. We see the growth in bureaucratic services, from the Conseil Consultatif des Marocains de l’Étranger (CCME) to the directorate for Turkish and Related Communities Abroad (Yurtdisi Türkler). It is the simultaneous effort to fill the vacuum of religious services for citizens and their descendants abroad, however, that is most revealing. The combination of newfound European and Muslim world interest has helped forge a new state–Islam bargain. Part of the impulse and justification for the growth of new bureaucracy were precisely the new challenges presented by citizens abroad. Addressing the voids in Europe forced Muslim governments to raise their game at home. The growth of religious affairs bureaucracies at home was partly the effect of European Muslims’ very existence: constitutional duties towards the diaspora and its religious needs – as well as potential threat.

Just as countries of origin sought new ways to stay involved in the daily life of the diaspora, however, European governments began to devote significant resources to integrating Islamic organizations into the prevailing state–Church framework at the same moment. Europeans assessed the need for more pluralism and expanded their range of partners in the Muslim communities. The reform of Islam policies in Europe led to the demotion and loss of monopoly for home countries. While falling short of full religious equality, governments in Europe have begun to take Islam seriously (Laurence, 2012). Doing so has had some of the desired effect –a more predictable range of leadership committed to institutional solutions – but also some unintended consequences. The incentive to be considered ultimately forced modernization and professionalization that have lasting effects at home and abroad.

In particular, this ultimately created an equalized playing field with dissidents and competitors in Europe, where local authorities forced the issue by establishing representative Islam councils. This move encouraged the establishment of detachable foreign religious services for export. Islam has been able to play a continuing role in citizens’ lives not because of unflinching state control over religion, but rather because that very religious control was consistently challenged from abroad. This has led to greater flexibility on issues ranging from the place of religion in the public sphere, through the separation of religion and state, religious reform and modernization, party politics, and required meeting with the ‘opposition’. Political actors from the state and opposition have been kept busy adapting to European standards in competition for influence over European diasporas (Laurence, 2012). An ironic outcome of the experience abroad – described by some critics of Islam as a ‘reverse colonization’ (Caldwell, 2009): with European regions effectively coming under the extra-territorial oversight of Islamic Affairs ministries abroad, the homeland authorities have had to internalize the norms of interior and justice ministries in Paris and Milan, from Berlin to Birmingham. This has contributed to the overhaul of what was becoming a creaky official state Islam, with some observers arguing that new energy had been injected into Diyanet to make it something more exciting: a new era of growth and reform. This is as significant a development as the onset of the Islamic infrastructure that made up the official Islam in the 1960s, described at the time as ‘no less than the transition from medieval into modern times’ (Mackeen, 1965).

If the Islam state keeps growing without reforming its statutes to become more inclusive, then it will miss out on these and other important social and political realities. Such an unhealthy dynamic will be familiar to those who have finally made it into power after decades underground. They know that propping up the majority religion’s state monopoly while barely tolerating peaceable minorities is unsustainable and unfair. Or at least these same governments have all argued this to be the case for Muslims in western Europe.

But if the new regimes cannot manage a better synthesis of publicly supported religion, then burgeoning social changes will likely make it clear, sooner or later, that they do not deserve to keep these powers. On the other hand, liberals and secularists should proceed cautiously and preach reform of the Islam state, not disestablishment. Dismantling it with no transitional plan would unleash anarchy in a field that has been regulated for centuries. There have been some glimpses of reform: Turkey and Morocco have made overtures to women, linguistic and religious minorities. Earlier this year in Egypt and Libya, the ruling Muslim Brotherhood parties accepted the appointment of well-known ‘moderate’ leaders for key roles in the Islamic affairs apparatus. But so far, not enough has been done to convince anyone that an equitable outcome of religious pluralism lies ahead.