Contemporary policies regarding the accommodation of transnational Islam in western Europe: the success and failure of muslim Representative organizations

This article deals with the problem of state involvement in the creation of representative umbrella structures for Muslims in Western Europe from the 1970s onwards. Based on a wide range of previous studies, official documents and media reports, it offers a general overview of the current state of this issue in sixteen European countries with different models of church-state relations and different sizes of Muslim populations. On the most basic level, the article demonstrates that the choice of government policies in this area has been determined by a combination of objective and subjective factors predominant in each specific context, rather than by some overarching European paradigm rooted in the principles of secularity. In this regard, it is highly indicative that common social, religious or cultural backgrounds of certain societies did not automatically translate into the deployment of similar strategies of accommodation of Islam through the formation of single representative entities. By contrast, countries with different state-church arrangements but similar political motivations often adopt comparable approaches to dealing with this problem. In order to illustrate such effects, three major clusters of cases have been singled out based on the level of state involvement and the level of success of the umbrella-type entities in executing their designated tasks of mediation between Muslims communities and European governments. Overall, the argument of this paper is that, despite some initial optimistic assessments of these processes, from the perspective of the mid-2020s the policies of political interference with the “natural” dynamics of the institutionalization of Muslim minorities can hardly be viewed as an effective means of managing the inherently transnational (or “transplanted”) nature of European Islam as a conglomerate of various, often conflicting, theological, cultural and ideological agendas.