The politics of visibility: Muslim leadership and public recognition in Belgium and Switzerland

Across Europe, Muslim leaders face a dilemma in deciding whether to seek recognition and public visibility. Recognition can offer legitimacy, funding, and stability, yet it also exposes Muslim groups to scrutiny and political contestation. While existing research has documented divergent patterns of Muslim public engagement, it has paid limited attention to the decision-making experiences of Muslim leaders themselves, particularly as localized actors navigating subnational political environments. This paper argues that the choice to seek recognition is best understood as a calculation under uncertainty: Muslim leaders weigh the expected probability of success against the perceived risk of backlash that greater visibility might provoke. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork and over 70 interviews with Muslim leaders and policymakers in Belgium and Switzerland, I develop the concept of institutionally mediated inference to explain how political structures shape the informational cues through which actors form these expectations. In Belgium, recognition is governed by regional executives whose partisan alignments provide clear heuristics of state openness or hostility. In Switzerland, recognition is filtered through practices of direct democracy, where the looming possibility of referenda renders outcomes unpredictable and heightens the perceived risk of backlash. The findings highlight that what appears as disengagement does not reflect indifference toward recognition, but rather a strategic response to the risks that visibility entails. By centering the interpretive agency of Muslim actors, the paper shifts analysis from state-centric accounts of recognition to the reasoning of those navigating it, bridging debates on political opportunity, secularism, and the governance of Islam in Europe.