Abstract
This special issue deals with Islamic authority-making among Muslims of migrant background in predominantly Western Europe. Religious authority is persuasive power in religious matters, regarding issues of knowledge and institutional competence, and of truth, authenticity, legitimacy, trust, and ethics. The seven articles in this special issue address some of the manifold ways in which Islamic authority comes about. They show that authority should not be reduced to the leadership or personal status of religious scholars and other religious professionals; it can also be attributed to bodies of knowledge, to institutions, to legal, ethical and material matters, and to events. Islamic authority is a crucial element in shaping Islamic landscapes in all their diversity.
1 What is Islamic Authority?
The articles brought together in this special issue deal with the making of Islamic authority among Muslims of migrant background in Western Europe.1 Religious authority is persuasive power in religious matters, regarding issues of knowledge and institutional competence, and of truth, authenticity, legitimacy, trust, and ethics. Islamic authority is a crucial element in shaping Islamic landscapes in all their diversity, or put differently, most of what can be observed with regard to evolving Islamic landscapes boils down to questions of authority.2
Religious authority is a qualification commonly attributed to religious professionals (see e.g., Chaves, 2003: 38), but it should not be conflated with, or reduced to the leadership or personal status of religious scholars and other religious professionals; it can also be attributed to bodies of knowledge, to institutions, to legal, ethical and material matters, and to events. Many good studies have been published about the authoritative status of religious experts and their role in Islamic knowledge production,3 but if we confine religious authority to religious experts, we miss important aspects.
Islamic authority is emphatically temporal. Since it is embedded in ever-evolving societal dynamics and power configurations, it must be reconfirmed continuously. We therefore propose to speak of authority-making to indicate its processual character. It is a process of authentication, of attributing truth to religious sources, persons and things by human beings in relation to the legitimacy of Islamic sources and rituals, triggered by societal, political and other circumstances and developments (see Schulz, 2006; Fadil, 2017; Sunier, 2018).
Islamic authority is also an elusive and ambiguous phenomenon, widely referred to in public and political debates, whether implicitly or explicitly. The recurrent discussion across Europe about visiting preachers in mosques and their possible influence on young Muslims, for example, is ultimately a discussion about their legitimacy and thus their authority. Rogers Brubaker shows how the term ‘Muslim’ has taken on a double function. As an ‘analytical category’, it must explain certain phenomena; as a ‘category of practice’, it is being used in public speech. Thus: ‘The traffic between categories of analysis and categories of practice makes it important for scholars to adopt a critical and self-reflexive stance towards the categories we use’ (Brubaker, 2013: 1).
The meaning and application of certain terminology is also relevant for questions of governmentality. The issue of authority in Muslim communities has received particular attention since the 1990s. The growing concern for religious matters on the part of migrants and the related processes of the institutionalisation of Islam have resulted in requests for the recognition of ‘Islamic practices’ by governments at national and local levels. Several Muslim communities began to organise themselves into associations that claimed to represent Islam and were eager to enter into negotiations with government bodies. Somewhat later, individuals and associations founded institutions, including several Islamic universities, for the transmission of Islamic knowledge to Muslims. This took place in almost all countries in Europe that had a sizable Muslim population, although in different arrangements according to the national legal provisions. Initially, just established European Islamic studies scholars were consulted and only much later did Muslims become involved.4
These developments catered to a demand on the part of administrative institutions to find reliable partners with whom they could ‘do business’ in an efficient way.5 We could witness a moving away from a colonial approach in which external ‘orientalists’ provided knowledge about Islamic normativity, to an approach in which national and local administrations actively encouraged some Muslim representatives ‘to speak for Islam’. Some self-appointed authorities were all too eager to jump to the task.
The relevance of Islamic authority, however, extends far beyond political and institutional issues. The aim of this special issue is to explore the dynamics of the manifold process of Islamic authority-making among Muslims of migrant background by addressing the following overall questions: (1) what are the modalities of Islamic authority; (2) what is being authorised; and (3) what are the constituent sources and contexts that produce modes of Islamic authority?
2 Assessing Islamic Authority
In most classical historical and religious studies on Islam and the Muslim world, written by Western orientalists, remarkably little can be found about Islamic authority. It seems that Islamic authority was predominantly taken for granted as a purely theological quality, based on knowledge of Islamic legal sources and traditions. Only much later interest for Islamic authority as a socio-political phenomenon grew. Dale Eickelman (1985) has written a biography of a judge in Morocco; Richard Antoun (1989) has considered the important figure of the preacher in Jordan; Brinkley Messick (1992) has studied the practices of muftis and judges in Yemen; and John Bowen (1993) has focused on debates about Islamic law in Indonesia. Studies on Islamic scholars at al-Azhar University in Cairo by Malika Zeghal (1996) and in Pakistan and India by Muhammad Qasim Zaman (2002), constitute other important landmarks in the creation of the field. Since then, various thorough studies have been published in which Islamic authority is addressed explicitly.
In studies on Muslims from migrant backgrounds in Europe, Islamic authority is still largely ignored. Research in this area is still dominated by the rather limited ‘accommodation and integration paradigm’, which casts the embedding of Islam in Europe as the negotiating process between collective actors such as governments and Muslim organisations (Sunier, 2014).6
While this lack of attention is understandable for studies that focus predominantly on the regulation of Islam by European administrations, its absence in many other areas is remarkable since the rapidly changing European Islamic landscape presents an abundance of critical cases and situations in which authority is the pivotal factor that should be questioned and assessed. Radicalisation among young Muslims, the training of imams, and the alleged influence on mosques by foreign agencies are obvious examples, but the position of Muslim women and the very topical discussion in mosques about vaccination against Covid-19 also touch on issues of authority and legitimation.
A likely cause for this neglect is the assumption that the quest for religious authority will become obsolete when religion becomes privatised under the influence of secularisation and modernisation. In many studies published in the 1990s and 2000s that deal with the religiosity of Muslims in Europe, the so-called ‘individualisation thesis’ is the dominant perspective from which to assess transformations of religiosity. The individualisation thesis is part of the secularisation paradigm. According to its proponents, individualisation will be the necessary outcome of the encounter of Muslims from Asia, Africa and the Middle-East with Europe’s secular political and public culture. One of the consequences will be that the collective and normative frameworks that have shaped Islam and have been brought to Europe by migrants will gradually dissolve to be replaced by privatised and individualised forms of religiosity. This would make authoritative guidance obsolete (see e.g., Cesari, 2003; 2004; 2013). The individualisation thesis is the yardstick by which developments among Muslims in Europe are being assessed and understood. This can particularly be observed in studies that make the social integration of migrants their main focus.7
As early as 2006, Frank Peter (2006) concluded that the study of Islamic authority among Muslims in Europe is in need of a more sophisticated assessment than the individualisation perspective (see also Peter and Arigita, 2006). In 2011, Martin van Bruinessen and Stefano Allievi published an edited volume with articles presented at an academic workshop, organised by the Dutch International Institute for the Study of Islam in the Modern World (ISIM), titled ‘Muslim Religious Authority in Europe’. The workshop aimed at understanding the rapidly changing Islamic landscapes in Europe from the perspective of Islamic authority and knowledge production. The editors concluded that remarkably little theoretical reflection on the actual process of knowledge production and on the (re-) making of Islamic authority was taking place (van Bruinessen and Allievi, 2011).
Only very recently an increased interest in issues of Islamic authority among Muslims of migrant background can be observed.8 Also, a number of recent studies on Salafism have addressed the issue of Islamic authority.9 In the research project ‘Making Islam Work in the Netherlands’ (MIWIN), which ran from 2013 to 2019, Islamic authority was the main focus.10
3 Islamic Authority-Making: Processes, Actors and Contexts
We focus on the processual aspects of authority and the importance of human agency at work in its making. This brings to the fore a number of conceptual strands variously addressed by the authors of this special issue.
3.1 Islam as a Discursive Tradition
As we have said, Islamic authority does not self-evidently emanate from a decontextualised essential core, the ‘Islam of the book’. If it did, it would for one thing not account for the fact that Muslims hotly debate even this core; it must constantly be reconfirmed and re-understood. Shahab Ahmed (2016: 405) argues that something is ‘Islamic’ to the extent that it is made meaningful in terms of hermeneutical engagement with the Revelation. This is the human activity of authority-making.
We take up the notion of Talal Asad (2012 [1986]) of Islam as a ‘discursive tradition’. A religious tradition, he argues, has an authoritative status and operates as an ethical guideline, not because it has timeless qualities, but because it has come about as a result of a historical process of authentication of Islamic sources.
[An] Islamic discursive tradition is simply a tradition of Muslim discourse that addresses itself to conceptions of the Islamic past and future, with reference to a particular Islamic practice in the present. Clearly, not everything Muslims say and do belongs to an Islamic discursive tradition. Nor is an Islamic tradition in this sense necessarily imitative of what was done in the past. (ibid.: 15)
Asad demonstrates that religious authority-making is a dynamic process of both confirmation and critical reflection, of continuity and of renewal. If a discursive tradition is created by generations of Muslims debating the correct form of practice with a view to its past, present and future, then to act Islamically is to engage with certain sources and themes, and act upon this discursive tradition. Schirin Amir-Moazami and Armando Salvatore (2003: 53) refer to this engagement as ‘internal interventions’.
3.2 A Political Economy of Knowledge
Authority-making is relational and must be assessed as a modality of power. This implicates interaction between people and the building of discursive communities and audiences. It brings to the fore the question of how to bring together into one analytical framework the theological and spiritual underpinnings of religious authority and the social and political bedrocks. As Gudrun Krämer and Sabine Schmidtke (2014: 1) argue:
[R]eligious authority can assume a number of forms and functions: the ability (chance, power, or right) to define correct belief and practice, or orthodoxy and orthopraxy, respectively; to shape and influence the views and conduct of others accordingly; to identify, marginalize, punish or exclude deviance, heresy and apostasy and their agents and advocates. In the monotheistic religions founded on revealed scripture, religious authority further involves the ability (chance, power, or right) to compose and define the canon of ‘authoritative’ texts and the legitimate methods of interpretation. Even so brief a sketch illustrates how easily the distinction between authority and power can become blurred.
Religious authority and knowledge production, we argue, are the result of what Michael Lambek calls a ‘political economy of knowledge’: ‘How are we to characterize the order to which people submit? Where is the locus of power?’ (1990: 28). Authority-making is by definition embedded in specific historical, political and social power configurations. Authoritative theological qualifications are the result of debate, negotiation and struggle. In his historical analysis of the ulama in the Indian subcontinent in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Muhammad Qasim Zaman convincingly demonstrates that ‘tradition’ can never be frozen into an unchangeable body of knowledge that speaks for itself. ‘[It] is the recurrent effort by Muslims to articulate authority and evaluate claims to such authority by positing and reaffirming a connectedness to the past’ (Zaman, 2012: 4; see also Zaman, 2014). As Masooda Bano (2018b) argues, a discussion about Islamic authority is a discussion about the status of religious knowledge and the institutions that produce that knowledge, the ‘Islamic authority platforms’. Scholarly knowledge remains lofty and aloof if scholars are not able to engage with the realities of the time (ibid.: 31). Many contemporary practices and initiatives by young Muslims involve a reflection on the meaning of Islamic sources in novel ways but with reference to the past.11
3.3 Societal and Technical Transformations
We contend that the dynamics of authority-making constitute an inherent aspect of the history of Islam, but are particularly salient under conditions of change and transformation, and in unprecedented circumstances. The fundamental societal changes that took place in the wake of the colonial subjugation of large parts of the Muslim world in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries generated a vast body of literature on the implications of these changes, soon to be subsumed under the common denominator of ‘modernisation’. The modernity paradigm became the point of reference in many of the Western studies that have since been published on the societal dimensions of Islam. It generated a set of questions and propositions about the characteristics of Islam as a tradition, its dogmatic underpinnings and its social and political parameters.
There are two rather fundamental flaws in much of this Western scholarship. First, the assumption that, prior to the European invasion, the so-called ‘Islamic world’ was eternally fixed by unchangeable theological dogmas (Asad, 1993). Second, the assumption that it was only after the European encounter that thinking about reform and change among Muslims was actuated. However, the history of Islam was a history of change and development already long before the colonial onslaught. The vast body of scholarly work by Islamic theologians produced over centuries deals predominantly with reflection and reasoning on societal and political transformations (Zaman, 2012; Ahmed, 2016). The colonial era was just one of many events that inspired Muslims to reflect on and reinterpret Islamic sources.
Authority-making is particularly salient and vibrant under so-called frontier conditions. David Chidester (2018) has developed the concept of frontier to explore politics in post-colonial states in Africa. He focuses mainly on policy interventions and administrative control in new circumstances, but any societal, political or technological transformation, we argue, generates unstructured realms, where conditions are unsettled, messy, ‘pre-legalised’, but also formative and productive, creating unexpected possibilities. In that respect, it is reminiscent of what Arjun Appadurai (1996: 31) calls ‘imagination as a social practice’.
In recent decades globalisation as well as technological innovation, have been major developments that generated ideas on how Muslims should deal with contemporary modes of what Ulf Hannerz (1992) so aptly called ‘cultural complexity’. One of such fundamental developments generating frontier conditions was the migration to Europe after WW II. Migrants with a Muslim background encountered a new and unknown society and, contrary to what has often been assumed, from the early stages of migration onwards, Muslims reflected on how to deal with these new circumstances (Abaaziz, 2021). Alexandre Caeiro (2010; 2011) has analysed theological work on Islamic law, particularly the production of fatwas focusing on Muslims living in a minority situation.
Subsequent generations became more involved in society as a result of upward mobility and better education, which also led to greater ‘Islamic literacy’. This intensified their engagement with all facets of society but also made them aware of mechanisms of exclusion, discrimination, and racism with which they were confronted. This has shaped their experiences and has generated reflections and discussions about what being Muslim entails, leading to a quest for religious guidance and a better understanding of Islam as an identity.
It is widely accepted that the emergence of modern mass media, especially the spread of the internet, has unsettled established forms of Islamic authority.12 Against the background of the quest for religious guidance, modern mass media have allowed a tremendous increase in the number of voices in the public sphere and a diversification of audiences (Eickelman and Anderson, 2003; de Koning, 2008). This process has sometimes been referred to as the fragmentation of authority and knowledge production. However, this fragmentation process is often taken almost to the point where religious authority seems to become obsolete and evaporates, and religion becomes a completely privatised pursuit. This is much in line with the individualisation thesis discussed above.
While the rapid increase in new forms of knowledge production and dissemination, and the individual search for knowledge by Muslims, may have contributed to the fragmentation of authority and knowledge production, this does not necessarily mean that the quest for guidance has faded or become irrelevant. On the contrary, the sheer overkill of knowledge platforms, chat and discussion sites, websites and self-appointed religious experts often causes ‘information stress’. This has increased the felt need for spiritual guidance and the quest for truth more than ever before. The quest for authority in matters of Islam coincided with a strong rise in interest in scriptural forms of Islam, in which old and new texts and authoritative interpretations through sermons and other forms of public performances played a vital role.
3.4 Bottom-Up Critical Reflection
Theologies are not made exclusively in official venues by religious experts, but at a multiplicity of places and a diversity of occasions, and not only by experts. ‘Expert religion’ is a specific domain of activity and reasoning, to be distinguished from the no less important religious activities of non-experts (Davie, 2006: 274). Linda Woodhead (2013: 16) brings to the fore the distinction between ‘strategic religion’ as the religion of experts and scholarly authorities who are ‘constantly engaged in operations to delimit and guard its sacred spaces’, and ‘tactical religion’ as a domain of reflection, ambiguity, creativity and innovation. Both domains are in constant interaction and negotiation with one another.
If we assume that authority-making is contextual, it follows that religious reasoning cannot be separated from social critique by ordinary Muslims in everyday situations. Religious authority is dynamic; it is not just the imposition of normative frames upon ordinary believers, but also bottom-up critical reflection on established authoritative frames. By the slightly problematic term ‘ordinary’, we refer to Muslims who are not religious experts, and to their quotidian activities, practices, ideas and experiences. We refer here to a scholarly field in the study of religion with ‘everyday religion’ as the core concept, addressing the bottom-up experiences and religious practices of people of faith.
Samuli Schielke and Liza Debevec (2012) point to the ambiguity and unpredictability of everyday situations in which Muslims find themselves. They draw on Michel de Certeau’s notion of the everyday as the domain where ordinary Muslims confront the order and discipline of powerful institutions and the necessity to reflect and act (see also Mahmood, 2005; Bracke, 2008). For Muslims, and for every human being for that matter, life consists of periods of relative stability and continuity, alternating with periods of change, development and uncertainty. When unprecedented situations occur, particularly when they are difficult to reconcile with established traditions, frictions and ambiguities occur, and ordinary routines turn into dilemmas. There are many situations in which ordinary Muslims consciously engage with prevailing authoritative structures and prescriptions. In most instances they abide by these normative and authoritative frames. Their religious practices are predominantly confirmative and reproductive. In some cases, however, especially in circumstances of societal change, or under novel social conditions, their wish to live pious lives in accordance with established traditions might lead to frictions, ambiguities and dilemmas. This could result in intense debates with peers about ‘how to live as a good Muslim’ and may lead to a stronger desire for guidance.
3.5 Aesthetics of Religious Authority
Authority is the capacity to convince and to persuade people to act in a certain way, the capacity to inculcate certain dispositions. This is how Max Weber understood charismatic authority as one of the legitimate forms of domination based on emotional devotion and imagination (Eisenstadt, 1968). Building on these insights, we contend that aesthetic and performative forms, skills and styles are crucial prerequisites in making persons, texts, material objects, institutional arrangements and events authoritative and legitimate.
For the making of religious authority, technologies of mediation are indispensable (Engelke, 2004; Eisenlohr, 2011). When old and established categories of authority erode, the capacity to disseminate specific understandings of religious practices and beliefs becomes increasingly based upon rhetoric, performance and visual events (de Witte, de Koning and Sunier, 2015). The performative and persuasive qualities of religious figures, religious knowledge and religious objects as particular modes of mediation, are as important as the very messages that are being conveyed. The emergence of modern digitised mass media has made these persuasive and performative qualities even more timely and immediate. In contemporary media-saturated societies, leaders and spokespersons increasingly need to respond to the forms of auratic and charismatic power found in the mass media.13 Through public performances and modern media, knowledge is disseminated and communities and audiences are created in an unprecedented way. The authority on which religious public figures thrive has important aesthetic dimensions: their multisensory appeal – in media and performances – often plays a vital role in persuading people of religious truths and linking religious forms, knowledge and followers. Followers are being captured on the basis of a strong public presence and persuasive and convincing rhetoric, performance and imagery.
Two important remarks should be added here. First, authority in the digital age is certainly more complex and sophisticated than how many likes one receives on Facebook, how many followers one has on Twitter, or how many people subscribe to a YouTube channel. There is still a tendency to reduce research on digital media to algorithmic calculations. Proper research into these media must include ‘offline’ networks. Second, research into the emergence and growth of digital media still suffers from a rather one-sided contention that digitisation is liberating and democratising, and engenders new possibilities and access to sources and resources. There is an abundance of research, including some of the contributions to this special issue, that shows how digitisation also produces new forms of conditioning, monitoring, disciplining and even coercion.
3.6 Where to Find Islamic Authority?
If Islamic authority is broader than the doctrinal proficiency of (male) religious scholars, and more than a qualification attributed to persons, it means that authority-making must be explored in sometimes unexpected settings and situations. In his work on female religious scholars in Indonesia and Malaysia, David Kloos poses the questions ‘where to find Islamic authority and are we looking at the right places?’ As he states:
[…] the literature does seem to take for granted that female Islamic authority is something unique or remarkable, and yet it can be useful to know in what kind of situations, settings and contexts, or under what circumstances or conditions, gender is – and is not – a salient factor in the lives and activities of female religious leaders. When does gender become an ‘issue’, something that creates constraints, opportunities or determination and therefore needs to be ‘taken into account’? When does it not?
Kloos, 2016: 535; see also idem, 2019.14
To ‘look in the right places’ is indeed an essential methodological requirement. The case of gender is particularly salient because the role of women in issues of Islamic authority is still often ignored or marginalised, also in academic works. But, beyond that, the question of where to find authority prompts us to reconsider that very concept. Rather than starting from a fixed definition of what Islamic authority entails, we argue that a methodology that starts with a systematic gathering of data generating middle-range theoretical insights, is more fruitful and productive for a conceptual field such as authority. This is in line with what Barney Glaser and Anselm Strauss (2017 [1967]) called ‘grounded theory’. As some of the contributions to this special issue show, while certain activities and initiatives may at first sight have little to do with Islamic authority-making, they do turn out to be constitutive of that process. The challenge of every researcher working on authority then is to work with an open mind and yet keep a clear focus on what to look for.
3.7 Contributions
Together, the contributions to this special issue are but a few examples of the richness and multiplicity of dimensions of this field. Masooda Bano opens with an account of the quickly expanding centres of Islamic knowledge production in Europe. She argues that the authority exercised by Islamic scholars is not only contingent on their demonstration of loyalty to the text, but also depends on their ability to relate Islamic teaching to social reality. Thus, being legitimate and truthful in the eyes of a quickly changing audience, is a matter not just of holding on to powerful positions, but also of responding adequately to changing conditions and developments.
Pieter Coppens in his article on tafsir studies, addresses a complex and well-known issue, that of the problematic dichotomy between insider and outsider perspectives. This is the classical conundrum of normativity in Islamic studies; on what grounds is one entitled to engage in theological reasoning? Coppens proposes a ‘historically and sociologically informed normativity’ as the way forward for Islamic theology and, by doing so, sheds new light on Islamic authority.
Arshad Muradin discusses how ‘ordinary’ Muslims look for workable solutions to family and marital disputes in line with their cultural and religious values. More specifically, he analyses the informal processes of reconciliation (sulh) guided by imams of local mosques. He poses the question of why Muslim women and men choose these processes over formal litigation? Muradin shows that many of these disputes are settled much more effectively in informal and low-profile settings.
Ellen van de Bovenkamp provides an intriguing account of the popularity of the Swiss-Egyptian scholar Tariq Ramadan among young people in Morocco. She argues that his popularity cannot be separated from the controversies around his person in France, Morocco’s former colonial power. Bovenkamp demonstrates the importance of engagement with social, cultural and political issues as an indispensable constituent of authority, and argues that Moroccan fans of Ramadan are sensitive to the manner in which he criticises postcolonial power structures.
Dorieke Molenaar analyses four online discussions between young Dutch Muslims from Moroccan descent on the forum Marokko.nl. These discussions about Islamic ideologies, imams and mosques show how the participants try to convince each other of their points of view. Molenaar provides a good example of how ‘ordinary’ Muslims actively engage with questions about Islamic sources, and shows that these online discussions cannot be detached from offline interactions. Online and offline environments are closely entangled.
Johan Fischer addresses the expanding halal markets in Denmark and argues that Muslim authority plays a central and controversial role in the regulation/certification of halal products along two axes: Muslims/non-Muslims and divergent Muslim groups/organisations. Fischer demonstrates that halal production and regulation is a constructive lens through which to explore why and how Muslim authority and legitimacy are generated and contested.
Aleeha Ali explores the majalis, the sermons in the Shi’a ritual in which the battle of Karbala is commemorated, marking the schism between the Sunni and Shi’a traditions in Islam. She particularly addresses Dutch Shi’as’ experiences of majalis and how they vary online and offline. Practitioners seek experiences of authentication in majalis – meaningful, truthful, emotional and legitimising experiences. With the concept of authentication, she points to an intriguing aspect of Islamic authority, namely how truthfulness (of events) comes about.
In short, with these seven articles, this special issue aims to show that Islamic authority is broader that the scholastic knowledge and institutional power of a religious elite. The making of Islamic authority is not an exclusively internal Muslim affair, but a dynamic process that also involves non-Muslim actors, and is inextricably linked with social, cultural and political situations and circumstances.
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The contributions to this special issue all deal with Muslims from migrant backgrounds in countries in the western parts of Europe. Authority-making and the development of authoritative landscapes among this category of Muslims is grounded in specific circumstances related to their background. A comparison with indigenous Muslim communities elsewhere in Europe, or with Muslims elsewhere in the world, would require a different approach. We intend to explore the situations of Muslims who have a post-WW II migration background.
We use the adjective ‘Islamic’, denoting a specific form of religious authority, provisionally for want of a more appropriate term. It erroneously suggests that authoritative qualities emanate self-evidently and directly from Islamic sources, doctrinal principles and theological order. As the term ‘Islamic’ also refers to truth and claims-making, we prefer this one over the often used alternative ‘Muslim religious authority’, which is broader, but also has some serious shortcomings.
See e.g., Antoun, 1989; Zaman, 2002; Birt, 2006; Schulz, 2006; Haddad and Balz, 2008; Gräf and Skovgaard-Petersen, 2009; Krämer, 2010; Bano and Kalmbach, 2012; Kloos and Künkler, 2016; Noor, 2018; Kloos, 2019.
In the Netherlands, for example, a debate took place about permission for schoolgirls to wear a headscarf. Various Dutch Arabists and Islamologists pronounced conflicting views as to whether this was an ‘Islamic practice’ to be accepted by the local authorities in accordance with Dutch law (see Shadid and van Koningsveld, 1990). Gradually, national and local administrative bodies started to realise that they might do better primarily to address internal Islamic authorities.
On issues of governmentality of Islam, see Maussen, Bader and Moors (2011).
See e.g., Rath et al., 2001; Fetzer and Soper, 2005; Maussen, 2006; Bader, 2007; Rosenow- Williams, 2012.
Many studies have been based on this premise (see e.g., Cherribi, 2000; Tietze, 2001; Phalet, Lotringen and Entzinger, 2002; Saint‐Blancat, 2002; Roy, 2004). We do not discuss this line of argumentation extensively as it falls outside the scope of this special issue.
See for example, Soares, 2005; Jouili and Amir-Moazami, 2006; Schulz, 2006; Boender, 2007; Hefner and Zaman, 2007; Volpi and Turner, 2007; Bunt, 2009; Gräf and Skovgaard-Petersen, 2009; Masud, Salvatore and van Bruinessen, 2009; van Bruinessen and Allievi, 2011; Caeiro, 2011; Fischer, 2011; Bano and Kalmbach, 2012; Zaman, 2012; Kloos, 2013; Fibiger, 2015; Walker, 2017; Bano, 2018a, 2018b; Hashas, de Ruiter and Valdemar Vinding, 2018; Noor, 2018; Corboz, 2019.
Becker, 2013; de Koning, 2013; Pall and de Koning, 2017; Wiktorowicz, 2006.
Thijl Sunier and Léon Buskens, the editors of this special issue, were the project managers of MIWIN, which was funded by the NWO (Dutch Research Council). The contribution by Arshad Muradin is based on the outcomes of MIWIN.
See e.g., Bracke, 2008; Moors, 2009; Beekers, 2015; Abaaziz, 2021.
See e.g., van Bruinessen, 2003; Salvatore, 2006; 2007; Mandaville, 2007; Masud, Salvatore and van Bruinessen, 2009; Caeiro, 2010. All these authors point at the contentious and provisional nature of Islamic authority. Modern mass media have thrown this temporality into sharp relief.
See e.g., Schulz, 2006; Turner, 2007; de Witte, 2008.
On female Islamic authority and social changes, see also the work on Aceh by Eka Srimulyani (2012). For Europe the work of Jouili and Amir-Moazami (2006), Bano and Kalmbach (2012), Becker (2013), and Noor (2018) should be mentioned.
