Fatwas for European muslims: the minority fiqh project and the integration of Islam in Europe

Abstract

Discussions about the necessity of creating a “European Islam” have become ubiquitous across Europe today. State actors and public intellectuals across the political spectrum frequently emphasize the need to adapt Islam to the West in order to counter the threat of terrorism, prevent the radicalization of young Muslims and facilitate the integration of immigrants. Although they rarely take part in these public discussions, orthodox Muslim scholars committed to the Islamic legal tradition (fiqh or shari‘a) have over the past decades been debating similar issues in the global spaces of Islamic normative debate which they inhabit. A wide range of Muslim actors – in Europe but also across the Islamic world - currently voice calls in favour of the “integration” of Muslims in Europe and against tendencies towards “assimilation” and “segregation”. This dissertation seeks to understand the specific grammar of this integration talk, and how it translates into fiqh discourse and fatwas. I do so mainly through a study of the discourse produced by the European Council for Fatwa and Research (ECFR). As a transnational institution committed both to the theoretical elaboration of a new fiqh for minorities (fiqh al-aqalliyyat), and the production and dissemination of contextualized religious opinions (fatwas) for Muslims in Europe, the ECFR plays a prominent role in these international conversations. The ECFR is often seen as a fundamentalist institution. A key contention of this dissertation is that the term fundamentalism allows limited insights into what is really at stake, from the point of view of the practitioners, in processes of religious interpretation and adaptation. The dissertation approaches the Muslim debate on Islam in Europe known as fiqh al-aqalliyyat as a particular historical instantiation of Islam’s “global space of normative reference and debate” (John Bowen 2004). It seeks to historicize this global space by showing the specific ideas and networks that made fiqh al-aqalliyyat both possible and intelligible in a transnational “European” field encompassing actors rooted both in European territory and in the Arab world. Through a study of the texts and fatwas produced by a range of Muslim scholars involved in the minority fiqh project, the dissertation argues that proponents of fiqh al-aqalliyyat have offered a theory of Muslim integration based on a set of widely shared assumptions. While fiqh is the terrain in which solutions to the problems of Muslims in Europe are sought, the engagements of minority fiqh advocates with the Islamic legal tradition are framed by an imaginary which is borrowed from mainstream European debates. The Islamic scholars considered here appear to agree with many European policy-makers and public intellectuals on a diagnosis of the current situation, a particular distribution of moral responsibility for this state, and a vision of the conditions under which community cohesion becomes possible and social conflict is eliminated.