Making Islam Work

Front matter

Making Islam Work

Islamic Authority among Muslims in Western Europe

Thijl Sunier

Contents

Preface and Acknowledgement xI

Notes on Transliteration XVI

1 2

Introduction

1 Islamic Authority: Themes, Stakes, and Foci

What does a group of local elderly neighbourhood watchmen, or a group of Muslim women active in their neighbourhood, have to do with Islamic authority and who decides on it? How can we assess and understand discussions among young Shi’a Muslims about the question whether or not an online performance of the majlis ritual is still ‘the real thing’? How are discussions about the question of whether or not a restaurant may use the label halal (allowed according to Islamic law), and what halal actually means, related to discussions about authority? Who decides about the curriculum of an imam-training program? Or how does a heated mediatised discussion about hand-shaking between a Muslim man and a non-Muslim woman relate to Islamic authority? To answer these and other questions is to disclose phenomena that can be understood as modalities of Islamic authority.

This book is about Islamic authority among Muslims in Europe who come from a migrant background.! Religious authority is persuasive power and deals with issues of truth, authenticity, legitimacy, trust, ethics, and imagination with reference to religious matters. It is a qualification commonly attributed to religious professionals with regard to institutional and knowledge-related competences and positions (see e.g., Chaves 2003, 38). However, I shall argue that Islamic authority is much more encompassing and versatile than the status of religious professionals and elites or of Islamic theological sources.”

The title of the book, Making Islam Work, unites the constituent elements of the overall argument that I shall unfold in the following pages.? As an anthropologist of religion, I am interested in human agency with regard to religious

1 Most of my research has been conducted among these communities, predominantly in the more western parts of Europe. Muslim communities in the eastern and south-eastern part of the continent, most of which are indigenous people, are not included. However, I contend that much of what is said in this book about Islamic authority also bears relevance for them. When I use the generic term ‘Europe’ I refer to the more western parts of the continent.

2 Throughout the book, I use ‘Islamic professional’ and ‘religious professional’ as generic terms, a common denominator when I refer to ulama (Islamic scholars), imams and other religious professionals. I fully realise that lumping together these religious functionaries may give rise to discussion, but when I deal with the imam explicitly, I shall of course use the term ‘imam’. In a number of cases, I also use the term ‘religious expert’, which in my view has a more attributive connotation. The question who an expert is and who is not, is ultimately a matter of legitimacy and authority.

3 Iderive the phrase ‘making Islam work’ from name of the research project Making Islam Work

© THIJL SUNIER, 2024 | DOI:10.1163/9789004684928_002 This is an open access chapter distributed under the terms of the Cc By-NC-ND 4.0 license.

practices, landscapes, life worlds and the making of religious selves. What are the social and spiritual environments that people build and inhabit, what institutional environments and power relations come with them, and what imaginative practices do people of faith establish and expand? In other words, how do people make religion work for themselves and for others and what factors account for that?

I contend that Islamic authority does not self-evidently emanate from a decontextualised essential core, the ‘Islam of the Book’. From friends and colleagues, experts in the field of Islamic law or working as imams, I have learned that the sources (and knowledge of them) are extremely crucial for being able to connect to people. It is these institutionalised sources of knowledge, education and learning that constitute the bedrock of Islamic authority and conceptualise religion and authority. But these colleagues also emphasise that it is the specific application of this knowledge that makes things tick.

Islamic authority should, furthermore, not be conflated with or reduced exclusively to the personal status of religious scholars, or to the status of theological bodies of knowledge. It can be attributed to institutions, to legal, ethical, and material matters, activities, and to events. Many good studies have been published about the authoritative status of Islamic scholars and their role in Islamic knowledge production.‘ Islamic authority in the narrow sense of scriptural proficiency will, of course, be addressed in this book. However, if the reader expects to find an assessment of the theological scholarly debates about well-known and not so well-known matters in Islamic theology and their implications for Islam and Muslims in Europe, he or she will be disappointed.

Some readers would by now probably expect to hear what my definition of Islamic authority is, but they will be disappointed as well, as I will refrain from formulating a ‘one-size-fits-all’ definition that applies to everything that is addressed in this book, and for good reasons. Rather than reiterating mainstream conceptions of Islamic authority, I intend to show that it is a semantically diverse field with different connotations and adjacent phenomena. The aim of this book is to show what Muslims make of it and how diverse this can be. There is a risk in stretching concepts to the extent that they ‘explain’ everything and thus nothing, as they may deprive concepts of their explanain the Netherlands (mrwin), that I conducted with my colleague Leon Buskens from 2013 to 2019, financed by the Dutch Research Council nwo.

4 See e.g., Antoun (1989); Zaman (2002); Birt (2006); Schulz (2006); Haddad and Balz (2008); Graf and Skevgaard-Petersen (2009); Krämer (2010); Bano and Kalmbach (2012); Kloos and Kiinkler (2016); Noor (2018).

tory power.® But a broad understanding of Islamic authority and showing the connections and similarities it has with adjacent concepts, enables us to understand the manifold ways in which Islam ‘is made to work’.

This book is about ‘Islamic’ authority, and this implies that I first have to take issue with the adjective ‘Islamic’. Some of my colleagues warned me that the adjective may create confusion about the focus of my book and the explanatory status of my conceptual tools. I fully understand their concern and I take this seriously.

Some authors use the adjective ‘Muslim’ instead of ‘Islamic’ in order to make a distinction between, on the one hand, that which is normatively and authoritatively considered ‘Islamic’ in the religious sense and, on the other, any activity performed by Muslims, people of faith. The question then arises of whether performing religious duties is as much lived Islam as a football team consisting of Muslims. And can we call an organisation founded by Muslims ‘Islamic’ by default? If so, why; if not, why not?

This is more than juggling with terms; it is an epistemological and methodological question, linked to what Muslims mean by ‘Islamic’ and also to the explanatory status of Islam as a constituent factor in complex historical, economic, political, and social fields. This is a puzzle with which scholars from various disciplines have grappled for quite some time, including anthropologists. In 1977, Abdul Hamid el-Zein (1977) posed the question of whether or not there is an anthropology of Islam. He concluded that, as there is a multiplicity of forms of Islam, Islam cannot be a category with explanatory power, and there can thus be no anthropology of Islam.

A couple of years later Talal Asad addressed the same issue. In his seminal paper ‘The Idea of an Anthropology of Islam’, he reacted to Michael Gilsenan’s proposition as an anthropologist not to exclude any form or idea of Islam, and he states:

The idea [Gilsenan] adopts from other anthropologists—that Islam is simply what Muslims everywhere say it is—will not do, if only because there are everywhere Muslims who say that what other people take to be Islam is not really Islam at all. This paradox cannot be resolved simply by saying that the claim as to what is Islam will be admitted by the anthropologist only where it applies to the informant’s own beliefs and practices,

5 Rogers Brubaker and Frederick Cooper (2000) have made that convincingly clear with regard to the term ‘identity, which is applied to virtually everything that pertains to culture and difference.

because it is generally impossible to define beliefs and practices in terms of an isolated subject. A Muslim’s beliefs about the beliefs and practices of others are his own beliefs. And like all such beliefs, they animate and are sustained by his social relations with others. (Asad 1986, 2)

Again, some years later, Aziz Al-Azmeh, like el-Zein, expressed his doubts about the prominent explanatory status of orthodox scriptural Islam that, according to him, haunted the social sciences. In an attempt to explain social phenomena by referring to authoritative scriptural sources, an essentialised category of ‘Islamic culture’ is being constructed. But, according to Al-Azmeh: “There are as many Islams as there are situations to sustain it” (Al-Azmeh 1993, 1). Although he is right in emphasising this interpretative diversity of Islam as a tradition and source of knowledge, it still leaves us with the analytical question of how to make sense of the fact that Muslims, and not only established Islamic authorities, claim that there is just one Islam.

Some authors have tried to solve this semantic and methodological problem by applying the terms ‘Islamdom’ and ‘Islamicate’, as coined by Marshal Hodgson. Hodgson reserved the terms ‘Islam’ and ‘Islamic’ for matters pertaining exclusively to Islam as a cult and a religious dogma, and ‘Islamicate’ to things that “would refer not directly to the religion, Islam, itself, but to the social and cultural complex historically associated with Islam and the Muslims, both among Muslims themselves and even when found among non-Muslims” (Hodgson 1974, 59).°

I go along with this line of argumentation to a certain extent because it rightly suggests that we should not overemphasise the influence of Islam as a unified religious tradition. However, on what grounds do we delineate the “social and cultural complex historically associated with Islam” from strictly ‘religious’ and dogmatic elements? In other words, how to understand the societal relevance and constitutive force of Islam while at the same time be careful not to single out Islam as the ultimate cause for everything Muslims do and articulate? And conversely, is it possible to define a specific field of human activity that is called Islamic (Sunier 2018b)? When Asad states that “there are everywhere Muslims who say that what other people take to be Islam is not really Islam at all’, this is in a nutshell the focus of this book, namely that what is taken to be Islamic is always contested. To debunk others’ definitions of what

6 Thus, Dressler, Salvatore, and Wohlrab-Sar (2019, 12) use the term ‘Islamicate secularity’ to denote “[...] forms of secularity that have developed in contexts where Islamic traditions have had a strong impact on society, culture, and politics”. In historical studies about Muslim societies, one often comes across this adjective.

Islamic entails is as relevant as to abide by one’s own convictions (see Schulz 2006; Fadil 2017; Sunier 2018b).

Rogers Brubaker shows how the term ‘Muslim’ has taken on a double function. As an ‘analytical category’, the term Muslim must explain certain phenomena, as a ‘category of practice’ the term Muslim 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).’

I shall come back to this issue in more detail further on. Here, it suffices to state that I in no way intend in this book to solve this epistemological puzzle and to redefine the ‘anthropology of Islam’ I use the adjective ‘Islamic’ to denote a specific category of authority, but not as a descriptive normative term, or as an analytical concept. ‘Islamic’ is an attributive adjective.

Islamic authority is a human-made attribute. Something or someone is authoritative in the eyes of the beholder and has persuasive and imaginative qualities to the extent that this quality is confirmed and legitimated by others. Islamic authority therefore must be understood as a principally relational concept. There are a multitude of opinions and interpretations of what proper Islamic authority entails. To call something ‘Islamic’ is a human activity of authentication, of attributing truth to religious sources, persons, and things, and revolves around questions of legitimacy and truthfulness, triggered by societal, political, and other circumstances and developments.

Islamic authority is principally contested and must constantly be reconfirmed. Consequently, Islamic authority is emphatically temporal and provisional, and it is embedded in ever-evolving societal dynamics and power configurations; it can wax and wane. Even if the authoritative status of a person is part of a religious institutional power structure such as the Catholic clergy or the official ulama in some countries, their authoritative status must be acknowledged by practitioners. Established authoritative positions can never be taken for granted.

In this book, I therefore use the term ‘authority-making’ to indicate its processual and attributive character. Authority-making is a social practice and principally contingent on relationships and interactions in a multiplicity of ways: top-down, horizontal, and bottom-up. Thus, the main focus of this book is not Islamic authority as such, but rather the making of authority and what factors contribute to that process. It should be emphasised that the authorita-

7 For an extensive discussion of the methodological implications of the term ‘Muslim’ for research, see Petersen and Ackfeldt (2023).

tive status quo is, of course, not always challenged. Many Muslims accept and submit to established authorities and follow them, but in such cases, we also have to ask why.

Islamic authority is also an elusive and ambiguous public phenomenon, widely referred to in public and political debates, implicitly or explicitly. This is an important reason why I prefer to stick to the adjective ‘Islamic’. To label persons, acts, practices, objects, knowledge, or events as ‘Islamic’ is attributive and emblematic in the sense of claims-making or appropriation. It can have programmatic, paradigmatic, and political underpinnings. The general Islamic landscape in Europe is still predominantly male-centred, particularly when it concerns issues of authority. That is where power is located and that is where ‘Islamic’ is normatively defined. That is also where many observers and politicians, but also researchers usually look when issues of authority and representation are concerned. In this way, they also confer Islamic authority and contribute to the status quo.

The meaning and application of Islamic authority as a category of practice thus also concerns questions of governmentality. The issue of authority in Muslim communities has received particular attention in Europe since the 1990s. The growing attention to religious matters among Muslims with a migrant background, and the related processes of institutionalisation of Islam, 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 governmental bodies. Somewhat later, individuals and associations founded institutions for the transmission of Islamic knowledge to Muslims, including several Islamic universities. This has happened in almost all countries in Europe with a sizable Muslim population, although in different arrangements according to the national legal provisions. Initially, only established scholars in Islamic Studies were consulted; only much later did Muslims become involved (Sunier and Buskens 2022).8

To conclude, developments that took place in Muslim communities in Europe from the late 1960s onwards made me convinced that much of what can be observed with regard to evolving Islamic landscapes in Europe boils down

8 In the Netherlands, for example, a debate took place about permission for girls to wear a headscarf in a school in a town. Various Dutch Arabists and scholars of Islam confronted each other in pronouncing 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 better primarily address internal Islamic authorities.

to questions of authority, provided we broaden the definition of what Islamic authority entails and where it is located.

This brings me to the overall question that I shall address in this book: What are the ways in which Islamic authority manifests itself among Muslims in Europe who come from a migrant background, and what factors, contexts and circumstances determine the process of authority-making? Subsequent questions are: (a) what do Muslims consider to be proper and legitimate Islamic authority, (b) what arguments do they have for that, and (c) why? I am interested in ‘inner- Islamic’ discussions, but I also intend to explore how these discussions are embedded in broader societal contexts, circumstances, and developments in which the ‘outside world’ and non-Muslims also play a role.

2 Assessing Islamic Authority

When one embarks on a project such as this, one has to dwell on the general concept of authority for a moment, but without drowning in the vast body of literature that has been published from the early 20th century onwards, and even earlier. When perusing that body of literature, and even more when including adjacent topics and concepts, one becomes aware of the richness and multifaceted character of authority. Many studies deal with power, force, and hierarchies; coercion and political authority are almost identical concepts. Frank Fuerdi (2013) argues that authority deals with questions of power but in a very broad sense and as such it is as old as humanity. Much of the work on authority deals with political matters and the question of the legitimacy of rulers. Thomas Christiano (2020) traces this back to Plato, and to John Locke, Thomas Hobbes and David Hume in the 17th and 18th centuries, but the Arab historian Abd ar-Rahman Ibn Khaldun had already explicitly and extensively addressed the legitimacy of rulers and their authority in the 14th century in his much-acclaimed treatise Muqaddima on the history of civilisations (Ibn Khaldun 1967 [1377]).

Many historical studies on imperial reign show that the legitimacy of rulers was bestowed by divine power. The power of the Chinese emperors and their legitimacy to reign, was considered a ‘mandate of Heaven’ that was granted but could also be withdrawn. Even in such cases, ruling power was conditioned by circumstances and a certain public consent (Fairbank and Reischauer 1979; Chen 2014).

Hannah Arendt (1956, 403) argued that the thinking in Europe about the legitimacy of authoritative political formations coincided with the emergence of the European totalitarian regimes in the 1920s. In Arendt’s work, authority and resistance were always twin concepts, inextricably linked with the human condition and with issues of truthfulness and morality but also with responsibility and conditioning. Richard Sennet sees authority as an almost existential matter inherent in the human condition. Sennet ([1965] 1980) was mainly concerned with the question of how people experience authority and how resistance to authority in turn constitutes new forms of authority as an ongoing process.

In her fascinating and thought-provoking essay, Losing Control? Sovereignty in the Age of Globalisation (1996), Saskia Sassen argues that the pace and intensity with which processes of globalisation occur have engendered among many people anxieties and feelings of the loss of control over developments in their daily lives. The essay, written over 25 years ago, reads as a comment on the current wave of conspiracy theories and the political authority crisis. Thomas Blom Hansen and Fins Stepputat (2005) explored how political sovereignty and sovereign power were reconstituted under postcolonial conditions. The contributions to their edited volume clearly show that authority in the sense of righteous rule was the prime issue.

These are only a few of the relevant studies on authority that have shaped my thoughts on the theme. In my view, they make one thing very clear: issues of authority can only be studied properly in close connection with attempts to reflect on, debunk or even unmask the prevailing authoritative status quo. Or to put it less decisively, if there is authority, there are questions about its foundations, characteristics, and legitimacy.

To analyse Islamic authority as a socio-political and anthropological phenomenon is certainly not new in the study of Islam. Dale Eickelman (1985) wrote the biography of a judge in Morocco; Richard Antoun (1989) looked at the important figure of the preacher in Jordan; Brinkley Messick (1992) studied the practices of muftis and judges in Yemen, and John Bowen (1993) focused on debates about Islamic law in Indonesia. Studies on Islamic scholars at al-Azhar University in Cairo by Malika Zeghal (1996) and by Muhammad Qasim Zaman on Pakistan and India (2002), have provided crucial insight in how authority is constituted and discussed in history.

From the early 2000s, the concepts of Islamic authority and knowledge production appeared more regularly in publications, initially as descriptive terms denoting a specific theme or field of study. Some publications dealt with Muslims in Europe. In 2006, Frank Peter concluded that the study of Islamic authority among Muslims in Europe needs more systematic assessment (see also Peter and Arigita 2006; Arigita 2006). In 2005, a workshop was organised by the Dutch International Institute for the Study of Islam in the Modern World (1sIM) titled ‘Muslim Religious Authority in Europe’, with the aim of understanding the rapidly transforming Islamic landscapes in Europe from the perspective of Islamic authority and knowledge production. According to the convenors, much had been published about the settlement in Europe of migrants with an Islamic background with all its legal, institutional, and political ramifications. Most of these studies, however, did not deal with doctrinal issues and religious dynamics in Muslim communities. They were considered to be topics for theology and religious studies. In many theological studies, however, Islamic authority is still predominantly a taken-for-granted theological category that apparently needs no specific attention.

A couple of years later, Martin van Bruinessen and Stefano Allievi again concluded that there had been remarkably little theoretical reflection on the actual process of knowledge production and on the (re-)making of Islamic authority among Muslims in Europe (van Bruinessen and Allievi 201). Research on Muslims in Europe who had a migrant background was and still is dominated by the rather limited ‘accommodation and integration paradigm’, which casts the rooting of Islam in Europe mainly as a negotiating process between collective actors such as governments and Muslim organisations (Sunier and Buskens 2022).9 This lack of attention is nonetheless remarkable, since the quickly transforming European Islamic landscape provides an abundance of critical cases and situations in which authority is the pivotal issue. 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, or a very topical discussion in mosques about vaccination against Covid, also touch on issues of Islamic authority as legitimation.

A number of recent studies on Salafism have addressed the issue of Islamic authority. To study Salafism without addressing questions of authority seems to be almost impossible.!° However, in the vast number of studies on religious radicalisation that have been commissioned by European governments, Islamic authority is still taken as self-evident, and is often based on a rigid typology of political Islam.

The aim of this book is to critically engage with this often taken-for-granted narrow understanding of Islamic authority. What Islamic authority entails, how the making of Islamic authority evolves and what factors account for it, is an empirical question. I intend to unpack Islamic authority and to understand

9 See e.g., Rath et al. (2001); Fetzer and Soper (2005); Maussen (2006); Bader (2007); Rosenow-Williams (2012).

10 Wiktorowicz (2006); Meijer and Bakker (2012); Becker (2013); de Koning (2013); Pall and de Koning (2017).

what Muslims consider authoritative and why. I shall analyse various modalities of Islamic authority-making and explore their constituent sources and contexts.

3 Islamic Authority-Making: Processes, Actors, and Contexts

The book consists of six chapters, based on (ethnographic) research I have conducted or supervised, from roughly the mid-1980s until recently. In each of the six chapters, a case or a set of cases is analysed as a particular modality of authority-making. Shifting the analytical focus from Islamic authority as a descriptive normative category to authority-making as a productive force and a social practice, implies that we have to explore and compare its manifold characteristics and disguises. The most efficacious way to understand how Islamic authority is being constituted is to bring to the surface the specificities, settings, aims, agendas, and motivations of the various actors involved in specific fields of activity, and to dissect the various interlocking forces at work. In addition, each of the six modalities of authority-making constitutes a specific conceptual field with concomitant problem definitions, foci, questions, theoretical perspectives, and theoretical literature, which I shall also address.

However, the book in its entirety rests on five general theoretical and methodological propositions that need to be addressed first. They are, (1) the relevance of societal, political, and technical contexts and transformations, (2) Islam as a discursive tradition, (3) the relevance of bottom-up critical reflection by Muslims, (4) the relevance of aesthetics, and of performative and other persuasive skills, and (5) the location of Islamic authority.

3.1 Societal, Political, and Technical Contexts and Transformations

The dynamics of authority-making are always embedded in broader societal, political, historical, and technological contexts, but these dynamics are particularly salient under conditions of change and transformation, and in new and unprecedented circumstances. They generate reflection and discussion about Islamic sources of knowledge and their application in novel situations, and they sometimes lead to critical comments and new interpretations. We may think of political, social, and cultural developments, demographic changes, new political regimes, new power configurations, new hierarchies, new epistemes, and new languages. But technological innovations, engendering new forms of religious mediation, communication, and knowledge transfer, also affect processes of Islamic authority-making.

The fundamental societal changes that took place in the wake of the colonial subjugation of large parts of the Muslim world in the 19th and 2oth centuries generated a vast body of literature by predominantly Western scholars on the implications of these changes, soon to be subsumed under the common denominator ‘modernisation’. The modernity paradigm became the point of reference in many of the Western studies that have hitherto been published about 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 and in the modernity paradigm: first, the assumption that, prior to the European invasion, the so-called ‘Islamic world’ was pre-modern, eternally fixed by unchangeable theological dogmas and inert ulama; second, the assumption that it was the European onslaught, often depicted as the encounter with Enlightenment as a unique force in history, that in fact activated thinking about reform and change among Muslims.

However, the history of Islam was already a history of change and development long before the colonial onslaught. The vast body of scholarly work by Islamic theologians produced over centuries predominantly deals with reflection and reasoning on societal and political transformations (Zaman 2012; Ahmed 2016). However, this continuous reflection by Muslims has largely been ignored or even denied by many Western scholars of Islam.

The depiction of post-ww 11 migration as a transition from ‘traditional’ rural societies to the ‘modern liberal-secular’ European societies is a contemporary variant of the modernisation paradigm. According to this line of thinking, one of the consequences of the encounter of Muslims from Asia, Africa and the Middle East with Europe's secular-liberal political and public culture was that the collective and normative frames that had shaped Islam and were brought by migrants to Europe would gradually dissolve to be replaced by something new. In scholarly work that deals with the development of Islam in Europe, the organisational life of Muslims and various forms of religiosity and religious self-making, we find two dominant perspectives, both of which start from the assumption that ‘traditional Islam’ will dissolve and ultimately disappear to be replaced either by a form of ‘Euro-Islam’ that is accordance with secular European values, or by a complete individualisation of religiosity (Amir-Moazami and Salvatore 2003, 52). The individualisation thesis and the ‘Euro-Islam’ approach have become the yardsticks by which developments with regard to religiosity among Muslims in Europe are being assessed and understood." According to its proponents, the complete individualisation of

11 There are many publications based on this premise; see e.g., Cherribi (2000); Tietze (2001);

religion would make authoritative guidance obsolete. Politicians follow this line of reasoning to develop their policy programmes.

The relevance of change and transformation to Islamic authority-making entails, however, more than the quest for guidance by individual Muslims. The settlement of Muslim communities in European countries and the emergence and gradual transformation of the Islamic landscape also comprised an encounter with historically formed European political cultures based on specific modalities of the relation between the state and religion. Relevant to the problematic at hand are the particular forms of governance adopted by nation-states to ‘nationalise’ and to ‘domesticate’ religion (Sunier 2014b).!2

A crucial element of domestication politics is the religious—secular dichotomy. There is a persistent assumption that the widespread secularisation after World War 11 is simply the retreat of religion from all spheres of society and from the lives of individuals; a secular society, in other words, is a society without religion. But, as Talal Asad rightly argues, secularism is not simply the generic separation of religion from state and politics, nor is it the outcome of the changing place of religion in the lives of individual citizens. Secularism is a political doctrine that presupposes new notions of religion (Asad 2003, 2).!8 A specific understanding of the secular implicates a specific understanding of the religious (see also Mahmood 2036). Religion becomes an object of political concern and entails a specific definition of the religious field (Sunier 2020).!+ Sherman Jackson (2017) coins the term ‘the Islamic secular’ to denote a specific domain that is not necessarily connected to Islamic sources, but which is nevertheless an important field of activity by Muslims.