Individualization and religious authority in Western European Islam

In the literature on Western Europe’s Muslim communities, the question of whether Muslim beliefs and practices are transforming (or not) in a historically new environment and, one hastens to add, in a new global setting, has become a central issue in the course of the last decade or so. In an often highly politicized environment where transformation continues to be measured by the criteria of compatibility with supposedly European values, interest in this question has notably stimulated an ongoing debate about the structure of religious life inside Europe’s Muslim populations. The question is one of the degree of individualization characteristic of Muslim religiosity, and the usefulness of a study of Muslim institutions which have been rapidly increasing in number in almost all the countries of Europe. Put differently, two interrelated questions are whether Muslims are ‘Europeanizing’ through individualization, and whether the claims made by Islamic groups and organizations nevertheless need to be taken into account by public actors on the basis that these groups do represent the views of ‘ordinary’ believers. While a substantial number of important studies have until recently identified individualization of religious beliefs as the major development in Europe’s Muslim communities, today a growing number of authors have become interested in the thorny issue of religious authority in Islam and have attempted to examine its modulation in the Western European context. Although these two strands of scholarly work often address similar questions and partly overlap in their concerns, direct engagement between them has been until now rather limited and the apogee of the scholarly debate still seems to lie ahead. Substantial differences in the extent and orientation of theorizing by scholars participating in the debate, and the usual obstacles posed by disciplinary boundaries, are only two reasons Islam and Christian–Muslim Relations, Vol. 17, No. 1, 105–118, January 2006