Into Everyday Life

By PRC, *Muslim Networks and Movements in Western Europe* - Pew Research Center - Washington, DC, USA; Monday, December 6, 2010

On Sept. 15, 2010, a group of scholars discussed key findings of a new study, "Muslim Networks and Movements in Western Europe," published by the Pew Research Center's Forum on Religion and Public Life.

The study examines several of the oldest, largest and most influential Muslim groups operating in Western Europe today, many of which are virtually unknown to non-Muslims.

[In this edited (by PRC) excerpt, ellipses have been omitted to facilitate reading. Find the full transcript and the accompanying report by clicking on the title of this article. Click here to go directly to the part of the study about the Sufi Orders (ed.)]

Speakers:
Mandaville, Visiting Fellow, Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life, and Director, Center for Global Studies, George Mason University
Dilwar Hussain, Director, Policy Research Centre, Islamic Foundation
Maha Azzam, Associate Fellow, Middle East and North Africa Programme, Chatham House
Moderator: Claire Spencer, Middle East and North Africa Programme, Chatham House

Peter Mandaville, Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life:
I'd like to point out at the beginning that this project never aimed to be comprehensive in terms of providing an analysis of every single Muslim group or organization that you're going to find in Europe. Rather, the idea was to take the longest-established, most significant broad networks and movements whose origins lie in the Muslim-majority world but who over the last few decades have established a presence in Europe, and to tell the story of that transplantation, that adaptation and what has happened to their agendas, their visions and their activities as they've adapted to the very different circumstances and conditions that they've found in Europe.

I'm going to give a very short summary of these movements. I also want to draw out and identify what we have taken to be some of the major cross-cutting analytical themes that come out of the research that we've done.

What we did essentially was to commission from 12 leading scholars, the vast majority of whom are based in Europe, in-depth case studies of these groups and movements. These case studies will be published later next year as a full-edited volume. Then, based on these studies and working alongside a wonderful set of colleagues at the Pew Forum, we assembled and distilled that material into the report that you have before you today.

Our geographic scope is confined to Western Europe. We are essentially talking about the EU 15, plus Norway and Switzerland, in our coverage. The vast majority of examples that we've drawn on and studied relate to the three large contexts of the United Kingdom, Germany and France. The associated demographic material, if you're interested, is available on the Pew Forum's website.

A great many of [these groups] have received considerable analysis and scrutiny in recent years. To our knowledge, this is the first attempt to assay something like a comprehensive mapping of the landscape and fuller terrain of Muslim movements and networks in Europe. Part of what we're trying to do is to draw the attention of a broad readership of the report to not only specific groups and movements, but indeed the relationships between them.

The idea is that you only really get a full understanding of some of these groups by understanding the broader landscape and terrain that they inhabit, particularly in terms of the nature of their relationships with other Muslim groups and movements in the milieu that they inhabit. The point is that some of the things they do and some of the things they say are shaped by the relationships they have and the ways they position themselves vis-à-vis other Muslim groups and movements. While a good many of these groups, particularly those that fall in the radical or jihadi category, have received a lot of attention -- perhaps not unfair to say fairly obsessive attention of late -- some of the groups that we deal with here are not known necessarily to a broad readership.

The second point is really one that I think is going to be fairly obvious to most of you in this room, which is to say that an account of the presence of Muslim movements and networks in Europe is not simply a story about radicalization. It's not simply a story about terrorism, although that conversation tends to, for obvious reasons, dominate much of the public discussion of these issues.

Rather, we thought there would be value in precisely laying out and putting before an audience this broader landscape, not to suggest that the radicalization/terrorism-related issues are not important, but to actually say that one can develop a better understanding of the radicalization phenomena by looking at those groups in relationship to those who inhabit Muslim public space behind them. We look at the Fethullah Gülen movement, largely an educational initiative based on and driven by the followers of the Turkish reformer, scholar, educational entrepreneur, Fethullah Gülen. Present for several decades now, his followers have initiated and established 1,000 or more schools across many countries all over the world, from South America to East Asia, and indeed certainly here in Europe.

The group also has any number of affiliated institutions and bodies in Europe, schools that they've established, particularly in Germany. The group has certainly been the subject of any number of controversies, some of this relating to the question of whether there is some sort of political agenda that lies behind what is outwardly largely an educational approach, an emphasis on intercultural dialogue. Those of you who are familiar with the sensitivities around secularism in Turkey, the current debates about the government and the role of the Gülen movement in the Turkish political scene will immediately know exactly what this sort of controversy has been about.

We also then look at the Muslim Brotherhood, and in roughly the same category -- the Islamist category, the Jama'at-i Islami -- groups whose origins lie in the Middle East and South Asia, respectively. They've been on the scene and evolved considerably over a number of decades.

What's been very interesting to us in terms of looking at this phenomenon in Europe is precisely the question of how these groups have adapted and changed over the course of the multiple generations found within Europe's Muslim communities. The original, transplanted organizations produce successor groups that depart somewhat from but also preserve elements of the original flavor and ideologies even as they attempt to adapt their agendas. And of course there's the persistent public scrutiny that has plagued some of these groups as this process has played out.

Groups that were marked originally by the label of "Islamist," with all that that entailed in terms of their political ideology, faced the question of whether and how this agenda has adapted. A good many of these groups certainly have played a role in encouraging Muslims to get politically involved in the societies in which they live. In other cases, however, there have been concerns raised about their impact on issues such as social cohesion and about continued ties to political violence.

A very interesting coalition was formed in the run-up to the Iraq war between the Muslim Association of Britain, the British group most closely operating in the mold of the Brotherhood, and the Stop the War Coalition. Several successive protests came out of it.

Perhaps the group that is least known about in terms of details that we cover in the report are the large transnational, largely Saudi-funded da'wa organizations -- the Muslim World League and the World Association of Muslim Youth. Again, they've been around for some decades now, largely identified with efforts by Saudi Arabia to promote the rather conservative Wahhabi brand of Islam, and played an important role from the 1970s and '80s onward in terms of providing support and funding for the establishment of any number of Muslim organizations, mosques, publication efforts here in Europe.

These two groups are engaged in a wide range of activities. On many occasions, their work and activities have overlapped with some of the other groups that we deal with in the movement, most notably, the Muslim Brotherhood.

This is perhaps a moment to point to one of the bigger issues that we try to tackle here in the report. We think that there's value in trying to lay out these different strands and pathways of social movement and network activity, precisely because there is often a tendency to lump together groups that will at times collaborate and work with each other, even though their ultimate agendas and visions may diverge in the large picture.

We also offer up the possibility that some of these groups may be waning in terms of their influence -- those that fall within the transnational da'wa category, precisely because the flavor of Islam, the Salafi Wahhabi variant, that they provided access to is now available quite directly to those who wish to access it through any number of websites associated with prominent international Salafi scholars.

We, of course, pay some considerable attention to the impact and role of radical Islamists, jihadi groups. We do make the distinction in our work between violent and nonviolent radical groups, so on the one hand, cells that are affiliated with broader global jihadi groups, such as al Qaeda and Abu Hamza al-Masri's Supporters of Shari'a, as well as individual, "self-starter" militants who are inspired by the grand narrative of Ayman al-Zawahiri, Osama bin Laden and the al Qaeda "brand."

Then we also give some attention to nonviolent radical groups, most notably the group Hizb ut-Tahrir, which will of course be familiar to many of you in this room. Here, for example, is a photo taken earlier this year at a Hizb ut-Tahrir protest about the ongoing U.S. presence in Pakistan and Afghanistan.

We also give some attention in the report to traditional Sufi orders. These are groups that have been around in many regards for centuries. We consider them to be important because they do define particular social structures -- solidarity networks, ways of connecting and bringing the relevance of religion into everyday life.

One of the issues that we give attention to in the report is the debate that has gone on in recent years about where Sufism and Sufi groups fit into the counter-radicalization agenda. There was a time in the heady days of 2005 when there was a lot of talk in the air about the idea that Sufi groups were nice, cuddly Muslims that governments worried about radicalization should embrace because they were going to serve as an antidote to the radicals.

When you drill down and gain a better understanding of some of the Sufi groups, the idea that Sufism is a cuddly apolitical thing does not necessarily match with the reality. [Take], for example, a figure located in the U.K., Shaykh Faizul Aqtab Siddiqi, who is interestingly the shaykh, the head of a particular Sufi order, and simultaneously one of the figures at the forefront of the movement that seeks to build lines of connectivity between shari'a law -- Islamic arbitration councils -- and the British civil courts. He was also a figure who was a moving force behind the large protests in 2006 during the Danish cartoon crisis.

We look at the Tablighi Jama'at, again, a group that's not necessarily widely known. By some estimates it is the largest Muslim movement in the world, whose annual congregations in South Asia are attended literally by millions. They have a large presence in Europe, particularly here in the U.K., in West Yorkshire, Dewsbury. Also in France, also in Spain.

This is a group, the vast majority of whose members are really focused on issues of personal religiosity -- piety -- but a group that's also been the subject of some recent controversy with respect to its plans to build what was kind of styled as a mega-mosque here in London. There also have been nagging concerns that some elements of this group, particularly its leadership in certain parts of South Asia, have ties to the Taliban and al Qaeda.

Finally, we have looked at some of the networks that have been built around particularly significant and salient religious scholars -- scholars who work primarily in a jurisprudential mode, who offer legal opinions, who pronounce on the issues of the day and who seek to organize, in the realm of legality, the ways in which European Muslims approach and deal with the challenges thrown up to them by the specific issues they encounter. These are figures such as Yusuf al-Qaradawi, the figure behind the European Council for Fatwa and Research based in Dublin.

We look at groups such as the al-Khoei Foundation, based here in London. And we also raise this question of whether we're seeing the rise of a new set of competitors who don't necessarily carry the same sort of formal credentials as religious scholars but who have emerged in recent years, particularly through new media channels -- satellite television, the internet, Facebook -- as competitors to formal religious scholarship by packaging variants of popular "self-help" Islam. Here we give a little bit of attention to the Egyptian televangelist, Amr Khaled, based now in the U.K., and the recently controversial Mumbai-based popular preacher, Zakir Naik, who many of you will know was banned from the U.K. earlier this year.

As you can see when we lay this all out before you, there is a very diverse array of agendas and primary realms of activity associated with these movements, from education to the dispensation of fatwas to broad emphasis on religious observance to lobbying and advocacy to outright revolutionary politics -- a wide range of activity that we're talking about here.

One of the issues that appeared to us fairly quickly is the fact that -- and this is borne out by some recent sociological studies that have been done -- many of these movements are not particularly large in terms of formal membership. People are not necessarily card-carrying members, if you will, of the Muslim Brotherhood, or card-carrying members of the Tablighi Jama'at.

Indeed, their influence doesn't work according to the standard patterns of organizational membership. A lot of these groups, despite low levels of formal membership, have often had fairly high levels of influence in terms of shaping the debate, shaping the public discussion of these sorts of issues. Groups such as the Muslim Brotherhood and Hizb ut-Tahrir are particularly significant here because they have tended to emphasize the need for Muslim communities to engage in geopolitical issues, to have something to say about the struggles and conflicts that Muslims around the world have faced. So they have done a lot of the work of organizing the debate and the discussions in the public space.

We're also telling a story of agendas originally sculpted in relation to the circumstances of the Muslim-majority world, sometimes in the very early post-colonial periods, that have adapted, to varying degrees, in the process of transplantation to Europe. We see different ways that this plays out.In the case of the Tablighi Jama'at, the core focus on personal piety is actually very portable. It travels very easily and it's not surprising that anywhere in the world that you find Muslims, you always find some presence of the Tablighi Jama'at.

The Muslim Brotherhood is a group founded around the agenda of the Islamization of public space, the establishment of states based on Islamic law. This is an agenda that has undergone some movement, some reconsideration, to varying degrees. The whole question of what it means to be a member of the Brotherhood in a political context defined by the Western liberal state has been the subject of enormous controversy within this movement itself. So around this issue you can see any number of offshoot organizations and factions emerging that have wanted to take that project in very different sorts of directions.

I think most interesting, at least to me in terms of the work I've done, has been the question of generational differences. What has happened to these groups as a second and then a third generation of Muslims born and raised in Europe has sought to define their relationship to these groups, to understand what the relevance of these groups might be to the issues that they face on a day-to-day basis?

It's not been lost on us that some of these groups are marked by certain ethnic and sectarian characteristics that often speak to the circumstances of their original founding. And something that's been interesting in the younger generation are some initial moves, I think, to try to move beyond the ethnic and sectarian boundaries that have sometimes separated these groups.
I think there also has to be posed a set of questions about the extent to which these groups will continue to be relevant in the longer and medium term. In the 1960s, the '70s, the '80s -- the periods when these groups first appeared in Europe -- many times they were the only games in town. They were the groups that organized Muslim space.

That's no longer the case. There are now any number of home-grown European Muslim organizations out there that are speaking directly to the specific concerns that young people have. The agendas of some of these groups simply are, I think, largely irrelevant to a good number of young Muslims, who are offered a wide range of alternative visions, understandings of religion, and agendas around social activism, and the manifestation of religiosity in public space by new voices and competitors to old guard movements that they find in new media spaces.

And then finally, there is the question of the relationship between government engagement and these movements. If government is to engage with these groups, one doesn't engage for the sake of engagement. One engages to some end. What sorts of end points do both government groups and the Muslim movements we're talking about see of value in that relationship?The question of the extent to which good government -- the reaching out, helping hand of government -- what impact does that have on the credibility and legitimacy of groups whose activities and discourse government would like to foster? Government agencies are often working in a relative information vacuum and have to rely on often very superficial understanding of these movements, their histories and their origins.

Of course, the fact is that a good many of these groups are ambiguous in terms of what they're about, what their ultimate agendas are, and it's not simply a question of groups with secret agendas hiding agendas. It's as much a question of the fact that within these groups, you find a great many different agendas. It becomes very easy, for example, to conflate the ideas and agenda of a particular prominent individual who happens to be associated with a group with that group as a whole, and it's just simply not always accurate to do so.

So that in a very sort of shorthand form gives you a sense of the major themes that have come out of this report.