Muslim ethical self-making and secular governmentality in Europe: an introduction

ABSTRACT

In recent years, scholarship on Islam in Europe has highlighted the many attempts to govern Muslims and Islam. Concerned with discussions about secularism, security, integration, or national sentiments more generally, Muslims and Islam have become a target of governmental power. However, the effects of such governmental discourses, practices, or strategies are rarely analysed. In filling this lacuna, we turn to the scholarship on Muslim ethical self-making and specifically ask how configurations of a liberal-secular paradigm govern Muslim subjects in Europe. Focusing upon the nexus of governmentality and the (re-)making of an ethical self, we make visible the ways Islamic ethical and moral commitments are contested, negotiated, or even restructured through the liberal-secular powers of the modern state, its institutions, and its agents in different European contexts.

KEYWORDS:

• Islam
• Muslims
• Europe
• governmentality
• ethics
• subjectivity

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Zubair Ahmad

Zubair Ahmad is a Doctoral Fellow at the BGSMCS, Freie Universität Berlin. As a political theorist with a specialisation on postcolonial/decolonial thought, Zubair is concerned with questions of the (post)colonial government of religion and Islam in Europe. His current work excavates the colonial formation of the government of Muslims and Islam by looking at Germany’s colonial past. Among his recent publications are ‘A Dangerous Text: Disciplining Deficient Readers and the Policing of the Qur’an’ (ReOrient 2020), ‘On Colonial Aphasia in the Study of German Orientalism’ (TRAFO 2020), and his monograph Politische Theorie, Religion und postkoloniale Kritik (Tectum Press 2019).

Amin El-Yousfi

Amin El-Yousfi completed a PhD in Sociology (winner of the BRAIS De Gruyter Prize 2021) at the University of Cambridge. He is presently a Research Associate at the University of Chester and a Visiting Lecturer at the Cambridge Muslim College. Amin’s research project, currently in the process of becoming a monograph, focuses on how everyday Muslim pieties encounter and operate through policies of secular and neoliberal governmentality in France and the UK.