State, space and secularism: towards a critical study of governing religion

ABSTRACT

Over the last decade, cities have become key sites of investigations into the politics of religious diversity. However, the vibrant scholarship on governing urban religion frequently suffers from conceptually thin understandings of the debate's key terms. This contribution critically engages with the conceptual underpinnings of this scholarship by discussing the interdependence of the dimensions of state, space and secularism. Regarding the state, I suggest that we should reconceptualise the state as strategic terrain, effect and social relation; regarding space, I discuss the analytical purchase of the TPSN (Territory, Place, Space, Network) approach, and regarding secularism I argue that we need to investigate local secularisms as problem-spaces and vernacular practices. Focusing on Islam in Western Europe, I demonstrate the analytical benefits of these theoretical reconfigurations by discussing the case study of the failure of one of Germany's most prominent mosque projects, the Munich Forum for Islam (MFI).

KEYWORDS:

• Relational state
• space
• local secularism
• religion
• Islam in Germany
• TPSN

Acknowledgements

A draft of this article was presented at the workshop “Religious? Secular? Rethinking Islam and Space in Europe” at the University of Cambridge in December 2017. I would like to thank Adela Taleb and Chris Moses, the co-organizers of this workshop, for being such inspiring academics, skilled organizers and critical interlocutors, and I would like to thank the participants of the workshop and the contributors of this special issue for their collaborative thinking over the last three years. I am very grateful to Thandeka Cochrane, Sebastian Scholl, Chris Moses, and three anonymous reviewers for their incisive comments on earlier drafts of this paper.

Disclosure statement

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

Notes

1 For a detailed account of the failed attempt to construct the new Munich mosque see Müller 2019.

Additional information

Funding

This research was supported through a Vice Chancellor's Award of the ; Cambridge Commonwealth, European and International Trust, a doctoral scholarship of the German National Scholarship Foundation (Studienstiftung des deutschen Volkes), and a Junior Research Fellowship at the Woolf Institute, Cambridge.