The Neoliberal Turn in Regulating Islam

<jats:title>Abstract</jats:title> <jats:p>In this book, the author analyzes how everyday Muslim pieties encounter and operate through policies of secular governmentality. Based on more than two years of intensive fieldwork in the suburbs of Paris and London, in which the author was not only attending events but actively engaging in the everyday life of local Muslim leaders and various state and non-state actors in France and the UK, this book studies the neoliberal turn in regulating Islam. This turn refers to the importation of formalities, rules, and procedures, and the development of manuals, toolkits, and guidelines derived from private enterprise into the traditional sphere of mosques and madrasahs (Islamic schools) as well as halal and pilgrimage industries. This book analyzes the neoliberal turn at both the top-down level of the state policies and the bottom-up level of local Muslim leaders’ activities. The monograph argues that both processes take place in the light of two paradoxes: the paradox of neutrality and the paradox of legitimacy. The first one refers to the state’s claim of neutrality although it constantly intervenes in the regulation of the socioreligious field. The second paradox lies in the local Muslim leaders’ calling for neoliberal bureaucratization to become professional and legitimate, while resisting state attempts to control mosques and madrasahs, which are often plagued by opaque management. In this sense, this book discusses not only the existing contradictions of the so-called French and British secular regulation of Islam but also the impact of the neoliberal turn on the ethical self-making of local Muslim leaders.</jats:p>