Cemeteries and Mosques: Muslim Collective Action in Switzerland and France

Carolyn M. Warner

Department of Political Science

ArizonaStateUniversity

paper prepared for presentation at the annual meeting of the Association for the Study of Religion, Economics and Culture, WashingtonD.C. 2-5 April 2009. Copyright Carolyn M. Warner

I thank Colin Elman, Miki Kittilson, Paul Lewis, and Ramazan Kilinc for helpful comments and insights, Ali Ihsan Aydin and Diane Hässig for facilitating access to documents, and Kirsten Pickering for research assistance.

Abstract

This paper studies the coordination efforts among Muslims in two areas across two countries. The policy areas are attempts to obtain permission for Islamic burial practices at public cemeteries and the establishment of full-service community mosques. In order to take into account the variety of Muslim religious groups and ethnicities in Europe and to evaluate various dimensions of religion, the paper analyses case studies of these topics within several cities in France and Switzerland, across different religion-state regimes. This analysis of Muslim collective action to obtain permission for Muslim burial practices in cemeteries and to establish full-service community mosques finds support for the hypothesis that cooperation and conflict between Muslims, and by extension, between interest groups, varies depending on whether the resource being sought is a club or public good. The paper also finds some support for the claim that conflict is demarcated by theological and ethnic differences. It does not find support for the expectation that the nature of the religion-state regime affects cooperation and conflict.

Democracies tend to compel organized religions to act as interest groups at times in order to obtain resources and legal permission for the exercise of specific practices of their religions (Warner 2000). Catholics, Protestants and Jews have historically found this to be the case in Europe and the United States. In recent decades it appears Muslims have as well. How does religion affect organizational activity among religious groups? In particular, how does it affect collective action among Muslim groups in Europe? Do the factors which have been argued to affect collective action dynamics of Christians and Jews affect Muslims? The thrust of religious sociology is that different movements and groups in Islam, such as, within Sunni Islam, the Naqshbandi, Murids, Deobandi, Barelvi, Tablighi, Milli Görüs, Diyanet, and offshoots of the Muslim Brotherhood, are likely to have different theological orientations that affect their propensity to engage in collective action with other religious groups on public policy, and influence what demands and compromises they will make. The economics of religion school, as well as social movement theory, holds that material resources are necessary to sustain and expand a religion (Gill 1998; Wald, Silverman and Fridy 2005). Movements and groups within Islam should have material interests that affect their organizational survival, with the implication that different Muslim groups would have interest-based disputes over the provision of resources from the state even though they may share a basic interest in obtaining those state resources. I extend these perspectives to suggest that variation in conflict and cooperation depend on what kind of public resource is being sought -- is it a shared public good or a less divisible club or private good -- and on ethnic and theological divisions.

Attention to Islam and politics has focused increasingly on the role of violent minority factions (Berman and Laitin 2007; Kepel 2004; Lewis 2003). Little attention has been paid to the less dramatic but equally important topic of organizational mobilization among mainstream Muslims or the factors that facilitate or hinder efforts by Muslims in Europe to organize effectively and promote their interests. Studies of Muslims and Muslim organizations in Europe focus mainly on integration and the effects of state laws and policies on the ability of Muslims to practice their religion or on their status as immigrants (Buijis and Rath 2002; Bleich 2003; Laurence 2006; Laurence and Vaisse 2006; Cesari 2005; McLoughlin 2005; Fetzer and Soper 2005; Klausen 2005; Manço and Amoranitis 2005). Research has documented the multiplicity of Muslim groups, ethnicities, and organizations in Europe and shown how they are often divided on issues such as religious practices and control of community mosques (Maréchal, Allievi, Dassetto and Nielsen 2003; Allievi 2003; Cesari 2005; Kepel 1997; Warner and Wenner 2006). But we know very little about the conditions under which different Muslim groups collaborate to pursue policy interests. Scholars and policy-makers alike speculate that the religion of Islam itself matters, but have had little to say about how it matters. Given the increased politicization of Islam in Europe and state efforts to regulate the religion, the empirical and theoretical lacuna concerning how and what facets of Islam affect coordination and conflict among Muslim groups is a glaring problem. We need to focus attention on the incentives different kinds of resources give to groups to cooperate or compete, and we need to assess systematically how theological differences interact with those incentives to affect cooperation and conflict.

This paper is an exploratory study of the coordination efforts among Muslim groups in two policy areas in two countries. The areas are permission for Islamic burial rites at public cemeteries and the establishment of full-service community mosques. In order to do a preliminary test of how Muslims organize themselves to pursue policy goals pertaining to cemeteries and mosques, I start with case studies of these topics in several French and Swiss cities.[1]

There are good reasons to study collective action by Muslim groups directed at cemeteries and mosques. First, efforts to obtain Muslim burial plots at public cemeteries should prompt cooperation between different movements and ethnicities. Proper burial of the dead is a shared concern of Muslims, including those who are not devout or seldom attend prayer services. Despite diversity within Islam in many areas, basic burial rites are the same for all Muslims, even as other aspects of the funeral ceremony may vary. Most European cemetery standards are ultimately set or waived by the local municipality (Ansari 2007; Bowen 2007, 43-48; Renaerts 1986; Aldeeb Abu-Sahlieh 2002; Burkhalter 1999; Halevi 2007; Jonker 1996; Lemmen 1996; Haut Conseil à l’ Intégration 2000, 43). Large-scale national level collective action is not critical. Furthermore, cemetery policies, while not as newsworthy as headscarf laws, constitute a focal point of the integration of Muslims in European societies, and a definitive feature of a state and society’s religion-state relationship.

Second, an analysis of efforts to attain funding and planning approval for full-service community mosques is important because mosques are the physical and community cornerstone of Islam; as with Christian churches, mosques, through their mosque associations, can become platforms for socio-political movements and organizations and a presence in the larger community. Mosque proposals have also become politicized in public debates about integration, multi-culturalism, religion in the public sphere, neo-colonialism, and delivery of government social services. Muslims of different denominations and ethnicities sometimes attempt to cooperate to obtain the resources to create a large community mosque, ranging from a “neighborhood mosque” to a so-called “Cathedral mosque” (Maussen 2007). Research to date has focused on state obstacles and state interests in managing and secularizing Islam and on public reaction (Fetzer and Soper 2005; Laurence 2006; Cesari et al 2005), but not systematically on the conditions under which adherents of different variants of Islam cooperate to propose and run a full-service mosque. It is a project on which Muslims have strong incentives to collaborate, as well as strong incentives to compete.

Both areas create collective action dilemmas. First, while religion can unite individuals through common discourse, practices and institutions, providing a nearly ready-made community as a mobilization resource, it can also divide. Major religious traditions have numerous divisions within them, such that religious groups within the same tradition may vary in what they want, with whom they can or will ally and how they can legitimate their interactions with other religious groups. Autonomy of the group’s faith may be more important than physical facilities. Second, religions face the usual concerns about free-riding; in the cases here, these would be concerns about who puts up how much for financing, who meets with city officials, who does other organizing work. Third, they have concerns about the resource itself: who controls it and who has access to it?

I expect that there should be more cooperation and less conflict between Muslim groups in the effort to obtain permission for Islamic burials in public cemeteries, and less cooperation and more conflict between Muslim groups in the effort to obtain permission and funding for a full-service community mosque. I hypothesize that this is due to the nature of the resource being sought, and also due to differences in the theologies and orientations of the Muslim groups. Mosques have many of the characteristics of a club good: the enjoyment of it by one group diminishes or blocks the enjoyment of it by another, membership is voluntary and exclusionary, and use can result in crowding within the resource (McBride 2007; Sandler and Tschirhart 1997; Iannaccone 1998). It is a “concrete cultural resource” (Kniss 1996, 12; cf. Cesari 1993, 128-9). The mosque is not a resource in isolation; it inheres in a community.[2] Because mosques have a significant role in the perpetuation and practices of the religious group but are not each a divisible resource, access and control are major concerns–to wit, rotation of leadership between groups, when it has been attempted, has resulted in knife fights and gun battles, not peaceful coexistence.[3] Muslim groups are concerned about membership and control of the mosque committee; the latter usually hires the imam. They are concerned about whether they can exclude rival groups and how to protect their control of the mosque. In addition, mosque requirements vary somewhat across Muslim groups. For instance, the Nurcu movement is oriented towards education—its interest is in creating cultural centers, not full-blown mosques; the Tabligh (Foi et Pratique in France), however, is oriented towards individual piety. Its interest is in creating traditional mosques in which to worship.[4] Purpose-built full-service mosques are expensive resources. Given religion-state regimes in Europe, they must be funded almost entirely by Muslims themselves. Cooperation between Muslim groups to pool resources to get permission and funding to build a full-service community mosque should be difficult, and should break on theological and ethnic divisions. As the literature on immigrant churches in the U.S. suggests, because places of worship can be places of cultural solidarity, cooperation on mosques may be difficult across ethnicities (Marti 2008; Ebaugh 2003; Manço 1997; Warner and Wittner 1998). Even if a political entrepreneur cynically just wants to control a big mosque, I expect the divisions along which he will break his group to be theological and/or ethnic.[5]

Public cemeteries function more like a public good. While space is ultimately finite, one person’s use does not preclude another’s access to another plot in the cemetery nor undermine the city’s agreement to allow Muslim burial rites in public cemeteries. Theological differences among Muslims should not affect cooperation on getting Islamic burial spaces at public cemeteries, as all are interested in having the same basic Islamic burial rites (Adler 2005; Jonker 1996; Burkhalter 1999; Renaerts 1986; Aldeeb Abu-Sahlieh 2002, 42-43).[6] While Muslim groups would face concerns about free-riding in organizing to petition city officials, we should see less conflict between groups because of the common denominator of Muslim burial rites, because the cost of the public cemetery is born by the entire municipality and not Muslim groups themselves, and because the individual or group’s use of the resource is not diminished by another’s use of it. On the latter, there are three reasons for that. First, the cities require finite concessions, so that remains are removed after a set number of years and the plot is freed for a new burial.[7] Second, the specific content of a Muslim burial ritual by one religious group for one interment is not believed to detract from the ritual of a different Muslim group for another.[8] Burials, while they may bring together a family and religious community, do not take place with the regularity of Friday sermons or daily prayers, nor do cemeteries provide social gathering spaces or education facilities. Third, on the question of Muslim burial areas within public cemeteries, cities have not allowed Muslims to discriminate on the basis of religious orientation within Islam.[9]

There are numerous ways to characterize the theological orientation of a religious group, and the science of doing so is underdeveloped in political science. One way which has been used productively to study community engagement of immigrant congregations in the United States is that of Kniss and Numrich.[10] They argue that a useful typology is one which distinguishes religious congregations according to the emphasis they put on the collectivity or individual as the source of moral authority, and the collectivity or the individual as the object of a moral project.[11] If “[w]ho or what determines the nature of good, beauty and truth” is a group-based religious tradition whose authority is “housed in a religious text or ecclesiastical hierarchy”, then the religion is based on a model of collective authority (Kniss and Numrich 2007, 38, 40). An individualist model of moral authority finds the basis of “ultimate values” in the individual’s “reason or experience” or perception of experiences. Authoritative texts are open to reasoned critique and re-evaluation of how they apply to new circumstances and contexts (38). They argue that a religion for which moral authority is collective can nevertheless have the individual as the target of the moral project: here they note that while Protestant Evangelicals regard the Bible as an infallible moral authority, the “most important moral project for these Protestant groups is bringing individuals to a “born again” (evangelical) or “spirit-filled” (Pentecostal) experience” (57). For the reverse (individual moral authority and collective project) they note reformed Judaism and mainline Protestantism. The reasoning of Kniss and Numrich suggests that most Muslim groups, being collectivist in their locus of moral authority and object of the moral project, will be engaged in projects which work for the benefit of their community. Obtaining permission for Muslim burials and establishing full-service mosques would seem to be community-oriented projects; that is, projects which, while of course benefitting the individual Muslim, are meant to maintain the religious community. Kniss and Numrich argue that collective oriented groups are less likely to work collaboratively with other religious groups or civic groups on these projects, as they are less able to recognize alternative perspectives, and because their focus is their own community. Studies of Islam in Europe suggest that within Islam, there is variation on the collective- individual dimensions for both authority and object of action and Kniss and Numrich do note that while the source of moral authority in Islam tends to be collective, and that the moral project is usually the community (religious collective), there are interpretations, such as Sufism, which emphasize the individual religious experience (63). The implication is that if a Muslim group sees its community as largely limited to itself, it may be less likely to work with other Muslim groups toward a common goal.

What a mosque constitutes, and what permission for Muslim burial rites constitutes, needs more thought. After all, many individualist religions (where the source and object of moral authority is the individual, not the group) still have religious buildings. They may also argue for permission for their burial rites, though they may be willing to accept that they can buried along side someone of another creed or faith (or no faith); still others may be willing to adapt to whatever the local legal restrictions are and not worry about cemeteries. There also is considerable variation within Muslim movements in Europe on what their goals are, even if the goals are collectivist. Kniss and Numrich would agree that the specific content is likely to vary with the specific religious group, even though the broad outlines suggest that a group which sees moral authority as inhering in a collectively held religious tradition and which has the collectivity as the moral project is going to be engaged in projects which maintain and extend the group.

Another classification used by some sociologists of religion to provide additional leverage on the issue of cooperation and conflict might be more applicable to the questions under consideration in this paper. This starts with a fairly simple division between those religious groups with a theology that attempts to integrate their religious traditions with contemporary life, and those that strive to adhere to traditional religious principles and rules (as they define them) and shun integration. The first is characterized as flexible and modernist and the second as rigid and orthodox (cf. Davis and Robinson 2001). We would expect to find that Islamic movements vary in how restrictive they are about what is required in a mosque and what is required for proper burial. The flexible and modernist will have fewer requirements than the rigid and orthodox. One can hypothesize that groups will then vary along the dimension of engagement in collective action: those more restrictive should be more engaged in efforts to obtain a full-service community mosque, and be unwilling to settle for continued worship in a prayer room; likewise for cemeteries, with those more restrictive more engaged in pushing for efforts to be allowed to have the corpse face Mecca, and ensure permanence of the remains. However, those more restrictive about mosques are likely to strive to have full control over the running of the mosque, which may temper their willingness to engage in collective action with other Muslim groups. In contrast, restrictiveness about cemeteries might not hinder willingness to engage in collective action with other Muslim groups, because how the adherents of one group bury their dead at a grave does not affect how adherents of another group do, and European cities, not the groups, retain control over access to the cemetery spaces (where Muslim burials are allowed in public cemeteries, the city’s criterion is that the deceased must be said to be a Muslim; Conseil d’État 2004, 327). The constructs of flexible/rigid, modernist/orthodox do not capture the range of dimensions on which Muslim groups vary, or all the differences and similarities which the groups may consider relevant for distinguishing between themselves (Maréchal 2003, 111-143; El-Jisr 1993). The constructs are, however, useful for analytic purposes in this study (cf. Wood 1999). At a minimum, if religion as a theology makes a difference in willingness of groups to cooperate in order to obtain services from governing entities, then its effect should show up, with some variation, in these policy areas.