Muslims and the Relational State: Contesting Security, Identity, Diversity Tobias Müller

Interactions between Muslims and the state have become deeply contested political issues in 21st century Europe. States relate to Muslims in very different ways, in some instances as law-abiding citizens, tax-payers, and members of different religious communities, in other instances as insufficiently integrated migrants and terror suspects. This raises the question: how can we account for the complex interactions between Muslims and different dimensions of the state? The aim of this thesis is to investigate patterns of the mutually transformative interactions of Muslims and the state through the study of two diverse neighbourhoods. Two major lines of investigation have driven the recent surge in scholarship on Muslims and the state in Western Europe. First, scholars have focussed on how central governments employ laws, policies and discourses directed at Muslims. Complementary to these macro-level perspectives, this thesis argues that we need to study local interactions to understand the effects of the relations of Muslims and the state. Second, more sociological and anthropological work has focussed on the ways Muslims establish themselves as citizens and societal actors. However, many of these studies fail to connect actions of local state agents to the complex apparatus of the state. Critically, they often operate with a reductionist “black box” conception of the state that fails to unpack and problematise the very notion of the state. To address this problem, this study conceptualises the state as social relation and effect. This thesis is based on twelve months of ethnographic fieldwork in two urban neighbourhoods in Hasenbergl/Milbertshofen, Munich, and southern Brent, London. These observations are complemented by the analysis of 122 semi-structured qualitative interviews with a diverse set of Muslims and non-Muslims, state and non-state actors, experts and non-experts in Germany and the UK. Analysing two in-depth case studies allows us to scrutinise differences and similarities in how two distinct national trajectories of engaging with Islam are invoked, transformed and contested in two different localities. The main empirical argument of this thesis contends that in both local contexts one can identify three main state projects, namely a security state project, an identity state project, and a diversity state project which are often in conflict with each other. This thesis argues that despite significant differences, those state projects manifest in strikingly similar ways across the two cases under scrutiny. Major differences concern the role of the secret services, practices of labelling Muslims as extremists, scepticism towards transnational links, understandings of diversity and the ways in which knowledge formations on Islam shape activities of state actors. The central conceptual aim of this thesis is to demonstrate that we cannot understand “the state” nor “Muslim subjectivities” separate from local interactions and effects. Relational state theory is able to bridge the conceptual gap between these local interactions and effects, and the state as an ensemble of institutions, knowledge formations and subjectivities. Drawing on Bob Jessop and Michel Foucault, the thesis develops a conceptual framework that analyses the complex ensemble of polycontextual interactions of Muslims and the relational state along three heuristic, interdependent categories: state apparatus, state space and state people. This thesis concludes that Muslims and the state are trapped in a series of tensions between irreducibly contradictory imperatives and practices mobilised through different state projects.