What does it mean to “integrate” a complex and multifaceted tradition such as Islam into a transnational space as heterogeneous as that of modern Europe? And what kind of a project is precisely that of a “European Islam,” increasingly invoked today across the continent by a wide range of state and nonstate actors, including many Muslims? At a time dominated by variants of the clash of civilizations thesis, the project appears rather equivocal. What conceptions of Europe as a political space, and of Islam as a religious tradition, underlie the endeavor?

Starting with these questions in mind, the current article seeks to describe one particular articulation of the European Islam venture. I take as my focus the work of the European Council for Fatwa and Research (ECFR), a transnational institution committed to the elaboration of a Muslim jurisprudence for minorities (fiqh al-aqalliyyāt) through the production and dissemination of fatwas for Muslims living in Europe. Many of the ECFR's most publicized rulings have been studied elsewhere.Footnote ¹ They deal with a wide range of issues, including political participation, interest-bearing transactions, dilemmas arising out of marriage and divorce, and prayer timetables. In this paper I put forward an interpretation of what the institution does, and the kind of project that it articulates, while trying to avoid a culturalist interpretative framework.Footnote ² I start from the assumption that the complex deliberative process that underlies the ECFR's production of fatwas makes it problematic to speak of minority fiqh as anything other than a project, diversely understood and variously implemented, by the heterogeneous members of the collective fatwa body. Drawing closely on Michael Warner's articulation of the concept of the “public,”Footnote ³ I then argue that the ECFR's construction of a minority fiqh is perhaps best understood as the result of a performative conjunction between a particular tension—the tension between the cultivation of a pious subjectivity in tune with the temporalities of the global Islamic Revival and the perceived necessity to integrate Muslims into local European contexts—and a specific relation to public discourse.Footnote ⁴

THE POWER OF FATWAS

The ECFR purports to “guide Muslims in Europe,” “promoting a unified fatwa” against the cacophony of the religious advice currently circulating through a variety of media, and “become a reference” for Muslim and non-Muslim institutions, including state authorities.Footnote ⁵ Founded in 1997 by the Federation of Islamic Organizations in Europe (FIOE), the ECFR thus seeks to simultaneously protect the identity of Muslims and to integrate them into European societies. While the anxiety about the lack of unity of Muslim scholars has long been a mainstay of writings by the ʿulamaʾ, the ECFR's ambitious goals seem predicated on a number of more contemporary assumptions: the perception of the inadequacy of noninstitutionalized forms of Islamic advice (the informal fatwas given by local imams); the posited need to produce interpretations of the shariʿa geared to contexts understood to be unprecedented; and a specific understanding of the possibilities of fatwas as media forms to spread novel interpretations.

Moving away from the conventional distinction between “normative” and “practiced” Islam, I consider fatwas here as discourses that contribute to shape Muslim selves in specific ways and that therefore cannot be simply opposed to practices. Fatwas are seen, by the scholars of the ECFR, as performative speech acts whose effects can be easily traced. The fatwas issued specifically by the ECFR purport to “meet the needs of Muslims in Europe, solve their problems, and regulate their interaction with the European societies.”Footnote ⁶ Where does such regulatory power come from? How do these muftis seek to inscribe this power upon European Muslims?

The authority of the ECFR's fatwas is secured through an engagement with the authoritative Islamic texts, the disclosure of the reasoning that underlies the opinion, the inscription of the specific issue in a broader narrative structure, and the invocation of a set of moral principles and juridical formulas (al-qawāʿid al-fiqhiyya) that help to construct Islam—and Europe—in particular ways.Footnote ⁷ Two of these formulas, repeatedly cited, are central to the ECFR's project: al-taysīr (lenience or facility) and al-wāqiʿ (reality). They not only constitute the basis of the process of integration of Islam in Europe attempted by the fatwa council but also lie at the heart of the politics of authenticity enacted by the ECFR in print. Although “lenience” and “reality” are invoked by the members of the fatwa council as if they constituted unproblematic concepts (an assumption the muftis of the ECFR seem to share with many of their critics), the incorporation of these two notions into the texts of the fatwas has not been devoid of ambiguities.Footnote ⁸ A close reading of the ECFR's fatwas suggests an underlying tension between, on the one hand, the attempt to reconcile traditional Islamic norms with the dominant practices of the mainstream host society and, on the other hand, a reiteration of the Islamic tradition's contemporary relevance. The texts negotiated collectively within the ECFR thus oscillate between an emphasis on the relative powerlessness of Muslims and a stress on their individual moral responsibility. The former founds a regime of exceptions that suspend traditional Islamic norms through concepts such as “necessity” and emphases on the need to abide by European laws.Footnote ⁹ The latter purposively ignores the context (or minimizes its importance) in order to consolidate a Muslim identity rendered fragile—in the eyes of the muftis—by deep pressures toward assimilation. The tension sketched above can be partly traced to the membership of the ECFR. Although most of the members are Europe based, and many have been directly involved in national processes of state institutionalization of Islam across Europe, the Middle Eastern leadership provided by Yusuf al-Qaradawi and Faysal Mawlawi (the ECFR's chairman and vice chairman, respectively) give the council a distinctively diasporic flavor. Although they “carry the worries and anxieties of their fellow Muslims in Europe, visit them on a frequent basis, and appreciate their condition,”Footnote ¹⁰ the charismatic scholars based in the Middle East work within a discursive field primarily shaped by conditions in the Muslim world—and in particular by the problematics of the Islamic Revival. Both Qaradawi and Mawlawi have accordingly striven to place the European fatwa council squarely within the revivalist movement. By contrast, the muftis based in Europe (particularly those affiliated with the FIOE) have been preoccupied with national discourses about the “integration of Muslims” and the fear of “Islamic radicalization.” These scholars and their organizations have typically been engaged in the promotion of Islam as an accommodating “civil religion.”Footnote ¹¹ Integration and the Islamic Revival thus provide two conceptual arenas—and a field of tension—crucial for situating the work of the ECFR.

IMAGINING AN ISLAMIC (COUNTER)PUBLIC

By purporting to issue “decisive fatwas” that represent the “pristine shariʿa” and “regulate” the life of European Muslims, the ECFR enacts an authoritative discourse of “moderation” (wasaṭiyya) that does not deny competing interpretations but constantly seeks to reaffirm its own superior authority.Footnote ¹² This politics of moderation requires publicity. Publicity enables the enactment of the moderate discourse against the so-called “extremist” readings that push Muslims toward the margins of Europe and “harm” Islam.Footnote ¹³ Although this is seldom explicitly stated, the members of the ECFR also seek to counter the more modernist—or, in the famous formulation by Qaradawi, “lax”—religious interpretations that tend to minimize Islam's normative import. Such an exclusionary project goes hand in hand with the ECFR's attempt to promote a “uniform fatwa” in Europe, and both depend instrumentally on mass media for their success.

Ultimately, the ECFR's project seems to betray an ambivalence regarding the social consequences of religious interpretation—an ambivalence that, based on a conception of Muslim ethical discourse as performative, extends to the fatwa genre itself.Footnote ¹⁴ This ambivalence points in turn toward a growing perception among the ʿulamaʾ of the problem of authority in contemporary Islam as intractable. Attempting, without ever succeeding, to centralize the production of fatwas and avoid the “fatwa wars” recurrently played out in the media, the institutionalization of collegial fatwa bodies such as the ECFR and, more recently, the International Union of Muslim Scholars has been a typical response by the ʿulamaʾ to this modern perplexity. However, if the quest for establishing a modern form of consensus has proved largely elusive, the reason perhaps lies less in the divisions amongst the ʿulamaʾ, or in their varying hermeneutical strategies, than in the properties of public discourse and the open-ended nature of discourse's circulation within publics.

The members of the ECFR see themselves as addressing a European Muslim community and guiding it further into the path of the Islamic Revival. However, although the fatwas of the ECFR purportedly seek to address a more or less bounded community, they should perhaps instead be seen as creating a distinctive public of European Muslims despite (or rather because of) their internal differentiation in terms of language, ethnicity, class, political orientation, and level of religious commitment. A public, as Michael Warner has pointed out, is an imagined relationship among strangers characterized by the reflexive circulation of discourse. It requires “mere attention,” and its rhetorical imagination is a performative act—it creates a public merely by virtue of addressing it as such.Footnote ¹⁵

The argument here is not simply that the members of the ECFR are made aware—by questions that typically confront them with other opinions—that in answering the query, and publishing the fatwa, they are also collectively taking a position in a public debate on the meaning and relevance of the shariʿa. Rather, the ECFR's use of fatwas to address “indefinite strangers”Footnote ¹⁶ as well as real petitioners interpellates Muslim subjects in Europe in certain ways, bringing about a specific kind of public, distinct (although not totally separate) from the logics of the market and governed by a set of rationalities incommensurable (even if sometimes overlapping) with those of the state.Footnote ¹⁷ Although the European distribution of actual petitioners confers upon the ECFR's public a sense of “practical possibility,” naturalizing its disciplining project, the larger audience of indefinite readers underpins the “hope of transformation” constitutive of any public. The projection of this public is thus a distinctive modern form of power that partakes in processes of subject formation. If the irregularity and spacing of the ECFR's meetings maintain this public at a significant distance from politics proper,Footnote ¹⁸ the publicity attached to the ECFR's fatwas may nevertheless contribute to the politicization of Muslim practices, that is, to rendering them subject to public scrutiny (as well as the potential object of public regulation).

The rhetorical act of the imagination that constitutes this public coincides with the establishment of a body committed to the integration of Europe's Muslims through the dissemination of appropriate fatwas. The public, however, is materially brought into existence by the dissemination, at the end of each session, of a final statement gathering all the meeting's fatwas delivered from the Dublin headquarters; by the repetitive enunciation of injunctions (tawṣiāt), attached to the answers to the believers' questions, which seek to consolidate a pious European Muslim subjectivity; by their subsequent publication in the ECFR's scientific review printed in Lebanon; by the reprinting of the fatwas in periodicals such as al-Urubbiyya (the FIOE's magazine published until recently from Reims, France); by their circulation via IslamOnLine's Arabic- and English-language websites, the London-based Saudi daily al-Sharq al-Awsat, or the satellite-TV station al-Jazeera in Qatar; and by their eventual compilation for mass readership at two Egyptian presses (Islamic INC and Dar al-Tawziʿ wa-l-Nashr al-Islamiyya).Footnote ¹⁹

This public appears therefore as a distinctively transnational space, crucially enabled by the proliferation of modern mass media. Although its international orientation draws in part upon an older social imaginary—the “global public space of normative reference and debate” that has characterized Muslim fiqh throughout the agesFootnote ²⁰—the public at hand functions through a reflexive circulation of discourse that arguably goes beyond the expectations underlying traditional fatwa-giving.

The language of discourse in this public draws upon the conventional protocols of the Muslim fiqh, with its five categories of evaluation and its distinctive mode of argumentation. It is significant that it also incorporates an acknowledgement of its own limits because, as many of its practitioners readily acquiesce, “fiqh itself is not enough.”Footnote ²¹ This public seems furthermore characterized by a new impetus to open up the circulation of the discourse to further elaboration, even contestation, from voices within the body of the ʿulamaʾ as well as to those outside it: a gesture that finds its most visible expression in the call for integrating social scientists and other experts—Muslim as well as non-Muslim—into the reflections of the ECFR.Footnote ²²

THE MUSLIM READER

The Islamic public that I am describing here presupposes an individualized moral subject that, as Qaradawi has argued elsewhere, needs to be persuaded before he or she accepts a fatwa—a subject who is asked to read and meditate in a world where knowledge (al-ʿilm) precedes practice (al-ʿamal). It is this subject who is also occasionally enjoined, by no less a figure than Qaradawi, to become “his own mufti”Footnote ²³—a proposition that appears at first sight intriguing coming from an Islamic scholar who has spent the best part of his life giving fatwas to Muslims worldwide but that nevertheless is in tune with Qaradawi's confidence that most Muslims, if liberated from the shackles of traditional authority (the four established Sunni juridical schools), would opt for his middle-ground vision of Islam—a vision he regularly depicts as rational and in line with the spirit of the times.

It is revealing that several of the dichotomies that the members of the ECFR mobilize to characterize this public seem to assume a linear temporality and echo those constitutive of liberal public spheres: they include, in the words of the ECFR's leadership, the call to privilege “rationality” over “sentimentality,” “originality” over “repetition,” and “reform” over “tradition.”Footnote ²⁴ However, although liberal publics are typically geared toward the exercise of deliberative democracy, the public brought about by the ECFR's dissemination of fatwas differs in its pursuit of distinctive Islamic futures—futures underpinned by specific assumptions about the purpose of human life (Mankind's creation to worship the Divine) and geared toward the cultivation of the pious virtues deemed necessary to ensure a life, and an afterlife, fitting these assumptions. Given this conceptual apparatus, and because the practitioners are aware of its subaltern status in European societies, this public can also be called a counterpublic.Footnote ²⁵

The paradigmatic figure of the public imagined by the ECFR can be said to be that of the “Muslim reader,” who stands in a specific relation to the written word and to textual forms of authority. This figure—suggested by the Egyptian editor of an English translation of Qaradawi's treatise on fiqh al-aqalliyyāt—designates primarily the individual who engages in a silent and solitary reading practice (one that therefore diverges both from the recitation of the Qurʾan and from the memorization of classical fiqh texts) and finds a measure of rational interest and spiritual comfort in the muftis' responses to the dilemmas faced by fellow Muslims residing in Europe.Footnote ²⁶ Reading everywhere is a culturally organized activity; in the context of the Islamic Revival, the practice is regulated through a set of instructions initially formulated for the student of religion and now reactualized in printed and HTML format for an expanded audience.Footnote ²⁷ Reading itself has elicited a number of fatwas delivered to answer questions such as how to read books of knowledge or where to seek knowledge.Footnote ²⁸ The ideal profile of the figure of the Muslim reader can be pieced together from such texts. Reading here is linked to a certain telos, presupposes particular ideas about knowledge, and also partakes in the construction of specific subjects.Footnote ²⁹ The Muslim reader requires sincerity of intention: this sincerity transforms reading into an act of worship and enables the reader to distinguish between useful and worthless knowledge. Reading is not done for its own sake (or for pleasure); rather, it is geared toward the acquisition of the necessary virtues for living in this world—and the next. It is linked to faith (īmān) and to action (ʿamal) and requires not only a particular attitude of the mind but also an openness of the heart. Appropriately, many intra-Muslim debates on the ECFR have revolved around proper and improper modes of reading the fatwas as well as on the intention of readers; many muftis of the fatwa council have complained in interviews with the author that “Muslims don't read our fatwas properly, as they look only for a yes or no answer,” a simplification of the texts that seemingly distorts their meaning. Likewise, Tariq Ramadan in his commentary to the First Collection of Fatwas echoes the sentiment of various ECFR members when he warns that Muslims who read the fatwas looking only for facility are likely to find neither “spiritual comfort” nor “internal peace.”Footnote ³⁰ Bereft of social context, the figure of the Muslim reader that I am evoking here may appear to be quite abstract. How can one locate more precisely the figure of the Muslim reader? What are the social conditions of his (her) possibility?

A number of overlapping distinctions appear crucial to answer these questions. The figure of the European Muslim reader is at least as heterogeneous as the mustaftī population that consults the ECFR, a population that includes (both male and female) first-generation immigrants, re-Islamized youth, and European converts. The first relevant distinction is between Arabic and non-Arabic speakers—a distinction that, given the composition of the respective Muslim populations, unfolds rather differently in places like France, Germany, or the United Kingdom. The Arabic-language collections of the ECFR's fatwas, freely distributed, circulate largely through the infrastructure of the FIOE, present across Europe mainly in the mosques and Islamic centers controlled by first-generation Arabs. They thus reach primarily male Muslim leaders and imams involved in community structures, refugees with a background in political Islamic movements, and pious students in institutions of tertiary education who were socialized in the Arab world. The English and the French translations of the ECFR's fatwas, however, target a considerably wider audience. If the English translations have been freely (albeit selectively) distributed while the French have been commercially traded, both can be said to participate in the burgeoning market for Islamic books that has proliferated since the 1990s, in Europe and elsewhere, in conjunction with the Islamic Revival.

The figure of the Muslim reader has therefore to be situated squarely in the context of the exponential expansion of the phenomenon of the Islamic book (al-kitāb al-islāmī) associated with the religious revival that has touched Muslims in Muslim-majority societies as well as many minority communities.Footnote ³¹ A further distinction found in the literature on the phenomenon of the Islamic book also seems relevant here, namely, that between the books of the Islamic heritage (turāth) reedited today to tap into a new specialized demand, on the one hand, and the pedagogical literature which summarizes, simplifies, or rearticulates the topoi of the Islamic classics for a general audience, on the other hand.Footnote ³² Both the English and the Arabic versions of the ECFR's fatwa collections exist in two different editions published simultaneously by Dar al-Tawziʿ wa-l-Nashr al-Islamiyya. The hardback edition, reminiscent of the heritage classics, seems to appeal to a religious elite (imams, Muslim intellectuals, advanced students), while the paperback version appears geared toward a much larger readership.Footnote ³³ If this is correct, the targeted audience of the ECFR's texts comprises both a (male) intellectual elite from the first generation of immigrants and a more general readership of Muslim youth (of both genders) socialized in Europe.

It should be clear from the previous discussion that if the transnational ethos of this Islamic (counter)public is at first sight striking, then the reach of the public is mediated by the existence of national (and linguistic) markets. The relatively high degree of publicity that the ECFR has generated in France is undoubtedly related to the fact that the translations of its fatwas have been commercially distributed only in that country. The competition between GEDIS (the publishing house of the Union des organisations islamiques de France based in Paris) and the Lyon-based Editions Tawhid (close to the Young Muslim network inspired by Tariq Ramadan) yielded two translations of the ECFR's First Collection of Fatwas in 2002. By contrast to the situation in other European countries, these French collections responded to a previously untapped market demand.Footnote ³⁴

The Islamic book market that sustains the ECFR's collections is commercially enabled partly by the growth of a pious Muslim middle class and partly by subsidies from donors in the Arab world eager to contribute to the vitality of Islam in the West. The growth of the Islamic book has been linked globally to what some observers have called the “objectification of Islam.”Footnote ³⁵ In Europe, it also appears connected to larger processes of social change. Intergenerational shifts have expanded the demand for vernacular translations of religious texts (reflecting the decreased Arabic competence of second and subsequent generations of European Muslims of Arab descent) and created a new reading function linked to what Olivier Roy has described as the relative loss of social plausibility of Islam in a minority situation.Footnote ³⁶ If the shift from the first generation of Muslim immigrants to subsequent generations of European Muslim citizens has been broadly a shift from a lived Islam (“islam vécu”) to a constructed Islam (“islam construit”)—as Leïla Babès famously arguesFootnote ³⁷—then the demand for the Islamic book, like the demand for fatwas itself, appears to fit into this distinctively postmigratory European phenomenon. The fatwa collections of the ECFR are among many volumes acquired by Muslims, who seem to read eclectically from the Islamic textual traditions of past and present in their quest for the knowledge deemed necessary for living as responsible believers in today's Europe.Footnote ³⁸

MEASURING THE SUCCESS OF THE ISLAMIC COUNTERPUBLIC

To place the figure of the Muslim reader in context is not yet to answer questions about the success of the public imagined by the ECFR. Bearing in mind that a public is “always in excess of its known social basis,”Footnote ³⁹ what are the criteria that one should mobilize to quantify a public? How should one understand the gaps between the imagined public and the real contexts of audience? To be more specific, to which extent must these gaps be attributed to institutional deficiencies within the ECFR (still largely tributary to the Middle Eastern contexts of its leadership and dependent upon an Arabic-speaking audience that does not reflect the linguistic diversity of European Muslim communities)? How do they relate to the competing agendas of its members, torn between sustaining the global Islamic Revival and promoting Islam as a civil religion in Europe? To what degree should the distance between imagined public and real audience be seen as the inescapable outcome of the contradictions and instabilities inherent in all public discourse?

It is clear that the distribution of petitioners—a distribution that, according to statements from members of the ECFR and fieldwork observations by this researcher, is wider than what the institutional framework of the ECFR can accommodate—naturalizes the ECFR's project. However, to suggest that the ECFR works discursively to bring about a specific public (and thus shape a particular European Muslim subjectivity) is also to reformulate questions about the authority of its fatwas. In an age of mass-mediated communication, and particularly in a diasporic context where the discursive tradition of the shariʿa stands apart from the structures of legal power, circulation arguably becomes a crucial measure of religious authority. Circulation, however, also enables the possibility of subversion. If the ECFR's project can be seen as an attempt to set the terms of the debate on Islam in Europe, its hegemonic aspiration leaves it vulnerable to discursive interventions that interrupt the underlying process of subject formation. Here I put forward the hypothesis that, given the features of the public as a particular kind of social imaginary characterized by the open-ended circulation of discourse, not all critiques disrupt the public brought into existence by the ECFR's mode of interpellation of European Muslims. There are only a limited number of ways through which the circulation of discourse in a given public can be disrupted. I discuss three such ways below: a denial of the public's constitutive tension, an attempt to shift its idiom, and a misrecognition of the public being enacted.

If, as I have suggested, the public imagined by the ECFR is characterized by a mode of articulating the tension between the impetus of the Islamic Revival (with its temporality geared toward Islamic futures), and the problematics of integration in Europe (with its underlying assumption of homogeneous space), then arguably this public will not be significantly disrupted by discourses placing different emphases on the former or the latter. Rather, the public imagined by the ECFR will be disrupted, and the underlying process of subject formation interrupted, only by discursive interventions that deny outright the relevance of a public Islamic religiosity (as in the discourse of “secular” Muslims) or of the necessity to integrate (as in the discourse of “radical” Muslim organizations). Although they may pose challenges to the religious authority of the ECFR, intermediate critiques, even virulent ones, can arguably be easily incorporated into the imaginary of minority fiqh. Given that one implication of the autotelic quality of the publicFootnote ⁴⁰ is that the circulation of discourse cannot be monopolized by any single agency, such criticisms do not appear to disrupt the public as such. If this is true, it would explain why Salafi or Hizb ut-Tahrir's critiques of the fatwa council are often perceived by the ECFR's leadership as rather damaging and necessitating specific public responses, whereas the increasingly vocal criticisms formulated by Tariq Ramadan—in Editions Tawhid's critically annotated translation of the ECFR's fatwas, and in his later works—can be incorporated into the internal discussions (and Ramadan invited to join the council).Footnote ⁴¹ While Hizb ut-Tahrir and the Salafis force the ECFR to justify its call for integrating Muslims in “non-Islamic” societies,Footnote ⁴² rather than urging them to segregate or migrate to dār al-islām,Footnote ⁴³ Tariq Ramadan's vision may seem to provide merely an alternative solution to the constitutive tension that, although quite different in its political implications, can be swiftly integrated by the members of the ECFR under a Muslim ethic of disagreement (adab al-ikhtilāf).Footnote ⁴⁴ It is undoubtedly in response to the critiques formulated by European Muslim intellectuals such as Ramadan that internal discussions within the ECFR about conceptualizations of a fiqh appropriate to the situation of European Muslims have started to move away from a stress on “minorityness” toward an emphasis on the notion of “citizenship.”

I have tried to argue that the Swiss intellectual Tariq Ramadan's critiques of specific ECFR positions may not be particularly harmful to the enactment of a public through the regular production of fatwas for European Muslims. Potentially far more disruptive appears to be his attempt to shift the idiom from what he calls “the spirit of the fatwa” to its “psychology.” According to Ramadan, the spirit of the fatwa designates a “dynamic” vision of the Islamic shariʿa based on ijtihād and upheld by the members of the ECFR. The psychology of the fatwa, by contrast, constitutes a horizon not yet met, an additional condition for the muftiship that includes specific “habits,” “culture,” and “sensibility” that those from the first generation of immigrants or visiting from the Muslim world need—but apparently, according to Ramadan, cannot acquire—in order to issue fatwas appropriate for European Muslims.Footnote ⁴⁵ Because the circulation of discourse within a public depends upon the existence of a shared idiom, Ramadan's attempts to shift the idiom (and thus the competences required for speaking authoritatively) appear to affect it in significant ways. Even more fundamentally, the use of the term “fatwa” by young Muslims to designate authoritarian and undemocratic discourses,Footnote ⁴⁶ or calls from Muslim intellectuals to “abolish” fatwas altogether,Footnote ⁴⁷ appear rather damaging to this public. In this regard, the ECFR's mobilization of the fatwa genre is submitted to a number of constraints of publicity linked to the largely negative connotations that the term has evoked in Europe since the Salman Rushdie affair. The involvement of the FIOE, a decade after establishing the ECFR, in a number of alternative projects such as the “Charter for European Muslims” or the constitution of a “European Assembly of Imams and Spiritual Guides”Footnote ⁴⁸ amounts to an implicit acknowledgement of the difficulties posed by the language of the fatwa in contemporary Europe. Such developments point to the emergence of discursive languages other than fiqh and promise to redistribute Muslim authority accordingly—away from the ʿulamaʾ and toward new types of religious spokespersons.

Finally, a public may be disrupted if it is misrecognized—that is to say, if the fiction of the public's self-organization is exposed as ideological. An instance of this misrecognition (or unmasking) occurs when European Muslims do not recognize themselves as legitimate addressees, for example, by raising doubts about the legitimacy of the ECFR (as in the assertion by a French Muslim intellectual in Le Monde that the ECFR is a self-proclaimed body that needs to be rejected)Footnote ⁴⁹ or by implying that the public in question is in fact the manifestation of some other unavowed political project (as when a group of believers distribute leaflets outside the ECFR's Dublin headquarters suggesting that the fatwas carry the misguided political project of the Muslim Brotherhood).Footnote ⁵⁰ A different expression of a similar misrecognition may be found in the indifference of the intended audience. If a public requires “mere attention,”Footnote ⁵¹ then attitudes of neglect by its anticipated readership can be seen as compromising it. An illustration of such an attitude appears to be the staging of an annual boxing exhibition between professional Muslim boxers in London by a local organization, Muslim Directory, which invokes “the importance of health and fitness in Islam” and makes no attempt to engage, or even to acknowledge, a fatwa by the ECFR condemning boxing as un-Islamic.