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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 ofEuropeas a political space, and ofIslamas a religious tradition, underlie the endeavor?

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This paper seeks to understand and contextualize the work of the European Council for Fatwa and Research, an institution committed to the elaboration of a fiqh of minorities through the production and dissemination at regular intervals of fatwas for Muslims living in Europe. Drawing closely on the work of Michael Warner, I suggest that the minority fiqh project may be 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. The paper argues that the Islamic counterpublic brought about by the European Council for Fatwa and Research's mode of interpellation of European Muslim subjects finds in the Muslim reader its paradigmatic figure. It concludes by suggesting some of the ways in which the Islamic counterpublic may be authorized or disrupted both by its Muslim addressees and by other discourses articulated in mainstream European publics.

This article explores the politics of family cohesion in a Muslim polity simultaneously committed to the application of Islamic law, the preservation of cultural identity, and socio‑economic modernization. The article focuses on the work of Qatar’s Ministry of Endowments and Islamic Affairs, a government body that seeks to make Wahhābī Islam relevant to a society in the midst of rapid social change. Drawing on an analysis of the Ministry’s fatwas on family life, the article shows how Qatar’s media muftis have incorporated modern assumptions into their discourse and adjusted to new power configurations. The dissonance between the discourses articulated within official religious institutions and those found in other state bodies reflects the growing polarization of Qatari society, the normative pluralism undergirding modernization in the Gulf, and the regulatory ambitions of proliferating state institutions in a rentier economy.