Workshops/Panels Organized by Amin El-Yousfi
Workshop titled "The Positionality of Muslims in the Study of Islam" to be held at the University... more Workshop titled "The Positionality of Muslims in the Study of Islam" to be held at the University of Cambridge in May 2025. This event aims to foster critical discussions on the methodological, theoretical, and epistemological challenges surrounding positionality in the study of Islam.
Conference Presentations by Amin El-Yousfi
Book Reviews by Amin El-Yousfi
Journal of Islamic Studies, 2019
Papers by Amin El-Yousfi
Religion, state & society, Oct 20, 2021
ABSTRACT In recent years, scholarship on Islam in Europe has highlighted the many attempts to gov... more ABSTRACT In recent years, scholarship on Islam in Europe has highlighted the many attempts to govern Muslims and Islam. Concerned with discussions about secularism, security, integration, or national sentiments more generally, Muslims and Islam have become a target of governmental power. However, the effects of such governmental discourses, practices, or strategies are rarely analysed. In filling this lacuna, we turn to the scholarship on Muslim ethical self-making and specifically ask how configurations of a liberal-secular paradigm govern Muslim subjects in Europe. Focusing upon the nexus of governmentality and the (re-)making of an ethical self, we make visible the ways Islamic ethical and moral commitments are contested, negotiated, or even restructured through the liberal-secular powers of the modern state, its institutions, and its agents in different European contexts.
Religion, State & Society, 2021
The French state’s laïcité is characterised by a paradox of neutrality: the state claims neutrali... more The French state’s laïcité is characterised by a paradox of neutrality: the state claims neutrality while constantly intervening in the religious field, including in the definition of religion in relationship to categories like culture. How do Muslims navigate this paradoxical secular governmentality in relation to the legal and social representation of mosques’ activities as either religious or cultural? Muslims have been able to register new mosques in France either as ‘cultural’ (based on the 1901 law of associations) or ‘religious’ (based on the 1905 law of separation) associations. However, in recent years (particularly after the 2015 Paris terrorist attacks) state representatives have pushed local mosque leaders to adopt the ‘religious’ status. This contribution not only discusses the secular nature of the cultural/religious dichotomy and its role in the process of establishing mosques in France since the 1926 creation of the Grand Mosque of Paris, but also analyses how Muslim pieties centred around God’s witnessing (shāhidiyya) and the holism (jamʿiya) of Islam encounter and operate through a central component of the French secular governmentality of mosques, the cultural/religious distinction.
Policy Centre of the New South, 2020
On February 18, 2020, a few weeks before COVID-19 became the number one concern for politicians a... more On February 18, 2020, a few weeks before COVID-19 became the number one concern for politicians and the public, Emmanuel Macron delivered a long-awaited speech in Mulhouse in which he emphasized the importance of fighting what he called "Islamist separatism". Many analysts were surprised by this declaration which differed from previous statements he'd made, following his election, about the need to institutionalize Islam. This policy brief explores the background to the institutionalization of Islam in France, and presents the obstacles to its Organization.
BRILL, 2020
Talal Asad has developed his famous “idea of an anthropology of Islam” (1986) based on Alasdair M... more Talal Asad has developed his famous “idea of an anthropology of Islam” (1986) based on Alasdair MacIntyre’s understanding of tradition and virtue and on Michel Foucault’s definition of power and discourse. Through Taha Abderrahmane’s “Trusteeship Philosophy” which is rooted in the Qurʾanic idea of trust (amāna) that bonds the divine, I intend to reread Asad’s anthropology of Islam and analyse anthropological works categorised as belonging to the “ethical turn” (Fassin 2014), particularly Saba Mahmood’s Politics of Piety (2005). The objective is to show how neglecting Islam at the level of analysis can downplay important and crucial aspects of the reality of faith—particularly the modalities of Muslim-God relationship. After depicting some of the similarities between the two intellectual projects, I will scrutinize the concept of “discursive tradition” that has produced an “ethical turn” in—and beyond—the discipline of anthropology in the sense of focusing on ethical self-making. I will question Asad and Mahmood’s use of MacIntyre’s Aristotelian philosophy by unpacking the notion of the “correct model” or “apt performance” that Asad uses in his conceptualisation as a way to explain what Muslims seek to achieve in order to have ethical coherence. Finally, I will discuss the importance of the trusteeship paradigm’s principles for the anthropological study of Muslims: the principle of requisition, i.e. returning deposits (mabdaʾ al-īdāʿiyya), the principle of signification (mabdaʾ al-āyātiyya), the principle of innateness (mabdaʾ al-fiṭriyya), the principle of wholeness (mabdaʾ al-jamʿiyya), and the principle of testimony or witnessing (mabdaʾ al-shāhidiyya). This article acts as an introduction to a philosophical discussion that is sorely lacking within the ethnographic debate between the proponents of the “ethical turn” and those calling to focus on the “everyday.”
Religions, 2019
This article analyses an ongoing conflict between two groups (Bargil and Kardal) over the managem... more This article analyses an ongoing conflict between two groups (Bargil and Kardal) over the management of a mosque located in an area near London. Based on fourteen months of intensive fieldwork, including participant observation, informal chats and semi-structured interviews, this article offers an in-depth and original account of the transformations taking place in mosques concerning the role of imams and mosque committee members. By analysing the object of conflict, the organisational structure, the dynamic of the groups and its leaders, as well as the process of bureaucratisation of mosques as a material condition, I intend to scrutinise the role and status of the imam and mosque committee members. The primary aim of this article is to reexamine and challenge the narrative of decline in religious authority (in Western mosques) propounded by some scholars as being the result of individualisation and the rise of new religious figures outside traditional institutions. I suggest that rather than experiencing a decline in imams' religious authority, mosques have become controlled by the bureaucratic authority of the committee members. In other words, imams' religious authority is still exercised, yet only within the bureaucratic framework set by the committee members.
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Workshops/Panels Organized by Amin El-Yousfi
Conference Presentations by Amin El-Yousfi
Book Reviews by Amin El-Yousfi
Papers by Amin El-Yousfi