Muslim Councils in Britain and Russia : challenges of cooperation and representation in contrasting institutional contexts
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Date
01/07/2015Author
Braginskaia, Ekaterina
Metadata
Abstract
Over the past two decades, both the British and Russian states have sought to
institutionalise relations with their Muslim communities through Muslim councils.
However, such attempts at institutionalisation raise challenges for these
organisations, which need to balance state demands for incorporation into religious
governance and Muslim community expectations for more inclusive representation.
Challenges of integration and representation have received considerable coverage in
Western and Russian studies. However, little comparative research has focused on
the behaviour of Muslim councils and how this is affected by different institutional
settings. In particular, theories of social movements and interest groups suggest that
strategies for dealing with this tension between integration and representation vary
between more corporatist and pluralist state-religion relations. Russia and Britain are
taken as exemplars of the two traditions, and thus help us to understand how these
tensions manifest themselves and are responded to in the two different contexts.
The project provides a comparative analysis of the strategies and discourses used by
the Muslim Council of Britain and the Russia Council of Muftis in 1997-2013. It
explores the conditions under which the councils engage with or disengage from the
state. It also examines how the two organisations respond to criticisms from Muslim
communities and undertake internal reforms to improve their legitimacy. A detailed
analysis of the councils’ engagement with state authorities and Muslim communities
is used to unpack the challenges of Muslim collective representation. The thesis
contributes to research by providing new empirical data and theoretical insights on
Muslim national organisations. It offers an innovative analytical framework by
revisiting the concepts of pluralism and corporatism and applying them to the
institutional context of state-religion relations in Britain and Russia. It draws on
social movement theories and institutionalist approaches to understand how Muslim
organisations deal with the dual pressure of co-optation and representation. It
examines how Muslim councils behave like interest group organisations and offers
theoretical insights that can be extrapolated to other kinds of institutions. Finally, the
thesis integrates Western and Russian scholarship on the role of interest groups in
general and religious institutions in particular.