Religious Governance and the Accommodation of Islam in Contemporary Spain

This article analyses the governance of Islam in contemporary Spain. Rather than presuming the existence of a singular and all-encompassing 'Spanish model' of religious governance, I focus on the critical role of actual practices of modelling in shaping the institutions and organisations implicated in the regulation of Islam, as well as the concrete strategies that have guided policies of Muslim accommodation. Modelling practices, I argue, have been particularly significant in Spain due to its late transition to democracy and the absence of viable frameworks for regulating religious diversity from within its own past. In determining which frameworks to use as models for religious governance, public actors have been influenced by a variety of factors, including (i) their respective political and social agendas; (ii) the professional networks, organisational fields and other means of knowledge circulation through which they have gained exposure to exogenous models; and (iii) religious, cultural, linguistic and historical factors that have made certain models more accessible or attractive than others. Given that these factors have varied at different levels of government, so too have practices of modelling influential in the development of national and sub-national approaches to governing Islam.