Accepting the Olive Branch? Bureaucratic Politics and Muslim Leadership in Belgium

I seek to explain why sub-national governments in advanced democracies vary in their incorporation of Islam despite operating within shared legal frameworks. I argue that electoral aims and party competition determine the political goals shaping the implementation of nominally bureaucratic policies. As a result, the same policy can be used by different sub-national units to further divergent, and often mutually exclusive, goals. I demonstrate this by focusing on how Belgian regional governments decide to 'officially recognize' mosque-communities. Comparing recognition outcomes across Flanders, Wallonia & the Brussels-Capital region allows me to demonstrate how local officials can use the same policy towards vastly different ends. I then use this explanation of state-sided dynamics to examine whether Muslim leaders decide to cooperate with or shun state-led incorporation efforts. After explaining the trade-offs involved in negotiating state aid, I argue that Muslim leaders rely on transnational networks to render those negotiations easier. Contingent on the partisanship of state officials, which denotes the political goal driving incorporation and the threat of state control that Muslim leaders perceive, networks can either act as a substitute or compliment to the decision to work with the state. As the literature suggests, networks can indeed provide finances and act as an exit option to state aid. What the scholarship underestimates, however, are the range of non-material considerations Muslim leaders have when navigating state policy. Given the audience costs involved in ignoring state aid, especially in a fraught post-9/11 context, Muslim leaders often have non-material incentives to opt into the state's regulatory apparatus. Therefore, and especially when the threat of state control is perceived to be low, networks can also facilitate state relations through resource and information-sharing. Consequently, I model how state-Islam relations can settle into vastly different equilibria within the same national, and even local, context.