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Domesticating Islam in Greece: Extending Religious Freedoms To Domesticating Islam and Muslim Immigrants: Political and Church Responses to Constructing a Central Mosque in Athens By Dia Anagnostou, Ruby Gropas and Dimitris Antoniou Forthcoming in the volume The Orthodox Church of Greece in the 21st Century: Religion, State and Society in an Era of Transitions, Elizabeth Prodromou, V. Macrides and Victor Roudometof (eds.), University of Notre Dame Press, 2008. Abstract Occasioned by immigration influx, Muslim religious presence in the country and its needs and claims have fuelled into a process of negotiating the terms of interaction between church and state, between religious and secular spheres. This chapter focuses on the mobilization and political controversy surrounding the establishment of a central mosque in Athens over the past couple of years, in which the Orthodox Church of Greece (OCG) has actively engaged. It explores the influence that established relations between Orthodoxy and the Greek state weigh upon initiatives to construct an Athens mosque, but also the fundamental ramifications of accommodating the religious needs and demands of Muslim immigrants. Notwithstanding the salience of transnational religious ties shaping migrants organization and identity, the analysis departs from the assumption that how host states respond to Islam, and the institutional structures through which they seek to accommodate migrants’ demands, play a decisive role. On the basis of ethnographic field research and material from the press, the empirical sections of this chapter explore the responses of the OCG regarding the so far suspended plan to construct an Athens central mosque. By reviewing parliamentary proceedings, they also examine the political debates that took place in the Greek parliament, and unravel the church- state dynamics that underpin these debates. Introduction The influx of large numbers of Muslims immigrants in Europe over the past couple of decades has brought national societies up against the challenge to accept and accommodate Islam. European governments are called to recognize its presence and to establish the institutional structures to enable its adherents to practice their religion and organize collectively. Defining the parameters of European Islam brings anew to the fore the uneasy intersection between religious and secular politics (Katzenstein 2006, 31). More importantly, it comes up against entrenched traditions and structures 1 defining dominant national religions and church-state relations. The active involvement of the Orthodox Church of Greece (OCG) in the political debates regarding Muslim religious presence in the country is characteristic not of Greek exceptionalism, but of a broader European pattern: it is part of an ongoing process of negotiating the terms of interaction between church and state, between religious and secular spheres. This chapter focuses on the mobilization and political controversy surrounding the establishment of a central mosque in Athens over the past couple of years. It explores the influence that established relations between Orthodoxy and the Greek state weigh upon the latter, but also the fundamental ramifications of accommodating the religious needs and demands of Muslim immigrants. In the past two decades, the immigrant population of Greece has risen to an estimated 10-12% of the country’s population (www.statistics.gr; Triandafyllidou 2006). Of these, at least 100,000 are estimated to be Muslims and come from various countries from across the Greater Middle East and Southeast Asia such as Pakistan, Palestine, Egypt, Syria (Gropas and Triandafyllidou 2007a).1 Most of them are concentrated in the Athens area. Immigration has transformed and diversified the composition of Greece’s demography at an exponential rate. Similarly to most other Southern European countries that have also experienced immigration pressures over the same period, Greek society perceived itself as largely mono-cultural and mono- religious. Furthermore, according to recent Eurobarometer surveys across the EU27, although immigration and integration of foreigners do not appear to be an issue of major concern for Greeks, nonetheless, they are among the Europeans who hold the most negative view towards immigration (EBS273 2007, 45, 72). The migration dynamics have presented a vast range of challenges for Greek institutions to manage the migrant influx by gradually beginning to develop policies 2 of socio-economic inclusion and cultural pluralism. Among the normative and policy shifts that have been taking place in Greece, one of the issues that merits closer examination are the religious needs and claims of Greece’s Muslim immigrant population in a country that is overwhelmingly Christian Orthodox. The first part of this chapter places the immigration situation in Greece in the context of the current literature on immigration and religion. This is relevant for understanding the politics and political debates that have surrounded the imminent, yet still unrealized, construction of a central mosque in Athens. To be sure, the recent immigration influx did not occasion the first encounter of contemporary Greek politics with Islam. Instead, such an encounter has already had a long history in relation to the autochthonous Muslim population inhabiting the northeast part of Greece, a vestige of the country’s Ottoman past. In reference to it, Islam is officially recognized as a ‘known religion.’ An extensive structure of mosques and religious foundations enable this historical minority of Thrace, the subject of another chapter of this volume, to practice and express its religious identity. While the question of immigrant integration has been approached in relation to principles of citizenship acquisition (Brubaker 1992), the issue of Muslim religious diversity in Europe is more closely linked to the relationship between church and state (Kastoryano 2004, 1235). In the Greek context, this chapter explores how the ‘new’ Islam is represented and recognized in relation to bequeathed structures and principles governing the historically symbiotic interaction between the OCG and the state. Such structures and principles have undoubtedly constrained the organization of Muslim religious diversity, as well as the ways in which Greek state institutions have so far attempted to accommodate the latter. The second part of this chapter briefly depicts 3 the inherited institutional and legal framework defining the relationship between the Greek state and the Orthodox Church of Greece. On the basis of ethnographic field research and material from the press, the empirical sections of this chapter explore the responses of the OCG regarding the so far suspended plan to construct an Athens central mosque. By reviewing parliamentary proceedings, they also examine the political debates that took place in the Greek parliament, and unravel the church-state dynamics that underpin these debates. The analysis juxtaposes and compares government initiatives to accommodate ‘new’ immigrants with established ‘old’ Muslim religious structures in the northeast region of Thrace. The Greek state’s regulation of both ‘old’ and ‘new’ Islam appears to be similarly characterized by an overwhelming tendency to centrally manage and tightly control the practice and organization of Islamic religious faith as a way of containing the political assertion of Muslim immigrant communities. The controversy over the creation of a central Athens mosque presented in this paper crystallizes ongoing public debates and reflects the political and social changes that have taken place over the past fifteen years as Greece has been transformed into an immigrant multicultural society. It encapsulates the institutional dynamics of conflict and accommodation between church and state, but also the shifting manner through which Greek political and ecclesiastical authorities view and seek to manage the rights of ‘new’ religious minorities. The political and social context has been significantly changing from the first 2000 law until the promulgation of the latest 2006 law for the construction of a central mosque in Athens. While reflecting and being shaped by the dominance of the Greek Orthodox Church, the debates around the Athens mosque no less reveal that the role of the latter is being reconfigured. In this context, it is also pertinent to consider whether Greece’s modernization process has 4 also been associated with an underlying secularization trend, thereby influencing the propensity of Greek political elites and Greek society to be more open towards religious pluralism. Thus, it is argued, in spite of certain nationalist or phobic reactions, the first steps towards further domesticating Islam have been made. Religion and migrants in Greece Greece’s immigrant population is estimated at about 1.15 million people and includes co-ethnic returnees such as Pontic Greeks and ethnic Greek Albanians, (IMEPO 2004, 4). Estimates range between 10% of the total resident population and 12% of the labour force (Triandafyllidou and Gropas 2007b). The largest immigrant population group is Albanian, followed by Bulgarians, Georgians, Romanians, Russians, Cypriots, Poles, Pakistanis, Ukrainians and Indians. According to the 2001 census data, the religious denominations of this population can be grouped as follows: 29.5% Muslim, 22.4% Christian Orthodox, 13.2% Christian Catholic, 27.7% Christian (other) and 1.8% are declared as atheist (www.statistics.gr). A significant percentage of the overall immigrant population are migrants from Romania
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