The political accommodation of Islam in Portugal and Ireland: Testing the 'convergence thesis' in two peripheral cases

Abstract

This paper compares the political accommodation of Islam in Portugal and Ireland since the end of the 1950s. Whereas much of the literature focuses on 'usual suspects' such as France, Britain, Germany or the Netherlands, states with long-established and sizeable Islamic communities, we know relatively little about the institutionalization of Islam in states where the presence of Muslims is more recent and still relatively marginal. In this paper we focus on Portugal and Ireland: two small, predominantly Catholic states in Europe's periphery with a relatively recent Muslim immigrant experience and an Islamic community representing less than one percent of the population. These two 'peripheral' cases provide a unique test of Laurence's observation that in Western Europe the institutionalization of Islam has followed remarkably similar pathways, despite strong historical, institutional and cultural differences. We find that while Portugal largely complies with the expectation that Islam has been institutionalized in Western Europe through corporatist arrangements, the Irish case provides little evidence of state-sponsored institutionalization of Islam. Our explanation for this difference is twofold. First, the Muslim community in Ireland is much more diverse than its Portuguese counterpart and, hence, by default more difficult to organize. Second, our analysis also points at the historical role of the Catholic Church in both societies: whereas in the Portuguese case the Church has always represented the status quo and thus had a clear interest in coopting new religious groups in existing institutional frameworks, in Ireland the relation between the Church and the status quo has historically been more ambiguous due to the question of Irish nationalism.