ABSTRACT
Over the last decade, cities have become key sites of investigations into the politics of religious diversity. However, the vibrant scholarship on governing urban religion frequently suffers from conceptually thin understandings of the debate’s key terms. This contribution critically engages with the conceptual underpinnings of this scholarship by discussing the interdependence of the dimensions of state, space and secularism. Regarding the state, I suggest that we should reconceptualise the state as strategic terrain, effect and social relation; regarding space, I discuss the analytical purchase of the TPSN (Territory, Place, Space, Network) approach, and regarding secularism I argue that we need to investigate local secularisms as problem-spaces and vernacular practices. Focusing on Islam in Western Europe, I demonstrate the analytical benefits of these theoretical reconfigurations by discussing the case study of the failure of one of Germany’s most prominent mosque projects, the Munich Forum for Islam (MFI).
