ABSTRACT
Based on the findings of a research project that combined ethnographic and socio-historic approaches, this chapter investigates how imams in France progressively established themselves as one of the main embodiments of Islamic authority under the dual impetus of Muslim communities and state authorities, particularly at the local level. Retracing the sociohistorical stages of the reinvention of their role(s), it shows both how French imams have emerged as a distinctive type of ‘organic intellectuals of migration’ in their places of worship, and how they became the objects of public policies in laïque (‘secular’) French society.
