Ideas Do Matter Politics and The Islamic Tradition Among Muslim Religious Leaders in Norway

How do Muslim religious leaders in the West theologically and ideologically approach a liberal and democratic political system? This question was investigated through a case study on 14 leaders in the largest mosques of Norway, comprised of both imams and administrative or civil mosque leaders. They all regarded the Norwegian political system as a good system, and viewed the current situation in most of the Muslim world as bad. Nevertheless, they related to the Norwegian political system in different ways. All the imams claimed that Islam has an irreducible legal and political aspect, and that Islam in principle does not support secularity as a political ideal. Many of the administrative mosque leaders, on the other hand, supported secularity as a political ideal, or claimed that the societal aspect of Islam is more about fundamental values than about legal or political rules. The difference between the imams and the administrative leaders is interpreted as resulting in part from the embeddedness of the imams in the Islamic legal tradition.