Triangulated brokers: imams, securitisation, and the performance of moderation in Belgium, Germany, Spain, and Italy

Imams in Europe are cast simultaneously as counter-terrorism assets, carriers of communal authority, and problems to be governed. Drawing on PROTONE project interviews with eleven imams and four Muslim community representatives in Brussels, Berlin, Madrid, and Rome, plus four focus groups, this article develops the concept of triangulated brokerage to explain how imams produce religious authority under asymmetric scrutiny. They are pressed at once by state recognition and securitisation regimes, by Islamophobic hostility from below, and by intra-communal contestation along doctrinal, ethnic, and generational lines. Comparing Belgium's derecognised Muslim Executive, Germany's transnational mosque ecology, Spain's 1992 Cooperation Agreement, and Italy's withheld Intesa, we show one brokerage logic operating within four institutional grammars. “Moderation”, we argue, is not a doctrinal location but a governmental performance: a labour of self-translation across these pressures. Debates about “moderate Islam” should ask whose labour produces it, on what terms, and at what cost.