The second chapter addresses three case studies that position masjids as spaces that reflect processes of compromise, concession, and sometimes intervention as it concerns heritage. The first case study explores how the shrine and mosque structures of the holy city of Harar Jugol (Ethiopia) serve as both spiritual touchstones and important Islamic heritage sites, and, in doing so, reflect the problems involved in how these sites negotiate these dual realities. The second case study focuses on the Muslim community of New Gourna, designed by Egyptian architect Hassan Fathy, which was meant to function both as a sustainable community and as a celebration of Egypt’s architectural, cultural, and spiritual legacies, but ultimately failed. Interestingly, Fathy would transplant these ideas in a later masjid project located in Abiquiú, New Mexico, raising questions about the so-called “embeddedness” of heritage traditions. The third case study also references this aspect with regards to contemporary spiritual architectural imports like “Neo-Ottoman”-style mosques into African space. This was recently realized in Ghana’s new National Mosque, located in the capital city of Accra, which eschews Ghana’s historical mosque-building traditions and raises questions with regards to who the stakeholders are in decisions about what constitutes heritage and what does not.

The introduction provides a broad theoretical overview of the definition of a masjid as both an ambiguous space and a space distinct from the structural genre of the mosque. To this end, the masjid is defined as a space created through spiritual performance, and this definition is fleshed out over the course of this chapter through a series of targeted discussions. The first discussion addresses Islam’s long and diverse history on the continent and the histories, identities, and realities that have emerged over the course of its 1500-year existence on the continent. In this context, the idea of multiple “Islams” comes to the fore, focusing on the diverse identities Islam has come to occupy for different individuals and communities over time and space. This has resulted in multiple, diverse iterations of masjid space that are embedded in the specifics of their diverse contexts.

This chapter analyses the Kemalism’s tolerated citizen creation project via the state’s powerful Presidency of Religious Affairs (Diyanet) that controls all mosques and employs all imams and preachers in Turkey. Kemalism wanted to keep Islam under its strict control to prevent its potential use for opposition. Thus, it made it illegal to have private mosques or to function as a non-state employer of imams. However, the Kemalist state also wanted to use Islam as a helping hand to build the nation based on the majority’s sectarian as well as ethnic identity. Thus, it worked to create a secularist and Turkish nationalism-friendly Islam –what I call ‘Diyanet Islam’. Before AKP came to power there were about 75,000 mosques in Turkey. The Diyanet used these mosques as adult education and indoctrination centres by politically instrumentalising weekly Friday sermons that are attended by about 60 per cent of the nation’s adult males. After elaborating on and defining Diyanet Islam, the chapter proceeds to discuss the Kemalist construction of a tolerated citizen category that I call ‘Homo Diyanetus’. Homo Diyanetus refers to a practising Sunni Muslim citizen of Turkey who follows the state manufactured Diyanet Islam, reveres the state and Atatürk, is Turkish nationalist, militarist and is definitely not a member or participant of any other religious group, brotherhood or movement.

A large existing literature points to a cooperative advantage within groups: if individuals share a common group identity, they tend to work together, based on a common sense of trust, extended to all group members even if they are strangers otherwise. This group-based trust appears to be naturally occurring whenever a shared group identity is commonly known among group members and salient to them. The argument is made that this group-based trust can serve as an effective substitute for more generalized feelings of trust (in “most people”) to support collective action on a similarly large scale. The concept of Islam as a group identity is developed, in contrast to traditional definitions of Islam as a personal faith, and an argument is made that regular participation in religious group activities should be used as anindicator for this Islamic identity. The empirical distinction between personal religiosity and religious identity is illustrated in data from Turkey and across the Muslim world. In addition, the validity of group activities as an indicator of Islamic identity and in-group trust is tested and confirmed.

The importance of interpersonal trust for participation in mass politics has been established in some contexts, but rarely in the developing world, and the mechanism linking trust to participation has not be well specified. In this chapter, the link between trust and participation is defined in terms of interdependence, on the one hand, and uncertainty, on the other. Based on this, participation levels are expected to be lower for individuals who generally distrust others and higher for those with a salient religious group identity. Moreover, religious group identity is expected to bolster participation because group-based trust operates as an effective substitute for generalized trust, where it is absent. The hypotheses are tested using survey responses from twenty-four Muslim countries, and evidence is found in support of each. Finally, the theory is extended to explain how repression impacts the advantage of Islamic-based political movements: in contrast to existing theories, which hold that repression should effectively sideline Islamic groups, I illustrate how increased repression bolsters the Islamic advantage by making trust even more important for political participation.