Abstract

This article studies the way in which local actors in Muslim associations strive to be recognized as respectable interlocutors by local public authorities. On the basis of an ethnographic survey carried out among members of the Muslim Federation of Gironde, we aim to reconstruct the conditions for becoming community mediators, within the context of strong public demands for a civil Islam. This work of conforming to a religion deemed to be acceptable requires the mobilization of various sociocultural resources that tend to be unequally distributed among Muslim communities.