What is it about?
Spain officially separates religion from the state, yet Catholic symbols and rituals still fill courtrooms, town halls, and public ceremonies. At the same time, Muslim practices — from the headscarf to Islamic burial — are routinely treated as "religious problems" that need regulating. This isn't a contradiction but a logic. The article calls it "selective secularism": a system in which the majority's religion is quietly recoded as "national heritage" while the minority's culture is loudly flagged as "religion". Drawing on legal cases, judicial reasoning, and the work of lay Catholic neoconservative networks, the article examines how this plays out in Spain — particularly in struggles over Islamic burial rights and the role of the Pluralism and Coexistence Foundation. It also shows how Muslim citizens born or raised in Spain, and Spanish converts to Islam, are pushing back. These "transcultural" actors, who move between Spanish and Muslim worlds, are not simply adapting to the rules but reshaping them. The article argues they should be treated as co-authors of how religious diversity is governed — in Spain and across Europe.
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Why is it important?
Debates on religious diversity in Europe usually focus on France, Britain, Germany, or the Netherlands. Spain is rarely included, even though its situation is now exemplary of a wider Southern European pattern: a culturally Catholic majority, fast-growing Muslim communities, and a secularism that is, in practice, deeply uneven. The article fills this gap by treating Spain as a "post-secular laboratory" — a place where the limits of dominant European integration models become visible. The timing matters. Across Europe, neoconservative movements are reframing Christian heritage as a "civilisational identity" under threat, while Muslim minorities face intensified scrutiny over burial, dress, and family practices. By mapping how selective secularism operates through both courtroom reasoning and grassroots civic mobilisation, and by offering a concrete framework — transcultural capital — that positions Muslim citizens as co-authors rather than consultants, the article speaks directly to current European debates on integration, secularism, and the future of plural democracy.
Perspectives
Writing this article was personal as well as analytical. Working in Spain on issues of migration and religion, I've watched debates about Muslim citizens unfold for years — usually with experts, politicians, and Catholic-inflected "civil society" setting the terms, while the people who actually live across these worlds are kept on the sidelines, framed as "representatives" rather than authors of their own situation. What I find most striking is how often this exclusion is dressed up as neutrality. A crucifix in a town hall becomes "historic-artistic value"; a Muslim woman's clothing becomes a "public order" problem. This asymmetry is not accidental; it is structural. My hope with this article is to offer readers — academics, policymakers, and the practitioners I work with in professional training settings — a sharper vocabulary to name that asymmetry, and to recognise that the people best placed to reshape it are precisely those whose lives don't fit the binaries the system depends on
ZAKARIA SAJIR
Universidad de Salamanca
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: From selective secularism to transcultural agency in Spain’s religious diversity governance, Ethnicities, May 2026, SAGE Publications,
DOI: 10.1177/14687968261449617.
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