What is a mosque for?

Even though there is always some kind of discrimination based on religion, the issue of mosques and other Islamic places of worship is the only one where the opening of a place of worship has become such a public issue. This is true even in countries where such conflicts had never happened before and mosques were already a part of the landscape. These disputes are not limited to the establishment of places of worship: they also include the question of their visibility in European cities through issues regarding the building and even the shape of minarets, the broadcasting of the adhan, the call to prayer, as well as the problem of Muslim cemeteries. Mosques are, among other things, a symbolic issue that concerns, materially, territorial control. At the same time and in the same sense, resistance to them becomes a very concrete and material sign of dominance and power over it. But conflict over mosques and other signs of the symbolic visibility of Islam in the public space are substitute discourses. What they refer to is the problem of the recognition and acceptance of an increasing pluralism, for which the conflict over mosques represents, in psychoanalytic terms, a transitional object.