Riconoscimento incompiuto dell’islam e relazioni tra lo Stato e le comunità musulmane in Italia: tra attuazione del pluralismo, preoccupazioni securitarie e ridefinizione del campo religioso

This article aims to analyse the emblematic case of the relationship between the State and Islam in Italy and the unfinished process of recognition of the Muslim religion in the Italian public space. It examines, on the one hand, the efforts, limits and contradictions emerging in the conception and practice of the management and protection of religious pluralism sanctioned by the Constitution, on the part of the State, and, on the other hand, the transformations of the religious field (Bourdieu 1971), in the negotiation of its internal and external borders that the Islamic communities continually exercise in the effort to achieve a coveted legal recognition. The article concludes by focusing on a relevant example of the complexity of this process: the ‘reinvention’ of the figure of the imam, in the articulation between the spaces defined, on the one hand, by the regulatory function of the state and, on the other, by the needs and processes of adaptation of religious communities.