Having defined what is meant by the moralising state in Islamic ethics, I will now move onto discuss institutions and functions of enforcing public morality in Muslim contexts. In general, the states in the Muslim world seek balance in their tolerance and/or restriction over religion. Over the last century, states evolved and adapted to the emergence of changes and competitors to the state in the religious-political field. Many states such as Turkey, Tunisia and Egypt envisaged modernisation as a secularisation of the state. However, these states are ambiguous about their role in the public space. On the one hand, these states kept some institutions of moralising the public space alive. As Islamist movements gained more visibility and influence in the 1980s, the states started to endorse more openly Islam for ideological and pragmatic reasons, and “Sharia has become somehow consubstantial with the public and political life, in the context of predominantly Muslim societies” as noted by Baudouin Dupret.1 On the other hand, some Islamist movements rejected the official Islamic discourse as deficient, calling for the full application of sharia. The national states’ instrumentalisation of Islam as an official religion and as a way to control the political and social order through religion reached its limits.