Islam in the West: Key Issues in Multiculturalism

It is, in its monotheism, legalism and communitarianism, not to mention its specific rules of life such as dietary prohibitions, particularly close to Judaism. In the Crusades of Christendom and at other times, Jews were slaughtered by Christians and their secular descendents and protected by Muslims. Yet even in that period Islam and Christendom were not discrete, nor merely competitors. They borrowed and learned from each other, whether it was in relation to scholarship, philosophy and scientific inquiry, or medicine, architecture and technology.

Indeed, classical learning from Athens and Rome, which was lost to Christendom, was preserved by the Arabs and was carried to Western Europe—much like the institution of the university—from Muslims. That Europe came to define its civilization as a renaissance of Greece and Rome and excised the Arab contribution to its foundations is an example of racist myth-making that has much relevance today. It is great tragedy, too, that Muslims turned their backs on this intellectual current, and that Europeans appropriated it without acknowledgement. One step towards inter-civilizational dialogue and less exclusive definitions of Europe and of Islam would be if we were to excavate this history.

One factor is a perception that Muslims are making politically exceptional, culturally unreasonable or theologically alien demands upon European states. I would like to address this. My contention is that the claims Muslims are making in fact parallel comparable arguments about gender or ethnic equality. Seeing the issue in that context shows how inescapably European and contemporary is the logic of mainstream Muslim identity politics. Some Muslims are devout but apolitical. Some identify more with a nationality of origin, such as Turkish, others with the nationality of settlement and perhaps citizenship, such as French.

Some prioritize fund-raising for mosques, others campaigns against discrimination, unemployment or Zionism. For some, the Ayatollah Khomeini is a hero and Osama bin Laden an inspiration; for others, the same may be said of Kemal Ataturk or Margaret Thatcher, who created a swathe of Asian millionaires in Britain, brought in Arab capital, and was one of the first to call for NATO action to protect Muslims in Kosovo.

Muslims have, however, the most extensive and developed discourses of unity, common circumstance and common victimhood among peoples of non-EU origin in the EU. This, of course, also affects Muslim residents and citizens, a situation that has been thrown into sharp relief by September 11 and its aftermath. There are many reports of harassment and attacks against Muslims, and Muslims, having expressed both vulnerability and defiance, have become a focus of national concern and debate. They have found themselves bearing the brunt of a new wave of suspicion and hostility, and strongly voiced if imprecise doubts are being cast on their loyalty as citizens.

In particular, these questions revolve around whether Muslims are committed to what are taken to be the core European values of freedom, tolerance, democracy, sexual equality and secularism. These questions and doubts have been raised across the political spectrum, voiced by individuals ranging from Berlusconi in Italy and the Dutch politician Pim Fortuyn to the British Home Secretary, David Blunkett. The Dutch, once the pioneers of a certain kind of multiculturalism, have reversed most of their earlier policies. Of the three largest European countries, Germany, France and the UK, the former West Germany and France have, in both absolute and relative terms, a larger foreign-born population and population of non-European origin than the UK.

Yet issues of racial discrimination, ethnic identity and multiculturalism have less prominence in those two countries than in the UK. Another aspect is the relative lack of data about ethnicity and religious communities, and consequently of research and literature. Yet this is not a simple matter of scale.

Each of the countries in the EU has a very different conception of what the issues are, depending upon its history, political culture and legal system. Hence, out of its population of 80 million, Germany has 5 million without German citizenship. This includes about 2 million Turks and Kurds, some of whom are now third-generation Germans but who until recently were excluded from citizenship by German self-conceptions of nationality as descent. But it has a republican conception of citizenship that does not allow, at least in theory, any body of citizens to be differentially identified, for example as Arab.

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In France, you can be of any descent but if you are a French citizen you cannot be an Arab. The giving up of pre-French identities and assimilation into French culture is thought to go hand in hand with the acceptance of French citizenship. If for some reason assimilation is not fully embraced—perhaps because some people want to retain pride in their Algerian ancestry, or want to maintain ethnic solidarity in the face of current stigmatization and discrimination—then their claim to being French and equal citizens is jeopardized.

The latter was defeated by pushing matters of faith and religion out of politics and policy into the private sphere. Islam, with its claim to regulating public as well as private life, is therefore seen as an ideological foe, and the Muslim presence as alien and potentially both culturally and politically inassimilable. The case of Britain is the one I know in detail and can be illustrative.

Policy and legislation were formed in the s in the shadow of the US Civil Rights Movement, black power discourse and the inner-city riots in Detroit, Watts and elsewhere. The right of entry was successively curtailed from so that, while in Britain was open to the Commonwealth but closed to Europe, twenty years later the position was fully reversed. Muslims have become central to these agendas even while they have contested important aspects, especially the primacy of racial identities, narrow definitions of racism and equality, and the secular bias of the discourse and policies of multiculturalism.

After a long period of hegemony, political secularism can no longer be taken for granted, but is having to answer its critics; there is a growing understanding that the incorporation of Muslims has become the most important challenge of egalitarian multiculturalism. While initially unremarked upon, this exclusive focus on race and ethnicity, and the exclusion of Muslims but not Jews and Sikhs, has come to be a source of resentment. One of the effects of this politics was to highlight race.

Hence, people have had to be self- classified and counted; thus group labels, and arguments about which labels are authentic, have become a common feature of certain political discourses. Public attitudes and arrangements must adapt so that this heritage is encouraged, not contemptuously expected to wither away. The two are not, however, alternative conceptions of equality in the sense that to hold one, the other must be rejected.

Multiculturalism, properly construed, requires support for both conceptions. For the assumption behind the first is that participation in the public or national culture is necessary for the effective exercise of citizenship, the only obstacle to which are the exclusionary processes preventing gradual assimilation.

Islam in the West: Key Issues in Multiculturalism

The second conception, too, assumes that groups excluded from the national culture have their citizenship diminished as a result. It sees the remedy not in rejecting the right to assimilate, but in adding the right to widen and adapt the national culture, and the public and media symbols of national membership, to include the relevant minority ethnicities.

While Muslims raise distinctive concerns, the logic of their demands often mirrors those of other equality-seeking groups.

What kinds of specific policy demands, then, are being made by, or on behalf of, religious groups and Muslim identity politics in particular, when these terms are deployed? So, for example, a person who is trying to dress in accordance with their religion, or who projects a religious identity such as a Muslim woman wearing a headscarf, a hijab , should not be discriminated against in employment.

While discrimination against yarmulke -wearing Jews and turban-wearing Sikhs is deemed to be unlawful racial discrimination, Muslims, unlike these other faith communities, are not deemed to be a racial or ethnic group. Nor are they protected by the legislation against religious discrimination that does exist in one part of the UK: The latter extends protection to certain forms of anti-Jewish literature, but not anti-Muslim literature.

This book contributes to understanding of the contemporary relationship between Muslims and the Western societies in which they live, focusing particularly on the UK. Chapters reflect on the nature of multiculturalism, as well as a wide range of specific aspects of daily life, including religious. Chapters reflect on the nature of multiculturalism, as well as a wide range of specific aspects of daily life, including religious dialogue, gender, freedom of speech and politics. We will send you an SMS containing a verification code.

Islam in the West: Key Issues in Multiculturalism - Max Farrar, Yasmin Valli - Google Книги

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