Muslims as a “Religious Minority” in Europe
Muslims are clearly present in a secular Europe and yet in an important sense absent from it. The problem of understanding Islam in Europe is primarily, so I claim, a matter of understanding how “Europe” is conceptualized by Europeans.
Europe (and the nation-states of which it is constituted) is ideologically constructed in such a way that Muslim immigrants cannot be satisfactorily represented in it. I argue that they are included within and excluded from Europe at one and the same time in a special way, and that this has less to do with the “absolutist Faith” of Muslims living in a secular environment and more with European notions of “culture” and “civilization” and “the secular state,” “majority,” and “minority.”I take it for granted that in Europe today Muslims are often misrepresented in the media and discriminated against by non-Muslims.1 More interesting for my present argument is the anxiety expressed by the majority of West Europeans about the presence of Muslim communities and Islamic traditions within the borders of Europe. (In France, for example, a 1992 poll showed that two-thirds of the population feared the presence of Islam in that country.2) It’s not merely that the full incorporation of Muslims into European society is thought to be especially hard for people who
1. See J. Wrench and J. Solomos, eds., Racism and Migration in Western Europe, Oxford: Berg, 1993, and especially the excellent contribution by S. Castles.
2. See A. Hargreaves, Immigration, Race and Ethnicity in Contemporary France, London: Routledge, 1995, p. 119.
have been brought up in an alien culture. It is their attachment to Islam that many believe commits Muslims to values that are an affront to the modern secular state.
Admittedly, there is no shortage of voices that respond to such anxieties with characteristic liberal optimism.3 They speak of the diverse linguistic and ethnic origins of Muslim immigrants and of the considerable variation in individual attachments to old traditions.
There is little to fear from most immigrants—liberals say—and much more from the consequences of the higher unemployment and greater prejudice to which they are subjected. Muslims in Europe can be assimilated into Western society. Liberals maintain that it is only the extreme right for whom the presence of Muslims and Islam in Europe represents a potential cultural disaster, and that right-wing xenophobia is rooted in the romantic nativism it espouses, and consequently in its rejection of the universalist principles of the Enlightenment. In this as in other matters liberals stand for tolerance. and an open society.All these claims may be true, but the liberal position is more layered than one might suppose. To begin with “the Islamic” disregard of the principle of secular republicanism (as symbolized by the affaire du foulard), and the “Islamic” attack against the principle of freedom of speech (as exemplified in the Rushdie affair) have angered liberals and the left no less than the extreme right. These events within Europe have been read as all of a piece with the Islamist resort to civil violence in North Africa and West Asia, and they have led even liberals to ask with growing skepticism whether the Islamic tradition (as distinct from its human carriers) can find a legitimate place in a modern Western society.
But I begin elsewhere. I focus not on liberal opposition to right-wing intolerance or dismay at the closed-mindedness of immigrants but with a larger question. Can contemporary European practices and discourses represent a culturally diverse society of which Muslim migrants (Pakistanis in Britain, Turks in Germany, North Africans in France) are now part? To answer this question I shall first address another: How is Europe represented by those who regard themselves as authentic Europeans?
3. Many of these voices are found in recent collections: B. Lewis and D. Schnapper, eds., Muslims in Europe, London: Pinter, 1994; S. Z. Abedin and Z.
Sardar, eds., Muslim Minorities in the West, London: Grey Seal, 1995; G. Non- neman, T. Niblock, and B. Szajkowski, eds., Muslim Communities in the New Europe, London: Ithaca Press, 1996.The general preoccupation in the social sciences with the idea of, f identity dates from after the Second World War. It marks a new sense of the r word, highlighting the individual’s social locations and psychological crises in an increasingly uncertain world.4 “This is my name,” we now declare, “I £ need you to recognize me by that name.” More than ever before identity >. now depends on the others recognition of the self. Previously the more J common meaning of identity was “sameness,” as in the statement that all A Muslims do not have “identical interests,” and attributively, as in “identity card.” In Europe the newer twist in the sense of the word is almost cer- tainly more recent than in America. Perhaps in both places the discourse of identity indicates not the rediscovery of ethnic loyalties so much as the un-, dermining of old certainties. The site of that discourse is suppressed fear. The idea of European identity, I say, is not merely a matter of how legal If rights and obligations can be reformulated. Nor is it simply a matter of £ how a more inclusive name can be made to claim loyalties that are attached to national or local ones. It concerns exclusionsand the desire that those ex- ' '' eluded recognize what is included in the name, one has chosen for onself. The discourse of European identity is a symptom of anxieties about nonEuropeans.