Islam and the ‘Muslim Question’
The ‘Muslim Question’ (generated by a series of questions over inte- gration/loyalty to the state/citizenship and claims for religious communal autonomy in family law matters, to name but a few) has, in recent times, come to be understood (by scholars and policy makers
ShariaccuncilsanclMuslim Famify 101 سأ alike) as one of the defining questions in the twenty-first century when framing, challenging and debating issues ranging from the limits of liberal free speech, minority rights, questions of modernity, immigration, liberalism, multiculturalism and most importantly, of course, issues of gender equality, injustice and personal autonomy for potentially vulnerable Muslim women living within Muslim families and communities.
This literature is accompanied by an expansive body of scholarship tracing the social and lived realities of Muslim communities in the UK,8 rights of minority communities and multicul- turalism,9 to charting the rise of anti-Muslim discrimination and ‘Islamophobia’10 and tracing the rise of religious intolerance and the emergence of a politics of fear and the limits of anti-discrimination legislation. Furthermore it seems that the ‘Muslim Problem’ is inextricably linked to the ‘Secularism Problem’ with the juxtaposition of religion and secularism and the public and private spheres deemed imaginary, problematic and illusory. For example, the works of Saba Mahmood11 (2012), Talal Asad12 (2011), Oliver Roy13 (2010) and Salman Sayyid14 (2014) demonstrate hcw debates on secularism are closely linked to the ways in which Muslim mobilizations in the West are managed, controlled and designated in western European societies often through security and racist governmentalities. In Britain, for example, the government’s Prevent strategy has been critiqued for not only the loss of civil liberties but its focus on Muslim communities and the potential consequences that this kind of exceptionalism promotes. This body of literature raises important questions regarding the separation of religious and political spaces in liberal politics and the junctures upon which religious personal practices can be located and accommodated as part of the liberal human rights framework. As Sayyid points out, ‘secularism is one of the categories often deployed in discussions about the difficulties of exercising Muslim agency’.15 Therefore, what are the dialogic processes and challenges between community and state law relations if Muslim communities seek not to operate from a liberal legal and ethical framework? What are the other possibilities for communicative or intercultural dia- logue(s)? Are minority Muslim communities in Europe simply in need of secularization?Critiques on liberal legal models aim therefore to de-centre the ‘West’ and challenge the ‘Western imaginary’ as the dominant loci of politics, governance and identity. Indeed the contemporary binary oppositions of Islam and the West are not only widely acknowledged as a reflection of the hegemony of Western legal liberalism but the
framing and naming of Islam and Muslim legal pluralism has led to disjunctures between ‘official laws’ and ‘law as a lived social reality’. Questions of ‘norms’, ‘truth’ and claims-making have focused on the uneasy tensions produced by communities with liberal and democratic principles of liberal legal conceptions of justice, equality before the law, human rights and citizenship. The focus on Islam and Muslims remains important for both communities and state law relations because ‘the act of naming is also the act of becoming’.16 In other words the ways in which Muslims name themselves as Muslims and construct ways of belonging (for example, belonging to the Muslim community or the Muslim Ummah) coupled with the ways in which communities are understood (or imagined) in non-Muslim societies contributes to policy initiatives and community-state relations.
Furthermore the ways in which Muslim communities ‘imagine’ the Muslim Ummah can help our conceptualizations of community and Muslim autonomy. Therefore the rubric upon which we frame debates can also help to reframe debates on cultural and religious autonomy and finding legal remedies to protect vulnerable members of communities subject to religious personal systems of law, most often Muslim women.Indeed this act of becoming as taken shape and form in a myriad of ways as epitomized by the emergence of local grassroots Muslim community groups (including private community governance) and the different levels of state funding and state support. Over the past three decades, for example, we have seen the emergence of local Muslim women’s groups, refuges and counselling services to the setting up of national organizations such as the Muslim Council of Britain17and the Muslim Women’s Network18 and numerous Sharia Councils and the Muslim Arbitration Tribunal.19 The 2011 Census identified Islam as the second largest religion in the UK with a population of 2,786,635 and 4.4% of the total population. This act of becoming has therefore taken shape, for example, under the rubric of multiculturalism, policies of integration, socio-economic factors vis-⅛-vis community, state and cultural interlocutors. So what are the cultural impacts of these new formations in our understandings of Islam and Muslims living in non-Muslim-majority societies? What does the description of a ‘Muslim community’ mean for Muslims and non-Muslims alike? What are the processes of governance and governmentality that signify Muslim communities? And how can we conceptualize, identify and address issues of cultural inter- and intra-community conflicts addressing issues of unequal gender relations without relying on reified notions of culture, religion, belonging, identity and law?
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