The New Muslim Elites in European Cities... (original) (raw)

The New Muslim Religious Brokers in European Cities and Politics of Muslim Citizenship

On the basis of the research into active social citizenship amongst the new Muslim religious brokers in Brussels and London, this paper explores the transition from the politics of Muslim identity to the politics of Muslim citizenship, a major change in the public mobilisation of Islam in Belgium and Britain. It argues that this move has been closely linked with the development of civic consciousness among certain segments of the Muslim populations in Europe and the construction of a new type of identity – ‘Muslim civicness’ - which is characterised by strong support for the national projects, activism beyond Muslim symbolic boundaries, emphasis on the similar rights to other citizens and obligations vis-à-vis all the citizens regardless of their religious adherence.

Muslims in Europe: Citizenship, Multiculturalism and Integration

Journal of Muslim Minority Affairs, Routledge., 2017

This article provides an analysis of the concerns in relation to citizenship and multicultural reforms in Europe. It examines the implications for the social integration of Muslims, who seemingly face insurmountable constitutional hurdles notwithstanding liberal institutional attempts, in accommodating a religion that, judged by its global politicisation, may pose more a challenge to multicultural societies than to others. While shedding light on recent developments concerning a wide-ranging panorama of the socio-legal dynamics of integrating Muslim communities in Europe, the article provides an overview of the multicultural idea, focusing on how some European countries address multicultural claims swiftly while others lag behind, busy with more basic issues of immigrant assimilation and integration. It is argued that while attempts are being made to improve Muslim integration, the rising tide of Islamophobia (political and media-manufactured), anti-terrorism legislations and security policies serve to provide a multi-pronged attack on civil liberties and freedoms of Muslim groups. In the concluding section, there will be general remarks concerning the future of Muslims in Europe and the commendable and realisable aim of Muslims to construct an inclusive national identity and find partners who will, like them, be determined to approve what Western culture produces in terms of its positive contributions and resist its deleterious effects on the human, societal and environmental levels.

Beyond “Methodological Islamism”? A Thematic Discussion of Muslim Minorities in Europe

Advances in Applied Sociology, 2013

In this discussion we offer an overview of the place of Muslim actors in European scholarship. We especially focus on the second and subsequent generations of European Muslims, and how future research agendas could conceptualise the relationship between contemporary Muslim identity and citizenship regimes in Europe. We explore the way in which our understanding is formed by a concern with socioeconomic processes, cultural adaptations and civic status. We include questions of citizenship and "difference", and the extent to which there has been a re-imagining and re-forming of national collectivities in the face of Muslim claims-making. By claims-making we invoke a further register which centres on the creation of a Muslim infrastructure, perhaps through modes of religious pluralism (or opposition to it), and how this interacts with prevailing ideas that to greater and lesser extents inform public policies e.g., multiculturalism, interculturalism, cohesion, secularism, or Leitkulture, amongst others. While the latter register focuses more on nation-state politics, there is a further transnational dimension in the Muslim experience in Europe, and this assumes an important trajectory in the ways discussed. It is argued that Muslim identities in Europe contain many social layers that are often independent of scriptural texts; such that the appellation of "Muslim" can be appropriated without any unanimity on Islamic matters. We conclude by observing how this point is understudied, and as a consequence the dynamic features of Muslims' leadership in Europe remain unexplored.

Multiculturalism, Muslims and Citizenship: A European Approach

2006

1. European Challenges to Multicultural Citizenship: Muslims, Secularism and Beyond Anna Triandafyllidou, Tariq Modood, Ricard Zapata-Barrero 2. Multiculturalism, citizenship and Islam in problematic encounters in Belgium Hassan Bousetta and Dirk Jacobs 3. British Muslims and the Politics of Multiculturalism Tariq Modood 4. French Secularism and Islam France's Headscarf Affair Riva Kastoryano 5. The Particular Universalism of a Nordic Civic Nation: Common Values, State Religion, and Islam in Danish Political Culture Per Mouritsen 6. Enemies Within the Gates - The Debate about the Citizenship of Muslims in Germany Werner Schiffauer 7. Religious Diversity and Multiculturalism in Southern Europe: The Italian Mosque Debate Anna Triandafyllidou 8. The Muslim Community and Spanish Tradition: Maurophobia as a Fact, and Impartiality as a Desideratum Ricard Zapata-Barrero 9. Secularism and the Accommodation of Muslims in Europe Tariq Modood and Riva Kastoryano 10. Europe, Liberalism and ...

Making Public Space: Opportunities and Limits of Collective Action Among Muslims In Europe

Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, 2004

Salvatore, Armando. 2004. “Making Public Space: Opportunities and Limits of Collective Action Among Muslims in Europe,” Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, 30(5): 1013-1031. Recent research suggests that the settling of Muslims in secular Europe is leading to the individualisation of their religious identity and to the fragmentation of their social life. Such research purports to show the production of a specific 'European' Islam that eludes the traditional authority in which Islam is allegedly still mired in most Muslim majority societies. This paper considers the predicament of Muslims in Europe from a different perspective, through a consideration of the ambivalence of secular norms of the public sphere and of their limits in dealing with religious expressions. While much of the current literature concentrates on the diasporic and transnational aspects of the Muslim presence in Europe, the focus here is on specifically European and postcolonial dimensions. The institutional sedimentation of historic traumas, rather than universal values, specific to the formation of European societies and public spheres are considered in both their internal-metropolitan and external-colonial articulations. Set against these original characteristics of European public spheres, an analysis is offered of some of the most vocal activism, particularly that of Muslim women and youth, as instances of a struggle to transform and enrich, and even to decentre, European public spheres.

Muslims in Europe: The Stranger Within

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Over the last two decades major changes in the nature of work and employment have occurred on a global level. The restructuring of the global economy, for example, along with the growth of trans-national companies, favours decentralised production and a cheap and flexible workforce employed on a casual basis . Casualised labour is not marginal to the modern industrial economy, which is dependent on these earnings, yet workers are marginalised within society. Casual workers, however, are often denied all employment rights and are exploited by their employers, in turn pressured by the manufacturers, to obtain the maximum level of production for minimum levels of pay. (Fekete, 1997) Furthermore, public discourse and policy-making have converged, so as to highlight some of the negative effects of the drive to enhance " economic growth and competitiveness" . In particular, this convergence has highlighted the manner in which this may have contributed to an increase of the " social exclusion and marginalisation" for different social groups and communities within the European Union. This paper will explore this argument with reference to one community; namely European Muslims (immigrants and settlers) who constitute one of those vulnerable and marginalised of these groups and who appear to have experienced discrimination in the labour market and the societal effects that have followed the drive for economic competitiveness and the concomitant increase in flexible employment practices. The focus on European Muslims also derives from a parallel concern to deconstruct an increasingly popular account, which has gained currency both within the field of academia and among policy makers at the local, national and European level 1 . This is the essentialist account of the recent emergence and increasing visibility of Muslims Voices 2 within the European Union, which it is argued derive from a loyalty to an anachronistic and traditional Islamic culture, which is incompatible with modernity. As such these accounts also have contributed, albeit inadvertently, to the emergence of a new form of " racism" within Europe; Islamophobia. ) Furthermore, such accounts also suggest that European Muslims are able to make use of their particular cultural capital (Islam) in order to both minimise the effects of economic restructuring as well as to exploit niche markets within the changing European economy. This, of course, it is argued, allows European Muslims to temper the effects of this economic restructuring and thus, contrary to received wisdom, negate some of the socio-economic ramifications of their social exclusion and marginalisation which, may have intensified due to the economic restructuring process. Such accounts, however, raise a number of conceptual and empirical concerns, which will constitute the focus of this paper. First, is the conceptual paradox where an apparently traditional and anachronistic culture (Islam) constitutes the particular social capital that allows European Muslims, albeit some of them, to compete successfully in a very " modern" and contemporary phase of capitalist development. This in effect raises the issue of the extent to which it is appropriate, conceptually at least, to perceive of Islam as a socio-cultural set of values that are incompatible with modernity. Second, is the assumption, derived almost entirely from aggregate quantitative economic indicators, that because some European Muslims are able to mobilise and exploit their particular cultural capital, they in effect are less vulnerable to some forms of social exclusion and marginalisation. Instead, this paper will explore the emergence of Muslim Voices within Europe in an analytical account, which gives conceptual privilege to an articulation of the two recent processes noted above: globalisation and economic restructuring and the formation of Islamic political identities (Muslim Voices) on the European political canvas.

Answering the Muslim question: The Politics of Muslims in Europe

e-cadernos CES, 2009

Since at least the 1990s, there has been a huge growth in interest about the Muslim presence in Western plutocracies. Part of this interest has been due to series of moral panics which have centred on the figure of the Muslim. The mobilisation of Muslims as Muslims has raised questions about national identity and belonging. Increasing interest is also due to the way in which the security threat-as posited by the "war on terror"-has been focused on the Muslim question as a means of reconfiguring the liberal-democratic contours of Western plutocracies. The responses to the attacks in the