British Muslim Minorities Today: Challenges and Opportunities to Europeanism, Multiculturalism and Islamism (original) (raw)

Critical Review: Muslims in Britain and Contemporary Europe

This essay will review two chapters from Muslims of Europe: the ‘Other’ Europeans by H.A. Hellyer, a research fellow for CREF at the University of Warwick. It will also summarise the author’s findings, followed by an assessment of the conclusions, and will provide critical and analytical remarks. The approach taken by the author is mainly qualitative; thus, working within the inductive research framework and paradigm. Additionally, Hellyer’s approach is textual based and theoretical; supplemented with a wide corpus of data analysis and empirical evidences. The background of the study is a research into the prospects for Muslims living in the West, residing in pluralistic and multiculturalist societies. Recently, however, due to the large increase of Muslims in Western Europe – and the controversies aired via the media about Islam – this has resulted in an ever growing and, yet to be, resolved challenges and complications. Therefore, rethinking terms like integration, assimilation, pluralism and what it means to live in a multicultural society have become the centre of debate and contention for many Muslim-Europeans. This, in turn, has had a negative impact on the Muslim community within Europe.

Issues and Problems of Muslim Minorities in Europe (A Case of British Muslim Community)

rahatulquloob, 2020

This piece of paper examines the existing position of Muslim minority in England with reference to their challenges, issues and problems, as well as this study reveals the solution and recommendations to solve these issues. The Muslims are one of the biggest communities of Europe in Britain. They are living and settled here since long. They have many important contributions in every field of life even the sitting Mayer of London is a Muslim. It doesn’t mean they have no problem. They are facing lots issues and discrimination in every field of life, especially they are being deprived in the field of economy. Practising Muslims face a wide variety of challenges, even they do not have enough freedom of religion, freedom to offer open prayer, build mosques, keep beard and wear traditional dress at work. Women wearing the veil caused all kinds of issues and are practically banned for certain jobs (e.g. teaching and the police). Islam has dietary requirements that can make deciding what’...

Muslims in Western States: The British Experience and the Way Forward

Journal of Muslim Minority Affairs, 2008

Almost one third of the world's Muslims live as minorities in non-Muslim states. This article examines the position of Muslims in the West with special reference to Muslims in the United Kingdom. First, an overview of Muslims in Western states is presented, concentrating on Muslims in the United States, Canada, Australia and Western Europe. Second, the demographic and socioeconomic position of Muslims in Britain is discussed, particularly highlighting various issues facing them. Third, the issues of religious discrimination and the feeling of insecurity among British Muslims, as well as state policies towards Muslims, are examined. Finally, it is argued that Western states, including Britain, have a long way to go in terms of their policies to accept Muslims as equal citizens and, in this context, several lines of action are proposed.

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 ...

Islam and multiculturalism in Europe: An exposition of a dialectical encounter

American Journal of Islamic Social Studies, 32(2): 31-50. Abstract Events, such as New York's 9/11, London's 7/7, and Paris's Charlie Hebdo, have played dramatic roles in redirecting the focus of multiculturalism in liberal democracies in Europe. Against a backdrop of the 'failure of multiculturalism', or 'multiculturalism in crisis', liberal democracies continue to struggle and stumble in their efforts to accommodate minority groups, while simultaneously trying to sustain the primary good of the majority. One such stumble appears to be the attempt by a number of European countries to 'emancipate' and 'democratise' Muslim women by regulating their dress code. In return, liberal democracies are accused of seeking to expunge itself of its multicultural baggage by pursuing a particular orientation of integrationism, which disregards the self-understandings of religious and cultural particularities. By focusing on the treatment of Muslim women vis-à-vis the regulation of the hijāb, this article attempts to make sense of why multiculturalism in Europe might be perceived to be failing in its response to Muslims and Islam. In weighing the increasing levels of fear and insecurity among majority groups within a context of growing social marginalisation among minority groups, I argue for a re-invocation of multiculturalism as a dialectical encounter. Such an encounter, based on mutual trust and respect, will lead to the equal citizenship necessary to counter the simmering alienation and scepticism, which threatens to always undermine any notion of peaceful coexistence among majority and minority groups .

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.

Islam and multiculturalism: Some thoughts on a difficult relationship

2008

We are living through a particularly difficult and delicate period in the development of Britain as a multicultural, multiethnic and multi-faith society. Even before the terrorist attacks in London on 7 July 2005, racial, ethnic, and religious tensions had led to the beginnings of a re-evaluation of "multiculturalism" as a viable discourse for British society. Following the riots in Oldham and Bradford in the summer months of the year 2001, the Cantle Report introduced into public discourse terms such as "parallel lives" and "separate communities" which profoundly shifted the terms of debate about cultural diversity away from "multiculturalism" and towards "integration". 1 The question of what "integration" actually means-integration into what?-is left open, however, and is filled with a silence that is all too eloquent a testimony to the absence of the mythical "common values" to which we should all supposedly subscribe. Nevertheless, politicians, journalists, and public figures from all backgrounds and political persuasions have increasingly fallen over themselves to attack multiculturalism as a divisive and devastating failure. This failure is premised on the belief that multiculturalism encourages "separateness" and "cultural segregation" and is in turn responsible for a situation in which, according to Ruth Kelly, the communities minister, "some communities [are] living in isolation of each other, with no common bonds between them." 2 This rhetoric attaching multiculturalism to tropes of apartness, conflating diversity and difference with separation and isolation is axiomatic in all articulations of the new consensus. The recognition and celebration of cultural diversity, it is argued, is having real material consequences on the