Phalet K., Maliepaard M., Fleischmann F., Güngör D (2013) - The Making and Unmaking of Religious Boundaries Comparing Turkish and Moroccan Muslim minorities in European Cities (original) (raw)
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In public debates over multiculturalism in Europe, Islamic values and ways of life are commonly represented as incompatible with Western rights and liberties. Against this background, Muslim minorities have developed generally strong and stable religious identities. This paper asks when and how multicultural cities and ethnic communities give rise to strong and stable religion. Taking an approach from religious boundary making as a heuristic framework, we bring together a series of five studies on the religious identities of Muslim minorities. The studies compare religious group boundaries and replicate boundary making processes (cf. Wimmer, 2008) across ethnic communities and multicultural cities as comparative cases. Drawing on several large-scale surveys of Muslim minorities, our comparative findings illuminate the making and unmaking of religious boundaries. We conclude that strong religion is 'made in Europe' as institutional rigidities and social inequalities enforce religious boundary making through social closure and cultural maintenance within ethnic communities.
Identity conflict or compatibility: A comparison of Muslim minorities in five European cities
Political Psychology, 2016
Drawing on large-scale comparative surveys across nine sociopolitical contexts, we address the question when and why ethno-religious and city or national identities of European-born Muslims are in conflict. We argue that the sociopolitical context makes the difference between identity compatibility or conflict and that conflict arises from perceived discrimination and related negative feelings towards the national majority. Using multigroup structural equation modelling, we examine how Turkish and Moroccan Muslims in five European cities combine their civic membership of the city and country of residence—as common identities shared with the national majority—with distinct ethnic and religious identities. In all sociopolitical contexts, participants combined significant city and national identities with strong ethnic and religious identifications. Yet, identification patterns varied between contexts from conflict (negatively correlated minority and civic identities) over compartmentalization (zero correlations) to compatibility (positive correlations). Muslims who perceived more personal discrimination were more committed to their ethnic and religious identities while simultaneously dis-identifying from their country and city. Across cities, discrimination experiences and negative majority-group evaluations explained away identity conflict.
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.
THEO2661: Religious Diversity in Europe: Identities and Practices
This module will address religious diversity in contemporary Europe by paying attention to recent events and ongoing debates surrounding this subject. For example, since the 1990s, the collapse of the Soviet Union has opened room for religious identities in post-socialist societies. Similarly, the increasing public presence of Islam by the hand of Muslim migrants and their children has challenged hegemonic ideas of secularism and citizenship. Meanwhile, the consolidation of supra-national institutions has produced a revival of ethno-religious identities that aim to recover sovereignty while targeting diverse forms of religious life. Ultimately, this module will discuss these issues by way of recent works by political scientists, sociologists, and anthropologists.
Given the growing presence of Islam in Europe, we developed a research program articulating minority perspectives on acculturation and religion among selfidentified Muslims across Europe. Integrating different cross-cultural perspectives on religious acculturation, we ask how acculturation contexts and processes affect the religiosity of Muslims (a) across heritage and mainstream cultures, (b) across different acculturating groups, and (c) across different receiving societies. Based on various large-scale datasets, collected among (young) Muslim populations from different ethnic backgrounds in four European countries, we conclude that religious decline in European societies is largely absent. A comparison across cultures of origin and destination suggests the reaffirmation of religion in acculturating youth, who are more strongly identified with their religion than comparison groups in both mainstream and heritage cultures. Cross-ethnic comparisons indicate that religious socialization is most effective in more cohesive acculturating groups. Finally, crossnational comparisons provide evidence of more strict forms of religiosity in societies with less welcoming intergroup climates. Together, the cross-cultural findings extend a well-established bi-dimensional conceptualization of acculturation to the religious domain.
New Multicultural Identities in Europe: Religion and Ethnicity in Secular Societies
Journal of Contemporary Religion, 2014
Th is chapter focuses on how second generation Muslim children of Turkish descent in Belgium (Flanders) move between their home and school culture and how they deal with competing expectations from both worlds. Th e chapter is based on qualitative empirical case-study work on three groups of ten-year-old children attending two diff erent Catholic schools. In general, the children as social actors adopt creative strategies to connect the two worlds. However, specifi c school and home contexts may interfere with children's agency. Th e chapter argues that the way adults at school and at home deploy their power status and introduce ethnic/ religious symbols of diff erence is crucial in understanding this process.
This article investigates the impact of discursive and political opportunity structures on religiosity among Muslims and on perceived distance between Muslims and non-Muslims on the role of religion in society, making use of the EURISLAM-data-set (2010). We will focus on Moroccan, Turkish, Pakistani and ex-Yugoslavian origin samples of migrants of Muslim origin and a control group of non-Muslim majority group citizens for six participating countries (Belgium, France, Germany, the Netherlands, Switzerland and the UK). Our analysis does not show any impact of opportunity structures on Muslims religiosity nor on perceived differences between Muslims and non-Muslims.
Muslims in Europe: The Stranger Within
cms.horus.be
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.