The Lived Experiences of Muslims in Europe

Recognition, Power and Intersubjective Dilemmas

Des Delaney

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• Topic: Social Sciences
• eBook ISBN:
  9781351017732
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

This book unearths new knowledge and challenges existing paradigms in relation to the integration of minority communities. It comprehensively reflects upon the complexity of recognition experiences and integration challenges faced by Muslim individuals and groups in Europe. By focusing on universal recognition themes related to experiences within personal relationships, legal relations, religion and civil society, it makes an essential contribution to a deeper understanding of Muslim life in the West. It offers a reconsideration of everyday lives of Muslims in Europe by drawing on the paradigm of recognition. Exploring universal themes, it demonstrates the complexity of recognitive relations by examining how Muslim individuals perceive the ways they are recognised, or misrecognised, within various spheres of everyday interaction. It sheds light on the ways in which forms of recognition affect identity formation and social relations more generally, and the broader ramifications that arise from such forms of misrecognition. This book draws on Honneth's critical social theory of recognition to frame a range of grassroots interviews and focused discussion groups. Grounded in qualitative research and with an emancipatory intent, The Lived Experiences of Muslims in Europe challenges both the assumption that minority groups simply seek to have their particular culture and associated beliefs endorsed by a majority, and the security paradigm that narrowly views Muslims in Europe through the lens of political extremism.

1 Introduction

Introduction

There is a common perception that democracy continuously moves in a positive direction towards higher forms of progress. However, as continuously highlighted by history and its events, this is not always the case and regressions are possible. A clear example of this is when unregulated capitalism faltered leading to the devastating 2008 economic crash and the Great Recession. As everyday people suffered, trust towards bankers, politicians as well as globalisation generally declined allowing extremist views to re-emerge, gain momentum in the mainstream and fill a political vacuum. Throughout the world, but particularly in the West, an alt-right politics has come to prominence. It is a politics that mirrors 1930s populism by similarly advocating for international isolationism, fervent nationalism, aggressive trading and security prioritisation. Examples of this politics in action include the surge in support and influence of far-right political parties throughout Europe, the divisive politics and mindset that led the United Kingdom (UK) to disconnect from the European Union (EU), and the increasingly hostile partisan politics played out between political actors and parties in the United States (US).

In domestic politics, to find majority support among the populace and garner legitimacy for divisive policies, alt-right leaders and administrations must still justify their actions. To do so, they utilise the power of fear. This fear works by connecting minorities to security risks, i.e. the risk of terrorism as well as economic and cultural harm. When the mechanism of fear is initiated to gain political capital, it is Muslims, legal and illegal immigrants, refugees and people viewed as different, who become the political pawns and scapegoats required to legitimise and sell ideological policy. Such regressions in democratic societies show the precariousness of belonging to a minority and being different from what is considered the dominant identity standard of a nation.

The use of the Muslim stereotype to produce fear and legitimise ideological policy is not a new phenomenon. Its origins date back as far as the time of the Crusades. However, in the 1980s, as alt-right ideas were being resown, there was a resurgence in the view that Islam and Muslims pose a potential security risk to Western societies. As the Cold War threat dissipated, a gap emerged in the manufacture and production of fear. With the communist enemy fading into history, a new threat was required. This led to Islam replacing the Soviet foe. The Islamic religion, its countries and people became a new enemy. Through political rhetoric and media propaganda with a simplistic focus on jihadism; Islam and Muslims generally became perceived as something to fear, a renewed justification for unpopular policies and security measures in the West. Then in 2001, the September 11 attacks occurred and the Muslim threat entered centre stage. Throughout the world, Muslims became suspect, potential terrorists. This blanket misrepresentation and misrecognition struck Muslims living in the West hard. The generalised stereotype linking Muslims to terrorism flowed through politics, media and academia. Research about Western Muslims adopted a defensive security lens that concentrated on studying issues related to Islamic terrorism, youth radicalisation as well as immigration and border control. The lived reality experienced by these Muslims was demoted in importance and left unacknowledged were the positive contributions Islam and Muslims make to Western culture and society. Through the adoption of this one-dimensional perspective, the humanity of Islam and Muslims became obscured and was replaced by a reified risk-assessment to safeguard Western civilisation. The fixation on security has had dire consequences for the 20 million plus Muslims living across Europe, whose lives and identities are tarnished, risk-assessed and seen as a potential threat to be contained. In essence, Muslims in Europe, and throughout the world, have become Othered. Jensen (2011) has clarified the concept of Othering and how it relates to

discursive processes by which powerful groups, who may or may not make up a numerical majority, define subordinate groups into existence in a reductionist way, which ascribe problematic and/or inferior characteristics to these subordinate groups. Such discursive processes affirm the legitimacy and superiority of the powerful and condition identity formation among the subordinate.

(Ibid., p.65)

Alongside this irrational fear which has crossed into the twenty-first century, large numbers of Muslim immigrants and refugees have left war-torn or poverty-stricken home countries and risked their lives to enter Europe in the hope of attaining a better life. These migrants bring with them religious and cultural ideas and practices that run counter to Christian-influenced traditions and secular ways of being in Europe. Consequently, such a mass influx of people into Europe exacerbates the already tense secular-religious divisions present on the continent as well as creating tensions in politics, culture and everyday life within and between European states. This complex situation raises pertinent questions relating to how best to integrate people of difference into European cultural life as well as how to ensure that European nation states do not regress back into an anti-immigrant and undemocratic nativist politics. To ease such tensions and create a cohesive pan-European society that benefits from harmonious co-operation and solidarity, it has been argued by pre-eminent European scholar, Jürgen Habermas, that it is imperative for Europe as a whole to overcome its secular-religious divisions so that people of difference and the constructed Other can be integrated inclusively into European democratic culture.

Habermas and bridging the secular-religious divide

To understand the European secular-religious divide the work of renowned German intellectual, Jürgen Habermas, is vital considering he has written extensively on the topic. Habermas’ academic career spans sixty years. He is a leading figure in the critical theory tradition primarily concerned with emancipation through transformational processes in society and his writings have covered pertinent topics, including his celebrated work on the development and transformation of the European democratic public sphere (Habermas 1994), communicative action and discourse ethics (1984, 1987, 1990) as well as post-nationalism (2001). Although his work primarily tackles problems in his home country of Germany, its universal application has enabled such work to be transferred and applied by others to the wider European context.

In the 1990s, Habermas tackles legal and societal issues relating to constitutional law, citizenship, immigration and the EU supranational project. He understands the conflict surrounding immigration, in that his home country of Germany, once a country of emigration, has for a number of decades been going through a process of ‘being painfully transformed into a nation of immigrants’ (Habermas 1996, p.122). However, with that, Habermas also acknowledges that it is from the ranks of second and third generation immigrants that ‘fellow countrymen and women are created’ (Ibid., p.123). For conflict to be avoided, he argues that immigrants ‘must now become citizens, in the legal sense as well as in the political-cultural sense of citizenship’ (Ibid.). Running in contrast to the persistent perception in Germany that being a citizen is integrally part of an ethnic German identity and community, Habermas advocates for German citizens to be viewed as a legal community to create harmony and internal equality (Ibid., p.129). It is this critical analysis that leads to groundbreaking work advocating for ‘the emancipatory protocols of a community under the rule of law’ (Ibid., p.141). By reflecting on the disintegrating influence of nation states, he comes to identify the need for a federal and legally based European project in law in which citizens, devoid of nationalist tendencies, can proclaim their trust and loyalty. He calls this new citizenship-based allegiance, constitutional patriotism. The benefit of European citizens looking towards the constitution of a post-national entity is that it enables the balancing of ‘ethnic tensions within a multicultural association of citizens’ (Ibid., p.493) and thereby eases tensions and social conflict surrounding the issue of immigration into Europe. Habermas is keen to point out that nationalism’s ability to embody in people a sense of extreme pre-political inherited loyalty and self-sacrifice is based on its appropriating the republican notion of citizenship, which does not see identity ‘in ethnic or cultural commonalities but in the practise of citizens, who actively exercise their rights to participation and communication’ (Ibid., p.495). Habermas advocates for the purity of republican citizenship to rise to the foreground and empower citizens of all creeds, races and religions to move beyond nationalism and its corresponding identifications (Ibid.). In the Habermasian argument, filling the void of the nation state will be a constitutional patriotism in which citizens pledge allegiance to the law of a supranational entity.

As stated above, Habermas is adamant that the political community ‘depends primarily on legal principles anchored in the political culture and not in ethnical-cultural forma of life as a whole’ (Ibid., p.514). It is this understanding of political community that informs how he views European immigration policy in an era defined by the mass movement of people towards economic and democratic centres. He advocates for European nations to adopt ‘a liberal immigration policy’ (Ibid.), meaning European societies should expect that immigrants ‘engage in the political culture of their new home, [but] without necessarily abandoning the cultural life specific to their country of origin’ (Ibid.). This implies that there should not be totalistic assimilation or isolation of immigrant cultures and identities. For Habermas, being political and participating as a citizen in the republican tradition does not by default imply that a person’s ethnic or cultural affiliations be discarded and replaced by an assimilated version of the dominant culture and identity.

In his book The Inclusion of the Other (1998), Habermas delves further into the contradictions inherent between republican citizenship and the nationalist tendency to Other minorities. He once again advocates that ‘the romantically inspired idea of the nation as an ethnically based community of culture and historical destiny’ (Ibid., p.xxxvi) is an ideological conception paving the way for such nationalist states to ‘support questionable attitudes’ such as claiming a ‘right to national self-determination, the corresponding hostility towards multiculturalism and a politics of human rights, and a distrust of the transfer of sovereign rights to supranational organisations’ (Ibid.). Habermas describes how the nation state constituted itself. Nationalism or popular national self-consciousness enabled subjects to become citizens and, for the first time, enter into a collective belonging with strangers. Through this process, the nation state solved recurrent problems regarding legitimation and social integration (Ibid., p.111). However, in creating modern citizens, the ideology of national consciousness and belonging to the same people, crystallised into the notion of common ancestry, language and history, to the exclusion of others (Ibid.). Alternatively, Habermas sees another way to foster inclusiveness, which is made possible by the ‘progressive extension of citizenship to the whole population’ (Ibid., p.132). This provides secular legitimation and facilitates social integration through the abstract neutrality of law (Ibid.). Through this alternative democratic route, the Other can become citizen, and direct his or her patriotic feeling towards a European constitution.

However, by the late 2000s, Habermas had become disillusioned with a faltering European Union project (2009). A pan-European constitution did not materialise as nation states remained firmly in control, thereby exasperating the democratic deficit felt by ordinary European citizens towards the EU’s large unwieldy technocratic bureaucracy. For an academic viewed as an ardent secularist and whose work is a continuation of the Enlightenment tradition, Habermas, in this period, makes concerted efforts to breakdown these assumptions by focusing specifically on unravelling the intricacies of the secular-religious divide in Europe. He does this by paying close attention to the communicative interaction between post-secular societies and Islam (Ibid., Chapter 5). The fact that Habermas’ work begins to focus on Islam in Europe shows the importance of the debate surrounding the role of religion in a Europe commonly perceived as fully secularised. It also highlights the need for more in-depth analysis and understanding about this topic. Together with acknowledging the steady decline of religious adherence in Europe since the end of World War II, Habermas defines Europe today as moving from secularism towards a post-secular society. By this he means that the presence of Muslims and other faiths keeps religion consistently in the public sphere and tests the universal awareness that Europe is a secular society. He states in relation to this point:

The Muslim next door … forces the Christian citizens to confront the practise of a rival faith … [and also] prompts a keener awareness among the secular citizens of the phenomenon of the public presence of religion.

(Ibid., p.64)

A post-secular society is one in which the public role of religion retains its influence and relevance in public forums and the totalising secular mentality that Europe as a whole has moved beyond religion is tested. On this point, Habermas states:

[In post-secular societies] religion retains a certain influence and relevance, while the secularistic certainty that religion will disappear everywhere in the world as modernisation accelerates is losing ground.

(Ibid., p.65)

In this new context, Habermas argues that the ‘end of religion’ narrative, adopted by extreme secularist ideology, has been forced to change in European society due to three factors. Firstly, the ‘media-generated perception’ that global strife is primarily caused by religious turmoil. Secondly, the increased religious influence in national public spheres due to vibrant advocacy of established churches and by ‘foreign religions’ in the civil public sphere. And lastly, the entrance of immigrants into European societies invoking ‘confessional schisms’ and problems of integration throughout Europe (Ibid., pp.63–64). By uncovering the dogmatic falsehoods of totalising European secularism, Habermas proposes two questions to be debated by the citizenry of all European states in relation to the interaction between secularism and religion. Firstly, as members of a post-secular society, how do people define themselves and relate to others? Secondly, in pluralistic democratic societies that should enable the growth of new and varied cultures and religions, how can social relations remain cohesive and civil?

In line with his past work, Habermas answers such topical questions by turning to constitutionalism and the recognitive power of the universal citizen. In this regard, the evolution from the early modern secular state to the democratic constitutional state is pivotal. Whereas the early modern state eased religious tensions by creating a secular separation between Church and state, over time, the modern constitutional state has been able to ‘guarantee its citizens equal freedom of religion only under the proviso that they no longer barricade themselves up within the self-enclosed lifeworlds of their religious communities’ (Ibid., pp.67–68). This implies that the everyday practise of full participatory citizenship, under the umbrella of constitutional law, enables individuals and groups enclosed in religious communes to venture out of their protective communities into the expanse of civil society. For Habermas, the concept of the legal citizen is closely connected to recognition in the political community:

All subcultures, whether religious or not, are expected to loosen their hold on their individual members so that the latter can recognise each other reciprocally as citizens in civil society, hence as members of one and the same political community. In their role as democratic citizens, they give themselves those laws which enable them as private citizens to preserve their identity in the context of their own particular culture and worldview and to respect each other.

(Ibid., p.67)

As a form of recognition, toleration is another key component for Habermas. Not only should it be practised in the practical application and enacting of laws but also in daily life. In Habermas’ understanding, toleration ‘means that believers, members of other religions and non-believers must concede each other’s right to observe convictions, practises and ways of life which they themselves reject’ (Ibid., p.69). Essentially, toleration is a form of ‘mutual recognition’ that bypasses ‘repugnant dissonances’ (Ibid.). The above can only take place if the citizen is given primary reference as the glue that connects many differing identifications in society. To put this in the context of Muslims in Europe, a young Muslim may protect his different Islamic identity and yet utilise the sameness of his citizenship to interact in society on a level playing field with other citizens. Although Habermas’ solution may be viewed as too utopian and idealistic, it is important to clarify that he remains aware that a transformation in political culture towards more inclusiveness is also required alongside the equal redistribution of material conditions, such as ‘full integrati...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of illustrations
• Acknowledgements
• List of Abbreviations
• Foreword
• 1. Introduction
• 2. Muslims in Europe: divergent perspectives
• 3. Recognition and power
• 4. Societal relations
• 5. Spiritual relations
• 6. Intergenerational relations
• 7. Resolving recognitive-power dilemmas
• 8. Conclusion
• Appendix
• Index