Muslim European Youth

Reproducing Ethnicity, Religion, Culture

Steven Vertovec, Alistar Rogers

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9781138322905
• eBook ISBN: 9780429837586
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Religion
• Index: Social Sciences

First Published in 1998, this volume consists of contributors providing position of Muslim youth in a European context. Providing case studies from 5 European nations: Denmark, France, Germany, the Netherlands and the United Kingdom. The chapters in this book draw from various of anthropological and sociological theory to discuss this topic. Many contributors relating back to ethnological research on young Muslims in relation to local government, political and religious associations, schools as well as community and family.

1 Introduction

Steven Vertovec and Alisdair Rogers

Recently observed in a British city: an Asian man about twenty years old wearing sunglasses, baggy trousers, large trainers loosely laced, and a black T-shirt depicting a photo of the Earth from space under which appear the words 'dar al-Islam' [the realm of Islam], Do these trappings merely mark a radical street style? Do they represent a new force of 'fundamentalism'? Do they indicate the retention of an identity across generations and continents, or a new mode of being Muslim that has been forged particularly in the British urban context, or some hybrid form of Islam sweeping Europe?

These possible, wide-ranging interpretations are only a few of many which have been widely rehearsed-by media journalists, academics and Muslim commentators alike-with regard to the myriad expressions of religious identity evident among young Muslims throughout Europe. The best interpretation is probably that such a combination of elements have no single 'message' or 'meaning'. Young European Muslims are increasingly demonstrating that there is no inherent contradiction or cognitive dissonance necessarily associated with having 'street-cred' and hip-hop style, identifying with certain contemporary global orientations within Islam, being for example British and Muslim and Pakistani, and perhaps being at the same time in accord with and at odds with the views and values of one's parents. This Introduction, along with the articles which comprise this volume, explores some of the multiple modes of expression and attachment which young Muslims in Europe are constructing today.

There are at least seven million Muslims currently living in Western Europe (Vertovec and Peach 1997). Although their families' roots may be in South Asia, the Maghreb, or Turkey, a large proportion of Europe's Muslim population-over half in many places (for example, 56% of Bangladeshis in Britain; Jones 1993)-is comprised of persons under twenty years old. They are Muslims who have been born, raised, schooled and who live in various European contexts. 'They are, in a sense,' writes Czarina Wilpert (1989: 6), 'new Europeans searching for a new belongingess and the right to new identities.' Despite their immigrant or 'ethnic' backgrounds, it is therefore fair to describe such persons as Muslim Europeans.

It is particularly the cohort of young Muslim Europeans who are presumed to have a problem with 'identity': yet the 'problem' is far more often in the mind of the non-Muslim (researchers and journalists not least), or the of the Muslim elder, than among the young people themselves. The set of examples below point toward some of the presumptions and complexities surrounding questions of young European Muslims and their 'identity'.

Fundamentalists, apostates or contextualists?

In June 1995, the northern English city of Bradford witnessed several nights of violence which saw police pitted against Asian young men. The police and much of the media put the blame on both a 'cultural gap' and 'generation gap' among the local Asian population: the 'westernized' youths-a generation caught 'between two cultures'-were deemed to be out of the control of their parents and 'Asian community leaders' (Burlet and Reid 1996). Some accounts even pointed to the alleged importance of 'Islamic militancy' in fostering the riots, despite the lack of any kind of evidence of Muslim symbolism surrounding the riot (McLoughlin 1997). It was somehow assumed, and readily accepted by many quarters of British society, that religious extremism must have had something to do with the disturbances, particularly in this city which was context to much of the controversial Satanic Verses protests in 1990.

Just after the riots, it was reported that the avowedly extremist organization Hizb-ut-Tahrir held meetings seeking new recruits from among the disaffected youths in the locale. Over the past few years, Hizb-ut-Tahrir itself has gained a notorious reputation for holding rallies and other activities at British universities at which anti-Jewish and anti-gay messages were propagated. Hence it seems to many that Muslim extremists are emerging both from the unemployed working class Asian youth of inner cities and from the population of intellectuals training at institutes of higher education.

A kind of moral panic concerning the imagined rise of home-grown Muslim extremists has not by any means been limited to Britain. Since the autumn of 1995, when the French police killed Khald Kelkal, the chief suspect in a terrorist bombing campaign, there has ensued a high degree of public debate about whether alienated French Muslim youth in run-down suburbs are turning to violent Islamicist groups and creating a rebel subculture (see Cesari this volume). In Germany a similar debate has followed the publication of Wilhelm Heitmeyer's (1997) Verlockender Fundamentalismus ['Enticing Fundamentalism']. In this book, based on arguably spurious research on the connections between German Turkish youth in Hamburg and the Milli Görüs tradition of Islam (associated with the Islamist Refah party in Turkey), Heitmeyer claims there is a dangerous fundamentalist element growing within Germany.

In stark contrast to these stories of emerging Muslim fundamentalisim, many observers have identified what appears to be a wholesale abandonment of Muslim attachments. This is exemplified in France, where Leveau (1997) indicates that 71 per cent of 18-30 year old Maghrebis claim they feel closer to the culture of France than to that of their parents. Hargreaves and Stenhouse (1991) report that between one-fifth and one-third of young people from Muslim backgrounds in France regularly say they are not Islamic believers. Many others profess only a weak allegiance to the religion by way of observing prescribed behaviour and practice. Further, such youths are shown to know little about Islamic doctrines and often react negatively to the dietary, sexual and other restrictions associated with such doctrines. Despite such negativity and low rates of knowledge and observance, the majority of young people nevertheless described themselves as Muslims. This is a new kind of attachment that Hargreaves (1995: 121) describes as 'affective identification with doctrinal detachment'.

A yet different pattern of situational or serial identification is perhaps the most commonplace development among European Muslim youth. This was raised at a 1995 conference in Berlin by Jørgen Back Simonsen, who provided a series of illuminating anecdotes concerning the rich multiple lifeworlds of Moroccan youths in Copenhagen. On any Friday night, Simonsen describes, Danish Moroccan youths might go to see a touring Raï (Algerian pop music) group; on such occasions the youths 'are' collective diasporic Maghrebians. On Saturday afternoon, the same youths may go to a meeting of the Union of Muslim Students; then, they 'are' part of a pan-Islamic awakening. On Saturday night, the youths might go to their uncle's place for dinner; there, they 'are' traditional Moroccan youths.

As these contrasting images show, diverse uses and meanings of Islam have emerged among young persons of Muslim upbringing in Europe. The 'problems' so often associated with this cohort lie less with these persons themselves than with observers who attempt to understand the category 'young Muslims in Europe' through conventional concepts of 'culture', 'community' and 'identity'. Clearly there is need to re-think these concepts.

The anti-essentialist critique

There is an increasingly abundant literature critiquing commonplace understandings of the notions 'culture' (see for instance Caglar 1994; Stolcke 1995; Vertovec 1996) and 'community' (see for instance Anthias and Yuval-Davis 1991; Baumann 1996). This gist of such criticism is that both terms are often used to represent integrated and bounded wholes characterized by uniform rules, values, practices and traits-or, as such understanding have come to be portrayed, both terms convey 'essentialist' meanings in which entire groups or categories of people are stereotyped as homogeneously imbued with specific attributes. 'Religion' and 'ethnicity' have also commonly been filled with essentialist connotations as well. More open, fluid, contested and socially constructed understandings of all these terms are now usually advocated instead.

The concept of 'identity' has been focus of comparatively less critique. Whereas 'culture' and 'community' are now often used rather reluctantly by many social scientists, the even more vague concept of 'identity' is still frequently utilized in a range of academic literature. On the whole, attempts to re-think the concept have not moved a great deal from the seminal theorizations of the social dynamics of 'identity' published by researchers such as Erickson (1968), Tajfel (1974) and Jacobson-Widding (1983). While many sociologists use the term uncritically, many social psychologists draw from these earlier works to probe the meaning of 'identity' as 'cognitive-affective consistency'. The latter approach often employs rather formalistic methods and concise sub-categories of identity content in order to get a firm 'fix' on the identity of people. It has therefore followed that the absence of a unitary configuration of measurable characteristics (often determined by the researcher)-in other words, the absence of a single 'identity', itself assumed to be identified with clear attachment to a single 'culture' and a distinct 'community'-was regarded as a serious 'identity problem'.

This kind of formal socio-psychological understanding of 'identity', along with static and bounded notions of 'culture', 'community', 'religion' and 'ethnicity', has long informed sociological work concerning young members of ethnic minorities, who have regularly been deemed 'the second generation'. Hence this cohort has been commonly associated with the concepts of acculturation, deculturation or assimilation, culture conflict, 'between-two-cultures', identity crisis, and bi-culturality (for example Anwar 1976; Abadan-Unat 1985; Singh Ghuman 1994). Despite the emergent anti-essentialist critique, there still appears an abundance of studies that 'measure' identity and its presumed contents through all sorts of quantifiable questionnaires, scales, standard deviations and statistical methods in terms of frequency of cultural practice and extent of cultural distance, degree of attachment to 'home' (pre-migration) countries, degree of integration to 'host' (residence) society, degree of adherence to Islamic principles and other categories themselves based on fixed and bounded notions of 'culture', 'community', 'religion' and 'ethnicity' (see for instance Similä 1988; Liebkind 1989a; Weinreich 1989; Nijsten 1996; van der Lans and Rooijackers 1996).

While these sorts of study continue, the shortcomings of such an approach to 'identity' have become increasingly apparent to many. Indeed, in the final overview of a volume centred around formalistic identity structure analysis, Karmela Liebkind (1989b: 238) concludes that for the majority of second generation youth:

The number of categories or groups for each individual generating social identities is enormous. Language, gender and political attitudes qualify the impact of ethnicity on one's identity. However, multiple group allegiance is not only a source of strain: cognitive flexibility and the ability to adapt to situational contingencies are acquired in the frequent modulations of social identities that occur when multiple group membership exists. Individuals differ in the extent to which they behave in terms of group membership, and people generally do not identify in an all-or-none fashion with the values and characteristics of various groups and/or individuals. In developing different identity structures, people relate to others and respond to situations in markedly different ways.

Alternative approaches: understanding multiplicity

By way of articulating resistance to essentialist notions, researchers in sociology and cultural studies have invoked a broad new range of concepts to convey better a sense of openness and mutability. This includes notions of translation, creolization, crossover, cut 'n' mix, hyphenated, bricolage, hybridity, syncretism, third space, multiculture, transculturation and diasporic consciousness (see Hannerz 1987; Hebdige 1987; Gilroy 1987, 1993; Alund 1991; Robins 1991; Bhabha 1990; Back 1996; Kaya 1997; Werbner and Modood 1997).

The terms and approaches certainly mark and advance in conceptualizing emergent forms and modes of expression. However, as Ayse Caglar (1997) points out, we must beware that such terms themselves-especially 'hybridity'-do not become new essentialisms. Alternative blends of cultural backgrounds are certainly being produced on the street celebrated in the literature. Yet an important feature of contemporary socio-cultural dynamics among ethnic minority youth is that many are not just adopting and adapting some (singular) new course which is neither that of their immigrant parents' origin nor that of their ethnic majority peers. Rather, such youths are illustrating their skills at combining, maintaining and serially selecting facets of all of these lifeways. They demonstrate multiple cultural competence (cf. Ålund 1991; Jackson andNesbitt 1993).

Fredrik Barth (1989: 124) usefully discusses the nature of living in complex societies and complex cultural configurations by asserting that such a way of being entails 'a multiplicity, inconsistency and contentiousness that deflects any critical attempt at characterization.' In such contexts, 'people participate in multiple, more or less discrepant, universes of discourse,' he (ibid.: 130) explains, and 'they construct different, partial and simultaneous worlds in which they move; their cultural construction of reality springs not from one source and is not of one place,' Cultural complexity brings about the potential, in every person, for a co-existing multiplicity of worldviews and ways of being.

What is the mechanism of multiplicity? One way of viewing this is through the understanding of culture as a kind of 'toolkit', as advocated by Ann Swidler (1986). Here, cultural attributes drawn from a number of sources throughout one's life are understood as a set of resources from which people can construct diverse strategies of action day-to-day, situation-by-situation. This means, according to Swidler (ibid.: 281), that people engage in their everyday activities by 'selecting certain cultural elements (both such tacit culture as attitudes and styles and, sometimes, such explicit cultural materials as rituals and beliefs) and investing them with particular meanings in concrete life circumstances.'

A further way we might better appreciate the nature of multiple cultural competence is via a linguistic metaphor of culture. One such exercise, based on creole linguistics, was undertaken by Lee Drummond (1980). Working in the ethnically plural context of Guyana, Drummond formulated a model of Guyanese society as an intersystem or cultural continuum. Just as creole linguistics posits no clear boundaries between two languages, Drummond saw a wide range of blendings evident between the conceived cultural 'poles' of Guyana's ethnic categories (African, Indian, Amerind, European and others). With such a model, he concluded that:

Individuals are cognisant of much or all the possible range of behaviour and belief in the continuum, although need not behave or act as the other does, just as speakers of a creole language can generally understand utterances at either extreme of the continuum but rarely control both extremes in their own speech. The reality of the system is, therefore, the set of bridges or transformations required to get from one end to the other, (ibid.: 353)

With regard to young Asians in Britain, Roger Ballard (1994) follows Drummond to make an important analogy between cultural and linguistic practice. 'Just as individuals can be bilingual', Ballard (ibid.: 31) emphasises, so they can also be multicultural, with the competence to behave appropriately in a number of different arenas, and to switch codes as appropriate.' By adopting such a perspective, Ballard (ibid.) reasons, 'the popular view that young people of South Asian parentage will inevitably suffer from "culture conflict" as a result of the participation in a number of differently structured worlds can be dismissed.'

If we are to probe further the analogy of cultural and lingui...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Contributors
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Islam in France: Social Challenge or Challenge of Secularism?
• 3 Islam and Interest Struggle: Religious Collective Action Among Turkish Muslims in the Netherlands
• 4 Imagining a British Muslim Identification
• 5 Islam and Socialization Among Turkish Minorities in Denmark: Between Culturalism and Cultural Complexity
• 6 Young Muslims in Keighley, West Yorkshire: Cultural Identity, Context and 'Community'
• 7 Continuity and Change: Young Turks in London
• 8 Gender and Generation: Young Muslims in Copenhagen
• 9 Good Girls, Bad Girls: Moroccan and Turkish Runaway Girls in the Netherlands
• 10 Growing Up as a Muslim in Germany: Religious Socialization Among Turkish Migrant Families
• 11 Educational Needs of Muslim Children in Britain: Accommodation or Neglect?