The Legal Treatment of Muslim Minorities in Italy

Islam and the Neutral State

Andrea Pin

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781134807758
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politica e relazioni internazionali
• Subtopic: Diritti civili in politica

Islam is a growing presence practically everywhere in Europe. In Italy, however, Islam has met a unique model of state neutrality, religious freedom and church and state collaboration. This book gives a detailed description of the legal treatment of Muslims in Italy, contrasting it with other European states and jurisprudence, and with wider global tendencies that characterize the treatment of Islam. Through focusing on a series of case studies, the author argues that the relationship between church and state in Italy, and more broadly in Europe, should be reconsidered both to secure religious freedom and general welfare. Working on the concepts of religious freedom, state neutrality, and relationship between church and state, Andrea Pin develops a theoretical framework that combines the state level with the supranational level in the form of the European Convention of Human Rights, which ultimately shapes a unitary but flexible understanding of pluralism. This approach should better accommodate not just Muslims' needs, but religious needs in general in Italy and elsewhere.

Chapter 1
Islam in Italy

Islam in Italy and the Emergence of New Issues for Religious Freedom

Italy has an immigrant Muslim population of multivarious ethnic diversity, which stems from two factors: first, Italy has not retained a relationship with its former colonies, which encourages immigration; and, second, because it is squeezed between the Arab-African South and the Balkans in the East. This “ethnic mosaic”¹ has distinguished Italy from other nations where there was (at least until recent times) a single dominant ethnic immigrant origin,² whether it is the Maghreb in France, Indo-Pakistani in Great Britain or Turkish in Germany.³

The largest Muslim communities in Italy are Albanian, Moroccan, Tunisian, Egyptian and Bangladeshi. Other significant Muslim communities come from Senegal, Pakistan, Nigeria and Algeria.⁴ The diversity of origins among these groups demonstrates the variety of ways Islam is practiced and defined in Italy.⁵ For example, even though 70 percent of the Albanians in Italy are formally Muslim, their community is highly secularized,⁶ meaning that the religious identity of Albanians in Italy is less pronounced and somewhat absent from the ongoing debate between the country’s various Muslim communities.⁷

Each minority’s strategy for social inclusion depends upon its specific origins and many other factors. Muslims with Moroccan, Tunisian or Albanian ethnicity seem to be those most interested in absorbing Italian culture and grounding themselves in Italian society.⁸ The Senegalese Muslims, by contrast, have generally focused on returning to their homeland.⁹ The Senegalese are different from other Muslim communities: they belong to brotherhoods within their ethnicity whose rules differ from mainstream Islamic doctrine in that they put a greater emphasis on the nurturing of their relationship with God.¹⁰ As a result, members of these brotherhoods build close personal bonds of support with each other, developing their relationship with the divine on the basis of affection rather than codices.¹¹ This phenomenon effectively eschews the organizational dynamics of Islam in Italy, because the Senegalese convene in separate gatherings motivated by different goals.¹²

Religion plays differing roles within Muslim communities. This is not to suggest that religion is the sole factor, but merely that it plays a role in cultural adaptation. The more secularized the immigrant Muslim group, the less difficulty it has in assimilating with the Italian culture and way of life. This works in reverse as well, as very religious Muslim groups with a wealth of tradition and established customs have difficulty fitting in. Another variable is the collective intent of the Muslim group, whether to settle in Italy or return to their homeland like the Senegalese. The diversity of attitudes among Muslim groups in Italy transcends their different places of birth and derives from the era and cultural cluster immigrants experienced before leaving their country. Ancient immigration patterns involved traditionally religious newcomers; milder religious practices characterize more recent expatriations.¹³

It is worth noting that Muslims’ customs and traditions, which are promoted by the political and social institutions of their homeland (including regular calls to prayer throughout towns and cities),¹⁴ stand out in Italy as unusual, if not eccentric. In Muslim countries, religious identity is substantially supported by institutional and social structure, perhaps more so than other religions. Civil authority, social structure and the religious forum are intractably interweaved together, as can be seen in the considerable influence of Islamic religious law over state law.¹⁵

All these dynamics come into play in the fashioning of the identity of the average Italian Muslim. It is inevitable that European Muslims will experience a rupture between territorial identity and religious identity.¹⁶ In an environment largely shaped by Christian culture, but which has for centuries experienced a process of gradual separation between the religious and civil world, they find it doubly hard to identify with the Italy’s basic social and institutional framework.¹⁷ In past centuries, religious Muslims (as opposed to more secular Muslims) would have felt alienated by the majoritarian Catholic faith. Now, most Muslims (whether religious or not) feel alienated by the fact that religion eschews the bond between the individual, community and institutions.

The dynamic between the Muslim immigrants’ own cultural and religious heritage and their new social and cultural context in Italy has led to various adapted forms of Islam in Europe. The first such form of Islam is neo-fundamental communalism, according to which a Muslim does not define his identity in terms of his origins, but in terms of a system of standards and codes of conduct, which are based primarily on the conflict between right and wrong. The unifying factor here is not so much common Islamic tradition, but religious practice, which binds individual members of the Muslim community. The second such form is neo-ethnic communalism, which underscores the immigrant’s affiliation and connection with Islam (elevating shared traditions) rather than the inherent orthopraxis connected to being a Muslim. The third such form represents a secularized approach to Islam based on the immigrant’s separation of private from public life and the internalization of his religious experience. This is a private and individual religious experience, focusing on spiritual, mystical and ethical aspects of the Islamic faith. It derives from constant contact with Islam in an incremental process of religious absorption and is seen mainly in European countries with strong Christian faith (which may have influenced this form by its own individualized approach to religion).¹⁸

A growing number of Muslim immigrants and new converts to Islam do not intend to give up or radically change their religiosity as they move to Italy; rather, they negotiate with the government to obtain legal exemptions to meet their religious needs. On the one hand, this phenomenon is inherent in the integration process of several other new religions now appearing on Italy’s landscape: their requests are usually initiated with the aim of creating a limited special status suited to their own particular characteristics. From this perspective, the attitude adopted by Italian Muslims is similar to those adopted by other religious minorities who have put forward similar demands (whether or not they were granted). On the other hand, the Muslim presence in Italy is generating tensions, which might be of a very different magnitude from those religions that the law has already tacitly supported through state–religion agreements. Islam raises new and different issues that the Italian legal system is not accustomed to handling. Accepting some of the more incisive demands of the Muslim community could precipitate a major impact on the state of religious freedom in Italy. The pressure on the legal system to meet Islamic demands from a qualitative perspective is decidedly novel and significantly greater.

See, for example, the practice of polygamy¹⁹ and the role of the mosque in political and religious aggregation. Polygamy impinges significantly on legally protected values like established models of institutions such as marriage.²⁰ Mosques often take on a strong role in political leadership, raising sensitive issues in an international context, through which Islamic terrorism has made a big impact. Moreover, Muslim immigrants in Italy are unlikely to let such demands lapse because of the passage of time or their potential impact on the law; they are also not likely to limit themselves to private religious practice.²¹ While a substantial number of Muslims appear inclined to embrace a more spiritualized, less public and socially relevant practice, indications from the whole of the European continent would suggest the contrary.

The Charter of Muslims in Europe, for example, signed on January 10, 2008 by more than 400 Muslim organizations that all gathered at the Federation des Organisations Islamiques en Europe in Brussels²² positions the European Muslim community directly at the forefront of Islam’s long-standing religious tradition. It affirms the prescriptive nature of the immutable rules of the Qur’an and the Sunnah of the Prophet Muhammad,²³ advocates the rapprochement between the many different component forms of European Islam in accordance with customary Islamic sensibilities that conceive of Muslims as a single fraternity, and expresses the need for Muslim immigrants to be granted the status of a religious community throughout Europe. As such, the concord highlights the will of the Muslim community to gain ground on the European continent through a communitarian approach. Although benign and positive on its face, this approach is not without issues. Several themes presented in the paper are vague, such as the assertion that men and women “complement” each other. This idea appears to elide the problem of legal equality between genders (which is symptomatic of Isla...