Muslims in Europe

Comparative perspectives on socio-cultural integration

Paul Statham, Jean Tillie

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2018
• eBook ISBN: 9781351387729
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

Atrocities by terrorists acting in the name of the 'Islamic State' are occurring with increasing regularity across Western Europe. Often the perpetrators are 'home grown', which places the relationship between Muslims and the countries in which they live under intense political and media scrutiny, and raises questions about the success of the integration of Muslims of migrant origin. At the same time, populist politicians try to shift the blame from the few perpetrators to the supposed characteristics of all Muslims as a 'group' by depicting Islam as a threat that seeks to undermine liberal democratic values and institutions.

The research in this volume attempts to redress the balance by focusing on the views and life experiences of the many 'ordinary' Muslims in their European societies of settlement, and the role that cultural and religious factors play in shaping their social relationships with majority populations and public institutions. The book is specifically interested in the relationship between cultural/religious distance and social factors that shape the life chances of Muslims relative to the majority. The study is cross-national, comparative across the six main receiving countries with distinct approaches to the accommodation of Muslims: France, Germany, Britain, the Netherlands, Belgium and Switzerland. The research is based on the findings of a survey of four groups of Muslims from distinct countries of origin: Turkey, Morocco, the former Yugoslavia, and Pakistan, as well as majority populations, in each of the receiving countries. This book was originally published as a special issue of the Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies.

Muslims in their European societies of settlement: a comparative agenda for empirical research on socio-cultural integration across countries and groups

Paul Statham and Jean Tillie

ABSTRACT

Islam has become the key site for demarcating boundaries between majority populations and individuals of immigrant origin across Europe. This article outlines a research agenda on the socio-cultural integration of Muslims in their Western European societies of settlement. Integration issues with regard to Muslims have especially tended to focus on cultural and religious aspects. This raises questions. First, does culture/religion matter in shaping Muslims’ relative disadvantage in the socio-economic domain? Alternatively, does Muslim social disadvantage result from majority society’s discrimination and bias against religious/cultural difference? Second, religious and cultural difference seems to matter in its own right. Do Muslims identify with their countries of settlement and accept the core liberal democratic values and norms? Or do persistent socio-cultural ‘gaps’ between Muslims and non-Muslims result from intolerance by the majority population? The article outlines a theoretical approach and empirical research programme. The framework is cross-national comparative, including France, Germany, Britain, Netherlands, Belgium, and Switzerland. The main data source is a survey that includes four groups of Muslims from distinct countries of origin (Turks, Moroccans, former-Yugoslavians, and Pakistanis) plus a majority sample, which facilitates cross-group, cross-national comparison. This introduction concludes by introducing contributions that address a specific question embedded within the overall framework.

Introduction¹

In the wake of the atrocity on 13 November 2015, in Paris, when ordinary people enjoying a Friday night out were gunned down indiscriminately and 130 killed by terrorists acting in the name of the so-called Islamic State or Daesh, the relationship between Europe and her Muslims once more became the focus of intensive political, policy, and media scrutiny. The Paris attack followed on the heels of the Charlie Hebdo attack in the same city earlier in the year, and a growing list of controversies and violent actions, including London 7/7, violent responses to the so-called Danish cartoon controversy in 2005, and the Madrid bombing in 2004. These conflicts raise questions about the ‘success’ of the integration of Muslims in Europe, and lead to popular fears, not least those championed by anti-Islamic politicians such as Geert Wilders in the Netherlands, that Islam is a threat and seeks to undermine liberal democratic institutions, values, and practices. Such public responses often seem to shift the blame from the few perpetrators to supposed characteristics of Muslims as a ‘group’. One of the first responses by French politicians was to demand that Imams should speak in French, as if the actions of the few were also part of religious issues within the behaviour of the majority of French Muslims. Here we do not want to address the complex issue of the radicalisation of the few in the name of political Islam—that question merits its own research agenda. On the contrary, our research programme is explicitly on the views and life experiences of the many ‘ordinary’ Muslims in their European societies of settlement and the role that cultural and religious factors play in shaping their social relationships with the public institutions and majority populations.

Of course, that we are talking of ‘Muslims’ as a single category in the first place, when this covers a highly heterogeneous ‘group’ of people from different Islamic faiths, countries of origin or descent, and generations, is already construction that is indicative of the problematic that we wish to study. In the last two decades Islam has become the key site for the demarcation of boundaries between majority populations and individuals of immigrant origin across Western Europe. Issues around the perceived and real problems of the integration of Muslims and accommodating Islam as a religion have resonated fiercely in the public debates of European democracies. In contrast to the USA, European debates on the so-called benefits and failures of ‘multiculturalism’ refer almost implicitly to accommodating the religious difference of Islam. Seemingly endless political controversies over teachers wearing headscarves, mosque-building, public funding of Islamic schools, and real or perceived incidents of Islamic fundamentalism, resonate in the mass media, reinforcing a strong demarcation along religious differences between Muslims and non-Muslims in the public imagination that can impact on the way that people relate to on another.²

Given that religious and cultural difference is often at the forefront of these controversies, we focus this Special Issue on the socio-cultural integration of Muslims of immigrant descent in Western Europe. ‘Integration’ has become the main way to talk about migrant inclusion in European academic debates, and was introduced by some in opposition to the concept of ‘assimilation’ that was deemed to infer a one-way cultural adaptation of minority to majority. By contrast, the concept of ‘assimilation’ is still prevalent in academic literature in the USA. Without wishing to dwell too long on terminology, we use the term ‘socio-cultural integration’: integration as the main concept used in Europe, but also ‘socio-cultural’ because we are specifically interested in the relationship between cultural/religious distance and social factors in shaping the life chances of Muslims relative to the majority. This is actually close to the position of contemporary ‘assimilationist’ theorists from the USA (see especially, Alba and Foner 2015a, 7; 2015b), who recognise that the process consists of mutual interaction between minority and majority, is not sequential, and that the social distinctions involved may weaken to the point where they hold little relevance for the everyday lives of many from the minority group. Important in our conceptualisation is that the behaviour, attitudes and values, of Muslims and the non-Muslim majority are both analysed, since the outcomes of social-cultural integration are built through the mutual interaction of these ‘groups’ within a specific context.

Concerns about socio-cultural integration come from two related sources. First, there is increasing discussion about whether cultural and religious factors are related (and if so, how) to the disadvantaged position of many migrant groups, but especially Muslims, in the socio-economic domain, for example, in the labour market. For migrants, cultural factors such as language deficiencies, limited social contacts across ethnic and religious boundaries, traditional views on gender roles, and insufficient knowledge of predominant cultural codes (e.g. how to handle a job interview) may make it more difficult for them and their descendants to be socio-economically successful (Farley and Alba 2002). For majorities, their perceived degree of cultural and religious difference between migrants and the receiving society culture may lead to overt and hidden forms of discrimination and bias, which may also make the successful socio-economic participation of migrants and their offspring more difficult. Second, cultural and religious integration has received an increased emphasis in its own right, regardless of its relationship to socio-economic integration. Again, there are two sides to this problematic. Especially since 9/11 onwards, there have been intensified debates about the need for migrants and their descendants who are Muslims to identify with their countries of residence and to accept their core values and norms, especially in the domains of democracy, separation of church and state, and gender equality. The other side of the coin is that peaceful coexistence and social interaction between Muslims and the majority may be hampered by a lack of acceptance for cultural and religious difference among parts of the receiving society populations, which may range from implicit avoidance of Muslims to outright hostility.

Our interest in socio-cultural integration requires that we focus on attitudes, norms, and values, particularly those relating to: democratic norms, gender relations and family values; ethnic, religious, and identification with the society of settlement; and attitudes towards relations across ethnic and religious boundaries. This means looking at questions around the frequency and quality of interethnic and interreligious relationships with neighbours, friends, and colleagues, and memberships in social and political organisations of one’s own ethnic and religious group as well as of those of the majority and mainstream society. These concerns shaped the contents of the survey that is the primary data source for this collection. We also address both types of questions with regard to members of the non-Muslim majority, because, obviously, socio-cultural distance and interactions are determined by the perceptions, attitudes, and practices that occur at both ends of the relationship.

In this Special Issue we use data collected in the EurIslam³ project to address questions about socio-cultural integration of Muslims of migrant origin and their descendants. The project covered the six Western European countries that have been estimated to be the numerically largest destination countries for people originating from predominantly Muslim countries up until the 1980s, in descending order of magnitude: France, Germany, Britain, The Netherlands, Belgium, and Switzerland (Buijs and Rath 2002). In addition, these countries are interesting because they have addressed postwar immigration flows and the presence of migrants and minorities in distinct ways. These differences have been much discussed and well covered in the large literature on citizenship and national variations in approaches and discourses for integration and cultural diversity (See for example, Brubaker 1992; Favell 1998; Koopmans and Statham 2000; Koopmans et al. 2005; Howard 2009; Janoski 2010). Without wishing to reify these differences into ‘national models’ or ‘integration regimes’, it is still possible to briefly outline the main characteristics of the cross-national variations of the countries relative to one another, that are broadly accepted in the literature, because the basic variations in these national ‘blueprints’ for cultural and religious pluralism matter for this inquiry.

Britain and the Netherlands have both long been (and to some extent still are) characterised by a multicultural approach to migrant integration, which is relatively open to group demands and to some extent actively promotes the organisation and institutionalisation of migrant communities along ethnic and racial lines. Compared to the Netherlands (Entzinger 2003), the emphasis in the British approach (Modood et al. 1997) has traditionally been more on the equality of socio-economic opportunities and less on cultural issues. These different approaches combine with different traditions of church–state relations in both countries. The Anglican Church and the Church of Scotland enjoy certain exclusive privileges as state churches, whereas the Dutch model of religious pluralism grants funding to a wider base of religious institutions (Lijphart 1984). Germany and Switzerland are examples of countries that have long adhered to more strongly ethnic conceptions of the nation, which means that it has traditionally been more difficult for migrant individuals to obtain equal citizenship rights and gain official recognition and support for their cultural distinctiveness. In both countries, migrants have long been seen primarily as labour hands, and integration efforts therefore focused especially on the labour market (Joppke 1996; Thränhardt 2000; D’Amato 2005). Apart from these similarities, the interaction between the state and religious institutions has been different in Germany and Switzerland. In Switzerland, this interaction leans more towards a French-style form of laïcité, which propagates a distinct separation of church and state. In contrast, the German state actively recognises and supports Christian and Jewish denominations, but does not extent the same privileges to other faith denominations, including Islam. France is known for its adherence to a republican view on migrant integration, which entails easy access to equal citizenship rights for migrants as individuals, but avoidance by the state of official recognition or facilitation of group differences. Integration is viewed primarily as a problem of socio-economic integration, and promoting socio-economic equality is seen as the best way to integrate migrants culturally. As indicated, the strict separation of church and state under the French notion of laïcité dictates that there is religious neutrality in the public domain (Kastoryano 2006; Laurence 2012). Belgium, finally, combines two different approaches, which draw on the French and the Dutch models described above. In the northern region of Flanders a more multicultural and pillarised approach, oriented towards the Dutch model can be observed, while in the southern region of Wallonia, an approach more similar to the French model can be found (Martiniello 2003; Jacobs 2004). It should be noted that the trends described above are indicative of the basic and dominant traditions and approaches in each of our countries. They are not set in stone, and clearly important changes can occur over time (Brubaker 2003, 2015; Joppke and Morawska 2003; Koopmans et al. 2005). One example is Germany, which overhauled its nationality legislation in 2000 and introduced a form of jus soli for immigrant children born in Germany. Another is the emphasis on linguistic and cultural assimilation in the introduction of citizenship tests in countries such as the Netherlands and Britain, which traditionally had been comparatively more open towards cultural differences. Nevertheless, there are persistent differences between our countries under study in the way they deal with migrants of specific cultural, ethnic, or religious groups, on both the level of the individual and the collective.

Before we introduce the specific papers in this Special Issue, we first discuss the general research question and theoretical approach in which they are embedded within the EurIslam project.

Research question and theoretical approach

The overall question that inspired the design of our EurIslam research programme comes from our recognition of the need to link research on the institutional side of incorporation to analyses of the opinions and social relationships through which Muslims and non-Muslims interact with one another. By working within a comparative framework, we were keen to unpack whether specific institutional approaches could be related to specific outcomes of socio-cultural interaction. Our basic inquiry can be summarised in the following, admittedly somewhat longwinded, formulation:

How have different traditions of national identity, citizenship, and church-state relations affected European countries’ incorporation of Islam? And what are the consequences of these approaches for patterns of socio-cultural distance and interaction between Muslim migrants of immigrant origin and their descendants, and majorities from the receiving society?

Formulated in this way the focus lies on the interaction between variables at the macro or the national-level, such as citizenship and cultural/religious policies, and variables at the micro or the individual level, including feelings of acceptance and ideas of socio-cultural distance. In this view, the socio-cultural distance and interactions between Muslims and the majority populations from a society can be seen as the main dependent variable that is partly ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Series Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Citation Information
• Notes on Contributors
• 1 Muslims in their European societies of settlement: a comparative agenda for empirical research on socio-cultural integration across countries and groups
• 2 Does assimilation work? Sociocultural determinants of labour market participation of European Muslims
• 3 How ordinary people view Muslim group rights in Britain, the Netherlands, France and Germany: significant ‘gaps’ between majorities and Muslims?
• 4 How crosscutting weak ties are established—the case of Muslims in Europe
• 5 Like will to like? Partner choice among Muslim migrants and natives in Western Europe
• 6 Ascription and identity. Differences between first- and second-generation Moroccans in the way ascription influences religious, national and ethnic group identification
• 7 Religious minorities and secularism: an alternative view of the impact of religion on the political values of Muslims in Europe
• 8 Electoral participation of Muslims in Europe: assessing the impact of institutional and discursive opportunities
• 9 Muslims’ religiosity and views on religion in six Western European countries: does national context matter?
• Index