Muslim Minorities and Social Cohesion

Cultural Fragmentation in the West

Abe Ata

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781000096477
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Islamic Theology

This book examines various attempts in the 'West' to manage cultural, linguistic, and religious diversity – focusing on Muslim minorities in predominantly non-Muslim societies.

An international panel of contributors chart evolving national identities and social values, assessing the way that both contemporary 'Western' societies and contemporary Muslim minorities view themselves and respond to the challenges of diversity. Drawing on themes and priority subjects from Islamic Culture within Euro-Asian, Australian, and American international research, they address multiple critical issues and discuss their implications for existing and future policy and practice in this area. These include subjects such as gender, the media, citizenship, and multiculturalism.

The insight provided by this wide-ranging book will be of great use to scholars of Religious Studies, Interreligious Dialogue and Islamic Studies, as well as Politics, Culture, and Migration.

Part I

Social harmony, nationalism, and integration

Introductory remarks

Abe W. Ata

The essays in this section provide a conceptual framework and relevant views on the rise of the clash of civilisations, better phrased as a clash of cultural perspectives. They also provide an overview of the subject of Anglosphere and an extended discussion of the theoretical literature on media influence. Debates on Australian values are addressed in detail, and the pertinent links with evolving notions of citizenship are established as a case in point.

Melleuish (Chapter 1) anchors his analysis to the emergence of the states, commonwealths and the ‘clash of civilisations’. He argues that the idea of the ‘clash of civilisations’ assumes that civilisations are necessarily connected with the political entities within which they are placed and therefore not only have a political dimension but can also be utilised for purposes of state power. Commonwealths have long existed in history, but the problem is that they have problems surviving without the support of state structures which possess the violent capabilities to protect them. Likewise, the modern nation-state was founded on the desire to integrate political and cultural power. The modern Western state sought to homogenise its citizens in a single cultural entity, but this put it at odds with the various commonwealths which cross the border of the state, such as the community of learning. Then, as a consequence of immigration, it invented the idea of multiculturalism. The modern liberal imagination, following Kant, dreams of humanity living in one vast commonwealth, but what we have really is a messy reality in which the alliance of political power and culture has opened up the possibility not of ‘perpetual peace’, but perpetual violence. Jupp (Chapter 2) launches into the evolution of the idea of national citizenship and integration of diversity. He notes that many societies today experience multicultural forces within them which may, or may not, contribute to their effective stability. The most frequently studied elements are differing religions, races, languages and customs. He notes that some countries like Australia, the UK and the United States have all at various times consciously introduced or excluded newcomers through legal and administrative measures. They have also developed public policies for ‘assimilating’ or ‘integrating’ newcomers from previously ‘alien’ backgrounds. Thus societies become constructed from a variety of peoples, languages and beliefs which are all expected to conform to already established traditions. Chisari (Chapter 3) takes a focused approach to national values, declaring that they are not fixed but are fluid and changing. She traces the return of Australian values in the Australian citizenship test during recent years – a set of core civic principles that are believed to be unique to Australian identity. The test was designed to teach prospective citizens about the Australian way of life and focused on candidates learning about Australia’s culture and history, its political system and the rights and responsibilities of Australian citizenship. It was believed that gaining these new orders of knowledge would equip migrants with the ability to integrate and, as a result, ensure that social cohesion is maintained in Australian society. In this way, Australian governments continue to promote Australian values in order to demonstrate their commitment to securing national security, as well as to reassure the mainstream population that the Australian way of life will prevail in these uncertain times. In Chapter 4 Miles-Novello and Anderson argue how exposure to Muslims in media and support for public policies is harming Muslims in the United States. In recent years, most news and entertainment media portrayals of Muslims in U.S. media have been negative, focusing primarily on Muslims as terrorists or as citizens of anti-U.S. countries with mostly Muslim populations. This chapter explores the effects that such portrayals have on anti-Muslim thoughts, feelings and behaviours and on the underlying psychological processes. Such portrayals increase anti-Muslim hostility, beliefs, stereotypes and actions, including support for public policies that involve bombing primarily Muslim countries and that involve curtailing the common civil rights of Muslim American citizens. Conversely, positive news stories and personal contact with Muslims lead to reductions in anti-Muslim beliefs, feelings and harmful action tendencies.

1 Of states, commonwealths and the ‘clash of civilisations’

Greg Melleuish

The modern Western state sought to homogenise its citizens in a single cultural entity, but this put it at odds with the various commonwealths which cross the border of the state, such as the community of learning. Then, as a consequence of immigration, it invented the idea of multiculturalism. The modern liberal imagination, following Kant, dreams of humanity living in one vast commonwealth, but what we have really is a messy reality in which the alliance of political power and culture has opened up the possibility not of ‘perpetual peace’ but perpetual violence.

The idea of a ‘clash of civilisations’ has been a common trope since it was first enunciated by Samuel Huntington (1997). It postulates that the key reason for conflict between countries are civilisational differences, and that the foundation of those differences is religion. Peoples clash because of ideas, values, practices and customs. Now, there can be no doubt that people can, and do, murder and oppress other people in the name of ideas, but that they should do so is really something of a puzzle. In less complex societies it was generally the case that conflict, often very bloody and violent and murderous, was generated by such things as the stealing of women and cattle (Keeley 1996). The origins of human warfare lie much more in the competition for resources rather than in the competition of ideas.

This raises the very real issue of how and why ideas and beliefs came to play such a role in human conflict. If one reads accounts of wars in the ancient world, the clash of ideas seems far less important than other matters. Sometimes the Greek-Persian wars are portrayed as a clash of civilisations, but that depiction owes more to modern America than to the ancient world and to a view that the Greeks belonged to the ‘West’ and the Persians to the ‘East’.

One of the few occasions in which those wars were understood in terms of ideas is in Thucydides’s (1996) account of the Peloponnesian War in which the war is described in terms of the conflict of the adherents of democracy led by Athens and those of oligarchy led by Sparta. For the Spartans democracy is dangerous because it unleashes innovation, thereby threatening traditional Hellenic values.

It is difficult to see the rise of the Roman Empire as a clash of civilisations, even in the case of the Carthaginian Wars, especially as Rome came to conquer Greece, which the Romans appreciated possessed a civilisation superior to their own and attempted to appropriate what they saw as its superior qualities. The one case in the Roman world which might be construed as a ‘clash of civilisations’ based on ideas and values occurred in Judea, where the Jewish uprisings can be understood in terms of cultural difference (Goodman 2017).

The Romans most certainly persecuted the early Christians, primarily because they believed them to be subversive of the Roman order, failing, as they did, to offer sacrifices to the emperor. Real persecution does not appear to have become widespread and systematic until the mid-third century when the empire was in the throes of crisis and Christianity was growing accordingly (Moss 2013). It would be difficult to see the relationship between the traditional Romans and the Christians as a ‘clash of civilisations’, despite some anti-Roman rhetoric on the Christian side.

Rather, it was the development of heresy, and the violent means adopted to extirpate it, which seem to prefigure later ‘clashes of civilisation’. This occurred because of the alliance which grew up between religion and state power in the wake of Constantine’s conversion to Christianity. Christianity, like Buddhism, was not initially linked to any form of political organisation. It can be argued, however, that both required the protection of an empire if they were to flourish. Without that protection they both could easily have withered and eventually died. This is illustrated best by the ultimate fate of both the Christian Church of the East, which flourished for almost a millennium only to suffer despoliation when the Mongol Empire was destroyed (Jenkins 2008), and Manichaeism, which failed to find a state to protect it. Religions which are a matter of practice, culture and intellect are essentially forms of what are best described as commonwealths (Melleuish 2009). The mode of power which characterises commonwealths is ideological or intellectual power (Mann 1987: 46–48) which may seek to overpower one’s opponents but which cannot do so without the assistance of some sort of political and military entity. For this reason, commonwealths tend to be peaceful in nature and more interested in the spread of ideas than in warfare and violence.

Political entities, on the other hand, have been defined in terms of violence; as Max Weber (1970: 77–78) famously wrote, a state has a monopoly on coercion and violence, at least in the modern world. This, in part, is because of the link between politics and military power. Political leaders have always been either military leaders or commanded those in charge of the military. Political entities, or polities, simply have not been able to survive without the means of violence to protect them. The Western Roman Empire collapsed once it had lost the province of Africa and the means to pay its armies. China was unified by a leader who put into practice a violent militaristic philosophy, legalism, although this philosophy was largely dumped by the next dynasty, the Han (Fukuyama 2011: 110–127). Nevertheless, even though Chinese political culture adopted Confucianism and military values were not highly esteemed, this did not change the reality that it was military power which preserved China from the pastoral peoples to the west who occasionally overran the empire.

If commonwealths can be understood as networks, this does not mean that these networks are necessarily pacific. Human beings have a capacity to develop and elaborate any set of beliefs and ideas in a variety of directions, leading to disagreements and to conflict between people holding different views. This process of elaboration, followed by disagreement, conflict and ultimately condemnation of opponents, would seem to be a natural human propensity. Human beings are perhaps puzzled by the reality that the ideas which they hold can be developed in a variety of ways, especially as most human groups would prefer that a consensus exists amongst its members. Hence, there is a tendency for individuals holding similar views to form into schools. Nonetheless, there are considerable advantages to human beings as a group in that the members of that group do not agree and do not always form a consensus. Given the constantly changing nature of the environment faced by human groups, they need to be able to adapt and hence need to be able to create more than a single set of ideas.

The real problem for any society is to manage those disagreements so that they do not lead to significant social conflict. A commonwealth is effectively what Niall Ferguson (2018) has recently described as a network, or more correctly, a set of networks which can be mapped in terms of overlapping Venn diagrams. They are generally more egalitarian than a political or military structure, which more typically organise themselves into hierarchies able to be mobilised for purposes of action. A network has no real purpose beyond allowing for the interaction of its members. It should be noted, however, that commonwealths can become hierarchies especially in their interaction with polities, as occurred to the Christian Church.

One way in which a polity can deal with a variety of commonwealths under its jurisdiction is simply to let all the flowers bloom, such as occurs most readily in a culture which is polytheistic in nature such as ancient Rome or in India. In such circumstances it is possible to create unity through allegiance to a central unifying political figure who takes on a divine status. In a similar vein, the Mughal emperor Akbar created his own religion to sit on top of the various religions of his subjects (Maroney 2006: 150–164). In the Islamic world other religions were tolerated so long as they recognised their inferior status. It is worth noting that small religious groups such as the Mandeans and Yazidis survived in the Islamic world, whereas, with the exception of Jews, this did not happen in Europe (Russell 2014). In Europe, Jews were expelled from many countries during the Middle Ages, including England, of course, the Spanish expelled both Jews and Moriscos from Spain once unification under a Christian monarchy had occurred (Rae 2002: 55–82). Christian Europe traditionally had problems tolerating minorities; for example, even in Venice, which traded with the Islamic world, there was no mosque (Goffman 2007: 135). It is often not fully appreciated that until fifty years ago there was no significant Muslim population living in Western Europe.

It is important to recognise that disagreements within civilisations have led to as much, if not more, conflict than conflicts between civilisations. Until relatively recently it was unlikely that large numbers of individuals from different civilisations would come into contact with each other, whereas they would most likely come into contact on a regular basis with those who were different within their own civilisation.

The most amazing thing about such disagreements is that it can lead to people being killed simply on the basis of their beliefs. It is interesting that all three Abrahamic religions, Christianity, Islam and Judaism, developed the idea that people who had incorrect beliefs and practices within their own religion could be executed as heretics (Ames 2015). All these religions had significant divisions at some stage during their existence, including Judaism, which had the Karaites who rejected rabbinical Judaism. It has generally been the case that religions are more intolerant of heretics than of people from other religions.

How then does heresy develop? In the case of Christianity, the development of heresy is linked to the emergence of a particular church claiming orthodoxy in relation to its rivals. Heresy emerges because of statements of doctrine which define that orthodoxy in the later Roman Empire, from Nicea to Chalcedon. Heresy requires a highly developed intellectual state of affairs in which religious experts can define orthodoxy and hence, lack of orthodoxy.

In this regard, it is worth noting that in less developed Western Europe there appears to have been little in the way of heresy before the eleventh century, as opposed to the more literate and intellectually developed Byzantine Empire. The emergence of heresy in the eleventh century was connected to the creation of a more sophisticated intellectual environment in the West combined with the emergence of a papacy which was simultaneously more bureaucratic and legalistic (Berman 1983: 85–119). To be a heretic, in the West at least, requires a particular intellectual environment with a high level of sophistication. In part, this was supplied by the recursive method which was imported into Europe from central Asia via the Islamic world (Beckwith 2012). Given the natural human propensity to elaborate ideas and practices, heresy – or the...