Welfare Activities by New Religious Actors

Islamic Organisations in Italy and Switzerland

Elisa Banfi

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9783319620954
• eBook ISBN: 9783319620961
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: European Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This book offers a comparative examination of Islamic welfare activities across urban areasin both Switzerland and Italy, in order to address general issues relating to the welfareengagement of Islamic organisations in Europe.

Welfare Activities by New Religious Actors describes how Islamic organisations have beencoordinated and structured in Geneva, Milan, Rome, and Zurich; four cities not yet analysed inthe literature on Islamic welfare. It also explores the institutional opportunities and constraintsthat are able to influence forms of social religious activities at the local and internationallevel, by bringing together two research fields that seldom speak to each other: social networkanalysis and political opportunity theory.

This book will appeal to scholars of Sociology, Anthropology and Religious Studies dealingwith the social and political inclusion of Muslims in Europe and the social activities of Islamicorganisations in Western countries.

© The Author(s) 2018

Elisa BanfiWelfare Activities by New Religious Actors Palgrave Politics of Identity and Citizenship Serieshttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-62096-1_1

Begin Abstract

1. Introduction

Elisa Banfi¹

(1)

Genève, Switzerland

End Abstract

1.1 Islamophobia, Islamophilia andAnti-Islamophobic Discourses

More than 300 years have passed since the battle of Vienna, during which the Ottoman Empire nearly conquered the Hapsburg capital. However, the possibility of an alledged Islamic invasion still seems to haunt the European nations, whereas present-day European societies seem to be unconsciously rearming to counteract an attack from within their borders. The renewed fear of an Islamic offensive against European countries is spreading and growing in intensity at both popular and institutional levels. This fear has taken different forms in recent decades: the fear of a demographic threat (Fargues 2000), an economic offensive after the oil shock (Deltombe 2005), the Islamisation of Europe, and terrorism (Geisser 2003). Presently, this fear of Islam increasingly expresses the economic/identitarian crisis of the middle class and poorest populations in Western countries. Many scholars have investigated the historical roots of Islamophobia. A first group of studies has illustrated the articulation between the fear of Muslim and their racialisation. Before the arrival of Europeans in the Americas, European states had already begun the racialisation of religious subjects, such as Muslims and Jews, by laying the groundwork for Islamophobic categorisations (Meer 2013). Islamophobia has been nurtured by the racialisation of religion during the Reconquista period and the fight against Moors in Spain (Rana 2007). A second group of studies has analysed the relation between Islamophobia and Orientalism (Meer 2014; Marwan 2010). In fact, the construction of postcolonial Islamophobia is strongly linked to the alleged incompatibility of European and Islamic values founded on an Orientalist analysis of Muslim societies. This alleged incompatibility is rooted, as Armando Salvatore suggests (2013, 8), in a ‘reluctance to attribute a transformative potential to non-Western social formations, with a corresponding devaluation of their religious and more broadly cultural traditions’. A third group of scholars has analysed the relation of Islamophobia with the accumulation of capital in the modern world system (Grosfoguel and Mielants 2006). They have defined Islamophobia as a ‘Western religious, cultural, Orientalist and epistemic racism’, a constitutive element (Tamdgidi 2012) and an ‘organizing principle’ (Bazian 2007) of the ‘modern/colonial capitalist/patriarchal world-system’ (Grosfoguel and Mielants 2006).

Beyond the academic debates and theoretical nuances, currently, anyone can verify in his or her daily life that this fear has become a crucial watershed for European debates on democracy and public policies. Since the end of the last century, a fear of Muslims has become a point on the agenda of several extreme-right political parties in Europe and has resulted in susceptibility on the part of all political actors to Islamophobic discourses. European institutions, scholars, and civil-society actors increasingly employ the concepts of Islamophobia, Islamophilia, and anti-Islamophobia in debates concerning the future of European societies. For instance, the Council of Europe’s European Commission against Racism and Intolerance (ECRI) has repeatedly outlined (ECRI 2000, 2002, 2004) how, as a result of the fight against terrorism, Muslim communities are subject to prejudice, ‘which manifests itself in different guises, in particular through negative general attitudes but also to varying degrees, through discriminatory acts and through violence and harassment’ (ECRI 2000, 3). Additionally, the European monitoring Centre on Racism and Xenophobia stated in 2001 that ‘… in all countries a latent Islamophobia has used the present circumstances to come to light, finding its expression in the mentioned acts of physical and verbal abuse. These episodes and other signs (i.e., the results of opinion polls in the Netherlands) seem to indicate that in some countries the gap between the main population and the minorities is still large’ (EUMC 2001, 2). In 2005, the European Council published the report Islamophobia and Its Consequences on Young People, in which it affirms that Islamophobia is ‘a threat to social cohesion’ (Ramberg 2004, 6).

In general, institutional reports agree that Islamophobia produces a predisposition to—in an ahistorical way—conceptualise any Muslim actor operating within European borders in the same way as within an Orientalist paradigm.¹ The institutional current use of the concept of Islamophobia is very indebted to its first definition proposed in the report Islamophobia: A Challenge for Us All published by the Runnymede Trust organisation.² In the report, eight features were attributed to closed views of Islam and eight to open views of Islam as Table 1.1 displays.³

Table 1.1

Runnymede Trust definition of closed and open views of Islam

Closed (insular) views of Islam

Open views of Islam

1. Islam seen as a monolithic bloc, static and unresponsive to new realities. 2. Islam seen as separate and other—(a) not having values in common with other cultures, (b) not affected by them and (c) not influencing them. 3. Islam seen as inferior to the West—barbaric, irrational, primitive and sexist. 4. Islam seen as violent, aggressive, threatening, supportive of terrorism and engaged in ‘a clash’ of civilizations. 5. Islam seen as a political ideology used for a political or military advantage. 6. Criticisms made of ‘the West’ by Islam are rejected out of hand. 7. Hostility towards Islam used to justify discriminatory practises towards Muslims and exclusion of Muslims from mainstream society. 8. Anti-Muslim hostility accepted as natural and ‘normal’.

1. Islam seen as diverse and progressive, with internal differences, debates and development. 2. Islam seen as interdependent with other faiths and cultures—(a) having certain shared values and aims (b) affected by them and (c) enriching them. 3. Islam seen as distinctively different but not deficient and as equally worthy of respect. 4. Islam seen as an actual or potential partner in joint cooperative enterprises and in the solution of shared problems. 5. Islam seen as a genuine religious faith, practised sincerely by its adherents. 6. Criticisms of ‘the West’ and other cultures are considered and debated. 7. Debates and disagreements with Islam do not diminish efforts to combat discrimination and exclusion. 8. Critical views of Islam are themselves subjected to critique, lest they be inaccurate and unfair.

Runnymede Trust, Commission on British Muslims and Islamophobia and Conway (1997)

Among these, the second closed view of Islam is the most relevant for the subject of this study, that is, ‘Islam seen as separate and other’. It does not have values in common with other cultures, is not affected by them and does not influence them’ (Runnymede Trust, Commission on British Muslims and Islamophobia, and Conway 1997).

Unfortunately, Muslim European populations often are represented as if they were cut off from the state structure, any historical relationship between secular and religious powers, the national or regional labour market, typical patterns of popular mobilisation or the degree of federalism, and the welfare state system. In doing so, an epistemic Islamophobia has fostered a crystallised conception of the Muslim presence in Europe. Therefore, the ‘Islamophobic approach’ has analytically isolated individual and collective expressions of the Muslim faith from other social actors.

From this perspective, Islamophobia imposes a perspective on Islamic social realities that does not consider interactions and interchanges between Muslims and non-Muslims or in Muslim different actors. The Islamophobic perspective ignores the historical permeability of social actors and denies contextual influences. When such a ‘primordial perspective’⁴ pervades all social actors, including institutions and associations, collective identities are likely to be fragmented into ghettoising identities. In particular, social policies based on such ‘primordial’ conceptions (Crepaz 2008) could fracture European societies by destroying the common sense of collective belonging based on the respect of mutual and plural coexistence.

Needless to say, 9/11 significantly affected the social representations of the Muslim segment of the global population (Telseren 2016; Cousin and Vitale 2012; Modood et al. 2006). The war on terrorism has irreversibly affected the public representations and studies of the Islamic presence in Europe and in the West in general. Since 2001, the segment of the population professing Islam has progressively conceptually been reduced to its religious identity by media, scholars, and political authorities. Other sociodemographic characteristics, such as age, gender, professional skills, and resident status, appear to be subsumed by religious identity in the case of Muslim believers.

Acting against this trend, as Said hoped for,⁵ this thesis focuses on combining various theoretical tools to describe the factors shaping Islamic social activities in Switzerland and Italy . Similar to other religions, Islam concerns both an individual and public sphere. When Muslim believers mobilise themselves collectively in the name of Allah, they overcome individual religious practise to constitute a new social actor. Mosques and Islamic schools are only two of the organisational possibilities. In this study, I analyse mosques, Koranic schools and Islamic associations in four spatiotemporal contexts and investigate the organising process employed by Muslim believers, focusing on the constitutive relationship between Islam and immigration in Europe.

Moreover, this study seeks to explain the influence of institutional context on the Islamic organisational presence in two European countries, with a particular focus on the social activities Islamic collective actors have developed.

Instead of focusing exclusively on the theological reason encouraging Islamic actors to develop their social activities, this study will investigate how institutional structures influence this kind of social agency. Three research questions will lead the empirical analysis of this book:

• How do welfare national and local structures influence the birth of Islamic organisations?
• How might the relationship between state and religious groups shape the organisational strategies of Islamic social organisations engaged in welfare activities?
• How do institutions and civil society interact with the network...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Frontmatter
• 1. Introduction
• 2. Analysing Islamic Welfare Activism in Western European Countries
• 3. Islamic Sociocultural Activism in Zurich
• 4. Islamic Sociocultural Activism in Rome
• 5. Islamic Sociocultural Activism in Geneva
• 6. Islamic Sociocultural Activism in Milan
• 7. Intranational and Cross-national Data Analysis
• 8. Conclusion
• Backmatter