Muslim Citizenship in Liberal Democracies

Civic and Political Participation in the West

Mario Peucker

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9783319314020
• eBook ISBN: 9783319314037
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Social Sciences

This book explores Muslims' civic and political participation in Australia and Germany, shedding light on their individual experiences, motives for, and personal implications of their multi-faceted engagement. Based on in-depth interviews with Muslims who have been active within a Muslim community context, mainstream civil society and the political arena, this comparative study reveals the enormous complexities and dynamics of active Muslim citizenship. The author paints a picture of Muslims as 'almost ordinary' citizens, who – despite experiences of stigmatisation and exclusion – often seek to contribute to the advancement of society and the promotion of social justice. Their civic engagement, even within a Muslim community context, builds intra- and cross-community networks, and contrary to widespread contestation of Islam and its place in the West, their faith is anything but a civic obstacle to their active citizenship agenda.

This book will be ofinterest to scholars and students in the fields of Sociology, Politics, Islamic Studies, Sociology of Religion and Political Participation.

© The Author(s) 2016

Mario PeuckerMuslim Citizenship in Liberal DemocraciesPalgrave Politics of Identity and Citizenship Series10.1007/978-3-319-31403-7_1

Begin Abstract

1. Introduction

Mario Peucker¹

(1)

Centre for Cultural Diversity and Wellbeing, Victoria University, Melbourne, Australia

We are part of the community. We are not going to sit on the periphery.

We are not non-Australians! We are just as Australian as everyone else!

We have a faith that will enhance our citizenship, our participation as Australians.

(Maha Abdo, Muslim community activist from Sydney)

‘Democracy depends on all of us: the price of liberty is not just eternal vigilance, but eternal activity’, said Abraham Lincoln. This is how British political theorist Sir Bernard Crick (2008: 18) underscored the vital importance of citizens’ active participation in liberal democratic societies.

End Abstract

¹

While this view is widely shared by scholars and policymakers in the West, there is also a broad consensus about the general decline of citizens’ interest in politics and the ‘disinclination on the part of growing sectors of the citizenry to become involved in political and civic life’ (Kivisto and Faist 2007: 136). A seemingly increasing proportion of the population in Western societies are neither vigilant nor active in the political sphere, and their willingness to commit and contribute to their community and become actively engaged in the public space has been dwindling. The ‘bowling alone’ diagnosis of Robert Putnam (2000) illustratively captures this alleged civic passivity, which, as he claims, weakens collective solidarity and mutual trust, and aggravates processes of social isolation and fragmentation.

This book on active citizenship of Muslims in Australia and Germany is situated within this broad thematic context. It takes as its starting point the tenet that citizens’ engagement in civil society and political life plays a key role in building and sustaining a vibrant, cohesive society (Forrest and Kearns 2001) and in maintaining the legitimacy of the democratic system (Hoskins and Mascherini 2009). If it is true, however, that the democratic project ‘depends on all of us’, as Sir Bernard Crick argues, why does this study then chose to explore active citizenship of one particular group—Muslims? Do Muslims in Western countries differ from others in the way they participate? Is there a certain Muslim quality to their citizenship, which requires specific analytical attention?

Within the scholarly context of citizenship—by definition, an egalitarian space—singling out one group of citizens based on their faith needs legitimate reasons. This is particularly true when this group has a collective history of being stigmatised as the ‘Other’, whose equal citizenship and loyalty to society have been called into doubt in many Western societies, including Australia and Germany, the two countries under investigation in this study. Ironically, the main reason why this research explores Muslims’ civic and political participation is attributed to precisely these experiences of marginalisation: Why would someone who consistently faces external questioning of their loyalty and belonging invest time and effort to contribute to the very society that treats them as strangers, second-class citizens or even as a potential threat to society?

Academic interest in how civically and politically active Muslims position themselves against this exclusionary discourse gives legitimacy to the research focus on Muslims as a particular group of citizens. This climate of scrutiny and marginalisation may also contribute to the emergence of Muslim-specific manifestations of active citizenship, which have thus far been under-researched. Does this discourse, for example, provide Muslims with a cause for collective mobilisation to make claims of equal recognition and to express dissent with the current political rhetoric and decisions (O’Loughlin and Gillespie 2012; Maira 2009)? Or, alternatively, does it paralyse some forms of civic and political commitment to a seemingly hostile or sceptical societal environment, and reinforce active Muslims’ proneness to community-internal engagement?

A second key factor that may affect the specific nature of Muslims’ active citizenship is the role their religious beliefs possibly play for their civic performance. This has been an underexplored theme of active citizenships of Muslims. A considerable proportion of the mainstream population in Australia and Germany consider Islam to be incompatible with liberal democratic value systems (Peucker and Akbarzadeh 2012: 92–96). This view resonates oddly with the claims of a very small minority of (typically Salafi) Muslims at the community fringes that argue along similar lines of incompatibility, prohibiting any Muslim participation in a Western non-Muslim society and polity (March 2007: 408). If such views were accurate, Islam would be a major barrier to active citizenship in the West. This minority position, however, is not supported by the realities of Muslims’ every-day lives in Germany and Australia—and it is also rejected by dominant interpretations of Islamic jurisprudence that strongly argue against the alleged contradiction between Islamic and liberal democratic principles (Ramadan 1999; March 2009).

While this research study explores potential particularities of Muslims’ active citizenship, such as the possible impact of the exclusionary climate and their Islamic faith, it fundamentally views Muslims as ‘ordinary’ citizens of Islamic faith. Muslims’ active citizenship is regarded as being performed not at the margins, but as an inherent component of an ethnically, religiously, linguistically and (in the broadest sense) culturally diverse polity and civil society. Framed by this fundamental tenet, this research deploys a qualitative methodology to examine manifold issues revolving around civic and political participation experiences of Muslims in Australia and Germany. This includes the goals and driving forces behind their activism, their views on empowering factors or discouraging barriers and personal implications of their active involvement. The explorative, interview-based methodology is complemented with a cross-national comparison between interviewed Muslims in Australia and Germany. These two countries were selected as case studies based on a combination of, on the one hand, cross-national similarities in terms of Muslims’ socioeconomic situation and experiences of exclusion and, on the other hand, differences regarding the policy framework and civic recognition of Muslim communities as civil society stakeholders. Such a comparative approach has been very effective in facilitating a deeper level of analysis of the qualitative interview data.

This research is not only innovative in addressing major gaps in social and political science—it is also highly relevant and timely in its endeavour to shed light on Muslims’ civic and political contributions to liberal democratic societies. This Muslims as citizens prism provides a much needed alternative to the prevalent political and academic discourse on Muslims as either victims of Islamophobia, as the deviant or dangerous Other (Poynting et al. 2004) or as the subject of governance strategies of domestication and securitisation (Humphrey 2009). These dominant lines of discourse have largely ignored that Muslims in Western countries like Australia and Germany are also—at least in many or most ways—ordinary members of these secular democratic societies. Current scholarship has been remarkably silent on this egalitarian membership perspective on Muslims in the West. This research seeks to address this underexplored area, generating evidence-based insights into how Muslims enact their citizenship. This is not solely an academic exercise, but it is also of vital importance for policymakers to have a more accurate and realistic understanding of how and why Muslims participate in civil society and the polity, contributing to the strengthening of social cohesion in Australia’s and Germany’s pluralistic societies and the legitimacy of their democratic political system.

Chapter 2 outlines the key concept of this study—citizenship—and elaborates more precisely what is meant by active citizenship, combining republican, communitarian and more pluralistic perspectives. This conceptual chapter situates the theme of the book in the contemporary discourse around citizenship as a social process, emphasising the performative nature of citizenship, enacted through various forms of civic and political participation. It also presents a theoretical framework outlining key factors, identified in previous theoretical and empirical research, that encourage or discourage civic and political participation of citizens in general and of ethno-religious minorities in particular. Chapter 3 elaborates on the methodology, based on in-depth biographical interviews with a sample of 30 systematically selected active and self-declared Muslims in Australia and Germany, analysed through a cross-national comparative lens. The realised interview sample is briefly described as well as the limitations of the research design.

The next two chapters contextualise the research. Chapter 4 presents a succinct overview on the demographic and socioeconomic situation of Muslims in Australia and Germany. It also provides insights into Muslims’ legal citizenship, the contestation of their equal citizenship and what is known about their civic and political participation. Chapter 5 discusses key dimensions of Muslim community structures in both countries and the national policy frameworks that may influence Muslims’ citizenship. Here particular attention is paid to those factors that have been identified by previous research and theoretical accounts as being potentially influential for the emergence of civic and political engagement.

Chapters 6, 7, 8 and 9 present the empirical findings from the research study on Muslims’ civic and political participation in Australia and Germany. These results are discussed from a comparative perspective and in reference to existing scholarship in the pertinent areas. Chapter 6 explores the various ways in which the interviewed Muslims have enacted their citizenship over the course of their often longstanding civic biographies, and examines the shifts and transition processes within these individual citizenship careers. Muslims’ goals, motives and fundamental driving forces behind their active citizenship are explored in Chap. 7. Chapter 8 focuses on Muslims’ views on empowering or discouraging factors that have affected their own willingness to participate and those that may—in their personal views—h...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Frontmatter
• 1. Introduction
• 2. What Is Active Citizenship?
• 3. Methodology: Exploring Muslims’ Civic and Political Participation
• 4. Muslims in Australia and Germany: Demographics, Resources, Citizenship
• 5. The Muslim Community and Political Context in Australia and Germany
• 6. Types and Trajectories of Muslims’ Activism
• 7. Goals, Motives and Driving Forces
• 8. Empowering and Discouraging Factors
• 9. Personal Implications of Civic Activism
• 10. Conclusion
• Backmatter