exploring muslim identities in europe & north america

There is a line separating Western and Eastern Europeans when it comes to public attitudes toward Muslims according to the Pew Research Center, a nonpartisan organization that generates data on the issues, attitudes and trends shaping the world .  The questions Pew Center asked related to the public's acceptance of Muslims in familial, and public contexts as well as to the association of religion to national identity.  The continental divide in attitudes and values can be extreme in some cases. For example, in nearly every Central and Eastern European country polled by the  Pew Research Center ,  fewer than half  of adults say they would be willing to accept Muslims into their family; in nearly every Western European country surveyed,  more  than half  say they would accept a Muslim into their family.  In a separate question, Western Europeans also are much more likely than their Central and Eastern European counterparts to say they w...

As Athens is probably the only European capital without a mosque for its 500,000 Muslim residents, discussions about constructing a purpose-built mosque started in the 1990s. A motley crew of "patriots" and "concerned Christians" have been mobilised by political entrepreneurs from across the political spectrum to frustrate the project as it was deemed by them to be unnecessary, undesirable and dangerous. 

Courtesy of Washington Post A cartoon that appeared recently in the Washington Post reminded me of a topic I have often discussed in classes and have written about in my book Islam in Europe , notably the construction of the Muslim woman as "subaltern". The cartoon powerfully points out the aporia of the woman over whose body two men, representing ‘Islamic traditionalism’ and ‘European secularism’ respectively are challenging each other. Gayatri Spivak has pointed out this aporia in her discussion of widow self-immolation in colonial India: "The relationship between the imperialist subject and the subject of imperialism is at least ambiguous. The Hindu widow ascends the pyre of the dead husband and immolates herself upon it. This is widow sacrifice… The abolition of this rite by the British has been generally understood as a case of "White men saving brown women from brown men." White women-from the nineteenth-century British Missionary Registers to M...

Recently, Charlie Hebdo featured a cartoon that purportedly provided commentary on the refugee situation and accusations of sexual misconduct in Germany by controversially depicting Aylan Kurdi—the three-year-old Syrian boy whose tragic drowning captured global attention—as a grown "pig-faced" individual chasing "white" women. The questionable caption asks what Aylan might have grown up to become, implying he would be an assailant in Germany. The illustration, created by Laurent Sourisseau, who is the magazine's current director and a survivor of the terrorist attack at Charlie Hebdo's offices, appears to underscore the claims that refugees, including Syrians, were among the perpetrators of the sexual assaults reported in Cologne, Germany, on New Year's Eve. Despite the claims of Charlie Hebdo that it champions a "healthy critical attitude," the overtly provocative nature of the cartoon borders on sheer sensation-seeking. Indeed, misinterpreta...

This is still a draft text, a repository of some thoughts to which I will return soon ... Last night Channel 4 news reported from La Place de la République where thousands of people stayed up late to protest against the brutal murders of the Charlie Hebdo staff and the policemen who got on the way of the perpetrators. The square was packed, with some people in shock, many angry at what had happened, most determined to send a message of defiance. Banners and posters featuring  #jesuisCharlie , the hashtag devised to express solidarity to the satirical magazine staff were everywhere and, later on, the same hashtag was projected on the statue of the Republic in the centre of the square, superimposed over the crowd that had gathered. Matthieu Ecoiffier, journalist with the French newspaper  Libération , talking to the Channel 4 reporter, was shocked, surprised that Charlie Hebdo could have caused offence. He mentioned the 'innocent' cover of the magazine issue with the title...

American journalist  Liz Smith once said very aptly that gossip is just news in a red satin dress. Although there is indeed an intimate relationship between rumour and news, it is important to note that rumour can often be a form of fiction that dones the cloak of veracity. Over the past couple of weeks a story has been featured in social media and email inboxes about a burqa-clad woman chastising a supermarket cashier for supporting Western bombing of Iraq. The most recent posting that came to my attention reached my facebook timeline from a user based in Israel and situated the alleged incident in a small Canadian town. The story sounded suspicious as, since the eviction of the Iraqi army from Kuwait in the first Iraq war, Canada has not been involved in military operations in Iraq and I therefore did some investigation only to find that the story must have been circulating in the internet since as early as 2003,  during the early days of the second Iraq war. This o...

Today, in The Guardian's ' Comment is Free ' columns, Seumas Milne argues 'denying a link between western wars in the Muslim world and the backlash on our streets only fuels Islamophobia and bloodshed'.  In what will be seen by many as a controversial argument, Milne re-establishes the obvious (or what should have been obvious) link between the war on terror , its 'dehumanization' and transmutation into a war where borders are irrelevant on the one hand and terrorist attacks such as the one that took place in Woolwich last May. To say these attacks are about "foreign policy" prettifies the reality. They are the predicted consequence of an avalanche of violence unleashed by the US, Britain and others in eight direct military interventions in Arab and Muslim countries that have left hundreds of thousands of dead. Only the willfully blind or ignorant can be shocked when there is blowback from that onslaught at home. The surprise should be ...

BY CAS MUDDE December 16 at 2:59 pm The following guest post is by  Cas Mudde ,  assistant professor in the School for Public and International Affairs at the University of Georgia  — reproduced from The Monkey Cage  -Washington Post. As Erik Voeten recently  posted , various European media recently reported on  research  on fundamentalism and out-group hostility by the Dutch sociologist Ruud Koopmans at the German Social Science Research Center (WZB), which found that “Islam fundamentalism is widely spread.” Koopmans and his collaborators interviewed nearly 9,000 people in six West European countries (Austria, Belgium, France, Germany, the Netherlands and Sweden), including 3,373 ‘natives’ and 5,548 ‘immigrants,’ respectively of Moroccan (2,204) and Turkish (3,344) origin. The survey stands out because of its cross-national scope, its solid theoretical and empirical basis, and the high number of ‘immigrant’ respondents. That said,...

Pierre-André Taguieff   is director of research at the French  National Centre for Scientific Research  in CEVIPOF. He is also a member of the  Cercle de l'Oratoire  think tank.Taguieff is the author of a number of books and papers on racism and antisemitism, including  The Force of Prejudice: On Racism and Its Doubles  (2001) and  Rising from the Muck: The New Antisemitism in Europe  (2004).

Being Muslim in France means having to navigate through a complex terrain informed by an aggressive secularism, sponsored by the state, a hostile to Islam public opinion (as the recent successes of Marine Lepen in the opinion polls suggest) and a sectarian Muslim communal life. The following text by Giles Kepel that appeared in Le Monde on 01.11.2013, provides an interesting take on the transformations taking place within French Islam but also reflects aspects of the official discourse on the relationship between Islam and the French state. The translation is my own. On 15 October, for the first time in the history of the Republic, an incumbent Prime Minister visited the Great Mosque of Paris , on the occasion of Eid al-Adha, the great feast of the Islamic calendar. In a brief statement, Jean-Marc Ayrault spoke to millions of our fellow believers in what he called "a great religion of France" to extend his wishes. He reminded them of "the ...

The debate about the face veil is not a novel one. Muslim notions of modesty, have often been subverted and colonized by patriarchal practices seeking to restrict women's autonomy. As such, the veil issue has mobilized social forces inspired by liberalism and Western feminism and generated valuable criticisms of patriarchy in Muslim communities. On the other hand, Muslim women in Europe (but also in parts of the Middle East, North Africa and Asia where secularist forces have been able to inform or determine state policy) who choose or are forced to cover their bodies and faces are often subjected to state regulation and disciplining. Focusing on Europe, it is undeniable that the 'out of place' look of veiled women in public spaces all over the continent has provided fertile ground for the transformation of the veil issue into a potent mobilizing symbol for xenophobic, right-wing forces only too happy to jump into the bandwagon of the secular, liberal and feminist oppositio...

Islam in Europe: Public Spaces and Civic Networks Spyros A. Sofos and Roza Tsagarousianou Published by Palgrave Macmillan (October 2013) ISBN 9781137357779 Islam in Europe delves into the daily routines of European Muslim communities in order to provide a better understanding of what it means to be a European Muslim today. Instead of positing particular definitions of being Muslim, this volume invites and encourages a diverse body of 735 informants from Belgium, France, Germany, the Netherlands and the UK to reflect on who they are and on the meaning and place Islam has in such considerations. Drawing upon extensive fieldwork and suggesting novel ways of seeing the phenomenon of European Islam and the continent's Muslim communities, Islam in Europe examines how through their practices, discourses, face to face and mediated interaction, European Muslims construct notions or identity, agency, solidarity and belonging, or how they negotiate and redefine religion, tradition, authori...

This video entitled  50+ EDL Vs 30+ Muslim Youths In Birmingham - EDL Run Out Of Brum  that has been seen 521,000 times is one of many that have appeared on YouTube over the past couple of years and document - some times even glorify - Muslim assertiveness in response to the activities of English Defense League . Such narratives of resistance are becoming more commonplace day by day and constitute part of an increasing in volume Muslim 'mythology of resistance' replete with heroes, memorable events and a geography of protest.  As we are arguing in our forthcoming book  Islam in Europe , this type of action constitutes one of the ways in which a European Muslim identity is forged, sometimes articulated to, often suppressing diverse ethnic and local identifications and experiences.  [The ways in which Muslims in Europe are represented by the mainstream or the extreme right provide] a lens through which they themselves see (and shape) their relationship wi...