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115 chapter eig ht Successes and Failures of Muslim Integration in France and Germany Christian Joppke If we compare immigrant integration in Europe and the United States, we immediately hit a paradox. In Europe, religion and how to deal with Muslim immigrants are indisputably the major topics. By contrast, in the United States the main problem seems to be language and how to deal with Hispanic immigrants (Zolberg and Woon 1999; Huntington 2004). This is despite the fact that it is the United States that has waged major wars against groups and regimes that are Islamic in claim or origins. The country that lamentably has become, together with Israel, the most hated country in the Islamic world (“the Great Satan”) is not known to have any particular problem with integrating Muslim immigrants—no problems here with mosquebuilding , dietary restrictions in public kitchens, exemptions from certain parts of the public school curriculum, or dress codes. Accordingly, when a U.S. “veil affair” seemed to be in the making in an Oklahoma school in March 2004, the federal Department of Justice promptly intervened, arguing that “religious discrimination has no place in American schools” (BBC News 2004). An explanation of this striking paradox is beyond the scope of this chapter. Let me only mention three sets of factors that are likely to be involved in it. First, and at the risk of stating the obvious (which does not therefore make it less true), church and state are more thoroughly separated in the United States than in Europe. Among other factors, this is due to the denominational fragmentation of the dominant Protestant religion in the United States, which rendered impossible any privileged rapprochement between state and any one church (as happened between the state and the Catholic Church in notionally laicist but factually corporatist, group-recognizing France). A second, much less commented on factor is the different social profiles of Muslim immigrants in Europe and the United States, poor and undereducated in the former but relatively privileged and with high skill levels in the latter. Europe, grosso modo, took in poorly educated postcolonial peasants whose likewise marginalized or unemployed children and grandchildren are now receptive to the protest ideology of a 116 Christian Joppke transnational Islamic movement. In fact, if we look for a parallel in the United States to the group of postcolonial immigrants in Europe, it is not Muslim immigrants but the nonimmigrant African Americans, who arrived involuntarily as slaves and some of whom have adopted a variant of politicized Islam, the Nation of Islam. By contrast, for Muslim immigrants in the United States, Islam mostly is not an issue because of their high social status. For instance, the well-to-do Iranian immigrants that we find in larger numbers in southern California have little interest in public prayer calls and the like because most of them are refugees from a regime that takes a keen interest in precisely such things. Overall, a recent survey found that, much in contrast to their socioeconomically marginalized European peers, U.S. Muslims are “solidly middle-class and solidly integrated with their non-Muslim neighbors” (Ackerman 2005, 18).1 Third,and in an interesting counterpoint to a comparatively incomplete separation between state and church in Europe, European societies are highly secular societies, whereas U.S. society has not only remained stubbornly religious but, in striking deviation from most other western societies, has become even more religious in recent years. There is a contrast in Europe between churches that are empty and mosques that are full. We may well argue that religious claims by Muslim immigrants are more difficult to accommodate in secularized societies such as those in Europe than in a society, such as the United States (to the limited degree that religious Muslim claims are raised here at all), where religion is more of a lived reality and common experience and thus not exotic to the same degree. As a young U.S. Muslim expressed his experience,“When I go out to Bush Country, it is true that, for some people, the way I pray is peculiar. But they don’t think I’m hallucinating when I say,‘It’s prayer time’” (quoted in Ackerman 2005, 20). By contrast, in Europe, it is not so much a religious society as, at best, the Christian churches that support Islamic claims, and we cannot help the impression that this is the solidarity of the underdogs. The very fact that Islam is an issue in Europe but not...

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