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8 MUSLIM INTEGRATION AND SECULARISM1 Tariq Modood I believe there is an anti-Muslim wind blowing across the European continent. One factor is the perception that Muslims are making politically exceptional, culturally unreasonable or theologically alien demands upon European states. Against that, I wish to say, that the claims Muslims are making, in fact, parallel comparable arguments about gender or ethnic equality. Seeing the issue in that context shows how European and contemporary is the logic of mainstream Muslim identity politics. Additionally I shall argue that multicultural politics must embrace what I call a moderate secularism, and resist a radical secularism. My main experience of these issues, both the lived experience, but also in terms of research and intellectual reflection, is based upon Britain, but I believe this experience has relevance beyond Britain. Of course so many of these issues are becoming European issues, for at policy level there is convergence as well as divergence, and moreover our countries impact upon another. We see that so dramatically at the start of 2006, with the Danish cartoon affair, which became a multinational affair, having an impact domestically in a number of countries including those some distance from Denmark. In Britain we have to come to approach issues to do with Muslim integration through what we used to call – and in other countries the language will not always have a natural resonance or fit – ‘racerelations ’, which is an American term. We are of course talking about the post-war migration of non-Europeans into a European country, or from the global South to the global North. And this phenomenon in Britain, initially at least, was very much understood with American ideas. People saw the issue as primarily one of colour racism, which of course had a historical legacy: slavery, colonialism, empire, and so on. The whole issue to do with Muslims, which is a headline issue today only became a feature of majority-minority relations from the early 1990s. In Britain nobody talked about the Muslims in the 1980s. The big dramatic 1 This chapter is based on my Multicultural Politics: Racism, Ethnicity and Muslims in Britain (University of Minnesota Press and University of Edinburgh Press, 2005) and my Multiculturalism: A Civic Idea (Polity Press, 2007). 86 Tariq Modood crisis that brought the idea of Muslims into public political discourse was the “Satanic Verses” or the Salman Rushdie affair in 1989-90. Up to that time, and to some extent beyond that time, the dominant post-immigration issue was colour racism. One consequence of that is that the legal and policy framework in Britain still reflects the conceptualization and priorities of racial dualism, of black-white dualism. Muslims and issues about Muslims arose in that context, and have struggled to seek clarity and a distinctive set of priorities, by counterposing themselves in that context, against that agenda. This dependence upon a ‘race’ framework has meant, at least initially, that Muslims have been marginalized. To some extent the assertiveness of Muslims in Britain has to be understood in the context of trying to move themselves from a marginalized position where things were seen in terms of black and white, to one where they say “talk to us as Muslims, treat us as Muslims, not just as people who are not white”. Moreover, in this Atlantocentric version of racism, which is certainly one of the classical and enduring versions, phenotype explains the existence of certain cultural traits (Miles 1989: 71-72). These traits are mainly negative in the case of blacks, people of African descent. As a result, racism or racial discrimination comes to be thought of as unfavourable treatment on the grounds of ‘colour’. I refer to this as ‘colour-racism’. While the physicality of blacks is taken to be enough to fill out the image of them as a group, as a ‘race’ – as for example, strong, sensual, rhythmical and unintelligent – the racialised image of Asians is not so extensively linked to physical appearance. It very soon appeals to cultural motifs such as language, religion, family structures, exotic dress, cuisine and art forms. These are taken to be part of the meaning of ‘Asian’ and of why Asians – which in Britain means South Asians – are alien, backward and undesirable. Such motifs are appealed to in excluding, harassing or discriminating against Asians – in both constituting them as a group and justifying negative treatment of them. Muslims too are, indeed, being generalised about in these and other ways in Europe (and elsewhere) at the...

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