How the Workers Became Muslims: Immigration, Culture and Hegemonic Transformation in Europe by Ferruh Yilmaz (review)

Over the last couple of decades, research on Muslim immigration to Europe has produced an important body of critical scholarship that has been characterized by a renewed interest in the intersections between the welfare state, citizenship, race, and religion in neoliberal economies. Much of this research has focused on how the period of the 1980s was seminal in the stigmatization of Muslim populations in Europe, amidst increased rates of unemployment, cuts to social services, and changes in immigration policy.

Yilmaz' research is situated within this literature as he traces the ways in which public and political discourse on immigration in Denmark changed in the 1980s. This shift involved the initial understanding of Muslim immigrants as workers to a discourse that erased their class background and emphasized their cultural difference as Muslims who were Other, separate from Danish society. The overarching argument of the book is that there was a process of "culturalization" that began 1984. (15) By culturalization, Yilmaz refers to the ontology of culture, a term indebted to anthropologists such as Clifford Geertz to describe a symbolic "meaning-making system." (16) In the 1970s and 1980s, public discourse was dominated by "economic questions such as taxes, public spending, and unemployment." (60) In Denmark in 1984 there were two simultaneous processes that occurred: a major rise in refugees and a number of Far Right actors who manufactured fear about immigrants and refugees. The evidence for Yilmaz' argument unfolds in Chapters 2, 3 and 4, where he analyzes the transformation of discourse in Denmark that demonized Muslims and generalized all immigrants as Muslim. One of the key players featured in Yilmaz' analysis is Søren Krarup, a Far Right pastor during the mid-1980s who generated a "moral panic around refugees" (102) by, for instance, regularly putting anti-refugee ads in far-right newspapers which then drew significant media attention.

The strengths of the book lie first in its detailed account of Danish politics from the 1980s to 2000s and second, in the overall argument. First, Yilmaz is well-placed to excavate this political and journalistic history of Danish society. As a former journalist during the 1980s, he wrote actively during this period of significant political change. Yilmaz' research methods rely on both the analysis of Danish newspaper articles from 1984 to 1987, and 2001, as well as 39 interviews conducted with "ethnic Danes" in 2001. (25) (Cultural studies readers will be interested in Chapter 1 where Yilmaz lays out his methodology of content, discourse, and rhetorical analysis.) On a personal level, Yilmaz shares with the reader that he arrived in Denmark from Turkey in 1979 as a leftist activist and explains how he "became Muslim." (3) Clearly, his lived experience resonates with both the content and title of the book. Yilmaz grew up atheist and did not identify as Muslim when he arrived in Denmark; he eventually assumed this political (not religious) identity as a result of other people asking if he was Muslim.

Second, the premise that Danish political discourse shifted in the mid-1980s from an understanding of immigrants as workers to a cultural Other is a welcome contribution to the field of labour, immigration, and racism. Indeed, Yilmaz makes the case that the culturalization of immigrants made racism widely acceptable in Danish society. The historical specificity of the political conditions in which racism in Denmark grew and was produced by particular figures demonstrates how racism is generated and is not natural or inevitable in a given population.

While focused on the Danish context, Yilmaz indicates that his case study is relevant to Europe more broadly. My research falls within the area of gender, Muslim migration, and labour in France, making this text relevant to my own interests. In Europe, the 1970s was characterized by immigration policies that relied on unskilled male migrant workers, often followed by family reunification policies in the 1980s which brought over female spouses. Similar to Denmark, this pattern...