Muslims in Western Politics

6. Muslims Representing Muslims in Europe: Parties and Associations after 9/11

6 Muslims Representing Muslims in Europe: Parties and Associations after 9/11 Jytte Klausen Hostility against Muslims among European publics and elites, as well as the shrill voices of Islamic radicals, has caused controversy and division but not deterred increasing civic engagement and more traditional forms of political participation. One unexpected consequence of the acrimony is that governments increasingly look for Muslims to act as interlocutors, and many Muslim leaders inevitably find themselves involved. Religious pluralism is an unintended consequence of unwanted immigration . It has raised difficult questions about the requirements of religious toleration, which Europeans are reluctant to face. The Madrid train bombing on March 11, 2003, and the July 2005 bombings of the London tube system reinforced the perception that Islam and Islamism are threats to the European social and political system. Paradoxically, the two events also induced governments and politicians to reconsider the importance of government involvement in promoting integration. Muslim Civic Engagement Before and After 9/11 Civic engagement among Europe’s Muslims started increasing in the 1990s. A wave of mosque construction initiated after 1985 signified a new desire to build Muslims Representing Muslims in Europe ·  permanent roots and intergenerational religious communities. Scholars have described the collective cognitive shift among Muslim immigrants as the end of “the myth of return” and the emergence of new hybrid identities such as British Muslims or French Arabs (Ballard 1994; Werbner 2002). Others have gone further and argued that the shift signaled the constitution of Muslims as an ethnic minority or a “parallel society” (Modood 2005; Heitmeyer, Müller, and Schröder 1997). The crystallization of new varieties of political imagination and modes of representation picked up speed after 9/11. The pressure to organize increased as governments and politicians looked for “responsible” interlocutors. Rising hostility toward Muslims also motivated them to organize and represent themselves as who they “really are.” In Britain, in particular, anger against foreign policy has engendered an unprecedented increase in Muslim political participation and led to record-high participation in the 2005 election. In the immediate aftermath of 9/11, the creation of broadly inclusive and moderate national Muslim associations giving new voice to Muslims’ hopes and aspirations for integration appeared to be an unexpected, but welcome, outcome. The picture today is significantly more complicated. The increased participation and demand for representation that we can observe has produced fragmentation rather than consolidation. The good news is that it is not possible to impute a shared political identity—the “fifth column” scenario of a cohesive dangerous Muslim presence—to European Muslims (Warner and Wenner 2006). The bad news is that in the resulting confusion governments and the media can find new reasons to refuse to extend recognition to Muslims as “partners” in the negotiation of solutions to the problems of integration. The cacophony of voices claiming to speak for Muslims notwithstanding, the underlying trend is one of increased participation and political integration. This is most clearly observed in the realm of electoral politics, where every election brings in new elected representatives of Muslim background and the presence of Muslim voters is increasingly felt in contested local elections and within the community organizations of the political parties. Between 2002 and 2005, I interviewed three hundred European Muslim civic and political leaders who are part of what I describe as the new Muslim political elite (Klausen 2005). My questions aimed to discover how important faith is to the Muslim political leaders, and what consequences—if any—they drew from their faith and identity for public policy. I considered as “elite” anyone of Muslim faith or background who held elected or appointed office in political or civic organizations at the national, regional, or metropolitan level in one of six European countries—the United Kingdom, France, Germany, the Netherlands, Sweden, and Denmark. I interviewed parliamentarians, city councillors, leaders, and spokespeople from civic associations, advocacy groups, and local and national umbrella organizations of mosque councils and interfaith groups, and also some of Europe’s leading imams and Islamic scholars.  · Jytte Klausen Why study the elite? Elites are a sociological fact. Democracies adapt in part by encapsulating and integrating new social groups and their political and civic leaders. The prospects for a future accommodation with Islam in Europe rest, to a large extent, on the ability of a Muslim elite to obtain influence and gain recognition as representative voices in debates on policies having to do with the position...