Orientalism and Resistance to Orientalism: Muslim Identities in Contemporary Western Europe

Abstract

This chapter is about Orientalism and Muslim identities in Western Europe, particularly insofar as the production and reproduction of Muslim identities constitute a response to Orientalism. One’s identity consists only partly of how one sees oneself; it also consists of how one is seen by others. As such, while this chapter is clearly about religious identities, it can be situated within the sociological debates about racism and ethnic identities which have taken place since the mid-1980s. Muslims are often defined in the West in racialized terms. By racialization we mean ‘those instances where social relations between people have been structured by the signification of human biological characteristics in such a way as to define and construct differentiated social collectivities’, and ‘a process of categorisation, a representational process of defining an Other (usually, but not exclusively) somatically’ (Miles, 1989: 75). In contemporary Britain and France, Muslims are often stereotyped as ‘Pakistani’ or ‘maghrébin ’, terms which may connote an irreconcilable ‘racial’ difference based on a perception of somatic features, such as skin colour.