Abstract
Chapter 1 illustrates how Muslim European populations often are theoretically represented as if they were cut off from the state structure, historical relationships between secular and religious powers, the national or regional labour market, typical patterns of popular mobilization or the degree of federalism, and the welfare state system. In doing so, it explains how an epistemic Islamophobia has fostered a crystallised conception of the Muslim presence in Europe. Therefore, the ‘Islamophobic approach’ has analytically isolated individual and collective expressions of the Muslim faith from other social actors. From this perspective, Islamophobia imposes a perspective on Islamic social realities that does not consider interactions and interchanges between Muslims and non-Muslims or in Muslim different actors.
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Notes
- 1.
‘Unable to recognize “its” Orient in the new Third World, Orientalism now faced a challenging and politically armed Orient. Two alternatives opened before Orientalism. One was to carry on as if nothing had happened. The second was to adapt the old ways to the new. But to the Orientalist, with believes the Orient never changes, the new is simply the old betrayed by new, misunderstanding dis-Orientals (we can permit ourselves the neologism). A third, revisionist alternative, to dispense with Orientalism altogether, was considered by only a tiny minority’ (Said 1979, 104–105).
- 2.
The report was written by 18 members of the Commission on British Muslims and Islamophobia coordinated by Prof. Gordon Conway.
- 3.
In his analyses of this report, Tamdgidi has suggested that the eight open views of Islam as a form of Islamophilia ‘unfortunately [fall] in the trap of regarding Islam monolithically, in turn as being characterized by one or another trait, and [do] not adequately express the complex heterogeneity of a historical phenomenon whose contradictory interpretations, traditions, and sociopolitical trends have been shaped and [have] in turn been shaped, as in the case of any world tradition, by other world-historical forces’ (Tamdgidi 2012, 76).
- 4.
Constructivist theories focus on the historical origin of categories such as ethnicity, race, and religion. Primordialist theories, in contrast, ontologise differences (Tamdgidi 2012, 76).
- 5.
‘What we expect from the serious study of Western societies, with its complex theories, enormously variegated analyses of social structures, histories, cultural formations, and sophisticated languages of investigation, we should also expect from the study and discussion of Islamic societies in the West’ (Said 1997, xvi).
- 6.
The IOS approach became a relevant theoretical framework for developing comparative studies of social movements (Kriesi et al. 1995). European scholars completed several comparative analyses on new social movements in different countries by describing the relationship between the national institutional structures and the outcomes of transnational claims-making activity in various spatial and temporal contexts (Kriesi et al. 1995). They also improved the operationalisation of the concepts of openness and closeness of IOSs that Eisinger and, subsequently, Kitschelt outlined (Eisinger 1973; Kitschelt 1986). In 1973, Eisinger introduced questions concerning how IOSs are measured by discussing opened and closed IOSs.
- 7.
For instance, in Italy, the migratory system provides undocumented labour in the form of underpaid immigrant workers to support elderly or health care services (Ambrosini 2013).
- 8.
In Geneva, the pattern of relationships between cantonal authorities and religious organisations is similar to a fully separated model. As a reaction to the Calvinist conception, the Canton of Geneva, imposed a total separation in 1907 (Grandjean and Scholl 2010).
- 9.
In Zurich, Zwingli Ulrich reformed religion by fostering interaction between the religious community and civil society.
- 10.
Translation: familiar, known.
- 11.
Translation by Terry Pinkard: ‘What is familiar and well-known as such is not really known for the very reason that it is familiar and well-known’ (Pinkard 2013).
- 12.
‘If, before its rationalization, the word had set free not only longing but lies, it its rationalized form it has become a straightjacket more for longing than for lies. The blindness and muteness of the data to which positivism reduces the world passes over into language itself, which is limited to registering those data. Thus relationships themselves become impenetrable, taking on an impact, a power of adhesion and repulsion which makes them resemble their extreme antithesis, spells’ (Horkheimer and Adorno 2002, 175).
- 13.
However, methodologically, we cannot forget that they own other identities beyond the Islamic one such as class, gender, national origin, regional origin, and professional ability.
- 14.
…and their totally inability to forecast the Egyptian and Tunisian revolutions.
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Banfi, E. (2018). Introduction. In: Welfare Activities by New Religious Actors . Palgrave Politics of Identity and Citizenship Series. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-62096-1_1
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