Islam in Europe, Limits of Liberal Tolerance, and the New Race Thinking

Abstract

The secularist narrative of modernity not only categorically separates the domain of the secular and the religious but also marks the latter as belonging to the private domain. In our globalized world, this prevailing and dominant narrative has become highly suspicious and severely contested with the escalation of religiously inspired movements and discourses and of the claims voiced regarding the organization of social, political, economic, and cultural life along religious parameters. Given that religion and religious demands have achieved an undeniable visibility in the public domain, the encapsulation of the religious to the sphere of individually held beliefs and practices thus proved to be, at best, an inadequate attempt to understand the increasing prominence of religion in the public space all over the world. This is also true for many European societies. In the wake of increasingly powerful articulation and expression of religious identities in the European public spaces, the modernist desire to encapsulate religion to the private sphere of individually held beliefs in Europe has gone awry and developed discourses that serve to displace the terms of the debate onto issues of culture and cultural identity. This displacement serves to manage the increasing public prominence that religion, particularly Islam, occupies in the European space.