Introduction

Abstract

The accommodation of Islam within Europe has received a great deal of negative publicity recently. A noticeable interest in ‘improving the integration’ of Muslims has arisen across Europe. At a recent security conference in Munich, for example, Chancellor Angela Merkel and Prime Minister David Cameron reiterated the tenuous but common, seemingly ‘causal’ link between multiculturalism and political terrorism (Euractiv 2011). According to the German and British heads of government, European democracies needed to limit the ‘uncontrolled’ flourishing of cultural distinctness and enforce ‘Western’ values. More recently, David Cameron spoke of the endurance of the ‘indomitable British spirit’, and ‘the belief in freedom, in democracy, in free speech, in our British values, Western values’ in the aftermath of the Woolwich Murder in London (Back 2013). These utterances only hint at how a spectrum of competing discursive visions currently inform and underpin public debates about the accommodation of Islam in Europe. For instance, we observe that multiculturalism, a discourse that advocates equal rights for Muslims in various spheres of life, is increasingly discredited as ‘going too far’ in its aspiration to accommodate. This diagnosis implies an understanding of social tensions and political violence as ‘deviant behaviour’ that is rooted in a ‘cultural package’ that migrant populations have ‘imported’ from outside of Western Europe; the latter theme is prevalent within discourses that emphasize social cohesion and ‘universal’ civic values.