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How do progressive social movements deal with religious pluralism? In this book, Timothy Peace uses the example of the alter-globalisation movement to explain why social movement leaders in Britain and France reacted so differently to the emergence of Muslim activism.
To what extent are Muslims in Europe integrated? Muslims are increasingly making themselves noticed in the political process of Europe. But what is happening behind the often sensational headlines? This book looks at the processes and realities of Muslim participation in local and national politics in a range of Eastern and Western European countries: voting patterns in local and national assemblies, membership of elected councils and national parliaments, and the tensions between ethnic, political and religious identities. It also asks how political participation and wider integration issues interrelate and considers how Muslims - as ethnic groups, or through specific institutions - seek to locate themselves within European political society.
As Europe’s Muslim communities continue to grow, so does their impact on electoral politics and the potential for inclusion dilemmas. In vote-rich enclaves, Muslim views on religion, tradition, and gender roles can deviate sharply from those of the majority electorate, generating severe trade-offs for parties seeking to broaden their coalitions. Dilemmas of Inclusion explains when and why European political parties include Muslim candidates and voters, revealing that the ways in which parties recruit this new electorate can have lasting consequences. Drawing on original evidence from thousands of electoral contests in Austria, Belgium, Germany, and Great Britain, Rafaela Dancygier sheds new light on when minority recruitment will match up with existing party positions and uphold electoral alignments and when it will undermine party brands and shake up party systems. She demonstrates that when parties are seduced by the quick delivery of ethno-religious bloc votes, they undercut their ideological coherence, fail to establish programmatic linkages with Muslim voters, and miss their opportunity to build cross-ethnic, class-based coalitions. Dancygier highlights how the politics of minority inclusion can become a testing ground for parties, showing just how far their commitments to equality and diversity will take them when push comes to electoral shove. Providing a unified theoretical framework for understanding the causes and consequences of minority political incorporation, and especially as these pertain to European Muslim populations, Dilemmas of Inclusion advances our knowledge about how ethnic and religious diversity reshapes domestic politics in today’s democracies.
Looking closely at relations between Muslims and their host countries, Abdulkader H. Sinno and an international group of scholars examine questions of political representation, identity politics, civil liberties, immigration, and security issues. While many have problematized Muslims in the West, this volume takes a unique stance by viewing Muslims as a normative, and even positive, influence in Western politics. Squarely political and transatlantic in scope, the essays in this collected work focus on Islam and Muslim citizens in Europe and the Americas since 9/11, the European bombings, and the recent riots in France. Main topics include Muslim political participation and activism, perceptions about Islam and politics, Western attitudes about Muslim visibility in the political arena, radicalization of Muslims in an age of apparent shrinking of civil liberties, and personal security in politically uneasy times.
This book offers a unique transdisciplinary collection of essays written by highly renowned international scholars.
Atrocities by terrorists acting in the name of the ‘Islamic State’ are occurring with increasing regularity across Western Europe. Often the perpetrators are ‘home grown’, which places the relationship between Muslims and the countries in which they live under intense political and media scrutiny, and raises questions about the success of the integration of Muslims of migrant origin. At the same time, populist politicians try to shift the blame from the few perpetrators to the supposed characteristics of all Muslims as a ‘group’ by depicting Islam as a threat that seeks to undermine liberal democratic values and institutions. The research in this volume attempts to redress the balance by focusing on the views and life experiences of the many ‘ordinary’ Muslims in their European societies of settlement, and the role that cultural and religious factors play in shaping their social relationships with majority populations and public institutions. The book is specifically interested in the relationship between cultural/religious distance and social factors that shape the life chances of Muslims relative to the majority. The study is cross-national, comparative across the six main receiving countries with distinct approaches to the accommodation of Muslims: France, Germany, Britain, the Netherlands, Belgium and Switzerland. The research is based on the findings of a survey of four groups of Muslims from distinct countries of origin: Turkey, Morocco, the former Yugoslavia, and Pakistan, as well as majority populations, in each of the receiving countries. This book was originally published as a special issue of the Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies.
This volume describes a clear and overall overview on contemporary European Islam, dealing with both Western and Eastern sides. Based on wide bibliographic research as well as original national contributions from recognised scholars, it is concerned with the process of construction of Islam as well as its co-inclusion in the European societies. Muslims in the Enlarged Europe has been selected by Choice as Outstanding Academic Title (2005).
The voices in this book belong to parliamentarians, city councillors, doctors and engineers, a few professors, lawyers and social workers, owners of small businesses, translators, and community activists. They are also all Muslims, who have decided to become engaged in political and civic organizations. And for that reason, they constantly have to explain themselves, mostly in order to say who they are not. They are not fundamentalists, not terrorists, and most do not support the introduction of Islamic religious law in Europe - especially not its application to Christians. This book is about who these people are, and what they want. This book is based on three hundred interviews with European Muslim leaders from six European countries: Sweden, Denmark, the Netherlands, Great Britain, France, and Germany. The question of Islam in Europe is not a matter of global war and peace but raises difficult questions about the positions of Christianity and Islam in public life, and about European identities. Europe's Muslim political leaders are not aiming to overthrow liberal democracy and to replace secular law with Islamic religious law. Those are the positions of a minority. There is not one Muslim position on how Islam should develop in Europe but many views, and most Muslims are rather looking for ways to build institutions that will allow European Muslims to practice their religion in a way that is compatible with social integration.
This new volume showcases the latest research into Muslim political participation both in terms of electoral politics and civil society initiatives. Muslims play a prominent role in British political life yet what do we actually know about the involvement of British Muslims beyond the existence of a handful of Muslim MPs? What is unique about political participation in Muslim communities? All the major parties actively seek to court a ‘Muslim electorate’ but does such a phenomenon exist? Despite the impact that Muslims have had on election campaigns and their roles in various political institutions, research on this topic remains scant. Indeed, much of the existing work was couched within the broader areas of the participation of ethnic minorities or the impact of race on electoral politics. The chapters in this volume address this lacuna by highlighting different aspects of Muslim participation in British politics. They investigate voting patterns and election campaigns, civil society and grassroots political movements, the engagement of young people and the participation of Muslims in formal political institutions. Written in an accessible style, this book will be of interest to students and scholars of political participation and religious studies.