Inventing "Muslims in Europe". Religion, culture and identity in the time of neoliberalism
In present-day Europe a category of "Muslims" appears at the center of the most heated social and political debates. It is because a group defined by its links with Islam has been growingly perceived as a threat to the European religious and cultural identity as well as "Western value...
| Main Author: | |
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| Format: | Electronic Article |
| Language: | Polish |
| Check availability: | HBZ Gateway |
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| Fernleihe: | Fernleihe für die Fachinformationsdienste |
| Published: |
Polskie Towarzyrtwo Religioznawcze
2015
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| In: |
Przegla̜d religioznawczy
Year: 2015, Issue: 4/258, Pages: 43-55 |
| Online Access: |
Volltext (lizenzpflichtig) |
| Summary: | In present-day Europe a category of "Muslims" appears at the center of the most heated social and political debates. It is because a group defined by its links with Islam has been growingly perceived as a threat to the European religious and cultural identity as well as "Western values" and the socio-political order that is supposed to stem from them. In this context one can observe development of a variety of Islamophobic discourses that are primarily targeted at immigrants and communities that have immigrant roots. What all these discourses have in common is a conviction that "Muslims" constitute a separate entity, a social category of people with shared identity, interests and goals, that can be easily identified and singled out on the basis of a criterion that is a religion and a religiously defined culture. In the paper I want to problematize a category of "Muslims" (as it has been functioning in the European public discourses), question its seeming self-evidence and argue that in fact it is a social construct whose exceptional present-day salience is strongly linked to a direction that Western political thinking and economic policies have taken since the 1980s. It will be my thesis that special meanings and currency that this category has acquired is a by-product of wider processes of "culturalization" of the public discourse in Europe. Following theorists such as Nancy Fraser or Ferruh Yilmaz I will claim that this "culturalization" has been related to widespread adoption of the neoliberal economic policies and is a result of a new way of framing of social conflicts and divisions that these policies have imposed. However, my analysis will not be limited to pointing to discursive conditions of the present-day prominence of the category of "Muslims" in Europe. I will also demonstrate how - against the background of the "culturalization" of the public discourse in Europe - one can discern progressing mobilization of various minority, immigrant groups around a marker of "Muslimness". In the paper I will discuss the most important events and factors that have contributed to this mobilization and argue that it has led to something that might be called "inventing Muslims in Europe". The most general purpose of the paper is considering how religion as a category of belonging has been functioning in the context of cultural, political and economic changes of the last few decades in the West. |
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| ISSN: | 2658-1531 |
| Contains: | Enthalten in: Przegla̜d religioznawczy
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