Recently, public policy debates over the political accommodation of ethnic minorities of migrant origin in Europe have focused on Muslims. The real or perceived difficulties Muslims face in adapting to the Western societies in which they have chosen to settle is an electoral issue for radical right populist parties, including the Front National in France, the Lijst Pim Fortuyn in the Netherlands, the Vlaams Blok in Belgium, and the Det Konservative Folkepartei in Denmark. There has been a shift from multicultural towards more civic integrationist governmental policies in Britain, and also in the Netherlands, which had previously gone furthest towards transforming multicultural principles into policies. In Britain, US-style citizenship rituals now allow migrants to express their allegiance when becoming naturalized Britons, while, as of July 2004, Dutch migrants will only receive funding for education in Dutch, not in their native language. In addition, the real threat of terrorist atrocities by Islamic extremists in European cities after the March 2004 bombings in Madrid has made a fresh negative impact on the public imagination regarding Muslim migrants and their descendants on European soil. At the same time, attempts by Muslim organizations to condemn terrorism ring hollow against the speeches of a small minority of extremist Islamic clerics.

Even before September 11, 2001, the position of Muslims in European societies was already a key reference point for scholars and commentators in fiercely contested debates about the consequences of multiculturalism. At stake in these controversies is the state’s capacity for maintaining social cohesion as well as the liberal conception of individual rights on which it rests. Problems arise from the increasing demands that migrants put forward for special group rights and recognition, exemptions from duties, and support from the state for cultural differences and identities. Public controversies have raged in response to Muslims’ cultural demands, which sometimes appear to challenge the very essence of liberal values. One high-profile case involved the British Muslims’ demand that Salman Rushdie’s Satanic Verses be banned for blasphemy, in which Muslims took to the streets to burn effigies of Rushdie as well as copies of his book. The “headscarf affairs”—conflicts over the wearing of religious symbols in state institutions—have rumbled on across Europe, principally in France, since 1988, when a headmaster first sent headscarf-wearing Muslim girls home from school. In addition, there have also been problems associated with cultural practices of Muslims. Some issues, such as food requirements, have been easily accommodated, as they were in previous generations for Jewish migrants. Others, such as polygamy and female circumcision, quite clearly contravene most liberal moral understandings of individual and gender equality. Much depends on the extent to which Muslims wish to practice such cultural traditions. Nonetheless, in light of such issues, which have received many column inches on opinion pages, the presence of Muslims has often been depicted by politicians and commentators as a challenge to the norms, values, and principles of liberal democracy.

From the European experience, it appears that Islam has been particularly resilient to political adaptation, maintaining a seemingly difficult relationship with liberal democratic states. The role of religion in politics has not been sufficiently taken into consideration as an explanatory factor by public and academic understandings of this topic, both with respect to the political accommodation of religion by the state and with respect to religion as a form of identification and belief that shapes political behavior.

Religion Matters

In social science, there is an overriding tendency to be blind to the role of institutional religions and religious belief. This unacknowledged built-in bias has often led sociologists to see religious identification as some backward or reactionary form of “false consciousness” simply masking objectives and interests that are actually secular in nature. Migrant religions, with their strange rituals and customs, are especially vulnerable. They are so far removed from the world of most academics that it is easy to see how they become dismissed as reactionary relics that will be swept away through interaction with a superior secular civic culture. Empirical evidence from around the world, however, shows that religion is not on the wane. Indeed, even Peter L. Berger, Director of the Institute for the Study of Economic Culture at Boston University and a founding father of “secularization theory,” has more recently recanted, arguing that we are witnessing a “de-secularization” or “counter-secularization” of the world marked by an upsurge in religion. He concludes that “by and large, religious communities have survived and even flourished to the degree that they have not tried to adapt themselves to the alleged requirements of a secularized world. To put it simply, experiments with secularized religion have generally failed; religious movements with beliefs and practices dripping with reactionary supernaturalism … have widely succeeded.”

This insight has special relevance to the position of migrant religions, because it implies that the more a migrant religion retains its cultural distinction from the environment of the host society, the more likely it is to remain a core focus of the life of its own community. In some cases, particularly for those religions that make significant cultural demands on the ways believers lead their lives, religion needs to be factored into the equation for understanding the nature of a migrant group’s political relationship to its society of settlement. In short, religion matters.

First, although European societies see themselves as broadly secular, the Christian religions often play important institutional social and political roles, regardless of how many or how few people actually believe or practice the religion that the institution represents. These institutional arrangements define pre-existing conditions and the political environment into which migrant religions have to find a space for their community. Second, religious identification is a belief system that can shape people’s core identity and shape their associational activity and political behavior. This is likely to be enhanced for migrants, who often live detached from the grasp of core public institutions which promote civic values and rely on their own religious institutions and family networks as a “community” support system. The nature of religion, and the demands it makes on its followers’ way of life, are likely to influence the extent to which migrants’ beliefs and understandings adapt or resist when confronted with those of the dominant culture. Following Berger’s thesis, religions such as Islam and Hinduism, most different from Christianity and “dripping with reactionary supernaturalism,” are most likely to resist adaptation, not least because if they adapt, they run the risk of losing the elements which attract believers in the first place.