Natalie J. Doyle

Lessons from France: popularist anxiety and veiled fears of Islam

Islam has become the second religion in a profoundly de-Christianized Europe that has seen its understanding of modern secularity harden. European countries have difficulties coming to terms with the presence of the large Muslim minorities who settled following post-war industrialization. France is a particularly instructive case, as highlighted by the legislative ban it introduced in 2010 on the wearing of full Islamic veils in public spaces. A close study of the rejection by the highest administrative court of an application for French citizenship on the basis of the applicants ‘radical’ practice of Islam reveals a profound incomprehension of the significance of the Muslim faith for new generations (and, more broadly, of the phenomenon of Islamic neo-fundamentalism worldwide). Radicalized expressions of faith have been interpreted as being by definition synonymous with hostility to liberal modernity and thus directly linked with Islamist terrorism. Yet Islam has in fact given a sector of society marginalized for primarily socioeconomic reasons a positive identity facilitating social integration. Islamophobia, fostered by incomprehension of the subjective meaning of contemporary Islamic faith, has gained ground in French political discourse, a phenomenon mirrored in other European societies.

The Sacred, Social Creativity and the State

Abstract This paper explores the specific contribution of a strand of contemporary French social theory founded by Cornelius Castoriadis and Claude Lefort to the under standing of human power. It formulates a conception of power that transcends its definitions in terms of physical coercion or institutionalised violence to reveal the way power is creative and institutes the social. Its reflection on the cultural nature of political power and it role in society is shown to extend the pioneering reflection of Durkheims sociology, especially as regards the homology that exists between religion and politics. The social role performed by the state explored by Durkheim prefigures Gauchets theory of the state, which builds on Leforts work. Gauchets theory can be said to elaborate a critical synthesis of the two stands of Durkheims work: the sociology of religion and the sociology of the modern state. This synthesis raises questions on the role played by the European state in the development of individualism, in both its political and economic manifestations.

Governance and Democratic Legitimacy: The European Union’s Crisis of De-Politicisation

The European Union (EU) is essentially defined by allegiance to common juridical norms. Its creation by a group of European nation-states gave a novel institutional form to trends evident since the 1980s in all Western societies. These trends can be summarised as constituting a shift in the perception of democratic legitimacy, away from the notion of government and towards that of governance. This shift has been characterised by the abandonment of the central concern which used to define democracy — that of its establishment through the electoral process — in favour of the question of its procedural integrity. The principle of democratic sovereignty came to be diffused through a plurality of institutions ranging from statutory and regulatory institutions to constitutional courts, whose task is to ensure that governmental action is both effective and respectful of the individual rights defining contemporary pluralism.

Islamophobia, European Modernity and Contemporary Illiberalism

The term ‘Islamophobia’ has been gaining quite a prominence over recent years. It has been used increasingly to refer to the rejection and discrimination from which the Muslim population in European societies has been suffering over two decades or so. The phenomenon in itself is far from new; but it was aggravated by the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001 and the discourse of securitization these encouraged and consolidated. Consequently, the politics of fear came to dominate all public discussions. Since the onset of the global financial crisis, these politics seem to have acquired greater magnitude. A conservative British politician, Baroness Warsi, famously stated in 2011 that hostility to Islam had passed ‘the dinner table test’. Yet, the notion of Islamophobia (as well as those of liberalism and secularism connected to it; see below) is considerably elusive. Those who favour its employment find it analytically useful whereas those who don’t regard it as no more than polemical. Among those who find it particularly helpful are scholars who use it in the diverse contexts of race relations, working class experience, postcoloniality, intellectual and media discourses as well as past and contemporary politics, such as the volumes by Junaid Rana, Esposito and Kalin, and Gottschalk and Greenberg. This special issue of Politics, Religion and Ideology seeks to contribute to the academic debate on European Islamophobia by focusing on the paradox that characterizes the discourses used today to discuss the ‘Muslim Question’ in Europe: European identity presumably defined by its liberalism is invoked to justify illiberal attitudes. In some countries such attitudes have led to the introduction of juridical initiatives that curtail the religious rights

Autonomy and modern liberal democracy From Castoriadis to Gauchet

Marcel Gauchet’s recently published theory of democracy sheds light on the way his understanding of modernity emerged from Castoriadis’s notion of autonomy but also deepened it by contextualizing it within a discussion of modern historicity. Modern autonomy means re-shaping the world through a new, transformative, form of power that draws on humanity’s capacity for imaginary creation. Gauchet’s theory of modernity, however, rejects the possibility of radical historical creation. Faithful to the teachings of structuralism, it explores the structural conditions behind the genesis of modern power, which favoured the emergence of a new societal form that produces its own future. Encompassing capitalism, Gauchet’s modern power proposes an essentially paradoxical definition of modern democracy that stresses its essentially liberal dimension neglected by Castoriadis. In modern democracy, humans make their own history by liberating individual subjectivities but this deprives them of the means to direct history: liberalism goes against the aspirations to collective sovereignty.

The Fear of Islam: French Context and Reaction

Western Europe has seen a radical decline of religious practice in its traditional institutionalised forms. This decline for those faiths that once were a dominant part of Europe’s cultural landscape has coincided with the revival of Islam among the second and third generations of Muslim immigrants. The Muslim presence challenges countries to re-examine their pre-existing understandings of secularity, which are no longer compatible with a commitment to pluralism. There is the need to move away from the narrow understandings of secularity pitting rationality against religious irrationality that dominated the nineteenth century. European countries seem deeply suspicious of religious radicalism, which is regarded as complicit with a hierarchical conception of society and as hostile to individual freedoms, as highlighted by the concern with women’s rights. Islam in France has come to be perceived as subscribing to a conception of gender roles totally incompatible with so-called European values. The concern for women’s rights that figures so prominently in all discussions of Islam in France, however, tends to be part of a discourse that considers Muslim women wearing the hijab or burqa/niqab only as victims. Such dress has become the target of Islamophobia, as symbols of a traditional world that is thought to threaten the future of Europe. Yet, Islamisation now partakes of the individualistic search for meaning and self-realisation that characterises Western societies, a search which in the last 20 years or so has been almost exclusively formulated in the language of the market. Individual self-expression, through patterns of consumption, also effects contemporary Muslims in different parts of the world. At the same time, the social profile of European Muslims is overwhelmingly working class and they have been particularly affected by the disappearance of unskilled jobs. Their segregation in particularly badly serviced urban areas has trapped many in the second and third generations in a vicious cycle of social deprivation. For this marginalised section of the population, Islam, often in its fundamentalist form, has been a way of constructing a positive identity, of building supportive social networks and more broadly of acquiring a code of ethics that enables them to live peacefully alongside mainstream society.

The New Arab Revolutions that Shook the World

traditions are diverse and multiple, and often eschew monolithic singular interpretations, and that scripture is neither clear nor unequivocal on some key issues such as eschatology and soteriology. A concomitant conclusion is that positions on salvation are not simply summarized as Scripturalists favouring exclusivism and Sufis favouring pluralism. The book does rather lack a conclusion – Khalil could have drawn together the findings of the study and also reflected upon what this entails for contemporary discussions, not least in current interfaith contexts. He does not consider salvation in terms of Muslims: many of the thinkers he considers may well have been more magnanimous to others than to some of those who also claimed to be Muslims. Ghazālī and Ibn Taymiyya anathematized different groups of Shiʿi Muslims (and Ibn ʿArabī and Rid.ā were not exactly philo-Shiʿi either). One wonders in what sense one can safely describe them as Universalists. Nevertheless, Khalil has produced an excellent scholarly work that should be the starting point for those interested in Islamic discourses on salvation.