Session 1
Multiculturalism in Europe
BIOG. | PAPER
Dr. Sami Zubaida
Well I can only agree with the problematisation of the familiar concepts that have appeared in both papers, the problematisation of multiculturalism, of the idea of community, of the idea of identity, of the idea of diaspora. At one level, of course, it's self-evident that our societies are multicultural, if you look, descriptively, at the multiple manifestations of culture within our societies. And the mixing of cultures – music, food, literature, the burst of literature in the English language from a variety of Anglophone writers from all over the world, including Muslims. However, when you say multiculturalism, it implies a multiplicity of cultures, so culture is a unit? Where is this unit? How do you define culture as a unit? I mean certainly, it is quite evident to all of us that there is no such thing as 'culture of Islam' or 'Islamic culture' as a unity, but is, say, Bangladeshi culture a unity? It was a shock for the London education authorities in the 1970s when they were trying to be multicultural by teaching children Bengali and then they discovered that Bangladeshis didn't speak Bengali, they spoke Sylheti, and even within Sylheti there are divisions. And of course, as Professor Allievi said, culture really is a process, it is not a unity and it's a process which is in constant flux. As against that, this emphasis on change is certainly true, but at the same time there is resistance to change. And you know one of the resistances to change is the actual ethnicization. We talk about de-ethnicization of Islam and that is certainly going on and if I had time I would go on to that, but I think as against that there is a kind of continuity of attempted ethnicity, I wouldn't say a constant ethnicity, so in fact if you look at the Islam of the Turks, for instance, it is highly Turkish. Turkish not only in the cultural sense, but in the organisational sense, so in fact all the diversity of Islamic associations in Turkey, the official 'diyanet,' the different Sufi-derived groups, the sulaymancis, the fethulaciler, and so on, they're all reproduced in Europe. And they fight between themselves in Europe in the same way they fight between themselves in Turkey. It's very interesting, of course, as the Turkish left is the same, because all the different Trotskyist groups and the communist groups and the off-shoots of this and that are also reproduced in Europe. You also have ethnic Islam, as in the case of South Asian communities in Britain, which integrate into British politics and British society as ethnics, so they form a kind of pressure group, which pressures for benefits, for facilities, such as halal butcheries, cemeteries, mosques, prayer times and so on. In contrast, there are certain ethnics which organise in such a way that they avoid the host society, so the various African networks of the tijaniya and the murids have their own networks which have functioned transnationally for a very long time anyway and they just adapted to Europe now. So in fact there is a great diversity of different things that may be called Muslim, which really, some of them, have very little in common with one another (apart from the core elements of faith and ritual, also subject to cultural and situational variations). But at the same time they are subject to these processes of change that we've heard about, but also to the resistance of change. Now, one of the most important elements of change is the generations and this is really crucial, because it is really at the generational level that you get these different processes of de-ethnicisation and the most important process of de-ethnicisation is towards secularism and assimilation. And this is something that is very little noted in the literature, although most of the empirical studies show that in Britain, in France, in Germany, something like 60 or 70 percent of nominally Muslims are just as Muslims as the others are Christians, which is a vague religious consciousness, they may be cultural Muslims, they may observe festivals, they certainly don't observe the strict rituals of Islam. And of the remaining 30 or 40 percent, there is diversity – some are sort of privately pious, some are activists and organisers, some are political and militant and many move in the direction towards secularism and assimilation. But there is also the other direction, which is toward Islamic universalism and there are, of course, different grounds of Islamic universalism and that depends on class and level of education. So one, obviously common ground of Islamic universalism is some form of Salafism or Wahabism, the idea of younger generations that the Islam of their parents is ethnic Islam, it is the Islam of the Bangladeshis or Pakistanis or what-have-you, in which religion is not distinguished from cultural traditions. And, in fact, so many of these cultural traditions are not compatible with the ‘true’ Islam. So there is a rejection of the parent's Islam in favour of a kind of universal Islam which is disciplinarian and ascetic and strictly according to the Koran and the traditions and what have you. The other direction of universalism is toward a liberal and reformed Islam with some ideas of Sufism. It is very interesting to see how popular Rumi is – the revival of Rumi, not only for Muslims, but for many others – the idea that this represents a kind of liberal, tolerant, humanistic Islam on which there would be common grounds on which they would be a European Islam, as Professor Allievi has mentioned. Now, as against that, I just if I had a couple of minutes, just to say something about Islamophobia and the reactions against Islam whether in Italy or Holland. I was struck by the Dutch leader Pim Fortyn, who was unfortunately assassinated, by his ideology and the ideology of his party, because that wasn't classic racist, it isn't Le Pen. His obviously being homosexual was an important part of it. And the idea that he wasn't against immigrants, he wasn't against blacks or anything like that, he was against Muslims, specifically. And the reason he was against Muslims is one that is closely associated with the history of European society, because especially for homosexuals, but also for a whole range of people, the social history of Europe has been one of both legal and social emancipation. Strong conservative norms and rules which were religiously inspired, so on family law, on divorce, on abortion, on homosexuality, on the tolerance of a range of different sexualities and all that. The 20th century of Europe was one of emancipation – we mustn't forget that homosexuality was punishable crime in this country until the 1950s or 1960s, that abortion was forbidden in this country until, again, a similar sort of time. So in this respect then there is a history involved in which people perceive conservative Islam and militant Islam which is heightened in the media as a kind of throwback, as a reaction against what has already been achieved. And I think it is important to understand that. That in fact here you haven't got the traditional racist, xenophobic attitude against foreigners, that you've got the association with your own history in Europe.
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