When Islam and Democracy Meet: Muslims in Europe and in the United States

Jocelyne Cesari was Visiting Associate Professor of Islamic Studies at Harvard Divinity School for the 2004-05 academic year and has served as a research associate in the Center for Middle Eastern Studies at Harvard University since spring 2001. Her book When Islam and Democracy Meet: Muslims in Europe and in the United States was published in 2004 by Palgrave Macmillan. HDS Staff Writer Wendy McDowell sat down with Dr. Cesari to talk about the important discoveries that resulted from her years of research about Muslims on both sides of the Atlantic.

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One of your central purposes in the book is to look at the immigration of Muslims to Europe and North America as "a foundational moment of new transcultural space." How is this is a different way of studying Muslims than other scholars have done in the past?

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There are several, layered purposes in this book. As a scholar of contemporary Islam for several years, I have been fighting and struggling with what I call the "exceptionalism of Islam." When I got into the field, this exceptionalism was already there because of the politicization of Islam, which had been a problem a long time before 9/11, especially in Europe. So my main purpose even before coming to the United States was to look at Islam as a religion—not as a civilization, not as a set of economic areas, not only through the language lens, but as a religion. When you want to look at Islam as a religion, you discover that there is not a lot of data on the Muslim world or on Muslims living among Westerners. What I mean is that very few scholars have really looked at Islam through the lens of social sciences in general or sociology of religion in particular. Of course, there is remarkable work on the Qur'an, on the diverse body of interpretation of the text, the theology, and so on, but there is much less on "living Islam," on the religious practices and behaviors of Muslims in different historical and cultural contexts.

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This particular domain is still terra incognita. We know a lot about political Islam, about the Muslim Brotherhood, about different Muslim states, the politicization of Islam, but the different forms of Islamic religiosity remain pretty much unknown. So, this was my first purpose in the book: to relay the research I started in Europe and then continue here in America about these concrete religious practices among Muslims in different contexts.

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The second point is related to the construction of the so-called exceptionalism of Islam. I have repeatedly encountered the idea that Islam has an opposite set of values from the West. Now the West is America, but for centuries it was Europe. A few years ago, I did some historical work to trace the major events of this kind of stereotyping and representation. In the beginning, there were some historical grounds and events to fuel or nurture this kind of vision of a complete opposition between Islam and the West, but over time, it has turned into a stereotype. The different images of Islam (violence, fanaticism, etc.) still used today are in fact part of the historical confrontation between Muslim societies and Europe in the Mediterranean area. You have to go back to medieval times to understand how this opposition between the West and Islam has been constructed. You can start at the Crusades and go through the confrontation between modern Europe and the Ottoman Empire, then colonialism, and now imperialism. The point has always been that Islam can't fit into the Western political or cultural project at any moment. The irony is that despite this continuous rhetoric of opposition, there were some transcultural moments, that is, mutual cultural influences.

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With Muslims living in Western Europe and in the U.S., we are again in a transcultural moment where we have to redefine ourselves in dialogue and discussion with Muslims, but we tend not to see it this way. We tend to see Muslims immigrating and being faced with the challenge to adjust themselves to the new regime, the new culture, the new political principles. Especially in Europe, but also here, we see it only as an obligation for Muslims—"Please, show us how you are good citizens and how you can fit into our project"—without realizing that the project itself is changed because of the inclusion of Islam and Muslims. All the research shows that actually there is a mutual transformation going on that is changing European and American societies, especially after 9/11.

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Americans may be more aware of that, because this is a country through immigration, so they know that each group of newcomers brings something, especially after the Civil Rights Movement. Even if the melting pot never really existed, there is this representation that "all together we contribute to create something new," which is not part of the European narrative.

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You say that a racialized conception of Islam has actually been far more prominent in Europe than it has in the U.S., in the past at least. But you also say that, post-9/11, the U.S. is becoming more like Europe than the other way around. Can you explain more?

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It used to be that there was a significant difference between Western Europe and the U.S. concerning their perceptions of Islam and Muslims. Of course, the negative perception of Islam was already here in the U.S. before 9/11, because Islam has been on the international agenda for a long time, with the end of the Soviet Union and the peaking of political Islam in different parts of the Muslim world. Think, for example, of the hostage crisis in Iran in 1979. But, in America, there was a disconnection between Islam as an element of the international agenda and Muslims at the domestic level, American Muslims. Although there have been some outbursts of anger targeting Muslims, such as after the first World Trade Center bombing and also the Oklahoma City bombing that was initially (and falsely) attributed to Muslims, the violence always goes down. With the exception of these crisis moments, Muslims in America have never been really bothered or discriminated against in developing Islam here. This ability to develop Islam is unknown to Muslims in Europe, where, since the beginning, Muslims from within have been seen as part of a transnational political problem.

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Is this because of the countervailing trend you point to in the U.S., which has to do with how we view religion in general?

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Yes, that's part of it. To say it in a very trivial way, I think that Europeans—in particular the French, but Germans also, and now even the Dutch—tend to have a problem with the status of religion in public space. Americans have a problem with race. The color line is a real divide here, even among Muslims, but the religious divide doesn't make sense in American national identity and national rhetoric. That is because religion has been part of the fabric of citizenship here in a way that is unknown in Europe. Peter Berger at Boston University likes to say that Europe is maybe the only secularized place in the world. He doesn't mean it in terms of institutional arrangements and the separation of church and state, but in terms of the status of religion in civil life. How do people deal with religion on a daily basis? Is it part of their civic engagement or their public postures? In Europe, it's not. You don't need to show yourself as a religious person or believer in civic society, and actually it can even be seen as suspicious if you do. Religion is often seen as a threat to public order, which is the opposite of here, at least until 9/11.

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The attitude toward religion in the U.S, not to mention the legal traditions of protecting religious freedom, helped Muslims in the building of religious institutions before 9/11. Since 9/11, the situation is different, and we really need to learn more about how Muslims are changing loyalties and identifications after 9/11, and whether, perhaps, the very status of religion is going to change in America.

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You say, "Muslims seem not to be the masters of their own identity in their adopted countries." Why is that?

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First, I do think that there is this meta-narrative on Islam that is very powerful, leading to all the discourse that automatically associates Islam with violence and fanaticism. This discourse is conveyed by politicians, by the media, but in Europe—and here to some extent—it is even conveyed by public intellectuals. One of the big changes I've noticed after 9/11 is that suddenly it's not even a nuanced, critical discourse anymore—it's an insult. More in Europe than here, 9/11 gave permission to people to use very rude and crude terms, whereas before they would have tried to be more politically correct. This is something that has really struck me in the last three years. For instance, a famous French novelist said publicly, "Islam is the religion of assholes."

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Full-text of the interview available, click here.

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