Interrogating Muslims: The Liberal-Secular Matrix of Integration

203 Pages·2022·1.387 MB·English

by  Schirin Amir-Moazami

Acknowledgments
This book is the result of a long journey across various institutions, across various
scholarships, and especially across various encounters and conversations that
have contributed to its emergence.
I would like to thank the Bundesministerium für Bildung und Forschung
(BMBF) for the funding of a joint research project “Muslims in Europe” and the
fruitful conversations with colleagues at the Institute of Comparative Cultural
and Social Anthropology at the European University Viadrina in Frankfurt/
Oder and the Zentrum Moderner Orient (ZMO) in Berlin. My main gratitude
goes to Dietrich Reetz, the spokesperson of the research group, and to Werner
Schiffauer, the mentor of my project.
I am also deeply indebted to my colleagues at the Institute of Islamic Studies
at Freie Universität Berlin as well as the Graduate School Muslim Cultures and
Societies for offering me a generous space for developing my own teaching and
research profile of Islam in Europe. I am especially thankful to Gudrun Krämer
for her tireless support and for her openness for unconventional research and
teaching perspectives. I thank Sonja Eising and Angela Ballaschk for their
amazing help and for keeping the institute together. I cannot thank the students
enough for their energy and curiosity to engage in complex and sometimes
uncomfortable issues and for their thoughtful questions and discussions.
I benefitted a lot from the inspiring intellectual environment at the
University of Bristol during my Benjamin Meaker guest professorship. I would
like to thank in particular Tariq Modood for his invitation and for many
thought-provoking conversations, and Aleksandra Lewicki for her intellectual
company and friendship.
My gratitude also goes to my colleagues at the Cluster of Excellence
Contestations of the Liberal Script (SCRIPTS) for ongoing inspiring
conversations, and to the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft German Research
Foundation for their generous financial support.
Acknowledgments vii
Many of the ideas and perspectives developed in this book have emerged
from extremely inspiring discussions with colleagues and friends of the network
Configurations of Muslim Traditions in European Secular Public Spheres, funded
by the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research. The same is true for
the network “Unfolding the ‘Muslim Question’. Towards a genealogy of religious
freedom and the minority question in Western European nation states,” funded
by the Blankensee-Colloquium at the Institute for Advanced Studies in Berlin.
For the latter I am particularly grateful to my co-organizers Nadia Fadil and
Sarah Bracke for numerous fruitful exchanges.
I am incredibly thankful to Ruth Mas for her generous feedback on all
chapters of the book, for her sharpness and intellectual spirit, and for the many
wonderful hours we spent together during her different stays in Berlin.
I would like to thank the series editors Frank Peter and Kambiz
GhaneaBassiri for having read all chapters carefully and for their extremely
helpful comments. Likewise, I am thankful to the two anonymous reviewers,
who gave me very productive feedback on earlier versions of the manuscript.
Lalle Pursglove and Lily McMahon from Bloomsbury have also been of
tremendous support.
Finally, I would like to express my gratitude to my family. First and foremost,
I thank my mother Renate Amir-Moazami who left us far too early but whose
strength and love will continue to accompany me. I am thankful to my dear
father Behjat Amir-Moazami for his trust, love, and warmth. My gratitude to
Barbara Witton’s energy, support, and generosity can hardly be expressed in
words. I thank my sister Susann for always being there for me, and I thank
my niece Kimia for many inspiring conversations and fresh thoughts. My
deep gratitude goes to Mika Hannula for his intellectual rigor, for his endless
encouragements, for his love, and partnership during the (too) long process
of getting this book done. Our beloved children Yuri and Aila have been a
constant source of joy and they also helped me to put things into perspective.
viii Acknowledgments
Parts of Chapter 3 were first published in:
2018 “Epistemologien der ‘muslimischen Frage’ in Europa” in Schirin Amir-Moazami
(ed.): Der inspizierte Muslim. Zur Politisierung der Islamforschung in Europa,
Bielefeld: transcript, 91–123.
2021 “Epistemologies of the ‘Muslim Question’ : On the Politics of Knowledge
Production in a Minefield”, in Amélie Barras, Jennifer A. Selby and Melanie
Adrian (eds.): Producing Islam(s) in Canada: On Knowledge, Positionality, and
Politics, Toronto: Toronto University Press, 27–49.
Parts of Chapter 5 were first published in:
2016 “Zur Produktion loyaler Staatsbürger: Einbürgerungstests als Instrument der
Regulierung von religiös-kultureller Pluralität in Deutschland“, in Aleksandra
Lewicki (ed.): Soziale Bewegungen, Special Issue: Bürgerschaft und soziale
Bewegungen in der Einwanderungsgesellschaft, 29 (2), 21–34.
Introduction
Muslims and Islam in Europe are on the spot. No debate about religious
plurality, immigration societies, or “refugee crises” passes without the
evocation of Islam as the central target. This discursive incitement is
coupled with a whole set of political measures and interventions of which
integration has turned into a master paradigm. In the intertwined processes of
securitization and recognition, calls for integration revolve around debates on
Muslim populations and the institutionalization of Islam (Brunn 2012; Mavelli
2012; Schinkel 2017; Tezcan 2012). Proclamations such as “naturalizing
Islam,”1 turning Muslims in France into “French Muslims” (Fernando 2014),
or creating a “Euro-Islam” (Mavelli 2012) are its most pertinent political-
rhetorical devices.
Integration can, of course, mean many different things. The term “integrate”
derived in the seventeenth century from the Latin word “integrat”—“make
whole,” also based on the sixteenth-century use of the term integer—“intact,
whole” (Concise Oxford English Dictionary). When employed in contexts of
immigration today, integration imposes itself as a remedy for a seemingly
fragmented, non-cohesive, and therefore deficient society because of
immigration. Integration can be oriented toward the enhancement of equal
opportunities in educational institutions or in the labor market to achieve
the social equality of immigrant populations. It can also be directed at the
recognition of cultural or religious practices considered minoritarian. And it
can involve attempts to remodel these very minoritarian practices according
to majoritarian rules, norms, and lifestyles. While thus mobilizing a variety
of—partly contradictory—political practices, integration is centrally about
managing the segregation of what is considered particular and exceptional
from what is considered as general and normal.
2 Interrogating Muslims
In short, the demand for integration is expansive and little contested. Its
operations are rarely laid bare, and its normative underpinnings are largely
taken for granted, even if there is no consensus whatsoever regarding its concrete
implications. In this book I suggest moving a couple of steps sideways. Rather
than joining the chorus on the critical importance of improving integration in
order to create a more cohesive society, I seek to denaturalize the very quest for
integration. Instead of asking if what Muslims are doing, saying, or thinking
is indicative of their integration into immigration societies, I interrogate the
conditions of this very interrogation, the discursive patterns that it takes, its
liberal and secular presuppositions, and also the aporias running through
the very promise and quest for integration. I interrogate the grounds on
which the politics of integration are justified and reasoned upon, and how
they consolidate rather than disrupt divisions between seemingly unmarked
majorities and marked minorities. I ask what the discourses and practices of
integration do, whence their salience derives, and why Muslims have become
their central focus. I interrogate the language that organizes the grammar of
integration. I ask what contours the liberal-secular matrix of state power gain
when specific minorities—in this case Muslims—are interrogated as subjects
of integration. And I ask how the paradigm of integration in its ambition of
inclusivity navigates between universalistic claims and particularistic—racial
and religious—reenactments of a secular nation-state framework. Addressing
this set of questions in this book I centrally argue that integration directed
toward Muslims as a “religious minority” in Europe is indicative of the problems
that it purports to resolve. I therefore do not so much ask how the integration
of Muslims into the social fabric of European nation-states could be improved.
Instead I take integration seriously as a political program which is imbricated
in, and productive of, complex operations of power and its functions to secure
the authority of the secular nation-state.
To unfold this argument, I take Germany as my point of departure. In
Germany public, political, and academic discourses on integration have
exploded in the last two decades as an answer to the seeming absence of a
coherent policy that would respond to the fact that Germany has become a
country of immigration. In light of the cyclically reemerging “refugee crises,”
the call for integration has gained further salience since 2015. The “law on
integration” (Integrationsgesetz), implemented in August 2016,2 has endowed
Introduction 3
this program with an additional—legal—dimension. Migrants settling into
Germany can now be obliged to take integration classes in which they must
learn German, and become acquainted with the basic rights and principles of
German society.
Very similar to other European countries, integration discourses in
Germany have increasingly centered on the governance of religious plurality,
generally, and of Muslims in particular (Brunn 2012; Fülling 2019; Schlerka
2021; Tezcan 2012). Its associated slogan “Demand and Support” (Fördern
und Fordern) has been put forward in state-led integration programs and in
the Immigration Act of 20053. This slogan shows that this paradigm is driven
by the ambivalent goal of assisting immigrants or people marked as such
in settling and participating in society, while at the same time signaling the
conditions and limits of this endeavor. Immigrants generally, and Muslims in
particular, are requested to “do” something in exchange for the support they
receive by the state or by society at large.
Precisely because political authorities consistently denied that Germany had
become an immigration society, scholars of migration often praised the move
toward integration as an overdue step (Bade 2007, 2017; Heckmann 2014;
Joppke 2010). Many had already called for the social and economic integration
of migrant workers from the late 1970s onwards, when “guest workers” were
not adjusting to the rotating system of a cheap labor force and to the logic
of the labor market, and instead permanently settled in Germany (Bade
2007; Fincke 2009; Heckmann 2014).4 Calls for the integration of Muslims in
particular have been endorsed as the overdue acknowledgment that Germany
has turned into an immigration society (Foroutan 2010; Heckmann 2014;
Laurence 2011).
Raising the question of how integration could gain this largely uncontested
status for addressing the presence of Muslims in Germany, I expand the
scholarship of critical migration studies (Castro Varela 2013; El-Mafalaani
2018; Ha 2007; Hess, Binder and Moser 2009). These scholars have critically
examined the normative premises of integration discourses, and the power
dynamics involved in the one-sided request for certain populations to integrate.
They have shown that integration programs are largely unable to address social
inequalities on a structural level and instead treat immigrants paternalistically
with a mission to pacify and civilize them.
4 Interrogating Muslims
On a conceptual level Willem Schinkel’s monograph Imagined Soceities. A
Critique of Immigrant Integration in Western Europe (2017) stands out as the
most relevant for my own analysis. Schinkel couples his critique of integration
with a critical inquiry into social theory. He argues that integration fulfills the
function of imagining “society” in holistic terms by constructing immigrants
as subpopulations that are set apart. Social theory itself, Schinkel claims, has
been epistemologically complicit of this binary. With their conceptualizations
social theorists provided the ingredients for the social imaginary of “society”
as a bounded entity. People considered in need of integration into “society,”
conceived of in such holistic terms, are necessarily constituted as “people apart.”
In the very moment in which these “people apart” are addressed distinctively
from what is considered the norm, this very norm takes shape, which in turn
secures the notion of a totalized society. Schinkel shows at length how social
science knowledge production has been productive of this operation:
Precisely because inside and outside are at the same time a consequence of
the working of “society” they cannot be regarded as separate terrains that
conform to a realist opposition between “society” and its “outside.” And
so … when the sociology of immigrant integration opposes “society” to
groups and individuals that are “not (well) integrated,” it contributes to the
imagination and thus the very formation of “society,” even though it claims
to describe as given the object and its environment, its transformations and
its identity. The same goes for social theory more generally: it has itself been
part of a more encompassing social imagination.
(Schinkel 2017: 37)
This performative function assigned to sociological knowledge can thus be
understood as a form of governing social reality by constructing it through
knowledge. While Schinkel has convincingly analyzed how integration works
as an enabling force of an allegedly holistic core of “society” by constituting
immigrants as eroding society’s margins, the role and function of the nation-
state therein still require more careful attention. Schinkel, moreover, has
observed an increasing culturalization of integration discourses across Europe.
This has entailed an asymmetric focus on Muslims as being encompassed
by a distinctive “culture.” Schinkel, however, does only marginally discuss
the question of how, when, and to what end “culture” has become almost
univocally equated with “Islam.” Similarly, the question of how the politics
Introduction 5
of integration sit on a longer legacy of interrogating “problematic” racial or
religious minorities still needs more careful attention.
I therefore expand and complicate Schinkel’s approach in two important
ways. First, I suggest a slightly different temporality: Despite their current
rise to prominence in dealing with immigration as an irreversible reality,
integration discourses are not unprecedented in German history. Their legacy
is located in the formation of modern nation-states and their simultaneous
production and inclusion of national, religious, or cultural “minorities.” To
show this, I do not provide a historiographical analysis. I rather build my
argument on Zygmunt Bauman’s conceptual elaborations on the paradoxes
of assimilation as a technique of power closely related to what Bauman
has called the “gardening forces” of the modern state (1991: 28; 178),
and its specific manifestation in the assimilation of Jews in Germany (see
also Arendt 1951; Aumüller 2009; Jansen 2013; Markell 2003: Chapter 5).
Bauman understands assimilation as a technique of governing a disturbing
cultural and religious plurality in the course of nation-state formation and its
ambitions for homogeneity and order. Assimilation, Bauman argues, works
as a trap: while promising inclusion into a national community, assimilation
marks, manages, and transforms incompatible difference into something
familiar.
I do not claim that integration is the same as assimilation or that the
Jewish minority in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries could easily
be equated with the situation of Muslims in Germany today. I rather follow
Ann L. Stoler’s suggestion to think of repercussions of past events or processes
in terms of “recursions” (2016). “Recursions,” according to Stoler, are not
simple repetitions of historical, social, and political processes: “Rather, they
are processes of partial reinscriptions, modified displacements, and amplified
recuperations” (Stoler 2016: 27). Throughout the different chapters, and
most notably in Chapter 1, I argue that integration today operates as such
a reinscription of assimilation. I therefore lay emphasis on the complex
reworkings of the trap that is entailed in the dynamics of the conditional state-
offered support for minoritized groups.
Assimilation revolved around somatic metaphors of organic “cultures,”
or the “nation” as an imagined body (Volkskörper). In the paradigm of
integration instead, somatic aspirations are both inscribed and concealed in
6 Interrogating Muslims
the frequent request for Muslims to be loyal to the liberal-secular contract
by bracketing their religious sensibilities and opening up to allegedly abstract
liberal principles. I therefore locate political programs of Muslim integration
in Germany in the genealogy of the secular nation-state and its production
of (religious) minorities. I raise the question of how in a consolidated
liberal-secular nation-state the presence of Muslims brings to the fore
distinctions between established citizens and outsiders (not yet or not quite
citizens), and how a liberal and secular lexicon conceals the embodied contours
of these very distinctions.
It is in this vein that I secondly expand Schinkel’s view on the relationship
between integration and secularism. Pertaining to this connection, Schinkel
writes that “secularism operates in the same plane as religion, as a program
that allows for the attribution of inside/outside values through topics debated
with a view to the secular and the religious. Secularism is part of a larger self
problematization of ‘society’” (Schinkel 2017: 32). Throughout the different
chapters I show that the politics of integration in liberal-secular nation-
states do not merely work through distinctions made between “inside/
outside values.” The integration of Muslims rather operates by conditionally
embracing religious difference, while at the same time transforming it to make
it compatible with contingent understandings of religion’s legitimate place in
public life. To show this requires more careful attention to the secular state in
its enabling and monitoring functions. And it also requires attentiveness to the
distinctive liberal commitment to accommodate religion while guarding the
borders between the religious and the political. I thus argue that projects that
organize the institutionalization of Islam and the social integration of Muslims
in Germany are animated by a contingent liberal-secular matrix through
which the sovereign state, in close connection with civil society, is empowered
to decide what counts as proper and improper religion.
Furthermore, my genealogically informed reading of contemporary
discourses on the integration of Muslims is inspired by the postcolonial
scholarship that has put emphasis on the colonial patterns prevalent in today’s
governance of Islam and Muslims in Europe, most notably France (Davidson
2012; Fernando 2014; Mas 2006; Scott Wallach 2019; Silverstein 2004).
These approaches have challenged the recurrent assumption that Islam and
Muslims would have been discovered unprecedentedly as a problem after 9/11.
Introduction 7
Arguably, 9/11 reinforced the racialization of Muslims by an expansive security
apparatus or by the quasi-natural categorization of immigrants as “Muslims.”
However, the deeper rootedness of these discourses and the related emphasis
on integration have to be located prior to 9/11 and even prior to post-Second
World War migration.
Recently, scholars have started to account for this deeper rootedness in
Germany. They denoted analogies between Islamophobia and nineteenth-,
early twentieth-century anti-Semitism (Keskinkılıç 2019; Shooman 2015) and
observed that contemporary discourses on Muslims and Islam in Germany
echo Orientalist tropes (e.g. Attia 2009; Keskinkilic 2019; Shooman 2014). The
complex question more rarely posed is how these tropes are translated into
liberal projects of accommodating difference and managing minorities today.
Integration projects which govern Muslims with the incentive of according
Islam its legitimate place within German society, and sometimes in explicit
rejection of enmity and segregation, thus tend to escape from view. Sometimes,
Muslim integration even figures as a counter-strategy to Islamophobia and is
celebrated as paving the way for “Muslims’ emancipation” (Laurence 2011).
These shortcomings derive from a narrow analytics of power, which does not
account for the powers of liberalism. But they also stem from the fact that
secularism as a structuring feature of religious plurality has not been taken
seriously into account in the scholarship on Islamophobia or anti-Muslim
racism in Germany.
The intimate intertwinement between integration and politics of Islam
in contemporary Germany in its partly tacit operations of power cannot
be fully grasped if we do not recall the older legacies in which Islam has
been conceptualized as subordinate to Christianity, and subsequently, as
subordinate to political secularism. This also implies recalling the imperial
and colonial legacy of a “spatialized knowledge regime” (Jackson 2019) in
which Islam was constructed as the external friend or, more frequently, the
enemy of European Christianity (Marchand 2010; Salvatore 1999; Stauth
1993). It is in this context that the notion of “politics of Islam” (Islampolitik)
as a specific mode of governing Muslims was coined by Orientalists such
as Carl Heinrich Becker when German imperialism was endangered. In
Germany today, politics of Islam is frequently coupled with approaches to
Muslims as subjects of integration (Fülling 2019; Tezcan 2012). It is therefore