ABSTRACT
Following the 9/11 terrorist attacks in the US, Madrid and msot recently in London (7/7 and 21/7), Western societies are in fear of international, Islamist groups. The concern of this chapter, as of the book as a whole, is on the domestic politics of civic multiculturalism. Independently of and predating these attacks, there is a widespread perception that Muslims are making politically exceptional, culturally unreasonable or theologically alien demands upon European states. My contention is that the logic of Muslim claims-making is European and contemporary. The case of Britain is illustrative. The relation between Muslims and the wider British society and British State has to be seen in terms of a development and rising agendas of racial equality and multiculturalism. Muslims, indeed, have become central to these agendas even while they have contested important aspects of it – especially, the primacy of racial identities, narrow definitions of racism and equality and the secular bias of the discourse and policies of multiculturalism. While there are now emergent Muslim discourses of equality, of difference, and of, to use the motto of the newsletter of the Muslim Council of Britain, ‘the common good’, they have to be understood as appropriations and modulations of contemporary discourses and initiatives whose provenance lies in anti-racism and feminism. While one result of this is to throw advocates of multiculturalism into theoretical and practical disarray, another is to stimulate accusations of cultural separatism and revive a discourse of ‘integration’. While we should not ignore the critics of Muslim activism, we need to recognize that at least some of the latter is a politics of ‘catching up’ with racial equality and feminism. In this way, religion in Britain is assuming a renewed political importance. After a long period of hegemony, political secularism can no longer be taken for granted but is having to answer its critics as there is a growing understanding that the incorporation of Muslims has become the most important challenge of egalitarian multiculturalism.
