ABSTRACT
Recent observers of the ways minorities, and especially Muslims, of a non-European migration attribution get framed in public discourses in Europe have noted the labelling of Muslims as Others that is based on a culturalised understanding of Europeanness vs. Muslimity (cf. Balibar 1991; Hüttermann 2009; Ezli 2009; Tezcan 2008; Schiffauer 2007). These critiques of culturalism hinge on the argument that minorities in contemporary western, especially European, societies are symbolically constructed in political and public discourses. Sometimes those arguments are extended into a conceptualization of the state of minorities as constitutive Others and as those that are excluded through instruments of alleged inclusion (see Schwarz 2010). Through policies and institutions that have been deliberately set up in order to integrate Muslims into the majority society, like the policy of community integration in the UK and the Deutsche Islam Konferenz, it is argued, a Muslim subject is constructed by way of reference to cultural characteristics attributed to Islam (patriarchy, religious intolerance, inclination to support authoritarian political systems, etc.), on which basis that subject is then held liable to respond to the demands of the political system (cf. McGhee 2003; Tezcan 2011).
