Introduction

Since 2001, the figure of the ‘young Muslim’ has become a prominent object of knowledge within British public discourse. Anxieties that a disaffected and radicalized Muslim youth might become willing recruits capable of perpetrating acts of terrorism on behalf of al-Qaida and its affiliates have compelled government, media, academia and third sector organizations such as think-tanks and charities to commission, produce, publish and disseminate research, analysis, policy reports, narratives and images that constitute the discourse (in the Foucauldian sense – disciplined and regulated by institutional mechanisms of state and nonstate power) about young Muslims in Britain today. Much, indeed most, of this has corroborated and confirmed existing tropes and connotations about Islam and Muslims that have become sedimented into the collective cultural habitus over centuries; some has contested and challenged them. In the course of this chapter, I will reflect on some wider theoretical questions pertaining not just to the difficulties, challenges and opportunities of being young and Muslim in Britain today as reflected by this knowledge, particularly that branch of it that might be called ‘academic research’, but also its relationship to the ‘real life’ that exists both within and beyond the sum of its representations. These are questions I have dwelt upon a great deal, ever since I embarked

upon the project that was eventually published as my book Young British Muslim Voices – not least because, as an academic literary critic, my professional training usually concerns itself with fictional as opposed to real lives, although the relation of fiction to reality is, of course, a complex and vexed one2

(Mondal, 2008a). The real lives I encountered during the course of that research problematized for me the very nature of academic research itself for the problem I constantly encountered was the tension between the singularity of individual experience and the necessary abstractions that ensue when those experiences are translated, via our analytical concepts and categories, into knowledge. For, in a strict epistemological – as opposed to, say, existential or ethical – sense, experience does not signify until and unless it is absorbed and understood through categories of knowledge. To put it another way, an experience is not significant until it is seen to be part of a larger pattern or system that speaks to,

and is spoken by, the ideas and concepts that motivate and determine our knowledge. The central problem framing academic research into real life is, therefore, the

relation of the general to the particular, of analysis to description. It is one that Dipesh Chakrabarty, in his book Provincializing Europe, characterizes as the tension between the analytical tradition (which operates through abstractions, generalizations, conceptualization and ‘grand narratives’), for whom the paradigmatic figures are Marx and Weber, and the hermeneutic tradition (which concentrates on the particular, the singular, the unique, and operates through a mode of ‘thick’ description), which follows Heidegger and the phenomenologists (Chakrabarty, 2000, p. 18). The other way to put this is to evoke the definitive problematic within social analysis between structure and agency. The point that I take from Chakrabarty, however, is that one cannot choose one or other of these positions but rather both – shuttling back and forth between the analytical and general, the hermeneutic and the particular (Chakrabarty, 2000, p. 107). That is, for academic research to be ‘research’ one cannot simply describe; one must analyze, evaluate and deploy categories and concepts even as one becomes insistently aware that the experiences which we are attempting to analyze are constantly exceeding the horizons of our thought. Experience, then, is always slipping through our fingers, an excess that always remains partially outside knowledge even as we try to bring it into discourse. One might argue that this ‘excess’ is the space of agency, of individuality, of liberty, of desire, of play – and of the necessary failure of knowledge to grasp its object, of truth to be fully present in any given truth claim. Acknowledgement of this fact involves an ethical gesture of humility before the ordinary sublimity of ‘real life’ that is seldom undertaken by those of us who have both invested (government, funding bodies, universities) and have an investment in (researchers and our readers) the truth claims that ‘academic research’ purports to deliver. This is perhaps particularly the case with respect to the purely analytical

tradition that constitutes the bulk of contemporary quantitative social research. As an illustration of how the hermeneutic tradition might consistently disturb and unsettle the truth claims of its analytical counterpart, I would like to stage here a reading of Eric Kaufmann’s demographic analysis of religion and religious politics in contemporary Europe, and in particular his critique, using quantitative methodology, of ‘Eurabian’ claims that the population growth of Muslims in Europe will soon result in the chimera of a majority-Muslim Europe (hence the term ‘Eurabia’) sooner or later3 (Kaufmann, 2010a). I should add that I find Kaufmann’s careful scrutiny and forensic demolition of the ‘Eurabian’ thesis entirely welcome. The supposed demographic ‘threat’ of Europe’s growing Muslim population to its culture and identity is a dogwhistle trope in the many contemporary debates about Muslims, immigration, integration and multiculturalism: barely audible at mainstream frequencies, it nevertheless possesses a shrill power to conjure up from the submerged depths of Europe’s collective unconscious all sorts of phantoms and fantasies about

the Muslim ‘Other’. Such claims invariably prey on ignorance and fear and wither when exposed to the cold light of fact and the illumination of rational analysis. And yet it is the nature of this illumination that I am concerned with here.

Kaufmann’s conclusions concerning the veracity of the Eurabian hypotheses rest on the claim that ‘[d]emography is the most predictable of social science, much more so than economics’ (p. 57), and whilst this is perfectly adequate in assessing the Eurabianist arguments since these are made on demographic grounds, other aspects of his wider argument are problematic precisely because there are good reasons to doubt the maxim he proposes that ‘demography is destiny’ (p. 57). Notwithstanding the fact that the hard data of demography – population statistics across a range of criteria – must be translated into and, in a Derridean sense, necessarily supplemented by its other, discursive prose, the science of demography – and, by extension, the discourses of all the human sciences such as sociology, economics, political science, etc. – is subject to the insistent and troubling pressure of questions concerning language, representation and interpretation. Its supposedly objective ‘facts’ can, therefore, never be separated from the subjective nature of these troubling questions. Although demography may be perfectly capable of quantifying and projecting the

size and scope of populations and groups, it is much less adequate in analyzing the nature of those populations, especially when it comes to questions concerning culture, ethnicity, identity and ideology. These depend less on the numbers of people per se (the realm of demography) and more on what goes on inside their heads. It would be a crude kind of empiricism that truly advances the idea that demography can analyze and illuminate the more nebulous aspects of social life in the way psychology or the study of ideology and culture can, but that is what Kaufmann seems to suggest (the ‘demography is destiny’ epithet is clearly an allusion to Freud’s ‘biology is destiny’). Unsurprisingly, he addresses the question of ‘integration’ primarily in demo-

graphic terms. ‘Intermarriage is arguably the best barometer of assimilation’ (p. 57), he suggests and, leaving aside the many slippages that conflate ‘integration’ with ‘assimilation’, I am inclined to agree: it is arguable. In fact, it is highly contestable since it could be argued that intermarriage represents merely one particular form of integration and not the sum of all possible paths towards it. Of course, intermarriage is exactly the kind of integration a demographer can evaluate because it can be reduced to bare statistics. As it happens, Kaufmann himself acknowledges other – more important – forms of integration that are also demographically analyzable. He notes, for example, the ‘assimilation’ of European Muslim fertility rates to ‘host society norms’ – an ‘integration’ based on the movement towards European family, work and social patterns but not on intermarriage (p. 58). This is just one aspect of the Europeanization of Muslim immigrants that many studies have already noticed (including a Europe-wide survey of Muslim attitudes, opinions and behaviours produced by The Open Society Institute),4 some of which can be measured, whilst others must be observed and analyzed using different methodology.