Muslims in Europe A Shared Citizenship Transcending the Imposition of Cultural Homogeneity
Historical Memories and Biases: From Past to Present
Both religion and culture shape behavior, the way we view and understand the world and thus can be seen as a “perception- shaping lens” within us. It is this perception-shaping lens which has not only framed the encounter of the West with Islam but Europe’s own religious experience. Regarding the latter, the absence of a theocracy in Islam has meant two different historical experiences and empirical differences in the relationship with religion. Islam has not witnessed a confrontation or struggle against a repressive religious order or “Church” that was intolerant to any kind of dissent and stifled intellectual and scientific thought. For Europe this resulted in displacing religion from the political sphere which was to be secular, rational and representative.
In the complex relations between Islam and the West it is the discourse of war and rivalry which has dominated, as compared to the fact that there were also very rich and fertile encounters. Islam’s legacy in Europe is evident in its contribution to science and culture even if it is Christianity which has served as the overall frame of reference. Yet as writers note “most Westerners have been taught that the greatness of the West has its intellectual roots in Greece and Rome, and that after the thousand–year sleep of the Dark Ages, Europe miraculously reawakened to its Greco–Roman roots.”
Historically Islam has been for more than a thousand years the west’s main rival or hostile other with inherited images of the enemy ‘at the gate’ the ‘Turks before Vienna.’ Akbar Ahmed pointedly observes that at two opposite ends of Europe both the tangled and disfigured architecture of the mosque of Cordova in the west (mosque converted to church) and the church, St. Sophia at Constantinople in the east (church converted to mosque) were a metaphor for the Christian-Muslim struggle. However at the same time for Muslims, memories of western colonialism, domination and neo-imperialism are more recent.
Furthermore for many Westerners Islam is the complete opposite of what distinguishes and characterizes the secular-West specifically, freedom, democracy, human rights, and modernity. Thus as Hurd elaborates more than any other single religious or political tradition, Islam represents the “non-secular” in European political discourse. This is because secularist traditions, and the European national identities and practices with which they are affiliated and in which they are embedded, have been constructed through opposition to Islam. Therefore, the divergent narratives of secularism and religion especially when manifested in the form of Islam pose a challenge in the context of the changing dynamics of a multi-national, multi-ethnic and multi-religious (even if relegated to the private sphere) European society.
