Secularity, Republicanism and Communitarism in the Euro-Islamic Public Sphere

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Theory, Culture &

DOI: 10.1177/02632764070750032007; 24; 135Theory Culture Society

Armando Salvatorein the Emerging Euro-Islamic Public Sphere

Authority in Question: Secularity, Republicanism and Communitarianism

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Authority in QuestionSecularity, Republicanism and

Communitarianism in the EmergingEuro-Islamic Public Sphere

Armando Salvatore

Introduction: The Politicization of Islam in EuropeanPublic Spheres

STRUGGLES OVER the place of religion in the public sphere, likethose over the Christian cross in state school classrooms in Germany

and Italy (see Auslander, 2000; Salih, 2004a), have provided highlymediatized cases of continual tensions in the contemporary framing of secu-larity in European societies. An uninterrupted series of such public disputesspecifically related to the presence in Europe of populations of Muslimbackground have assumed a particular virulence since the first eruption ofthe affaire des foulards in France and the concomitant Rushdie Affair inGreat Britain in 1989. All these struggles should be situated within a long-term process of defining the norms and procedures that regulate public life,of the values that institute the political community, and of a safe place for

religious commitments therein. These conflicts are related to the questionof whether there is a space for public religion within secularized societies(see Casanova, 1994). Yet in those controversies revolving around Islamicissues the specifically European character of the question has been largelybracketed out. The focus of those disputes has been on Islams allegeddeficit in terms of commitment to democracy and human rights, vis-a-visEuropean norms and values.

Differences in national traditions concerning the relations betweenreligious groups and state authorities have given way, in the last quarter of

the 20th century, to what is increasingly perceived as a more specific

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insights provided by a movement-based criticism, this approach could alsohelp to liberate the sociology of religion from an obsessive orientationtowards its classics, which quite neatly coincide with the master works inthe social theory of European modernity. In other words, there might be some

latent use value in case studies on controversies over Islam in Europe forsevering the umbilical tie between the sociology of religion and thediscourse on the self-understanding of European modernity.

This article can only suggest a possible starting point for such agigantic task. In order to approach this goal, I will try to recover, throughthe analysis of two separate, yet intertwined public disputes both takingplace in France yet widely echoed in other European countries, wheresimilar questions are intensely debated sociological insights into thematerial, intellectual and symbolic factors that produce the hegemonic

discourse on secularity and republicanism, and its challenge through newkinds of purportedly universalistic, republican and in some ways secularargument promoted by Muslim scholars and activists. The first such disputeconcerns the role in the movement known as the European Social Forum(ESF), the umbrella organization of European groups fighting againstneoliberal globalization (also known as alterglobalization movement), of themost vocal and by now almost iconic European Muslim leader TariqRamadan; the second revolves around the work of the French presidentialcommission on lacitin the republic. Both disputes climaxed in the last

part of 2003 but had wide repercussions during 2004 and 2005. The morespecific hypothesis to be tested is whether a Euro-Islamic public sphereis slowly emerging that features a variety of institutional and movement-based Muslim and non-Muslim voices. Hypothetically, this public spherefinds coherence around the interrogation and criticism of the discourseslegitimizing a securitization of the issue of Islam in Europe. Yet it alsoembraces larger questions concerning the redefinition of secularity, repub-licanism and, inversely, communitarianism (see Salvatore, 2004). It iswithin this public sphere that seeds for a critical interrogation of basic

categories of the European sociology of religion have been implanted.While until recently Muslim thinkers in Europe have been at the inter-face between transnational Islamic discussions and specifically Europeanproblems concerning the distinctive features of an emerging Euro-Islam(Mandaville, 2003: 12729), the debates here analysed show seeds of atrend that blurs the borders between Muslim and non-Muslim voices inEurope, and between problems of European and of transnational Islam.Euro-Islam is here intended not as a Europeanized Islam to be shapedthrough appropriate measures by the political authorities and the good willof European Muslims, but, increasingly, as a constitutive dimension ofEuropean public spheres and their discursive formations, cutting throughvarious national publics and at some crucial junctures unifying them intoone single Euro-Islamic sphere. Problems surfacing in one country areeagerly debated in other countries and not just terrorism. Euro-Islam isintended here not as a compact discourse but, more precisely and also more

Salvatore Authority in Question 137



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realistically, as a space for discourse variously reflecting or critiquingrealities on the ground.

The Islamic Bid for Participatory Democracy: Universalistic

or Communitarian?I suggest unpacking the notion of political Islam by what is probably aconvenient short-cut: considering the distinctive positioning of someEuropean Muslim actors and voices who cater to the youngest, educatedgenerations and promote battles for justice and solidarity in terms of partic-ipatory democracy. This type of discourse is an ambivalent re-articulationof some resources of the longer-term trajectory of Islamic reform developedsince the 19th century from Egypt through the Ottoman Empire to India.The potentially creative side of this ambivalence lies in the fact that this

reform discourse brandishes Islamic principles of justice and solidarity forcoping proactively with the experience of European modernity, with itsemancipatory potentials but also with its contradictions between promisesof justice on the one hand and socio-cultural discrimination on the other.

As a result of such a critical adaptation, emerging Muslim actors haveoften started to scrutinize unfair implementations of ideals of secular repub-licanism. In doing so, they have reconstructed an Islamic socio-politicalidentity, conceived as a culturally autonomous basis for practising universalnotions of citizenship and therefore for overcoming when not explicitly

opposing communitarianism. Nevertheless, this Islamic bid for partici-patory democracy is the target of a vehement counter-critique that questionsthe real intentions of the critique and surmises a communitarian logic indisguise as its ideological engine.

A recent significant manifestation (that promptly turned into a majorpublic affair) of this type of Islamic contestation of the meaning andfunction of secularity, republicanism and communitarianism is a disputethat flared around some statements made by the prominent Islamic scholarand activist Tariq Ramadan in an article posted on a Muslim website close

to him (and then also to an Internet discussion list of the ESF), after it hadbeen rejected by Le Monde and Libration, which had earlier publishedother articles authored by him (Ramadan, 2003a). The piece appeared onthe eve of the second meeting of the ESF, which was held in Paris inNovember 2003. After the first meeting of the ESF in Florence in 2002, thegrowing prominence in European public spheres of Geneva-basedRamadan, the grandson of Muslim Brothers founder Hasan al-Banna, andin particular his programme to educate European and more generallyWestern Muslims to an ethics of citizenship based on Islamic principles,were increasingly discussed in the framework of the larger socio-politicalmovement associated with the slogan Another world is possible, born outof the Seattle World Trade Organization (WTO) protests of 1999.

For Ramadan, current struggles for political participation and socialjustice (in a word, for citizenship writ large) are the best way to modern-ize the universalistic thrust of the reform movement in Islamic thought.

138 Theory, Culture & Society 24(2)



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However, the laying out of this innovative approach has been paralleled byincreasing suspicion and accusations by several speakers in the movement,inaugurated by an unsolicited, unfavourable portrait of him on an ESFdiscussion list by a Swiss activist from the alterglobalization movement, just

before the Florence meeting. This portrait articulated the leitmotif ofRamadans double talk: showing a progressive orientation but remainingIslamist in its basic convictions. Moreover, the lapse of time from the ESFin Florence to the one in Paris had witnessed the intensification of thesituation in the Middle East. At this conjuncture Ramadan spoke out infavour of Palestinian rights and against the US-led invasion and occupationof Iraq. In the incriminated article, provocatively titled Critique des(nouveaux) intellectuels communautaires (2003a), Ramadan accused someFrench thinkers whom he identified as being of Jewish background (in one

case erroneously) and who had vocally supported the Iraq war, of hypocrit-ically endorsing values of justice and freedom in some international crises,while justifying military occupations in other cases (in particular inPalestine and Iraq).

While the discussion of the Islamic veil issue, which was reaching aclimax in those same months as we will see, was not part of Ramadansargument, it was well known that some among the intellectuals that hecritiqued, like Alain Finkielkraut and Andr Glucksmann, had played aleading role in the campaign against the headscarf since the issue had first

erupted into public attention in 1989 (see Amir-Moazami, 2001). The mainconceptual arrow in Ramadans offensive was that these thinkers weretrapped in a communitarian logic and therefore betrayed the key secularrepublican values of justice and solidarity. A counter-offensive followedfrom many sides. It ranged from denouncing Ramadan as a Muslim Brotherand an al-Qaida supporter, to depicting him as an anti-Semite who propa-gates conspiracy theories in the style of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion.Most leaders of the ESF who were involved in the ensuing polemics (includ-ing the founder of the Social Forum movement and honorary president of

Attac, Bernard Claussen) took a distance from Ramadan, in some casessharply. The significant exceptions, like Pierre Khalfa and the movementstar Jos Bov, provided a lukewarm defence of Ramadans intentions. Yetthey did not support Ramadans core claim that he intended to argue froma universalistic, anti-communitarian stance (see LeVine, 2005).

The implications of this dispute for the potentials of a Euro-Islamicpublic sphere and for its critical contribution to some basic categories ofthe sociology of religion can only be made more transparent if we relate theanalysis to a tentative sociological typology of such Euro-Islamic intellec-tuals. If we follow the categorization of Renate Holub concerning the threestages of the intervention of organic migrant intellectuals in Europeanpublic spheres, we have a first stage, when intellectuals reflect on theirmigrant experience through novels and poetry, a second stage when theytake over the social science discourse and methodology to denounceexclusion and exploitation, and a third stage when they offer a sophisticated




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diagnosis of the interaction between migrant communities and their hostsociety (Holub, 2002: 188). This is, like many typologies, a somewhat reduc-tionist and evolutionist attempt to make sense, in Gramscian terms, of atrajectory of politicization of migrant intellectuals from ghetto to citizen-

ship, or from a low to a high level of organicity of their intellectual role.1Nonetheless this typology can be of heuristic help in situating the criticalIslam (Mandaville, 2003) of Ramadan and others as the possible beginning,not so much of a fourth stage, but of an organic orientation to a sort of hyper-citizenship leading into cosmopolis, yet passing through the construction ofa pan-European republican commitment.

This happens when the modern thrust towards reform of Muslimtraditions is turned into an arsenal for the critical reconstruction ofEuropean universalism, republican citizenship and even secularity: an effort

that quite consciously transcends the particularistic limitations of nationalmodels.2 Ramadans political programme is no doubt projected towards thisnew frontier of critical intervention that comes close to an almost Millianview of the construction of the critical subject and citizen, yet placed in alocalglobal, instead of a national, terrain of operation:

. . . the overwhelming majority of Western Muslims are experiencing a trueintellectual revolution nourished by a representation of themselves and oftheir historic responsibilities revived thanks to the opportunities and the newchallenges that they face. Citizens of democratic states are enjoying an

increasingly vigorous education, are critical while intending to keep theircommitment to a faith, an ethic and a tradition; new generations of womenand men are appearing on the social and political stage of Western countries.(Ramadan, 2004a)

Although presented as a diagnostic assessment, like most politicaldiscourses, this is a programmatic call intended to galvanize and mobilizeMuslim critical voices into adopting democratic methods of action, startingfrom the local level. This call is intended to adapt and optimize the way

modern Muslim reformers have invoked the democratic potential of decen-tralized and competitive modalities inherited from Islamic traditions andinstitutions, through their potential to fragment and dilute the weight oftraditional authorities. It is probably of minor relevance here that thesereformers imagination of Muslim traditions entails a selective reading ofthe entanglements of such traditions with political authority, especially inthe modern Ottoman state. It is more important to consider that theseattempts face a difficult task in trying to strike a balance between the recon-struction and democratization of tradition on the one hand, and the necessitynot to antagonize the present sensibilities of a European secularity inupheaval on the other.

A particularly delicate juncture in the argument of critical Islam isrepresented by the perceived need to reconcile the call for participatorydemocracy with the reconstruction ofsharia through the codification andproceduralization offiqh (Islamic jurisprudence) in ways that are adequate




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to the predicament of practising Muslims living in European societies.According to the approach of critical Islam, the goal cannot be restricted toproviding order in the lives of Muslims, but extends to building practicalplatforms for their acting as citizens on the basis of an orientation to the

common good. In other words, what is good for Muslims can no longer bedefined purely by Islamic law but has to be oriented to what is good forhumanity as a whole. This approach should, according to Ramadan, preventa communitarian ghettoization. The idea ofsharia as an overarching lawbinding all Muslims is not rejected but reinterpreted in ways that stress thecommitment to the common good and dilute, when not openly criticizing,the jurisprudential, often casuistic ramifications of this key Islamic norma-tive idea (Ramadan, 2003b).

Neither are such efforts confined to younger scholars exclusively

operating in Europe. A leading personality in promoting the developmentof a theoretically and politically strong nexus between innovative juridicaltrends and reform traditions in Islam on the one hand, and a constructivelycritical approach to European modernity, secularity and universality on theother, has been Khalid Masud, formerly director of the Institute for the Studyof Islam in the Modern World (ISIM) of Leiden, and an active participantin European debates within the wider, transnational movement of Islamicmodernism. Now head of the influential Council for Islamic Ideology inPakistan, Masud has consistently defended the legitimacy of a humanist,

and in this sense secular approach to sharia, while reaffirming its norma-tive legitimacy. He sees this legitimacy as enshrined in a notion of humanlydefined purposes (maqasid) based on the common good or public interest(maslaha), while he also believes that a universalistic approach based onmaslaha is by necessity pragmatic. Masud crowns this approach with akeenly sociological sense of the social constructedness ofsharia (2001,2005). His position is echoed by Dilwar Hussain of the Islamic Foundationof Leicester, who proposes to expand the notion ofmaslaha by building onit a gate leading to concrete innovations, for example on the key level of

womens rights (Mandaville, 2003: 13940). Hussain has been outspokenin promoting this view against current trends of Muslim apologeticdiscourse, first developed under the impact of colonialism and now repli-cated in postcolonial European settings. For example, he has seen in theIslamic Charter of the Central Council of Muslims in Germany on therelationship between Muslims, their state and their society, promulgated inFebruary 2002, an instance of a defensive discourse that distracts Muslimsfrom drawing argumentative resources from the potential of their reformtraditions (Hussain, 2003). In his frequent encounters with Muslim youthin various parts of Europe and also in Internet forums, Tariq Ramadan hasfirmly opposed any victimization posture that would, at best, push Muslimsback to the second stage of migrant discourse as sketched above(Ramadan, 2004b).

In Ramadan and others, the approach to critical Islam aspires toanimate a socio-political movement ranging from local civic engagement to




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a global discourse of justice. Such a movement is therefore conceived asalternative not only to a governmental politics of cooption of Muslim leaders,but is also opposed to any instrumentalization of issues of discriminationand integration of Muslims by the institutional left. Ramadan resists the

imposition of models of conduct, the fashioning of artificial leaders,intervention from the top and the selection of speakers who are partymarionettes (Ramadan, 2004a). He has been among the most outspokencritics of the initiative of French Minister of the Interior Sarkozy, who, inthe course of 2002, put together a Conseil Franais du Culte Musulman, inorder to institutionalize the representation of Islam in French society.

Ramadan and others clearly saw that Sarkozys council is a dubiousapplication of the inherently ambiguous secular principle of separationbetween religion and politics as inherited from the history of European

nation-states. This principle allows state authorities to permit a modulationof exceptions to the separation, corresponding to the expedient interests ofthe state to preserve its authority over, and control of, the religious field.In other words, the definitional power itself of what is legitimately religiousand what is not is exercised by the state in ways that are often incoherentin purely logical, and even ideological, terms. The result is that the coher-ence of the states definition of a religious field is residually given by whatexpediently and exceptionally corresponds to the states assessment of itssuperordinate interest, primarily the self-preservation of its power and legit-

imacy. An important precedent invoked by the advocates of the council wasthe formation of a Jewish consistory in the time of Napoleon. Sarkozyhimself did not conceal his intention to use the organ as a means to facili-tate a postcolonial monitoring of mosques and meetings, and, ideally, theselection of imams, in exchange for tangible benefits for Muslim communi-ties like state support for the construction of sites of worship, which is veryoften resisted by local French authorities (islamonline.net, 10, 12, 20December 2002).

This shaky approach has provided some public Muslim intellectuals

like Ramadan the opportunity to show that the French state is ambivalenton the separation of religion and politics and the concomitant principle ofstate neutrality, and that therefore every Muslim should, as part of his orher civic engagement, actively participate in the interpretation and practiceof the principle of secularity that is considered at the root of the values ofthe Republic. In other words, the power to define the border between thereligious and the secular spheres should be monitored not only throughpublic critical discourse, but also through Muslims practical engagementwith those social issues that evidence when and where the border isarbitrary or secondary with regard to the problems faced: i.e. on matters ofwomens discrimination and the veil. This is an important implication ofthe emergence and functioning of the Euro-Islamic public sphere: torelocate value issues like non-discrimination in the life of young Muslimwomen, from symbolic representation through the state or its culturalmajorities into their real, and always complex, terrain of production.




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The Islamic Veil and Beyond: Struggles Over the Definitionof Secularity

At stake in the disputes raging around the work of the French commissionon lacitsummoned by President Chirac and chaired by formermdiateurde la Rpublique Bernard Stasi in the summer 2003 was the definition ofpolitical and social authority inherent in secularity. The focus was on thelegitimacy to enforce a narrative of the secular as a state-led process over-coming the patriarchal authority considered as inherent in religion, inparticular in its Abrahamic forms, and of which Islamic radicalism issupposedly the most conspicuous and militant manifestation not only inEurope but on the global stage. It was the economic crisis of the 1970s andthe politicization of the Islam issue at a global level, between the Arab oilembargo of 1973 and the Iranian revolution of 19789 (Salvatore, 1997:

13346), followed by the visibilization of the religious identity of migrantsin the 1980s and 1990s, that recast the issue of authority in terms of aconflict between European secularity and Islamic religion. While Islam wasthe main culprit, the re-Islamization that threatened to spread from theMiddle East to the West was also reflected in other world religions in waysthat made their rising fundamentalisms measurable by comparison to theIslamic one.

This was increasingly and erroneously perceived as prototypical,although among sociologists of religion it was admitted that the historic

prototypes of fundamentalism are found within Protestantism. Over time,and in particular through the eruption of the affaire des foulards in 1989,another derogatory concept associated with dangerous manifestations ofIslam found its way onto the central stage of French public disputes:communitarianism. Through this term, the political implications of theEuropean interpretative syndrome of political Islam have become moretransparent. The analysis of the dispute over the work of the Stasicommission can also render more transparent the meaning of the accusa-tions and counter-accusations of communitarianism in the above-analysed,

first controversy concerning Tariq Ramadan. Moreover the commissionswork had important implications for the questioning of republican author-ity within the Euro-Islamic public sphere.

In the argument of the Stasi commission, as echoed by a hammeringmedia attention not only in France but in all Europe, secular republican-ism is exposed to the threat of political-religious proselytizing, supportedby a communitarian orientation that perpetuates traditional forms ofauthority on whose terrain the politicization of religion thrives. A caveatwith regard to the French understanding of communitarianism is necess-

ary. Hardly used as a substantive, the basically unanimous understandingof the word in the French debate, as also in Ramadans above mentionedcritique of the (new) communitarian intellectuals, would be probably bestrendered in English as communalism: a political orientation effecting afundamental erosion of citizenship and of its postulates of equality in favourof a closed community identity and its scarcely transparent norms. This is




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a meaning quite far from communitarianism as understood in Anglo-American political parlance and theoretical debates where, in spite of thefrequent difficulties of reaching a consensus concerning who is to belabelled a communitarian and who is not, it is a respectable political theory

furthering and not hindering the exercise of citizenship.However, the French use of the adjective communitarian is not based

on any explicit or implicit differentiation of meaning between (bad)communalism and (neutral or potentially good) communitarianism.3 InFrench controversies all significant actors including the Muslim girlsprotesting their right to wear the headscarf at school and all Muslim actorsfeeling inspired by Tariq Ramadan have claimed allegiance to values oflacitand secular republicanism, while nobody has echoed positions closeto the Anglo-American communitarians. By and large the French concep-

tual approach was reflected in the European-continental reception of thedebates, even where critical accents prevailed towards what was perceivedas the dogmatic closure of the French approach. Nonetheless, it is not irrel-evant, as shown by the first dispute previously analysed, that these debatestook place in the context of the Anglo-American war in Iraq. The massiveopposition to this war in the European public sphere (that even led manyobservers to admit for the first time that there might be such a thing as aEuropean public sphere) pre-emptively limited any positive reference to anAnglo-American idiom in order to critique the French debate. The vehement

yet articulate critique of the anti-hijab discourse by British Muslims wasalso of limited use to their French co-religionists.4

The hearings and deliberations of the French commission on theapplication of the principle of lacit started just a few months after theinauguration of the Muslim Council. The work of this commission and itsdecisions, published in December 2003, which its president emphaticallycalled a stimulator of a public debate, impacted the ongoing disputes inother European countries such as Germany, Austria, Italy, Belgium and theNetherlands. Germany, in particular, witnessed in the same period a judicial

recrudescence of the issue of the permissibility for a state school teacher towear the headscarf, and the beginning of legislative initiatives to regulatethe matter (see Oestreich, 2005 [2004]). The French commission also under-took several journeys to the neighbouring countries for exchanges andconsultations.

Although it was clear that the temporary consultative body was consti-tuted in order to help solve, once and for all, the Islamic headscarfcontroversy, the work of the commission addressed the issue of secularityin more general terms. It included among its members and invited witnesses,representatives of several political orientations and intellectual currentswith a variety of religious backgrounds. Among them there were severalleading intellectuals with a first-class academic pedigree, like the socialtheorist Alain Touraine and the historian of French lacitJean Baubrot.The commission held numerous hearings with leading personalities belong-ing the political and religious establishments, officials of state schools and




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representatives of civil society organizations, from the Grand Orient ofFrance to the recently founded association of French young women ofMuslim background Ni putes ni soumises.

The commission probably marked one of those watershed moments

when political cultures are either transformed or consolidate in response tochallenges that are critical for the capacity of a nation-state, that is, of itslites, to organize and give sense to collective life. It is through such eventsthat religion (in this case best exemplified by Islam) and secularity areredefined in ways that acquire a wide public, discursive and political signifi-cance. Underlying the work of the enquiring body was the endeavour toreconstruct forms of legitimate authority in the secular tradition and de-legitimize other forms perceived as mired in a religious communitarianismand therefore as clashing with secularity. As proudly claimed in the report

of the commission, French lacit represents a particularly radical andunadulterated version of secularity. In the report it is affirmed that such aFrench type of secularity goes beyond the issue of state neutrality towardsorganized religions and becomes a foundational value of republicanism andeven a living practice (Commission de rflexion . . ., 2003: 38). The reportis unambiguous in claiming that there is no other possibility of furtheringcollective life and protecting public order than through reviving a radicalinterpretation of secularity and making it adequate to the new challenges.The document evidences that the setting up of the commission, and its work,

were a swift response to an insistent popular call for a restoration of repub-lican authority, in particular in schools (2003: 7).A famous (albeit blunt) caricature circulating in the French press

depicts this challenge to republican authority as a shoulder-to-shoulderbetween Marianne, the symbol of the Republic, holding the French consti-tution, and a bearded Islamic fundamentalist, wielding the Quran. Inaccordance with this popular perception, the report denounced a consciousstrategy of political Islam to attack the Republic in its weakest segments,represented by helpless school teachers and vulnerable Muslim girls. While

the commission recommended, on the affirmative side, to issue a newCharter oflacitspelling out the rights and obligations of every citizen, tobe distributed on occasions such as the return to school and the receptionof migrants (2003: 5051), the main result of its deliberations was, on therepressive side, to make sure that the Islamic veil could no longer beexploited whatever the degree of autonomy and the type of intention ofthe Muslim girls who don it by political Islamists as a proselytizingsymbol. In their hands, this symbol became a tool so the commission main-tained to undermine the authority of the Republic through the harassmentof pupils and the consequent weakening the authority of teachers.

The diagnosis of the commission on the shoulder-to-shoulder betweensecular republicanism and Islamic communitarianism, and the necessity tosupport Marianne by all means and therefore to make public order prevailover freedom of conscience (2003: 58) misses a key sociological dimen-sion of the clash of authority. This was lucidly reflected upon by the




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sociologist of religion Hervieu-Lger half a decade ago (1999): not a simplis-tic differentiation between a good, victimized silent majority of Muslimsand a dangerous minority of anti-secular radicals, but a more complex andfragmented picture where several types of association, forms of mobilization

and patterns of organization variably inspired by Islamic tenets (and notonly those that would be classified as radical and political) are in acontinually evolving tension with the orchestrated partnership between stateand Church that emerged as a solution to previous conflicts in France (asin the rest of Europe), and that provides the basis for the legitimization ofthe procedures and institutions oflacitsanctioned by the century-old lawof 1905.

Such arrangements between states and Churches are modelled on thehistoric structure of the European nation-state, while the fluidity of Islamic

mobilization, regardless of its political or non-political, compatibly liberalor aggressively communitarian orientations, highlights the modalities ofaction, validation, and organization of emerging movements and aggrega-tions. Here secular Europe is not and cannot be the exception to a widerglobal trend. Islamic, but also other religious movements of various outlookscannot be essentially captured by a Weberian and Troeltschian typologypitting an institutional type of validation of belief (Church) against acommunal validation (sect). They rather enact a modality of action alsofound in parish aggregations and in the new religious movements: the

increasing centrality of a processual type of mutual validation of commit-ments among religious activists that is neither institutional nor communal(see Hervieu-Lger, 1999, 2000, 2003): a type of validation to whichspeakers like Ramadan astutely appeal. It is a weak management of the newdynamics of the religious field in France, as elsewhere in Europe, based onworn-out tools of regulation promulgated by the nation-state at the apogeeof its power, that destabilizes lacitmuch more than any purported offen-sive of political Islam that targets the weakest links in a vulnerable chainof transmission of republican authority.

Hervieu-Lger places the headscarf saga of the 1990s in the contextof the crisis of the Republics capacities to redevelop and implementsecularity as an instrument of social cohesion and as token of national,republican unity. Her call for a mediating lacit appears as compatiblewith an approach to a reformed Islam that contributes to reconstructing toolsof republican coexistence, cooperation and communication. The Frenchsociologist of religion has exposed the issue that forms the kernel of thiscrisis, that is, the loss of the authority of the main agents of secularity in amaterially and symbolically crucial institution of the Republic, like stateschools. The work of the commission on secularity magnified this diagnosis,but the fear of a collapse of republican authority prevailed over the idea ofmediation, as was also reflected in the pronouncement of the Council ofState after the first eruption of the veil dispute in 1989. At the end of 2003this fear led the members of the commission to recommend drastic legisla-tive steps to solve the problem.




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The argument of the commission most fiercely contested by Muslimleaders worldwide is that the Islamic headscarfis a symbol (Hijab Obliga-tory, Not Symbol: Scholars, islamonline, 20 December 2003; HijabReligious Obligation, Not Symbol: Egypts Mufti, islamonline, 21 December

2003). This criticism has argued that the headscarf is a fashioning of thebody chosen by the Muslim woman who in this way responds to what shesees (or is instructed to see) as a religious duty. In other words, the head-scarf is considered intrinsic to the bodily posture of the woman and there-fore as a non-negotiable personal right, not as a symbol that is used forcommunicating a creed and so, potentially, for proselytizing. This view isreflected in the stance of some of the Muslim women who were protagonistsof headscarf disputes, for example, Iyman Alzayed, a teacher who wasprevented from wearing the veil in Germany. She argued that considering

the hijab a symbol is the beginning of a chain of misjudgements. It excludesfrom the outset the possibility of judging the womans choice as the act ofa responsible person (Oestreich, 2005 [2004]: 110). In juridical and politi-cal judgments the idea has prevailed all over Europe that the headscarf hasan effect, in that it signals values that are incompatible with the republicanpolitical culture and with the principle of gender equality.

This idea anticipates that a headscarf will create conflicts in theclassroom, even if there is no evidence of such conflicts (as, or example, inthe GermanLand of Nordrhein-Wetsfalen, where a dozen teachers wear the

headscarf and school authorities have registered no complaints). It estab-lishes the duty of state authority to prevent such conflicts by authoritativelyand pre-emptively interpreting all possible symbolic meanings of the veilthat are unacceptable to the political majorities. This pre-judgement notonly evidences the decisionist prerogatives of the modern state, but alsoshows that there are limits to their legitimization in procedural terms. Theconsequence is that the last instance of legitimacy can only be provided bya paternalistic invocation by the state of its duty to protect its children: avocabulary of authority that was consciously used in the report of the Stasi

commission to justify the last resort of legislation.That the negation of the symbolic nature of the headscarf is not astubborn denial by the involved Islamic actors is also proved by the factthat, in one prominent case, a major court argued in similar ways. InSeptember 2003 the German constitutional court affirmed that, unlike theChristian cross, the headscarf is not a symbol and that the consequencesof how its meaning is interpreted by those who interact with the head-scarf-wearing woman (in the court case, a school teacher) can only beevaluated in the context of her overall behaviour (Oestreich, 2005 [2004]:57). It is nonetheless symptomatic that a minority of judges of the samecourt opposed to that view the principle that the evaluation of the symbolis the prerogative of the state authority that employs the teacher (2005[2004]: 61). Indeed, this happened to be the principle that inspired subse-quent legislation on the issue by the parliaments of several GermanLnder.




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For sure, reducing the hijab to a substantial symbol is integral to asociological view of religion as essentially consisting of functional meaningsand symbols. This view is the product of the Protestant Reformation and ofits aftermath in the secularization of wide parts of Europe (see Asad, 1993).

It is also strongly entrenched in French sociological and anthropologicaltheory, which through Durkheim and Mauss (though with substantial differ-ences between them) has had an enduring impact on European socialsciences at large (Tarot, 1999). The basic theoretical intervention for whathas been defined as the invention of the symbolic dimension of socialprocesses was Durkheims hyperspiritualization and de-materialization ofsigns (pp. 2546). Yet even in those contexts historically influenced by thesymbolic politics of modern societies and nation-states, the meanings ofsymbols are usually activated within dense webs of interaction, communi-

cation and challenge. Whether an object has a symbolic meaning and whatthis meaning is, depends not only on context but also on the positioning ofthe interpreter and on the inherited power relations among actors. In theFrench case, the interpreter, that is, the state as represented by a pool ofwise men (and a minority of women), coincides with the most powerful actor(see Asad, 2004).

This problem did not go unnoticed by observers and actors. In a publicdiscussion on the headscarf issue in Germany, Green politician SylviaLhrmann (2004) questioned the legitimacy of the states definition of a

symbol attached to the body of peaceful citizens, when these citizens rejectthis specific, unilateral definition. Yet it is also interesting that, as stressedby one authoritative member of the French commission, the main concernof the consultative body was to restore the efficacy of the chain of republi-can authority linking the political leadership to the teachers: all otherconsiderations (or cultural misunderstandings) had to be considered second-ary. In other words, from the viewpoint of the primacy of republican author-ity, contests over symbolization are subordinated to public order. Moreprecisely, the interpretation of the proper meaning of symbols is finalized

to the restoration of this order.To sum up, the commissions priority was to protect the classroomfrom the divisiveness generated by the fact that the sheer presence of girlswearing a headscarf (and, in this sense, the symbolic effect of thispresence) creates a pressure on the unveiled Muslim girls. These girlsfound themselves exposed to harassment by Muslim boys for not comply-ing with what the latter see as mandatory standards of Islamic modesty(Weil, 2004). Another member of the commission, the most prominentFrench Muslim intellectual of the last quarter of the 20th century,Muhammad Arkoun, discussing the headscarf issue with other leadingMuslim intellectuals from all over the world at a meeting in Cairo on TheIslamic Synthesis in October 2003, argued that, whatever the pastmistakes of both the French state and Muslims in France, the situationwas now one of sheer emergency. Arkoun expressed serious concerns lestMuslims in France fail to acquiesce to the majority French public attitude




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towards the veil as a symbol. But he also insisted on the necessity that thismove occur in parallel with a deepening of the critical and self-criticalpotential of Islamic discourse (Arkoun, 2003).

It is remarkable that while at the beginning of the work of the

commission almost all members were negatively inclined towards recom-mending an anti-hijab law on the basis of considerations of individual rights,at the end all except one (Jean Baubrot, the member with the bestprofessional expertise on the history of French lacit) voted in favour ofsuch a law. They had been apparently impressed by the hearings thatpainted for them the picture of a dangerous crisis of authority that thecommission members did not hesitate to see as incarnate in the Republic(Weil, 2004). A major moment in turning around the initial inclinations ofits members was probably the hearing of Fadela Amara, who gained public

recognition by publishing in 2003 a book titled Ni putes ni soumises andfounding an association of the same name. Pledging loyalty to the values ofthe Republic and its educational system, while identifying herself as apractising Muslim and at the same time as a feminist activist who knowswell the terrain and the city, she first called attention to the dramaticpredicament of Muslim girls in the quartiers, deprived of the basic rightssupposedly guaranteed by the Republic to all its citizens. She also pointedout a syndrome of visibility of the veil, which becomes ubiquitous andoppressing in spite of the fact that only a minority of Muslim women wear

it. It is likely that the commission was quite impressed by Amaras interpret-ation that veiled girls exercise a pressure on non-veiled ones by their sheervisibility, via the role played by boys who respect the former and feel author-ized to harass the latter. But she also maintained that there is a systematicpressure exercised by Islamic associations on Muslim women to wear theveil. Determinant for the deliberations of the commission was her view thatreaffirming lacitwas a necessary condition for solving the problem of theghettos, in spite of its more intractable socio-economic dimensions. Thistype of argument was oil on the fire of the commissions fear of a collapse

of the symbolic authority of the Republic. The fact that her original activismin the neighbourhoods was focused on factors of social alienation andeconomic deprivation had much less impact.

In building her argument, Fadela Amara sharpened dichotomies suchas that between a religious framework of action equated with communitar-ianism, on the one hand, and secular republicanism on the other. While shestill retained a feeble empathy with the sentiments of injustice that mightpush the Muslim youth into the hands of Islamist groupings, she labelledthem unambiguously soldiers of green fascism. She interspersed thisdenunciation of Islamic associations with accusations of laxity hurled atFrench authorities for having allowed the implantation of political Islamin the soil of the Republic. In the final analysis, as a female Muslimactivist committed to republicanism, she authoritatively articulated theleitmotif of the veil as a symbol of the unacceptable power of politicalIslam and communitarianism in everyday life. Her final warning was that




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even if it is an issue of individual freedom, our Republic is in danger. Itis nonetheless noteworthy that after such a powerful denunciation of thedangers of the headscarf, she advocated pedagogical action rather thanlegislation banning the headscarf in schools (Amara, 2003). It is also

remarkable that the young French Muslim women who took to the streets toprotest against the recommendations of the commission to ban the headscarffrom state schools protested their commitment to lacit, chanted the Frenchanthem, and carried banners denouncing the betrayal of lacit. Secularrepublicanism became exclusive of those Muslim voices that claimed toshare in it and which, once they had been powerfully associated with whatthe majority culture construes as a religio-political symbol, were degradedto an expression of dangerous communitarianism.

Diverging Interpretations of Cultural Diversity and ofUniversalistic Programmes

Even the overwhelming majority of the laws opponents among non-Muslims,for example those who signed the petition Yes to the foulard in the laicschool (Libration, 20 May 2003, among them tienne Balibar), and themost vocal feminist group that did not join the feminist mainstream inadvocating the states intervention to impose the ban (through the voice ofChristine Delphy, director of Nouvelles questions fministes) took forgranted that the veil is an affront to the girls freedom and dignity and did

not bother to assess its legitimacy from the viewpoint of the girls owncommitment to a religious practice (see Becci, 2004).The main concern of this article has been identifying the growing

Euro-Islamic significance of key discussions which are not a merecontention among Muslims-in-Europe and non-Muslim-Europeans butcut through both categories of actors and create a new space of debate andconflict. This is why, while it would be easy to list responses among thearsenal of arguments of critical Islam, I prefer to focus here on a well-articulated criticism of the headscarf ban formulated by the leading thinker

tienne Balibar. He pointed the finger at the commissions interpretation ofsecularity as a drastic separation between religion and politics. Morespecifically, he denounced the underlying conviction that only religious andnot political symbols were to be banned from the classroom, for beingdivisive and inimical to the personality growth of the pupils. Balibar pointedout that far from being the enemy ofcatholicit, French lacithas become,since the law of 1905, a catholacit, since the state and the majorityCatholic Church have reached a degree of symbiosis and even complicityin managing the religious field (see also Hervieu-Lger, 1999). The half-hearted though honestly argued opposition of the Catholic Church in Franceto the anti-veil law could not conceal this consolidated pattern. The inter-mingling of religious and political components in forming citizens identi-ties (Amir-Moazami, 2001; Baubrot, 2002, 2004) is an established fact ofmodern European history that has been reinforced by new migration trendson the global stage. This is also what legitimizes the powerful role of the




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Catholic Church in French society, not least as educator of significantsegments of the French elite. In a nutshell, Balibars main argument is thatthe French state chose to oversymbolize and overpoliticize the veil issue inorder to win a symbolic-political battle of authority, instead of launching a

reflective public debate on the nature of secularity, republicanism anduniversality, and instead of allowing all political and religious voices in theRepublic to take part in it (Balibar, 2004).

It would be interesting to directly relate Balibars argument to theapproach of a leading Muslim intellectual like Tariq Ramadan, yet I foundno significant trace of any such cross-cutting link in the debate. When theFrench thinker came to identify his favourite interlocutors among Muslimintellectuals, he named the signatories of a call for retrieving the force ofa vital secularity issued on February 2004, which featured among others

Fadela Amara, Malek Chebel and Fethi Benslama, and clearly denouncedthe veil as a sign of oppression. This recognition of authors belonging towhat would correspond to Holubs third stage of migrant intellectualdiscourse, and the concomitant lack of interest in a speaker like Ramadanon the part of a radical universalistic thinker like Balibar confirm the diffi-culty for Muslim leaders in legitimizing their leap into a full-fledged univer-salistic stage by promoting a deepening of the reform impetus of Muslimtraditions. There are still limits to their capacity to earn the trust and part-nership of leading, critical non-Muslim voices.

Among the notable exceptions to the limited recognition of TariqRamadan among non-Muslim intellectuals and scholars in France is thesociologist of religion Jocelyne Csari (2002). The issue is whether what isappreciated in Ramadans thought by Csari, that is, its adaptation to theFrench context of doctrines of the Muslim Brothers, can be seen as valuablefor French society as a whole, and not just as useful for the democraticintegration of Muslims. In other words, the issue is whether Ramadan canbe seen as the initiator of a truly critical school of Islam (Mandaville, 2003)and therefore as the carrier of a discourse that amplifies the connection

between Islam and modernity as premised not only on Islams integrationinto Europe, but also on Europes acceptance of Islams international posi-tioning (Mas, 2004: 281).

Clearly Ramadan, like other representatives of critical Islam, istaking a considerable risk in breaking through the threshold of universal-ity, while the representatives of the third stage, inspired by an ever moresophisticated post-structuralism, are seeking a point of equilibrium in thename of a secular Franco-Maghrebin identity and are therefore much morecautious in invoking the universal potential of Islam. While Ramadan insistson the principle ofmaslaha (common good, public interest) and expands onthe reformist principle of ijtihad (innovative endeavour of the jurist) incalling for the implementation of participatory democracy among allEuropean Muslims (Ramadan, 1999), the third stage intellectual is stillmore attractive to a French politicalintellectual audience. Not by chance,Balibar is interested in a programme like that put forward by Fethi




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Benslama, which, according to the French philosopher, favours a transform-ation of the theological complex of Islam.

The writings of another leading author of this current, Malek Chebel,deal at length with issues of love and sexuality within Muslim traditions

and, like Fethi Benslama and Fadela Amara, he develops a programme forauthenticating Muslim traditions through a focus on the singular practicesof Franco-Maghrebin women and men. This move allows them to disauthen-ticate what they see as the homogenizing tradition offiqh and so to displaceQuran-centred authority (Mas, 2004). There is a clear conflict here. Chebeland Amara, claiming the support of the secularly oriented, silent majorityof Muslims in France, also benefit from positive media coverage and wide-spread intellectual solidarities, while Ramadan has unambiguously singledout Fadela Amaras Ni putes ni soumises as the latest victim of the instru-

mentalization of the problems of Muslims as a minority by the Frenchpolitical and intellectual establishment (Ramadan, 2004a). He has alsodenounced the hypocrisy of progressive intellectuals who denounce Islam-ophobia and discrimination while ignoring those Muslim actors who are atthe forefront of such battles (Ramadan, 2003c). What both the Muslimleaders of the third stage and their supporters in the French intelligentsianeglect is that the plural and hybrid Franco-Maghrebin practices cannot becoherently promoted as authentic traditions threatened by the conformismand intolerance of the one-dimensional discourse of Muslim jurists and

reformists. These practices and traditions are part and parcel of a history ofcolonial repression and postcolonial compromises (Mas, 2004).Though the key terms of his political discourse are born of a French

environment (Schulze, 2002), the stakes of the universalizing and criticalapproach of a Tariq Ramadan are high not only in France. He is also widelyread in other languages and countries, including the US, while heconsciously tries to de-parochialize French debates and make them the foilfor the challenges faced by Muslims on a global scale. His stated purposeis to invest his energies in the education and political spiritedness of what

he calls Western Muslims as the prospective, if not yet de facto leadersof transnational Islam. A growing number of non-Muslim internationalscholars support his struggles. Among them, Franois Burgat has supportedhim well beyond France, by appearing at his side at the third ESF in Londonin November 2004. At that meeting, the type of incidents that occurredaround the second ESF in Paris did not take place, and Ramadan wasacclaimed as a major star of the event, alongside prominent personalities ofthe alterglobalization movement like Gloria Ramirez and other leaders ofhigh symbolic significance like Aleida Guevara and Ahmed Ben Bella.

At the same time, while voices of scepticism and delusion multiply inFrance against the Swiss-born Muslim intellectual (Fourest, 2004), who forFrench Attac remains nothing more than a fundamentalist theologian ille-gitimately claiming to represent the Muslim youth of the banlieus5 and inother instances is ironically depicted as a softcore Islamist, in summer2004 he was denied a visa (first issued by the State Department and then




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revoked by Homeland Security) to go and teach at Notre Dame Universityin the US.

Ramadan has become, by 2005, almost as iconic as the veil in repre-senting controversial issues in the Euro-Islamic public sphere. This is a

proof of the existence, yet fragility, of such a sphere thus far in Europe.Through the ongoing mediatic polarization, evaluating his influence beyondand beneath the level of public discourse has remained an elusive task. Inan interview he gave to Mark LeVine for beliefnet.com he reminded us, notwithout apointe of irony, that his detractors depict him as immensely influ-ential (and dangerous) while his supporters decry that, in spite of the sound-ness of his argument, the struggles he promotes are doomed to fail for a lackof basic receptivity in the European context (Ramadan, n.d.).

Conclusion: The Emerging Euro-Islamic Public Sphere as aChallenge to the Sociology of Religion?

If we avoid the diffuse tendency to trivialize and iconize arguments andsymbols related to Islam in the European media landscape, we might seethat the sociology of religion could benefit from the critical perspectivedeveloped by several Muslim scholars and activists in order to unpack andredefine the loaded notion of secularity, and from the response that thiscritique has elicited from other critical, non-Muslim voices in Europe. Thespecific positioning of European Muslim public personalities as both

internal and external to the European political and philosophical traditionsis a critical asset. However, the condition for valuing their contribution isthat the legitimacy of their critique is not pre-emptively neutralized byaccusations of split loyalty and double talk. The fragile emergence of a Euro-Islamic public sphere reflects a perspective that is internal to the Europeanquandaries of secularity, yet allows for a duplication of angles. The older,immanent critique of secular modernity meets intrinsic limits, for it is builton the same postulates of the essential, yet post-Christian, secularity ofmodern power.

A certain duplication of perspective is useful and even necessary inorder to avoid a pre-emptive culturalization of the meaning of secularity. Itdraws attention not just to the power relations between state authorities andreligious groups, but to the metamorphosed notion of power that secularityincorporates. Secularity manifests itself in concrete modes of governanceand in the way religion is reconstructed as experience and belief to beconfined to the personal sphere of life or to a level of invisible or scarcelyvisible practice. Without such packaged dichotomies as that between secu-larity and religion, or between the privateness of religion and the public-ness of religious neutrality, the argument of the address of Fadela Amara tothe commission on lacit would vacillate. This type of argument cannotcapture the viewpoint of a reform tradition in Islam whose trajectory sincethe 19th century has included serious attempts to develop an originalcommitment to republican universalism, while also consistently resisting aone-sided definition of secularity.




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As in the works of the French commission, this definition is a theo-retically informed (and theoretically conservative) response to a crisis ofrepublican authority dictated by a state of emergency. The collateral damageeffected by this response is visible in a demonization of all social and civic

activism inspired by an Islamic commitment. It is interesting that the bestimmanent critique, as voiced by Balibar, was also stimulated by theconflicting voices of Muslim intellectuals, whereby third stage post-structuralists challenge the Islamic, but also pan-European, republicanismof a Tariq Ramadan. This is a serious contrast because it is exactly this pan-European dimension that exerts a strong appeal to younger Muslim leadersand cadres in Europe (Salih, 2004b).

Sociological attempts to redefine secularity and the concomitantconcept of secularization become particularly insightful if they take into

account the current challenges represented by transnational Islam, and inparticular by Islam in Europe, as reflected by investigations pursued bysociologist of religion Jos Casanova. He has attempted to redefine theconditions under which the publicization of religion, including Islam, putssecularity in a more elastic and realistic perspective: secularization is inter-preted as the product of a malleable transformation of religions access tothe public sphere, and not as the marker of religions inexorable privatiza-tion (Casanova, 2001). In a similar vein, Klaus Eder has suggested that weinterpret secularization as the idea that all communication, including

religious communication, passes a test of public debate and critique. Thistest is also an examination of identities rooted in lifeworlds on the basis oftheir capacity, or lack thereof, to nourish civic bonds (Eder, 2002: 3357).

A clear restriction on such attempts to reformulate secularity andsecularization comes from the report of the French commission, which, itshould be reiterated, included social scientists and even leading socialtheorists. The commission established that there are definite and narrowways as to how religion can be publicized. According to the commission, itis republican authority per se (its legitimized organs) and not public criti-

cism that is entitled to authoritatively test the feasibility of public religion.Many of the above-mentioned critics in the French debate, and others fromneighbouring countries like Germany and Italy (Manconi, 2003; Walther,2003), have observed that it is problematic to speak of a fair public debateunder the impact of such a cry of alarm over a growing threat to republicanauthority. At least one should question the malleability, in the short run, ofnational political cultures.

At a theoretical level, it is interesting that the dispute enhances themobility between internal and external perspectives and facilitates a post-colonial critique of Europe performed, this time unambiguously, in thename of European ideals and not against them. The controversy also de-essentializes the functionality of the public sphere itself and releases it froma one-sided subservience to an uncontested notion of secularity. No doubt,however, that the short-term strictures are further narrowed when an em-battled secularity is reaffirmed with sociological blindness by a commission




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installed by the state, incapable or unwilling to take into account thechanging modalities of religiously motivated action. Towards this situation,Talal Asads critique is that if the secularization thesis no longer carries theconviction it once did, this is because the categories of politics and

religion turn out to implicate each other more profoundly than we thought(2003: 201). As also noted by Balibar, the frequent astonishment by publicobservers that politics and religion do not evolve along the institutionallines of the separation of state and Church is seldom turned into a reasonedacceptance of the increasing level of complexity and overlapping in theirrelations. It is more often rigidified into a dogmatic reaffirmation of theirnormative distinction.

It is historically true that the codes and instruments for action in thetwo fields have been subject to a substantial differentiation. However, on a

sociological level this differentiation is never as neat as in the ideological,legal, institutional and concordat frameworks regulating the relationshipbetween state and Church. The discourse according to which belief is theonly code appropriate to the religious field has always been part of the policyof the state. Nonetheless, the institutional framework of establishedChurches has seldom contained religious activity within the confines of theprivate self and of invisible or not so visible church congregations. Thelegitimacy of the resulting expansion of the religious code has then beensubject to explicit or implicit negotiations by Church leaders with state

representatives, often willing to relax the principle in the name of a politicsof mediation and concertation. The main problem is that this politicalprinciple of relaxation, which on a theoretical level should correspond to alegitimization of the contestability of the meaning and practical conse-quences of secularity, does not apply well to Islam in todays Europe. Thiscannot be too surprising, due to the colonial precedents that demanded astrict monitoring of religiously motivated socio-political action in Muslimmajority countries, because of its potentially subversive character.

Indeed, it is thanks to this postcolonial rigidity that, by reaction, a

Euro-Islamic public sphere is now coming into being. Pace all Europeanclassics of the sociology of religion, the transformations of religion do noteasily fit into an evolutionist trajectory. At best, the movement looks morelike a spiral. This shows that, far from being mutually functional, secular-ity and the openness of the public sphere within European modernity canbe in a reciprocal tension, and their tense relationship is subject to contin-ual and largely unpredictable transformations.

This predicament encourages several actors and observers to developa constructively critical attitude to the dominant framing of secularity, andto the patterns of legitimacy and authority that support it. It is through ques-tioning the unquestioned authority of secularity that a chance for its renewalin a more inclusive and consensual fashion is emerging. Increasingly, keyMuslim actors in Europe appear ready to tackle such nodes while also over-coming a tendency of Muslim intellectuals outside Europe to lapse intowholesale and stereotypical views of Europe as the civilization that has




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erased religion (first of all, its own, i.e. Christianity) from human society.These attempts presently face the daunting task of striking a balancebetween the needed reconstruction and democratization of tradition andauthority on the one hand, and the necessity to tune their discourse into the

institutional concerns of a European secularity placed under increasingstrain on the other.

For the observer and the scholar this requires moving beyond steriletypologies based on the interpretative syndrome of political Islam and inparticular on the dichotomy between a radical/fundamentalist/communitar-ian and a moderate/modernist/liberal Islam. One needs to look at thedifferential capacity of Muslim actors to penetrate a wider political processdirectly related to the deep transformations of the nation-state and to thecomplex remaking of Europe within new global scenarios. These changes

also embrace timid and contradictory attempts to effect a postcolonial disen-gagement of the old continent.The suspicion of Muslim actors demonstrated by political, institutional

and media actors in Europe, though nourished by a more ancient fear ofIslam, is more immediately related to the quite anarchical processes ofreconstitution of authority that Islam faces in the diaspora. This process isincongruous with the ways secularity was first constituted in Europe, basedon ties of control and concertation between the state and increasingly loyalleaders of religious communities, and producing distinctive forms of repub-

lican authority vested in bureaucratic and political functions. In this sense,the diagnosis itself of fragmentation of Islamic authority risks being a muchtoo direct reflection of the categories of European actors and observers, andmay well prove inadequate to capturing the more complex realities unfold-ing on the ground. At the same time, to concentrate on the public sphereand the tense yet creative, Euro-Islamic double perspective could be alsocritiqued as a way of evading the issue of the adequacy of analyticcategories. Largely evolutionary accounts of authority along a trajectoryleading from a religious-charismatic towards a secular-procedural type are

clearly no longer doing the job.The provisional conclusion that we can draw is that the potentialuniversalism of Islam has generated a current of proactive socio-politicalcriticism whose asserted goal is to reconstruct forms of secularity andrepublicanism in institutionally compatible ways with the heuristic help ofnon-totalizing Islamic norms. This process is stimulating and sometimeschannelling the critical capacity and civic engagement of new Muslimsubjects. This critical Islam might show a better capacity than criticalideas of Europe to bypass national allegiances and so to earn the mistrustof committed national republicans, while becoming attractive to pan-European institutions. Whatever the conflicts in politics and the conceptualdeficits in sociology, the Euro-Islamic public sphere has carved a niche andhas shown a potential to attenuate the conflictuality of the process of Islamsintegration within European societies.




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Notes

1. For an empirically more accurate picture of migrant cultural production and thesynchronic entanglements and higher complexity of reality on the ground seeWerbner (2004).

2. See Salih (2004b), presenting the case of a younger Muslim leader in Italy,himself, like many others, critically elaborating on Ramadans teachings.3. Otto Kallscheuer has suggested that there are, unsurprisingly, European-continental traditions of modern communitarian thought, like the rival traditionsgoing back to Herder and Hegel. However, reasons and labels do not easily matchand the European reception of the Anglo-American debate is a story in itself(Kallscheuer, 1995).4. For a sensible analysis and critique adopting the Anglo-American viewpoint seeBowen (2004).

5. See Attac France,Nos relations avec Tariq Ramadan, 10 November 2003.

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Zubaida, S. (2005) Islam in Europe: Political and Cultural Orientations, inS. Nkel and L. Teczan (eds) Islam in the New Europe: Challenge of Continuity,Chance for Change, vol. 6 of Yearbook of the Sociology of Islam. Bielefeld: tran-script. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction.

Armando Salvatore is Reader at the Department of Social Sciences,Humboldt University, Berlin. Among his most recent books (authored,edited and co-edited),A Genealogy of the Public Sphere: Liberal Modernity,Catholicism, Islam (2007), Islam in Process: Historical and CivilizationalPerspectives (2006), Religion, Social Practice, and Contested Hegemonies(2005) and Public Islam and the Common Good (2004). He edits theYearbook of the Sociology of Islam and is Research Director of the

Programme Mediterranean, Europe, and Islam: Actors in Dialogue, Naples.


Documents

Secularity, Republicanism and Communitarism in the Euro-Islamic Public Sphere