Interrogating Muslims: The Liberal-Secular Matrix of Integration (Islam of the Global West) - Softcover

Amir-Moazami, Schirin

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1350266418 ISBN 13: 9781350266414

Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic, 2024

Synopsis

This book interrogates the patterns and discursive structures that have generated the seeming urgency of Muslims’ integration. Focusing on Germany, it problematizes the grounds on which politics of integration are justified and reasoned upon, and thereby investigates divergent operations of power vis-à-vis Muslims and Islam in a formally liberal-secular society. The integration paradigm in Germany has been predicated on an imperial knowledge regime, in which Islam figures as the external friend or enemy of an imagined Christian secular. This book analyzes three kinds of integration practices as symptomatic sites for the multifaceted dimensions of power in this paradigm: the scientific measurement of Muslims’ degrees of integration which are correlated with their degrees of religiosity; the politics of recognition promoted by state-organized dialogue with Muslims; and the threat of sanction, found in the regulations of citizenship and explicitly in citizenship tests. Centrally, the book argues that the paradigm of integration navigates between universalist claims and particularistic—racial and religious—re-enactments of a secular nation-state framework at moments in which this very framework is crumbling.

About this title

About the Author

Schirin Amir-Moazami is Professor of Islam in Europe at Freie Universität Berlin, Germany.

Edition details

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Publication date: 2024
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1350266418
• ISBN 13: 9781350266414
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 204