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Piety in a Secular Society: Migration, Religiosity, and Islam in Britain
Abstract
While in the American context religion is seen to facilitate immigrant incorporation by providing both spiritual and socioeconomic resources, in Europe high levels of religiosity are theorized as a barrier for immigrant incorporation into the secular mainstream. This is particularly salient for Islam, Europe's largest minority religion. In this study, we use the 2008–2009 England and Wales Citizenship Survey to compare levels and predictors of religiosity between Muslim and non‐Muslim first‐generation immigrants and their native‐born counterparts. Overall, Muslims are more religious than non‐Muslims. The results show that among non‐Muslims, the foreign‐born are significantly more religious than the native‐born; among Muslims, however, nativity has no impact on religiosity, indicating the native‐born are as highly religious as the foreign‐born. Additionally, although education is associated with reduced religiosity among non‐Muslim immigrants and native‐born, for Muslims it has no significant impact. Muslims across diverse ethnic and socioeconomic backgrounds show strong religious adherence. Results suggest that pathways to secular, mainstream norms do not operate in the same manner across Muslim and non‐Muslim immigrant groups.
... Many Muslim immigrants retain their religious identity and religiosity in host societies, and this transcends generations. Evidence indicates that neither generation of immigration nor educational attainment reduces levels of self-identified religiosity for Muslims in non-Muslim majority countries (Lewis and Kashyap 2013;Ozyurt 2013;Scourfield et al. 2012). Interestingly, Lewis and Kashyap (2013) found contrasting results for non-Muslim British immigrants: namely, that later generations of immigrants, as well as those who were more educated, had lower levels of self-identified religiosity. ...
... Evidence indicates that neither generation of immigration nor educational attainment reduces levels of self-identified religiosity for Muslims in non-Muslim majority countries (Lewis and Kashyap 2013;Ozyurt 2013;Scourfield et al. 2012). Interestingly, Lewis and Kashyap (2013) found contrasting results for non-Muslim British immigrants: namely, that later generations of immigrants, as well as those who were more educated, had lower levels of self-identified religiosity. Likewise, Scourfield et al. (2012) found that non-Islamic religious and non-religious orientations weakened in transmission over three generations of non-Muslim British respondents, but the transmission of Islam over three generations remained robust for Muslim British respondents. ...
Scholars explain immigrant generational differences in perceptions of discrimination through differential exposure to social norms and milieu of the host society. This logic, however, fails to explain why differences persist even for acts of egregious violence. In this chapter, I draw on theories of everyday racism, boundaries, and imagined communities to explore divergences in how inclusivist and exclusivist reflexive Muslim participants frame similar experiences of Islamophobic racism. Exclusivist Muslim participants, who view only one approach to Islam as correct, quickly recall discriminatory experiences, describe the incidents in language that evokes pain and insecurity, and identify Islamophobia as a major problem in Canada. Inclusivist Muslim participants, who view multiple approaches to religion as correct, have trouble recalling discriminatory experiences, use strategies to dismiss those incidents, and simultaneously recognize and dismiss tension around Islamophobia in Canada. These findings have implications for the role and utility of religiosity in the stress process model.
... Studies comparing synthetic immigrant generations often document rather stable levels of religiosity across the first and second generation of Muslim immigrants: this has been found in Britain (Lewis and Kashyap 2013b), France (Soehl 2017), Germany and the Netherlands (Beek and Fleischmann 2019). Other studies, however, document declining religiosity in the second generation, both among Dutch Muslims (Maliepaard et al. 2010;Phalet et al. 2008) and immigrants across Europe ( Van der Bracht et al. 2013). ...
... A comparative study of second-generation Turkish Muslims found negative associations of religiosity with educational attainment in Berlin-but no significant associations in Amsterdam, Brussels and Stockholm . A decoupling of religiosity and educational attainment was likewise found in studies among Muslims in the UK (Lewis and Kashyap 2013b) and immigrant youth belonging to multiple denominations in Germany (Ohlendorf et al. 2017). The German NEPS-study even shows positive associations between adolescents' frequency of prayer and scores on a math test, but simultaneously reveals a negative relation of subjective religiosity and a nonsignificant one of community engagement with test scores (Carol and Schulz 2018). ...
This contribution to the special issue on religion and migration reviews two decades of large-scale survey research on changes in immigrant religion and the relationship between immigrants’ level of religiosity and their integration into European societies. The body of work reveals that Muslims in European societies stand out due to their comparatively high levels of religiosity and greater stability in religiosity over time and across immigrant generations. While the comparative picture is rather clear, findings regarding the long-term trend in Muslims’ religiosity and its association with immigrant integration are instead inconclusive. A systematic review of empirical studies of the association of (various indicators of) individual religiosity with immigrant integration reveals positive, negative and non-significant results for all outcomes and domains. Thus, based on the current state of art it is hard to assess whether and why religion forms a bridge or barrier to immigrant integration in Europe. To move the field forward, the contribution ends with a twofold proposal for a research agenda that includes a broadened empirical scope, moving beyond the focus on Sunni Muslims, and a conceptual extension that focuses on differences in reasoning about religion and religious meaning-making as additional, potentially more consistent and more powerful explanation for immigrants’ social relations and positions in their new societies
... The literature also tended to locate immigration within debates about the nature of British society and culture (Ford, 2011;Kaufmann and Harris, 2015); although some recent studies have corrected these biases by examining immigrant responses to their place in Britain (Bauer, 2018). Research into the nuanced role of religion within British immigrant communities has mainly focused on a specific religious faith (Chivallon, 2001;Sharma, 2012), mostly Islam (Geaves, 2015;Lewis, 2007;Lewis and Kashyap, 2013;Maliepaard and Schacht, 2018;Werbner, 2002). ...
... This study also extends the discussion around immigrants' identity by providing evidence of the interviewees' blend of identities, irrespective of their religious faith, background or generation. Scholars have claimed that the level of religiosity declines among the second and third generation immigrants (Lewis and Kashyap, 2013) and so does their bonding with their family roots as their priorities and interests merge traits of the host and the ancestral cultures (Sharma, 2012). In relation to British Muslims specifically, the literature argues that, after the 9/11 and the 7/7 events, British-born Muslims began to view themselves as a mix of the two cultures. ...
... The second reason for anticipating that media references to devotion in articles about Muslims will be negative is that Western societies-although nominally Christian-have become increasingly secular over a number of decades (Brubaker 2016;Cesari 2007;Lewis and Kashyap 2013;Pew Research Center 2015;Roy 2016). Analyzing laws and constitutional changes that aim to exclude religion from the public sphere, such as rulings against the wearing of the hijab and the secularization of public education, it is evident that faith is increasingly considered and treated as a private rather than public matter (Casanova 2006;Cesari 2007;Roy 2016). ...
... Its 2014 survey found that 71% of Americans describe themselves as Christian (Pew Research Center 2015, p. 4). religious than their American or European non-Muslim counterparts, they generally acknowledge that Islam is widely associated with a high degree of religiosity in Western society (Fischer et al. 2007;Lewis and Kashyap 2013;Fish 2011). Fish (2011 explains that "Islam is sometimes seen, by its very nature, as calling its followers to a greater level of devotion than other faiths demand of their adherents." ...
Scholars have identified Muslims’ religiosity and faith practices, often believed to be more intense than those of other religious groups, as a point of friction in liberal democracies. We use computer-assisted methods of lexical sentiment analysis and collocation analysis to assess more than 800,000 articles between 1996 and 2016 in a range of British, American, Canadian, and Australian newspapers. We couple this approach with human coding of 100 randomly selected articles to investigate the tone of devotion-related themes when linked to Islam and Muslims. We show that articles touching on devotion are not as negative as articles about other aspects of Islam—and indeed that they are not negative at all, on average, when focused on a key subset of devotion-related articles. We thus offer a new perspective on the perception of Islamic religiosity in Western societies. Our findings also suggest that if newspapers strive to provide a more balanced portrayal of Muslims and Islam within their pages, they may seek opportunities to include more frequent mentions of Muslim devotion.
... It drives migration policies based on reducing the number of newcomers and limiting humanitarian help provided by the country of destination. However, literature on the relationship between migration and integration does not give one answer to the question about the role of culture and religion in integration with the receiving country's society (Sarli and Mezzetti, 2020, 433;Alba and Foner, 2015;Kivisto, 2014;Lewis and Kashyap, 2013;García-Muñoz and Neuman, 2012;Zolberg and Woon, 1999). The North American literature tends to see religion as a factor fostering integration, by playing a role in addressing migrants' social needs. ...
Much research confirms that the country of origin of migrants (refugees), as well as their religion, determines the approach of the destination country society to newcomers. It affects the conditions of receiving the acceptance of a legal stay and possible support. Double standards are the main results of this intersection. The study aimed to present the research results on the securitization processes implemented in Poland as a response to two migration crises related to the influx of migrants and refugees from MENA countries and Ukraine. Proposed by Rita Floyd, a just and unjust securitization approach has been implemented in the analysis of securitization movements undertaken by Polish governments in 2015-2023. Critical discourse analysis (CDA) has been used to analyze securitization done by politicians in response to expectations of the society. The results confirm that although in the case of both described influx of securitization of migrants has been implemented, not in all cases it was a response to an existential threat. Migration from MENA countries was securitized much more often than from Ukraine and, at the same time, in most cases, it was unjust securitization. Those results confirm that the country of origin determines the securitization process as well as their justification.
... Multiple studies focusing on the European context reveal that the religiosity of Muslim immigrants tends to remain either relatively stable or increases over time, while other groups, especially Christian immigrants, present the opposite trend (e.g. Diehl and Koenig 2013;Drouhot and Nee 2019;Guveli 2015;Khoudja 2022;Lewis and Kashyap 2013;Platt 2014;Simsek, Fenella, and van Tubergen 2019). In the context of Canada, Nagra (2011) uses the term 'reactive identity formation', originally based on reactive ethnicity theory, to discuss how Muslims in Canada strengthened their religiosity despite facing mounting Islamophobia after 9/11 (425). ...
This study explores the shifting religiosity and religious identity of a group of Muslim Uyghur immigrants in Canada. The findings reveal that many have strengthened their attachment to their Islamic faith and identity after resettlement. Drawing on data gathered through 12 in-depth interviews (n=12) and a survey of more than 100 participants (n=106), this article suggests that this ‘reconversion’ process results from ‘conversations’ with three groups of ‘interlocutors.’ Firstly, their engagement with other Canadian Muslims has pushed them to revisit, confirm, and fortify their Muslim identity. Secondly, their self-reflection on their situation in China has renewed their awareness of their Uyghur Islamic heritage. Finally, their interaction with Christian/White majority others in Canada has reinforced the need to strengthen their Muslim identity. The awareness that they are different from the majorities in their homeland and Canada has contributed to this process simultaneously.
Key words: Islam; identity; religiosity; Whiteness; Canadian diaspora; Uyghur immigrants
... Furthermore, the uncertainty of the predominant social, economic, cultural, and political behaviour presents a challenge to certain elements of basic Islamic principles, understanding, and conduct. The facets of Islamic faith and conduct are in conflict with numerous spiritual, sexual, and socio-economic aspects of a secular state (Fridolfsson & Elander, 2013;Kuru, 2008;Lewis & Kashyap, 2013). Consequently, the host society in particular may ask if Muslim immigrants, when compared with other immigrants, differ with regard to cultural assimilation. ...
Muslim migration to Mexico is considered a new phenomenon, despite the longstanding Islamic-Iberian influence and Muslim presence in the country as a result of the Spanish conquest, slavery, Arab diaspora, globalisation, and local conversion. In the 21st century, the era in which Islamisation became visible, the ‘newcomers’ in the Muslim immigrant population are more racially and ethnically diverse than those who have been in Mexico for a longer time. They mostly settle in Mexico City and frequently immigrate through marriage with local citizens. However, little is known about who they are and what they do and think. This is because no significant in-depth research has been conducted on the presence of Muslim immigrants. Employing an interdisciplinary approach, the primary purpose of this research was to therefore examine how they adapt to the Mexican lifestyle and their experiences as Muslims in the country. The primary focus was on identity negotiation, which involved examining their metaperceptions and everyday religious practices across personal and social domains while performing what I conceptualize as Mexicanness. Rather than assuming that their religious characteristics are of ongoing importance, a better option was to consider the specific means by which immigrants understand or demonstrate religious meaning and identification in daily interrelationships. To achieve these aims, I employed an ethnographic approach consisting of in-depth semi-structured interviews with 43 informants, participant-observation, document analysis, informal conversations, and the collection of visual material (photographs and videos) during a 12-month period of fieldwork in Mexico in 2021. My original contribution to knowledge is to pioneer research on the Muslim population in Mexico by considering all immigrants together under the label of ‘Muslim immigrants’, and recognising the diversity that exists beyond Middle East sources while still considering each individual’s contestation of identity. In the historical chapter, my research expanded on the contemporary reasons that brought Muslims to Mexico and documented the
fast-growing interest in ḥalāl. The main findings were as follows: concerning metaperceptions, I argue that because of Mexico’s welcoming culture toward foreigners, the deep-embedded history that values foreigners in the doctrine of mestizaje, the lack of pre-existing ideas and personal experience with Muslims, and the absence of inflammatory political debates, these Muslims experienced highly positive and welcoming attitudes that helped forge the creation of an unstigmatised
Muslim identity. Islamophobia was almost non-existent except for a small
intersectionality of discrimination for being dark-skinned. On the other hand, the Muslim identity is viewed as exotic, rich, unique, and foreign. I argue that even though it is sometimes rather challenging to fulfil religious practices and obligations in a catholic-dominant environment, particularly when local Muslim communities are too small to provide assistance, Muslims do not move to Mexico holding very conservative, traditional religious views and rigid attitudes. They are very much integrated into host societies by performing Mexicanness, mainly through language, inter-cultural marriage, food, and culture. Finally, various identity negotiation strategies are
deployed, primarily to educate locals about their religious identity, as opposed to assimilation due to threat or stigma. This indicates that host members do not view Muslims as a threat to their nation, therefore these foreigners did not feel compelled to radicalise their faith in order to secure legitimacy.
... The available literature on the relationship between migration and integration can be divided in two research strands that are based on opposite sets of assumptions developed mostly on the two sides of the Atlantic, namely in Western Europe and North America (Alba, Foner, 2015;Lewis, Kashyap, 2013;García-Muñoz, Neuman, 2012;Zolberg, Woon, 1999). The North American literature on migration -particularly the us one-tends to see religion as a factor fostering integration, by playing a role in addressing migrants' social needs. ...
Within an ample study on the role of religion in the migratory and integration processes, this chapter illustrates some of the results of an original research carried out in Italy and based on different sources, among those 20 in-depth interviews with migrants and asylum seekers who, regardless of the entry channel and of their current legal status, have been significantly influenced by their religious belongings, as for both their decision to migrate and the development of migration and insertion processes.
In particular, the Chapter explores the “space” dedicated to the religious dimension and to the spiritual needs of migrants, also during the delicate phase of first reception and re-elaboration of the migratory distress. Thanks to the involvement of a sociologist of migration and of a theology scholar as co-author, the Chapter also investigates the “functions” and meanings that (forced) migrants for religious reasons attribute to religion and spirituality, seen both in their individual and communitarian declinations. Finally, through a de-instrumentalization of religion and the acknowledgement of migrants’ human subjectivity, the Authors discuss the results of the study through the concepts of identity, religious freedom, citizenship, and common good
... The available literature on the relationship between migration and integration can be divided in two research strands that are based on opposite sets of assumptions developed mostly on the two sides of the Atlantic, namely in Western Europe and North America (Alba, Foner, 2015;Lewis, Kashyap, 2013;García-Muñoz, Neuman, 2012;Zolberg, Woon, 1999). The North American literature on migration -particularly the us one-tends to see religion as a factor fostering integration, by playing a role in addressing migrants' social needs. ...
Within an ample study on the role of religion in the migratory and integration processes, this chapter illustrates some of the results of an original research carried out in Italy and based on different sources, among those 20 in-depth interviews with migrants and asylum seekers who, regardless of the entry channel and of their current legal status, have been significantly influenced by their religious belongings, as for both their decision to migrate and the development of migration and insertion processes.
In particular, the Chapter is devoted to analysing the role of religion within the procedure for the scrutiny of asylum applications. Given the legislative framework in force in Italy, the Author discusses how the actual implementation of rules and procedures allows (or does not allow) for the emergence and the acknowledgement of those aspects variously connected with asylum seekers’ religious belongings. Here, religiosity has emerged as both an obscured and a sensitive issue.
... Regarding employment status, unemployed individuals are less tempted to leave their country of origin (Williams et al., 2018), while, traditionally, it has been argued that male migration fl ows outnumber the female ones (Kanaiaupuni, 2000). Moreover, individuals with high levels of religiousness migrate to a lower extent to secular societies (Lewis and Kashyap, 2013). ...
In the context of increasing concerns about the demographic decline of Europe and the lack of sustainable policies to fight against it, the main purpose of this study is to estimate the migration intention of the Romanian students in economics and business administration and the influence of the determinant factors. Data are collected from a questionnaire survey applied to a sample of 1,155 students at the Alexandru Ioan Cuza University of Iasi. We have applied a multinomial logistic regression model with both simple effects and interactions. The results have brought strong arguments proving the importance of personal value recognition, beliefs and attitudes, family background, as well as interactions between genders, attitude towards competition and active search for a job or between parental severity and migration legacy, as determinant factors of the students' intention to migrate to Western Europe. These results may serve regional, national and even community-based sustainable development policies for the conservation of human resources and mostly of higher-educated individuals.
This study outlines how the aid of both corpus-based sociolinguistics and principles of Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) can help expose the subtle value-laden ideological representations of major religious orientations in American discourse. To do this, COCA (Corpus of Contemporary American English) and Van Dijk"s Discursive Strategy Framework (2004) were employed. Results indicated that the most highly used strategy was Lexicalization. It was further revealed that this discursive strategy was utilized to convey certain positive or negative connotations in the audience"s mind regarding different religious and belief systems. Accordingly, the most politicized religion was Islam, while Buddhism was the least politicized one. Its representation was also not as ideologically-loaded compared to other belief systems. Christianity was politicized, too, but mostly in terms of religious and historical-religious issues and events. Shifts in ideological representation of Judaism have been completely palpable. As in early COCA entries, the Jew were represented as greedy and crooked people (physically and ethically). While, more recent entries have attributed Judaism to science, discipline and physical attractiveness. Finally, atheism has been depicted in COCA as a long-running belief system highly attributed to bona fide scientists, progressive-minded people, and the LGBTQ community.
This paper examines religious change of immigrants from Poland, Bulgaria, Turkey, and Spain in the first years after their arrival in the Netherlands––one of the least religious countries in the world. Religiosity is measured by attendance, praying, and subjective religiosity. Multiple‐group latent growth models are estimated based on four waves spanning a total of 4 years (n = 3354 at Wave 1) to identify religious trajectories. Results show an initial increase in attendance that levels off and ultimately reverses and a steady decrease in subjective religiosity across all immigrant groups. A group‐specific pattern is visible on the praying dimension: Turks show an initial increase that levels off over time and then reverses, whereas the other groups show no substantial change. The analysis suggests that differences in opportunities to attend and exclusion experiences are unlikely to be the main drivers of the immigrants’ religious trajectories.
Mass migration of students is a phenomenon associated with the present times. There has been significant increase in number of international students from 1702788 in 1995 to 5085159 in 2017. Though traditionally preferred destinations for Indian students for higher education have been from USA and UK, but since the turn of the century the preference of Indian students for Canada and Australia is increasing. The present paper attempts to explore the migration of Indian students to Australia and the process of migration and policies. The study has been divided into two phases including the pre 2009 era and post 2009 era and was observed that a considerable amount of change in the international migration of Indian students in Australia has taken place because of the racial attacks on the Indian students in 2009.
Covid-19 has led to the steepest slowdown since the great depression of 1930's. It is expected that the global economy would shrink over 5.2 percent in 2020(IMF, 2020). This situation of pandemic had led the international migration to come to a standstill. Australia is considered to be a fastest moving economy and students prefer it for its globally acceptable institutes, and liberal policies of its government. The present paper attempted to explore growth of international students in the Australian institutes with special focus on the Indian students as well as explore on this category of migrants. The study found that there remains a question mark as to how many students would opt to go for their studies to Australia in spite of many incentives being given both by the Australian government and the universites. The decline in number of international students would have adverse effect on financial outlook of these universities.
This paper explores what the author terms as “Islamic moral impulses,” a tradition that could be developed to address issues of migration and displacement. The aspiration is that Muslims would investigate their own moral tradition to help construct humanitarian paradigms that elevate international moral trajectories rather than simply acquiescing and rubber-stamping vague doctrines produced by nation-states in search of their own national interests. The Muslim tradition is replete with powerful virtuous ethical impulses that could make substantive contributions to the field of forced migrants and displacement. Among these ethical impulses are critical concepts of counter-istiḍʿāf—countering oppression and powerlessness through mobility and accessibility, first and foremost between Muslims themselves; and second, between Muslims and “the other”; as well as the ethics of muʾākha (brotherhood), ḍiyāfa (hospitality), and ʾijāra (asylum). These are ethical concepts that could easily find common ground with other religious and faith-based traditions, in a way that challenges and elevates, rather than simply apologetically rubber-stamping modern international law. The author argues for Muslims to deploy their own ethical tradition in the service of alleviating and removing human suffering. Global refugee and migration flows stemming from recent conflicts in the greater MENA region have become a pressing global priority for governments, NGOs, and civil society networks alike. In this paper I analyze the discursive practices emerging in the transnational Muslim humanitarian sector, documenting the emergence of a pervasive ethic of non-secular universal humanism therein. I argue that the practices of theologically informed universal humanitarianism constitute a type of “living fiqh” that can be developed by Muslim ethicists to help mitigate the challenges of religious sectarianism, ethno-nationalism and political ideology that have been exacerbated by the forced migration crisis. If mapped, debated, and engaged with responsibly, the discourses that emerge in the “living fiqh” of Muslim humanitarianism promise to provide much needed concrete examples of cooperative ethics and practical solutions to pressing problems faced by the victims of forced displacement and their hosts. To do so, I argue that Muslim ethicists should integrate contemporary social sciences with the classical jurisprudential tool of custom (ʿUrf). In this paper I make the case that a closer examination of the tradition of jiwār or neighbourliness can help unsettle the binary of citizen and migrant that forecloses the possibility of accessing rights for the latter. Here, insights from human geography and social anthropology pertaining to understandings and practices of conviviality are mobilised to ask what contemporary readings of jiwār can tell us given that the nation-state dominates modalities and practices of locality production. Mobilising interview and ethnographic research material produced in partnership with Palestinian, Syrian, Sudanese, and Iraqi forced migrants over the past 8 years across multiple sites, this paper draws attention to the significance of creating and maintaining neighbourly relations and spaces as an ethical position contrasted against exclusionary nation-state and sectarian discourses and practices. Here, I draw on the Turkish state response to on-going Syrian displacement and the Syrian state’s response to the earlier displacement of Iraqis (2005-11) to illustrate how the sedentarist logic of the nation-state impedes practices of conviviality that emerge from the lived realities of encounter between those already resident and those who newly arrive. This paper is part of a broader study that I conducted for my fieldwork in Egypt during the summer of 2017 where I interviewed over thirty Syrian refugee women who escaped the conflict in Syria and married Egyptian men after 2011 once they settled in Egypt. The paper highlights a recurring notion that I came across during many of the interviews: Zawāj al-Sutra or “Protection Marriage”. Such practice was arguably recurrent throughout Islamic history where many have suggested it was encouraged in Islamic tradition (Qurʾan and Sunnah). I start by positioning this practice in Islamic jurisprudence. I then follow the stories of three women that I have interviewed to unfold the different trajectories and mixed experiences that Sutra marriage has taken with different Syrian refugee women in Egypt. In doing so, I demonstrate how the application of this marriage intersects with notions such as modernity and patriarchy. I use an anti-colonial framework to assess this practice and its contemporary application in a way that does not only reveal its advantages and shortcomings, but also exposes orientalist assumptions in the contemporary ethical and humanitarian frameworks that often reduce and stigmatize similar social arrangements as exploitation, forced marriage or sex trafficking. The objective of this paper is to offer Islamic Jurisprudence, in its search for an ethico-religious framework, some deeper sociological understanding of the realities of women and particularly refugee women in Muslim societies. This paper is an attempt to identify the continuities and discontinuities between the religious Islamic notion and practice of kafala (kafāla) and its contemporary application to migrant, or temporary contract labour – with specific reference to the Gulf States where it has been most prominently legislated and practiced. Western (and non-Western) critiques of this form of kafala portray it as a system that is inherently oppressive and exploitative and thus falls considerably short of its traditional representations in Islam. It has been argued that there has been a fundamental rupture between Islamic jurisprudence of kafala and its present practice as a form of labour management. Part of the argument in this paper is that the modern Islamic state, through the right of the leader (waliy al-amr and his siyāsa sharʿiyya), has legitimately modified traditional practices on the basis of the public interest (maṣlaḥa). This political dimension has not been previously addressed. However, despite the veritable criticism of the contemporary practices in the name of kafala, it is argued here that these should be seen as violations of the principles, not because of the principles themselves. We can still identify a traditional normative set of social arrangements, but the exploitative potential of these arrangements motivated by greed and control has overtaken the ethical guidelines of trust, care, responsibility and obligations in relation to the presence of foreign contract labour. From the law and religious dicta through fatwas, we provide evidence of traditional ethical continuity, with some traditional elements in the codified law, but non-compliance in contemporary practice – a perennial problem. Much scholarship highlights the importance of using indigenous paradigms for social science and of stripping social science from some hegemonic trends influenced by Western materialistic and colonial ethos. While several schools of thought have pushed in this direction, this approach has some excesses, including positing antagonistic binary categories. In this article, I will raise three questions to echo this debate: first, can one talk about an epistemic social science community that possesses certain normative positions? If yes, what would these positions be? Would binary categories generated by the above-mentioned perspectives inform us about the way social science should head to reach a context where Muslims live in the world? I have chosen the topic of migration as a particularly salient topic, rife with major waves of forced and voluntary migration, racism, Islamophobia and ethnic diversity. Empirically, I conducted a content analysis of 74 recent academic articles in Arabic, English and French. The results demonstrate that when migration studies scholars are normative, they combine Weberian ethics of conviction and of responsibility in order to make often sound social/political judgments. This combination makes them refuse a position that is too permissive in the sense any means are justifiable to secure particular ends (refuting overemphasis on security approach in relation to migration for instance). This combination often puts social scientists in a dilemma that sometime encodes paradoxes: protecting local employment v/s open borders for refugees/migrants; multiculturalism v/s some migrant cultural habits that contradict some basic principles of human rights, etc. This cannot be discussed in famous dichotomies of scholars of Islamization of social science or post-colonial studies (community v/s individual, tradition v/s. modernity, revelation v/s reason, history v/s present time, central v/s periphery etc.). The paper addresses citizenship access to “outsiders” in Muslim-majority states. In the dominant view, Islamic provisions imply the relegation of unequal rights for non-Muslims, for instance with the traditional dhimmi status. Certainly, the criteria for citizenship acquisition in Muslim countries today show a predominance of the Jus sanguinis principle, which has the effect of excluding non-Muslims. We focus mainly on the states’ practice relating to naturalisation since the mid-twentieth century using a comparative approach. In the first part, there is the observation of a general similarity in naturalisation provisions to resident foreigners across Muslim states. In the second part we analyse the six Arab-Gulf states in closer detail. The conclusion affirms that most Muslim states are inclined to the Jus sanguinis practice. However, they do not take a uniform path. This indicates political considerations in the discrimination or strategy, rather than a rigid formula inspired essentially from religion. This essay engages with the refashioning of the hijra narrative in the literatures of the deported peoples of the Caucasus. I shed light on how early Islamic concepts of migration have shaped local histories and created diasporic identities for Caucasus peoples who are at present scattered across the Middle East. Amid a series of forced migrations to Ottoman lands, displaced peoples from the Caucasus adapted the hijra narrative to 19th and 20th century contexts. Yet in adapting it, they retained its core features: the story of forced displacement and the longing to live in an environment where they could freely practice their religion. This paper explores the experience of Uyghur immigration to Turkey and the U.S., using the issues of Religion, Law, Society, Residence, and Citizenship. The history of Uyghurs in the homeland, the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region of China (aka. East Turkistan) has colored their diasporic travels. Their immigration to Turkey that first started in the 1950’s and continued in waves, reflects the differing experiences among early and later migrants. U.S. immigration came later and included some who were re-migrating. Even though Turkey is predominantly Muslim and the U.S. is a secular country but mostly Christian, experiences in both are similar in many ways. Despite the diversities and differences that divide the Uyghur diasporic community, the Uyghur refugees’ relationships with Turkey and the U.S. can be analyzed within a context of Turkish and U.S. multiculturalism. This implies on the one hand democracy and tolerance, and on the other hand exclusion, inferiority and ‘otherness’. Regardless of their formal status, Uyghur immigrants in the U.S., and to some degree in Turkey, are considered as ‘other’ and are thereby subject to unfair treatment, being ignored, ridiculed or treated differently. They are not viewed or treated as equals socially or culturally. Hence, there is a gap between formal and “substantive” citizenship. Research by the author has indicated that ideas about an inborn and unchangeable identity connected to a certain territory and culture remain very much alive among both Uyghur-Turks and Uyghur-Americans. They have experiences of, as well as intense social and emotional bonds to, their “homeland” and the Uyghur diaspora community. The process of ‘naturalization’ by immigrant Muslims in host social settings or its modern variant of ‘citizenship acquisition’ in modern secular nation states has often been examined within the light of legal and ethical parameters drawn by Muslim scholars in the heartlands of Islam. Revisiting the concept in the light of Muslim historical experiences of naturalization in non-Muslim political settings will provide aspects of naturalization of Muslims that are contrary to the anti-immigrant narratives aired in the West. Contrary to the conventional binary of Dār al-Kufr and Dār al-Islām usually drawn in the scholarly debates on nationalist identities within Islamic ethics, this chapter contextualizes the amicable livelihood that Arab immigrants nurtured in the peripheries such as the Indian Ocean for understanding citizenship and naturalization process in non-Muslim lands. The historical anecdotes in this chapter not only present a more dynamic ethical dimension of migratory settlement of Muslim immigrants in Islamic history but also expose the significance of contexts in understanding Islamic ethics that helps to dismantle anti-immigrant bigotries.
In this paper I investigate intergenerational transmission in religiosity among immigrants and natives, comparing families affiliating with Christianity, Islam or any other religious denomination in Germany. Thereby, I focus on the role of transmission opportunities and perceived benefits of religious transmission within and outside the family on the chance of successfully passing on religious attachment from parents to children. Furthermore, I investigate whether these factors contribute to explain group differences in the intergenerational transmission in religiosity. Using data from the Children of Immigrants Longitudinal Survey in Four European Countries (CILS4EU), my empirical results show that family characteristics and everyday interactions influence the strength of intergenerational secularisation, but they can only partly account for differences in divergent transmission patterns.
Migration creates opportunities but also bring challenges that cause stress and affect mental health of migrants. Stress among Muslim immigrants can be intensified by experiences of discrimination. This study addressed the meaning and role of religion as a mediator of stress and mental health among Central Asian Muslim immigrants. This paper explored whether religious coping worked for recent Muslim immigrants in the US, and how religion buffered migration and discrimination-related stress that negatively affected mental health of Central Asian immigrants. Drawing from different types of ethnographic and biological data, collected in Chicago Metropolitan Area, this study explored culturally embedded stress responses, and tested the religious coping framework upon experiences of a new minority group of Muslim immigrants in the US, expanding our knowledge on factors that inform health outcomes of immigrant population.
Strangers No More is the first book to compare immigrant integration across key Western countries. Focusing on low-status newcomers and their children, it examines how they are making their way in four critical European countries-France, Germany, Great Britain, and the Netherlands-and, across the Atlantic, in the United States and Canada. This systematic, data-rich comparison reveals their progress and the barriers they face in an array of institutions-from labor markets and neighborhoods to educational and political systems-and considers the controversial questions of religion, race, identity, and intermarriage. Richard Alba and Nancy Foner shed new light on questions at the heart of concerns about immigration. They analyze why immigrant religion is a more significant divide in Western Europe than in the United States, where race is a more severe obstacle. They look at why, despite fears in Europe about the rise of immigrant ghettoes, residential segregation is much less of a problem for immigrant minorities there than in the United States. They explore why everywhere, growing economic inequality and the proliferation of precarious, low-wage jobs pose dilemmas for the second generation. They also evaluate perspectives often proposed to explain the success of immigrant integration in certain countries, including nationally specific models, the political economy, and the histories of Canada and the United States as settler societies. Strangers No More delves into issues of pivotal importance for the present and future of Western societies, where immigrants and their children form ever-larger shares of the population.
Much attention in popular discourse and academic, qualitative research has focused on strengthening ‘fundamentalist’ religiosity among Muslim youth in Britain, and its impact on engendering politicized religious identities and conservative social attitudes. We use new survey data to empirically examine how Muslim youth differ from older Muslims and non-Muslim British peers on religiosity, Islam-specific and broader social attitudes. We find that young Muslims attribute a greater salience to Islam for their personal identity, even though they pray and read scripture less, and support plural interpretations of Islam more than their elders. Like other youth, Muslim youth show liberalizing social attitudes across generations on gay marriage and legal abortion. Notably, like Christian youth, Muslim youth express stronger support for including religion in public debates than their elders. Overall, Muslim youth religiosity although uniquely expressed, influences moral and social attitudes for Muslims similarly to that of Christian or other religious youth.
‘Believing without belonging’ has become the catchphrase of much European work on religion in the past decade. The thesis that religious belief is fairly robust even if churchgoing is declining is examined using data from the British Household Panel Survey and the British Social Attitudes surveys. The evidence suggests that belief has in fact eroded in Britain at the same rate as two key aspects of belonging: religious affiliation and attendance. Levels of belief are lower than those of nominal belonging. The roles of period, cohort and age effects on religious change are considered; the conclusion is that decline is generational. In relation to the rates at which religion is transmitted from parents to children, the results suggest that only about half of parental religiosity is successfully transmitted, while absence of religion is almost always passed on. Transmission is just as weak for believing as for belonging.
Drawing on recent cross-national surveys of the Turkish second generation, we test hypotheses of secularization and of religious vitality for Muslim minorities in Europe. Secularization predicts an inverse relationship between structural integration and religiosity, such that the Turkish second generation would be less religious with higher levels of educational attainment and intermarriage. The religious vitality hypothesis predicts the maintenance of religion in the second generation, highlighting the role of religious socialization within immigrant families and communities. Taking a comparative approach, these hypotheses are tested in the context of different national approaches to the institutionalization of Islam as a minority religion in four European capital cities: Amsterdam, Berlin, Brussels and Stockholm. Across contexts, religious socialization strongly predicts second-generation religiosity, in line with religious vitality. The secularization hypothesis finds support only among the second generation in Berlin, however, where Islam is least accommodated.
The study of secularization appears to be entering a new phase. Supplyside theories that focus exclusively on religious participation and membership seem too one-dimensional. But classical theories of secularization contain generalized and teleological premises that are at odds with the complexities of empirical reality and the historical record. This review seeks to map a new way forward and identify key obstacles and goals. It begins by retracing the development of secularization theory within sociology and the genealogy of the secularization concept within presociological discourse. It then reviews what is and is not known about secularization in the West, noting the limitations of the data and biases in research. The article further argues for comparative and historical approaches that incorporate non-Christian religions and non-Western regions. The social scientific literature that critically reassesses the relationship between diverse religious movements, secularisms, and liberal democracies presents new questions for future research. We stress the importance of theoretical approaches that move beyond the deeply entrenched secularist and religious assumptions and propose general guidelines for future research on the varieties of secularity.
This study examines cross-national differences in the religiosity of immigrants in Europe utilizing three different measures of religiosity: religious attendance, praying, and subjective religiosity. Hypotheses are formulated by drawing upon a variety of theories—scientific worldview, insecurity, religious markets, and social integration. The hypotheses are tested using European Social Survey data (2002–2008) from more than 10,000 first-generation immigrants living in 27 receiving countries. Multilevel models show that, on the individual level, religiosity is higher among immigrants who are unemployed, less educated, and who have recently arrived in the host country. On the contextual level, the religiosity of natives positively affects immigrant religiosity. The models explain about 60 percent of the cross-national differences in religious attendance and praying of immigrants and about 20 percent of the cross-national differences in subjective religiosity.
This article analyzes why immigrant religion is viewed as a problematic area in Western Europe in contrast to the United States, where it is seen as facilitating the adaptation process. The difference, it is argued, is anchored in whether or not religion can play a major role for immigrants and the second generation as a bridge to inclusion in the new society. Three factors are critical: the religious backgrounds of immigrants in Western Europe and the United States; the religiosity of the native population; and historically rooted relations and arrangements between the state and religious groups.
This study examines the religious affiliation and participation of immigrants from a large-scale, comparative perspective. I propose a “specific migration” framework, in which immigrants' religiosity is an outcome of both individual characteristics and contextual properties related to immigrants' country of origin, country of destination, and combinations of origin and destination (i.e., communities). I use notions discussed in the religion and migration literature that fit into this scheme. To test these ideas, I collected and standardized 20 existing surveys on immigrants in eight Western countries, yielding about 38,000 immigrants. Applying multilevel models, I found, among other things, that: (1) immigrants from countries with higher levels of modernization express lower levels of religious commitment; (2) immigrants in religious countries are more religious themselves; and (3) the well-documented higher levels of religious commitment among women is not generalizable to immigrants.
In all immigration societies, a social distinction between immigrant and second generations, on the one hand, and natives, on the other, is imposed by the ethnic majority and becomes a sociologically complex fault line. Building on a comparison of second-generation Mexicans in the U.S., North Africans in France, and Turks in Germany, this article argues that the concepts associated with boundary processes offer the best opportunity to understand the ramifications of this distinction. The difference between bright boundaries, which involve no ambiguity about membership, and blurred ones, which do, is hypothesized to be associated with the prospects and processes of assimilation and exclusion. The institutionalization of boundaries is examined in the key domains of citizenship, religion, language, and race. The analysis leads to the specific conclusion that blurred boundaries generally characterize the situation of Mexicans in the U.S., with race the great, albeit not well understood, exception, while bright boundaries characterize the European context for Muslim groups.
Are there generational differences in ethnic and religious attachment among Muslim minorities in the Netherlands? To answer this question, we assess patterns of ethnic and religious identity and practice as well as their interrelation among Dutch Turks and Moroccans. Classical assimilation theories predict a decline in ethnic attachment over generations, but are less clear on consequences of migration on religious attachment. We use quantitative analysis to test propositions among first and second generation minorities (N = 1,861). Our data indicate that the second generation reports weaker ethnic and religious identities, and engages less in ethno-cultural and religious practices. We do find, however, that religious and ethnic identity become increasingly related for the second generation. These differences can only partly be accounted for by differences in education, employment and life course events.
We demonstrate that social scientists rarely take full advantage of the information available in their statistical results. As a consequence, they miss opportunities to present quantities that are of greatest substantive interest for their research, and to express their degree of certainty about these quantities. In this paper,we o#er an approach, built on the technique of statistical simulation,to extract the currently overlooked information from any statistical method,no matter how complicated,and to interpret and present it in a reader-friendly manner. Using this technique requires some sophistication,which we try to provide herein, but its application should make the results of quantitative articles more informative and transparent to all. To illustrate our recommendations,we replicate the results of several published works, showing in each case how the authors' own conclusions can be expressed more sharply and informatively, and how our approach reveals important new information a...
Exploring the woefully neglected reality of Islam as a major cultural and relgious facet of American and European politics and societies, Cesari examines how Muslims in the West are challenging the notion of an inevitable clash or confrontation. With nearly twelve million Muslims living in the larger countries of Western Europe and almost six million in America, the challenges of integrating newcomers within different countries, and the place of Islam in democratic and secular context in the post 9/11 context, have become more pertinent. Comparing the interaction of Muslims with their new countries, this book addresses the implications of increased Islamic visability, violent clashes, beneficial cooperation, and questions within the Muslim community about their role and the role of Islam in democratic states. Pursuing a holistic approach to Muslims as a new minority within western democracy, Cesari provides important insights.
Zusammenfassung
Die Religiosität türkischer Einwanderer zeichnet sich durch eine erstaunlich hohe intergenerationale Stabilität aus. Dieser Beitrag diskutiert existierende theoretische Erklärungsansätze für Religiosität im Generationenverlauf und überprüft sie anhand empirischer Daten der in Deutschland durchgeführten Generations- and Gender Surveys (GGS). Dabei wird gezeigt, dass die klassische Assimilationstheorie und Konzepte der symbolischen oder kompensatorischen Religiosität ebenso wenig eine befriedigende Erklärung dieses Phänomens bieten wie der Hinweis auf die allgemein hohe Wertestabilität in Migrantenfamilien. Weder nimmt die Religiosität zwischen erster und zweiter Generation ab, noch erfährt sie einen Bedeutungswandel hin zu einer primär symbolischen Dimension der Lebensführung. Auch finden sich nur schwache empirische Evidenzen für die Thesen, dass intensive Religiosität eine Domäne der gesellschaftlichen „Verlierer“ ist oder lediglich einen Spezialfall einer generell hohen intergenerationalen Wertestabilität im Migrationskontext darstellt. Abschließend werden daher makrosoziologische Erklärungsansätze entfaltet, die muslimische Religiosität auf die Diversifizierung des islamisch-religiösen Feldes und auf die Salienz von Religion als symbolischer Grenze gegenüber Einwanderern beziehen.
Introduction British Muslim young men occupy a sensationalised and demonised position in contemporary British society - indeed, we might describe them as the new folk devils of the British imagination. Popular discursive constructions of British Muslim young men coalesce around homogenised and stereotypical representations of dangerous and angry fundamentalists who engage in burning books (the Rushdie affair), rioting (e.g. in Bradford, Oldham) and planning, advocating and/or carrying out acts of terrorism (11 September 2001, 7 July 2005, summer 2006). In short, they are popularly feared as the archetypal ‘outsiders within’ - those who cannot be trusted and whose loyalty to the nation-state, and to the values and ideology of ‘Britishness’, cannot be counted upon. These representations and panics raise important social justice questions. Extending Skeggs' (2004) theorisation of the representation of working-class subjects in public life, I would argue that British Muslims are being increasingly subjected to a narrow ‘forced telling of the self’ within popular and media discourse. For instance, it has become a common practice within news and current affairs reporting to parade an endless series of Muslim individuals, spokespersons and community representatives who are asked to explain their identities and to define their own positions vis-à-vis the various events and issues in question. This is not limited to Muslim men, as witnessed in autumn 2006, when fierce debates erupted around the wearing of the niqab, a debate in which Muslim women have been impelled to explain and situate themselves and their religious identities/practices through a simplistic, narrow dichotomy (wearing the veil vs not wearing it).
August Comte, Herbert Spencer, Emile Durkheim, Max Weber, Karl Marx and Sigmund Freud predicted that religion would gradually fade in importance and cease to be significant with the emergence of industrial society. Their belief that religion was dying became conventional wisdom in the social sciences during most of the twentieth century. However, this analysis reveals that the traditional secularization thesis needs updating now. Religion has not disappeared and is unlikely to do so, even though secularization has had a surprisingly powerful negative impact on human fertility rates.
If secularization is increasing over time, this should be observable in patterns of religiosity across the generations. The Home Office Citizenship Survey (of adults in England and Wales) and its accompanying Young People’s Survey provide a relatively rare example of individual-level and intergenerational British data on religious transmission, with indications of religious affiliation or practice across three generations. Secondary analysis was conducted on the 2003 data, looking at religious transmission in four groups: Christians, Muslims, those from non-Christian non-Muslim religions and those with no religion. Associations between religious transmission and a range of social factors are presented, with these including ethnicity, gender, country of birth and socio-economic characteristics. The data suggest a complex pattern of religious transmission over the three generations and a higher transmission of Islam than any of the other religious categories. There is, therefore, a focus on Islam in the presentation and discussion of the data analysis.
This article considers the interrelationship between religious and ethnic identities maintained by young British Pakistanis, and addresses the question of why religion is a more significant source of social identity for these young people than ethnicity. There are two basic manifestations of this greater significance of religion. First, it is manifest in the nature of the fundamental distinction made by many young British Pakistanis between religion and ethnicity as sources of identity. This distinction rests on the assumption that whereas Pakistani ethnicity relates to a particular place and its people, Islam has universal relevance. The greater significance of religion is manifest, secondly, in the contrast between the essential characteristics of the social boundaries delineating the two forms of social identity. The social boundaries which encompass expressions of religious identity among young British Pakistanis are pervasive and clear‐cut in comparison to increasingly permeable ethnic boundaries.
This article has three sections. The first deals with the attempts by the sociology of religion to come to terms with the post-modern condition; it draws on the argument set out in the final chapter of Davie (1994). The second section updates these ideas taking account of more recent evidence. The third looks to the future; it is based primarily on the more theoretical aspects of Davie (2002a). It illustrates the needfor rather different approaches in the sociology of religion as the debates of the new century assert themselves.
In contemporary media and policy debates young British Muslim men are frequently described as experiencing cultural conflict, as alienated, deviant, underachieving, and as potential terrorists. In this article we seek to convey the everyday negotiations, struggles and structural constraints that shape the lives of young British Pakistani Muslim men in particular. We draw on interviews with British Pakistani Muslim men aged between 16 and 27 in Slough and Bradford. These are from a broader project, which focused on the link between education and ethnicity, and analysed the ways in which values and norms related to education, jobs and career advancement are accommodated, negotiated or resisted in the context of their families, communities and the wider society. A range of masculinities emerge in our data and we argue that these gender identities are defined in relational terms, to other ways of being Pakistani men and to being men in general, as well as to Pakistani femininities. While we recognise the fluidity, instability and situatedness of social identities, we also illustrate the ways in which masculinities are negotiated at the intersection of gender, ethnicity, class, religion, age and place and enacted within contexts which are themselves subjected to racialised and gendered processes. Our findings offer a varied and contextual understanding of British Pakistani masculinities.
In this paper I look at the growth of revivalist Islam - the 'new Islam' - within Muslim migrant communities in Western societies. I do so through a comparative analysis of how Bangladesh-origin Muslims in Britain and the US view and understand revivalist Islam, especially its popularity among youth within their communities. I explore the effects of national context, exploring the ways in which variations of history and context of settlement shape the character of revivalist Islam in the British and US Bangladesh-origin communities. I find that Bangladesh-origin Muslims in Britain and the US see the growth of revivalist Islam to be a response to the growing salience of 'Muslim' as a public identity for them in these countries. Other explanations include a deep sense of political and cultural alienation from the West, coupled with a desire, especially among the younger generation, to distance oneself from an identification with Bangladesh. The impact of national context is evident in how these understandings are expressed as well as in their implications for patterns of incorporation. The growth of revivalist Islam appears to be a far more contested matter among the Bangladesh-origin community in Britain than it is in the US.
Among migration scholars, immigrant religiosity has become an important variable in understanding immigrant incorporation into the new society, but less studied are determinants of varying immigrant religious outcomes. Using a subsample of immigrant Muslims within the European Social Survey (2002, 2004, 2006), contexts of immigrant receptivity as less or more welcoming are tested on immigrant Muslim religious outcomes using multi-level modelling. Results confirm the hypothesis that less welcoming immigrant contexts are associated with higher religious outcomes among Muslim immigrants in comparison to the host region's religiosity.
The article presents new data for the Muslim population of Britain from the 2001 Census. It uses the cross tabulations of ethnicity by religion to back-project the growth of the Muslim population from 21,000 in 1951 to 1.6 millions in 2001. It examines the social, economic, demographic and geographic characteristics of the population. Although Muslims are often represented as a homogenous group, there are considerable internal differences, so that the characteristics of the population as a whole do not apply to all groups within. The 2001 Census shows that two-thirds of British Muslims are ethnically Pakistani, Indian and Bangladeshi, but one-third comes from diverse European, African, North African, Middle Eastern and other Asian sources. Nevertheless, Muslim gender roles emerge as a critical differentiator of socio-economic vulnerability. Taken as a whole, the Muslim population is young and rapidly growing; its socio-economic profile is depressed, marked by the exceptionally low participation rate of women in the formal labour market, and by high concentration in areas of multiple deprivation.
Social Scientists rarely take full advantage of the information available in their statistical results. As a consequence, they miss opportunities to present quantities that are of greatest substantive interest for their research and express the appropriate degree of certainty about these quantities. In this article, we offer an approach, built on the technique of statistical simulation, to extract the currently overlooked information from any statistical method and to interpret and present it in a reader-friendly manner. Using this technique requires some expertise, which we try to provide herein, but its application should make the results of quantitative articles more informative and transparent. To illustrate our recommendations, we replicate the results of several published works, showing in each case how the authors' own conclusions can be expressed more sharply and informatively, and, without changing any data or statistical assumptions, how our approach reveals important new information about the research questions at hand. We also offer very easy-to-use Clarify software that implements our suggestions.
This article analyses the growth of a new revivalist, internationally orientated Islam in Tower Hamlets. It moves beyond discussions of identity to look at the roles of ideology and socio-economic background, and to assess the effect of the new identities and ideologies on social and political action. It looks at why young Bengalis are being increasingly attracted to Islam, and at how this can benefit both themselves and the wider Bengali community; and it also explores where the impact of the new Islam is less positive, ending with an examination of the limits of its power as a vehicle for radical change in a deprived area of London. The article is based on interviews carried out in 2000 and 2001 as part of a wider historical study of political mobilization of Jewish and Bengali immigrants in London's East End.
Islam has a long, albeit hidden history in Wales. Traditionally, studies of Welsh religion have focused on Christianity so that little has been written about non-Christian religions in Wales. Moreover, general theoretical debates about secularisation have tended to be overly Christocentric in their focus, with the experiences of non-Christian faith groups conspicuous by their absence in most studies of modern urban societies and secularisation. Similarly, most academic studies emanating from Islam, while they have much to say on liberal secular societies, have yet meaningfully to engage with the secularisation thesis. This article explores the relationship between classical theories of secularisation, historical processes of secularisation in Wales, and the contemporary experience of Muslim groups operating within a highly secularised environment. The article argues that there is a need in multi-cultural societies to develop a theory of secularisation that can incorporate a non-Christian dimension. Recent theoretical writing by Steve Bruce (Politics) and David Martin (Revised Theory) offers a promising route in this direction.
This article analyzes the best available evidence from the major British social surveys to describe and explain the continuous decline of religion throughout the 20th century. This decline is overwhelmingly generational in nature rather than a product of particular periods such as World War II or the 1960s. Measures of religious affiliation, regular attendance at worship, and religious belief show nearly identical rates of intergenerational decline. Decline has not been offset by any positive age effects in an aging society: Britons do not get more religious as they get older. The intergenerational decline follows clear patterns of transmission of parental religious characteristics to children. Two potential modulators of decline are identified and investigated: immigration of people who are more religious than the existing population and higher fertility rates among the religiously active population. Of these only the former appears of importance. The nonwhite ethnic minority immigrant population is far more religious than the white population; however, the rates of intergenerational decline (between immigrant parents and native-born children) are almost as high as for the white population, leading to an intergenerational convergence of levels of religiosity. Although ethnic minority populations tend to be more religious and have higher fertility rates, there is no differential fertility by religiosity among the population as a whole.
This study examines the religious participation of Islamic immigrants in Belgium using data from the Migration History and Social Mobility Survey collected in 1994–1996 from 2,200 men who had immigrated from Turkey and Morocco. Religious participation is measured as mosque attendance, fasting during Ramadan, and sacrificing a sheep at the Festival of Sacrifice. Results show that the religious participation of Islamic immigrants depends on both premigration and postmigration characteristics. Religious participation is higher among immigrants who: (1) attended a Koranic school in their country of origin, (2) were socialized in a religious region of their home country, (3) received little schooling, (4) currently live in an area of Belgium with a greater number of mosques, and (5) associate with a high number of co-ethnics. These results suggest that the religious participation of Islamic immigrants in Belgium is an outcome of characteristics unique to immigrants as well as processes common among the general population.
There is evidence of two main discourses about the masculinities of young Muslim men – one that emphasizes patriarchy and aggression, the other effeminacy and academicism – and together they offer polarized perspectives of young Muslim men's masculinities. This paper explores youthful Muslim masculinities through narratives of gender and generational relations, using interview and focus group data collected during discussions with young Muslim men, mainly of Pakistani heritage, who live in Glasgow and Edinburgh, in Scotland. I seek to use this data to disrupt these dominant discourses by demonstrating that young Muslim men's masculinities are influenced by markers of social difference, as well as locality, and so are multiple, fluid and multi-faceted.
The classical model of the role of religion in the lives of immigrants to the United States, formulated in the writings of Will Herberg and Oscar Handlin, emphasized cultural continuity and the psychological benefits of religious faith following the trauma of immigration. Although this perspective captures an important reason for the centrality of religion in most immigrant communities (but not for all immigrants), the classical model does not address the equally important socioeconomic role of churches, synagogues, temples, and mosques in American society. The creation of an immigrant church or temple often provided ethnic communities with refuge from the hostility and discrimination from the broader society as well as opportunities for economic mobility and social recognition. In turn, the successive waves of immigrants have probably shaped the character as well as the content of American religious institutions.
More than nine million Muslims currently live in Western Europe, which makes them the largest religious minority in the region. There has been significant political controversy in various European states over how best to recognize Muslims' religious rights. These questions have become even more significant and contentious in the aftermath of the September 11 attacks by Islamic extremists. Using privately commissioned polls on attitudes toward Muslim religious rights taken before and after September 11 in Britain, France, and Germany, this article determines the extent of popular opposition to state accommodation of Muslim practices and tests several leading theories of attitudes toward Muslims. We conclude that the most important determinants of attitudes toward Muslims are education and religious practice.
Intergenerational stability of the religiosity of Turkish migrants is surprisingly high. In this article, several theoretical explanations for the maintenance of religiosity from generation to generation are presented and tested empirically against data from the German Generations- and Gender Surveys. We can show that classical versions of assimilation theories, concepts of symbolic religiosity, of religiosity as a compensation for a lack of social status, or of a high intergenerational stability of values in general cannot fully explain this phenomenon. Religiosity does not decline between the first and the second generation, nor does it become more symbolic in character. Furthermore, empirical evidence yields only limited support for the hypothesis that high levels of individual religiosity can only be found among structurally and socially less assimilated segments of the immigrant population. The same holds true for the argument that they just reflect generally high intergenerational value stability among immigrants. Concequently, in the final section we discuss the role of contextual factors in explaining intergenerational stability in migrants' religiosity such as an increasing diversity of the religious Islamic field or the salience religion as a symbolic boundary marker between natives and migrants.
Religion in the Modern World: From Cathedrals to Cults
- S Bruce
Bruce, S.
1996
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Why Can't They Be Like Us? America's White Ethnic Groups Piety in a secular society: Migration, Religiosity, and Islam in Britain Heelas
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Piety in a secular society: Migration, Religiosity, and Islam in Britain
Heelas, P. and L. Woodhead
2005
Piety in a secular society: Migration, Religiosity, and Islam in Britain Heelas
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Piety in a secular society: Migration, Religiosity, and Islam in Britain
Heelas, P. and L. Woodhead
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Norris, P. and R. Inglehart
2004
Sacred and Secular. Religions and Politics Worldwide, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.
Peach, C.
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and Racial Studies, 29(4): 629-655.