‘Settling’ the multicultural nation-state: Little Mosque on the Prairie,and the figure of the ‘moderate Muslim’

This paper analyzes Little Mosque on the Prairie, its characters and themes within the context of post-9/11 discourses of nationalism and citizenship. Against the backdrop of the Canadian national narrative, I argue that the sitcom foregrounds a ‘moderate Muslim’ that demarcates the boundaries of the multicultural nation-state, especially when juxtaposed against the racially and sexually coded Muslim ‘other’ on the global landscape. The moderate Muslim is represented as ‘liberal’ and ‘modern’, one who seeks to integrate her faith into the multicultural fabric of society. Such a figure, represented both as a ‘good’ Muslim/immigrant and a ‘good’ Canadian citizen-subject, illuminates the boundaries of ‘acceptability’ within the Canadian national imaginary. The figure of the moderate Muslim reinforces the racial coding embedded in this imaginary, while enabling the state to proclaim its ‘multicultural tolerance’ and benevolence. Building on previous scholarship on race, citizenship, and nation-building, I argue that the moderate Muslim – as exemplified in Little Mosque on the Prairie – serves important ideological functions in (re)defining the internal (and racially coded) borders of the nation. While Little Mosque on the Prairie makes an important contribution to the representation of Muslims, challenging some stereotypes, I argue that it does not deliver on its considerable potential to articulate nuanced representations of Muslims. Through its foregrounding of the figure of the moderate Muslim, the sitcom reaffirms key norms, engages in a politics of authenticity, and reinforces hegemonic messages, both within Muslim communities and in Canadian society. Thus, the moderate Muslim becomes a key player in enabling the state to render invisible its exclusion of the ‘Muslim Other,' while maintaining its non-racist credentials.     

Colonial legacies,post-colonial (in)securities,and gender(ed) representations in South Asia's nuclear policies

Through a comparative study of India and Pakistan's national security discourses, this article explores the linkages between post-colonial India and Pakistan's nationalist/communalist identities, configurations of masculinities, and gendered representations underpinning their nuclear (in)securities. This paper contends that the colonial politics of place-making in the sub-continent has not only inscribed a process of ‘othering’ between these states but has also facilitated the rise of divergent visions of post-colonial nationalisms, which, at each of their phases and with particular configurations of masculinities, have used women's bodies to re-map India-Pakistan's borders and national (in)securities. This article particularly draws attention to a new form of gendered manipulation in South Asian politics in the late 1990s, whereby both states, embedded in colonial notions of religious/cultural masculinities, have relied on discourses of Hindu/Indian and Muslim/Pakistani women's violence and protection from the ‘other’ to pursue aggressive policies of nuclearization. It is at this conjectural moment of a Hinduicized and Islamicized nationalism (flamed by the contestations of a Hindu versus an Islamic masculinity) that one needs to provide a feminist re-interpretation of India-Pakistan's nationalist identities, gendered imaginaries, and their re-articulation of national (in)securities – that represents a religious/gendered ‘otherness’ in South Asia's nuclear policies.     

Education and national identity in a comparative context

A missing link in the voluminous chain of prior studies on Canadian versus American identity is a comparative analysis of the impact of social studies – especially civics – education on the construction of national identity in these two North American nation-states. This article analyzes curricular documents and secondary-level school textbooks to learn more about how social studies education contributes to constructing a sense of ‘being a Canadian’ versus ‘being an American’ north and south of the 49th parallel.     

Muslim Women in America: Challenges and Politics of Diversity Within American Muslim Community

This paper will examine the complexities of the struggles faced by young Muslim women within the American Muslim community. Data are part of a study aimed at understanding the ways in which the gendered religious identities of Muslim women are constructed in the United States. This work seeks to address the dearth of research on the lives of Muslim women, and to identify and enhance an understanding of the issues and challenges they face during the process. Participants include 15 women, 18–22 years old, who graduated from an Islamic school in the mid-Atlantic region of America (ISA). Two phenomenological interviews were conducted with each participant. Data were analyzed using critical discourse and content analysis techniques. Findings point towards conflicts within, including those related to the rich racial and ethnic diversity in the community, and to the patriarchal norms that still prevail. Some of these norms along with the perceptions and experiences of American Muslim women guiding their lives will be shared, and will be located within a larger discussion on how the obstacles towards their contribution to this diverse social setting can be dealt with.     

To be or not to be an Australian: Focus on Muslim youth

In 2001, 67% of Australians identified themselves as Christians and only 1.5% as Muslims, according to the Australian Bureau of Statistics. Other Australians are Jews, Buddhists and Hindus – to name just a few of the religious minorities. Since 1975 until recently when the Anti-Discrimination Act was legislated, multiculturalism has been the official policy of the Federal Government. Yet in these terror-ridden times, the policy – however interpreted – has well and truly fallen into disfavour. This article discusses both the historical and contemporary dimensions of Muslim Australians’ national identity, focusing particularly on Muslim youth. It examines how one group of Australian-born Muslims exhibited their national identity during the Second World War and how the newly arrived Muslims feel about their identity during the ‘War on Terror’. The article is based on both primary and secondary sources – particularly on oral testimonies.     

Promoting ‘American’ democracy

Dating from the Reagan presidency's ‘crusade for freedom’, democracy promotion has been a central pillar of US foreign policy. Whether claims by George H.W. Bush that ‘beyond containment lies democracy’, or by George W. Bush that intervention into the Middle East promoted a ‘march to freedom in the Muslim world’, the importance of democracy to US foreign policy should not be underestimated. Far from promoting democracy, however, critics suggest that it is merely rhetorical cover for intervention and control, thus serving US rather than local interests. While not discarding these insights, this paper suggests that while democracy promotion may support US self-interests, so too does it uphold a US self-image by acting as an ideal around which Washington constructs its identity and worldview. Explored in relation to Latin America, it is argued that US democracy promotion – enabled by authoritarian representations of Venezuela – is central to both a US-authored Latin American identity and, in contrast, integral to challenging it. While Venezuela acts as the reverse image of freedom-loving United States and a democratically abiding Latin America, Caracas also challenges US democratic pre-eminence by extending the very notion of democracy and thereby demonstrates how both democracy and US influence more broadly are increasingly sites of contestation.     

Failure of Muslim Leadership in America From the Perspective of First-Generation Muslim Americans: A Phenomenological Study

While leadership is a foundational component of guidance in most societies, Muslim children born in America to immigrant parents lack such guidance. A qualitative case study was recently conducted with six first-generation Muslim American college students and professionals. The purpose of this study was six-fold: to examine the concept of leadership in Muslim communities in America, to observe perceptions of Muslim leadership in mosques and community centers, to examine the practice and beliefs of Muslims in America, to view the social interaction of Muslim Americans within their community, to view the mentorship and leadership aspects of Muslim Americans in their community and to inspect marital and cultural aspects within those societies. Findings reveal four themes that show that Muslim Americans are subject to role confusion as they go through adolescence and need a leadership role model to assist them through this stage.     

The Role of Labeling and Bias in the Portrayals of Acts of “Terrorism”: Media Representations of Muslims vs. Non-Muslims

Several high-profile negative events involving Muslim perpetrators have recently been covered by the media. We investigated whether the same negative actions are more likely to be labeled “terrorism” when they are committed by Muslims than when they are committed by White non-Muslims. In Experiment I (n?=?60), using a real article about a Muslim perpetrator and a modified version about a non-Muslim perpetrator, we found that participants were more likely to identify a crime as terrorism when it was perpetrated by a Muslim. The label “terrorism” also mediated the effect of Muslim identity on negative judgments of the behavior. In Experiment II (n?=?60), we replicated the results of Experiment I and clarified that the effects persisted when we used a real article about a non-Muslim perpetrator and a modified version about a Muslim perpetrator. We discuss implications for cross-group communication and representations of Muslims in the media.     

Muslims’ social inclusion and exclusion in France,Québec,and Canada: does national context matter?*

This article compares the social experiences of Muslim minorities in three contexts – France, Québec, and English Canada – each reflecting a different approach to immigrant integration. France’s republican model emphasises cultural assimilation and the exclusion of religion from the public sphere; Canada’s multicultural model advocates official recognition of minority cultures; Québec shares Canada’s tradition of large-scale permanent immigration but embodies a unique intercultural discourse of integration, in some ways resembling France. We compare the social experiences of Muslim and non-Muslim minorities in these three settings using the French ‘Trajectories and Origins’ survey (2009) and the Canadian ‘Ethnic Diversity Survey’ (2002) data on reports of discrimination, friendship networks, social trust, voluntarism, and national identity. We find the Muslim/non-Muslim gap in social inclusion is significant in all three settings and results from ethnic, cultural, or racial differences, more than religion. In assessing immigrants’ social inclusion, we suggest consideration be given to: (i) the reality of ‘national models’ in the community, (ii) a tendency for minorities to locate in more accepting segments of mainstream society, and (iii) the limited impact of policies based on national models.     

Transnational mobility among early-career academics: gendered aspects of negotiations and arrangements within heterosexual couples

ABSTRACT

Today, transnational mobility is often presented as indispensable for a successful academic career. This institutionalisation of transnational mobility for young academics has important effects in (re)producing or transforming gender inequalities. Building on the results of a qualitative study conducted at three universities – Zurich (Switzerland), UCLA (U.S.A), and Cambridge (UK) – this paper examines the mobility experiences of early-career academics and their partners and seeks to understand the gendered mechanisms underlying mobility patterns. Drawing on three case studies, this paper focuses on the negotiations and arrangements of mobile couples. Each case study represents a different ideal-typical pattern of how gender is entangled with mobility. We show how gender is ‘done’ and ‘undone’ by the academics and their partners throughout these mobility trajectories, and how these couples’ negotiations and practices are closely entangled with gender representations that are structurally anchored in labour markets and discursively expressed within the wider social environment. As such, this paper questions the dichotomy between economic men and social and cultural women sometimes reproduced in studies on highly skilled migration. Furthermore, the findings challenge earlier studies that suggest a causal link between mobility and the leaky pipeline by showing that important transformations with regard to gender relations are occurring.     

Citizenship, ‘rubbished’ dissidents and local restoration of the dead – the execution of Luri political activists in south-western Iran

The paper's focus is a critical moment in the trajectory of the Islamic state in Iran, the trace of which was still discernible in the presidential election of 2009. It draws on ethnographic research among the Lurs of south-western Iran between 1979–1982 to examine the impact of the abolition of politics as contested representations at the centre on a ‘remote’ periphery. The end of a short-lived political activity, as a distinct form of power, in Iran in 1981 was earmarked by mass executions of which only 1600 had been officially counted for the period of 20 June to September 1981 (Amnesty International). The executed were guilty of expressing dissent against divine rule of which the Islamic state was an embodiment. Although the Lurs paid a less heavy penalty for this ‘crime’ than elsewhere in the country the survivors' response to the loss of a young relative in the hands of Islamic executioners was noticeably muted. The response is looked at as the restoration of the status of the dead to the executed relative whose body had been ‘rubbished’ – wrapped in an American flag and abandoned unburied in a desolate place by the Muslim executioners. The paper argues ‘rubbishing’ signified the annihilation of citizenship under the Islamic rule in which the body of the citizen is seen as harbouring ‘the most corrupt’ subject, the sinner who could not even be ‘rectified’ through a less destructive use of force – flogging and mutilation. It, therefore, had to be disposed of – ‘rubbished’. The survivors, on the other hand, by confining themselves to the symbolic return of the executed relative to the community left unacknowledged his quest for equality and liberty. By their reluctance to remember and recount the executed's words and deeds the survivors refused to grant him the ‘immortality’ of a citizen whose death outlived his destruction. The brutal suppression of political agency at the centre and its muted recognition in the periphery are explained as a negation of political power. The power entails postponing the use of force to the last resort thus allowing plurality as a human condition to be realised. Consequent on this realisation is the publicly contested opinions by many who would inevitably challenge the truths guarded by few both at the centre and periphery. It was this challenge that led the ruling mullahs to invoke the Koranic Truths to annihilate the disseminators of opinions. The unspoken citizenship of the annihilated dissidents in the periphery served in turn to reassert the Lurs' historically cherished otherness geared to the use of force. The citizenship called for a discursive inclusion of Lurs, through the use of ‘the pen’, in a wider world, by postponing the use of force. In contrast, the traditional Luri rebels relied heavily on an immediate use of force, through the celebrated ‘rifle’, to perpetuate their perceived inaccessibility. Resistance leads to emancipation, the paper argues, when the particularised subjectivity of local actors is superseded in the universal – objectified – political space in which the agent, i.e. the citizen, overrides the boundaries within which localness is reproduced.     

Ideal liberal subjects and Muslim “Others”: liberal nationalism and the racialization of Muslim youth in a progressive Danish school

Drawing on an ethnographic case study of Muslim youth in a Danish lower secondary school, this article explores teacher talk about Muslim immigrant students and how teachers engaged liberal ideals of respect, individualism, and equality in ways that racialized immigrant students. I consider moments of vacillation in teacher talk to explore tensions between teacher’s desires to assimilate immigrant students to national norms of belonging and their desires to be perceived as inclusive and ‘open.’ In doing so, I ask how visions of liberal schooling impose ideas of what a ‘normal’ citizen should be and how teachers produce ‘ideal’ liberal subjects in their talk and in the everyday practices of schools. I argue that teachers engage the ideals of abstract liberalism to establish a colorblind discourse of non-racism. While educators described the school as an idealized space where students are encouraged to freely express themselves, to develop unique individual outlooks, it was clear that this vision of ‘openness’ did not include Muslim students’ attachments to religious and cultural identities.     

Fear,Terror and the New Global Economy of Salvation–Global Excess and ‘Suicide’ Bombing in London

The article looks at the London bombing of July 2005 as a double volunteered witnessing. The four male British ‘suicide’ bombers purported to witness the plight of the victims of global excesses in places like Iraq and Palestine as Muslims and their own privileged membership of the Muslim Community (umma). The witnessing was as much a trans-national self-identification by the bombers with their Islamic faith as a counter-identification against their British citizenship. On their trails of death and destruction, the bombers advocated the supremacy of the privilege of faith over the rights of citizen by destroying the mortal bodies of individuals to which is anchored citizen rights in order to provide room for the immortal body of the Muslim Community which cherishes the privilege of the faithful. In their surrogacy for the will of fellow Muslims, the bombers drew on a new economy of salvation that promised them the magnanimity of the witnessing (martyrdom) for the Muslim Community and offered the Other the ignominy of an apocalyptic retribution. By substituting the body for the mind as the immediate object of power the Muslim volunteers inspired fear among the potential victims of their violence without giving them the opportunity to reciprocate fear thus turning the fear into a sense of despair—terror—that makes power incontestable and abolishes politics. Faced with the threat of terror, the British public erected invisible, internal borders within which they constructed an invincible Britishness from which no one was excluded. The insurrectionary, multicultural assertion of British identity through recourse to the notion of individual rights is followed by a moment of constitution of Britishness by the institutions of government. An institutional construction of the general will to protect public safety within the spatially fixed borders is mediated by the Anglo-American model of multiculturalism. The article explores the incompatibility between cultural construction of boundaries sanctioned by the model and the state's educating role to dis-identify the faithful in order to identify them as citizens.     

Critical Race Theory,policy rhetoric and outcomes: the case of Muslim schools in Britain

The expansion of state-funded Muslim schools in Britain since 1998 has developed against a backdrop of sustained public political rhetoric around the wider position of British Muslims in both political and educational contexts. This article explores the public policy rhetoric around Muslim schools under New Labour and the subsequent Coalition and Conservative governments and compares how these narratives align with outcomes in terms of numbers of, and types of, denominational Muslim faith schools in Britain. The article applies a Critical Race Theory approach based on the construction of counter-narrative through a critical analysis of policy and its outcomes. This analysis is contextualised through exploring the implications of counter-terror strategies such as Prevent for the political and educational equity of British Muslims as stakeholders in the state. Against this context the article explores the extent to which successive policy frameworks and political narratives around faith schooling have played out in terms of denominational state-funded Muslim schools. Whilst gains have been made under New Labour and the successive Coalition and Conservative governments, critical analysis reveals that public policy narratives allow for a misleading account of the extent to which Muslim communities have been enfranchised through state funding for Islamic schools.     

Colonial Sainthood in Australasia

Concerned with the formation of national identities in postcolonial Australasia, this article compares and contrasts representations of religious women Mary MacKillop (1842–1909) and Suzanne Aubert (1835–1926). MacKillop, constructed as a contemporary popular ‘Australian legend’ is set to become Australasia's first saint, while in April 2004 investigation began into the beatification of New Zealand nun Aubert. Combining religious and secular explanations, despite the two women's lives and work displaying many similar characteristics, the article offers an explanation as to why it is that MacKillop, and not Aubert, will be Australasia's first saint. The article argues that representations of the two women are embedded in the construction of national identities in Australia and New Zealand that draw upon gendered ‘white settler society’ mythologies.     

Between Civilizations: One Side of a Dialogue

In the present global context, the ‘problem’ of religion in relation to gender has become predominantly about the situation of Muslim women and what this indicates about the state of our civilization. Thus, in such incidents as the death of Aqsa Parvez (age 16) in late 2007 in Toronto, Canada, Muslim women's bodies, as many scholars have argued, become the battlegrounds which clearly demarcate the line between the civilized secular modern nation and premodern religious fundamentalisms. In this paper, I want to extend this critical work by bringing in an analysis of the second or ‘homegrown’ generation as it is in this context, I will argue that national anxieties about Canada's global status as a tolerant multicultural nation are most pronounced. Drawing on the work of Asad (2003), Mahmood (2006) and Brown (2006), I will outline how conceptions of tolerance and secularism operate through culture to produce a racialized distinction between the civilized, modern citizen and premodern fundamentalist groups in the making of Canada as a white settler multicultural nation. In order to illustrate this concretely, I will carry out a critical content analysis of representations of Aqsa Parvez's death in the media, representations which clearly demonstrate the contemporary operation of secularism and tolerance in relation to multiculturalism and its particular intensity as it pertains to second generation Muslims. In the conclusion, I want to reflect on how we might rethink our understanding of violence against Muslim women in order to destabilize this powerful binaristic framing which continues to secure a white settler hegemony of ‘multiculturalism within a bilingual framework’ even as it obscures the power relations through which it sustains a racial hierarchy.     

Pools,Piety, and Participation: A Muslim Women's Sports Club and Urban Citizenship in Germany

Abstract

This paper introduces the Muslim Women's Sports Club (MWSC) in Stuttgart, Germany and analyzes this club's role and contribution in the construction of urban citizenship. Based on ethnographic fieldwork, I illustrate that this club is a vibrant space of civic participation. I argue that associations like this sports club are crucial sites of Muslim civic engagement where individuals configure forms of religiously circumscribed citizenship. The club plays a vital, but largely overlooked, role in the urban civic sphere, as it articulates and strengthens the bonding and civic participation of pious Muslim women and creates cross-ethnic relationships and networks. Some members are initiated into the landscape of civic associations, as they learn about their rights, duties, and potentials, through cooperation with other associations or institutions. I argue that an association such as the MWSC, regardless of its rather invisible activities, is a full-fledged part of the urban public sphere in Germany. Theoretically I engage questions of urban citizenship and civic participation in the context of a faith and/or identity-based association.     

Colonial laboratories,irreparable subjects: the experiment of ‘(b)ordering’ San Juan's public housing residents

This article provides a genealogy of the discourses that shaped the public housing policies of the mid-twentieth century in the US island colony of Puerto Rico. In the 1950s and 1960s, a conversation arose between government officials, social science experts, and the local press about how to fix social inequalities by ‘ordering’ mostly black and mulato, economically dispossessed families residing in shantytowns and barrios. This led to the establishment of caseríos (housing projects) as places where the government would attempt to ‘modernize’ residents through architectural design, planning, and social betterment programs. Because the caseríos did not address the structural causes of inequalities of power and wealth in the island, they failed in lifting residents out of poverty. From the mid-1960s onwards, a host of writings blamed caserío dwellers for the failure of the projects, attributing it to their purportedly dysfunctional – and nearly incorrigible – ‘culture of poverty’. This perpetuated a particular characterization of Puerto Rican economically dispossessed people as incapable of political or social agency without the guidance of elite Puerto Ricans and the ‘benevolent’ American colonial metropolis. It also led to the subsequent ‘bordering’ of caseríos spaces with walls and checkpoints, which in turn reproduced the branding of public housing residents as irreparably dysfunctional and ‘criminal’.     

The Muslim Continuum: An Analytical Model of Religiosity and Socio-Political Diversity in Muslim Minority Environments

This paper examines the challenges facing Muslim societies in the early part of the twenty-first century. The paper examines tensions between “liberal” interpretations of Islam and extreme views within a globalisation paradigm and how these are changing. Specifically, the work investigates how the spotlight on Islam and its adherents in a post-9/11 world has manifest among Muslim individuals, groups and societies and how these may change to accommodate or react to the shifting global frame of mind towards Islam and the Muslims. Analysis is provided within the context of Muslim minority dwellers, with focus on Muslims living in Britain. The paper further proposes a fundamentalism continuum based on Dekmejian’s¹ model and analyses its impact on the Muslim Diaspora.     

Muslimness as a political formation: an inquiry into Muslim presence

ABSTRACT

In this article, I undertake an investigation into the political significance of Islam and Muslimness. By doing so, I aim to underscore the primacy of Islam’s ontological (constitutive) nature and its irreducibility to any of its ontic (empirical) articulations. This project necessitates the recovery of the political as the moment of the formation of a collective order and community, irreducible to any of its material expressions (e.g. territorial or institutional unity). Thus, the article renounces the objectivity of the secular grammar which fixes, essentializes, and reduces Muslimness to being merely ‘religious’ as opposed to ‘political’. By contrast, it attempts to retrieve Islam’s basic condition of existence and hence emancipate it from the confines of the Western epistemic structure. Toward that end, the article presents a deconstructive analysis of Islam as an autonomous universe of meaning inaugurated by the event of the Divine Revelation to Prophet Muhammad as its originary moment. By doing so, I also emphasize the primacy of Muslimness as a political subjectivity, whose unity and autonomy is contingent upon the drawing of its most universal boundaries and the exclusion of an outside – a function, I argue, which had historically been fulfilled by the mechanism of the caliphate. Finally, the article discusses an alternative conceptualization of diaspora in order to come to grips with the political implications of Muslimness in the post-caliphate world order.