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This chapter looks at how converted German Muslims seek to practice a so-called true Islam stripped of cultural accretions. In its indigenous German Muslim context, an Islam free of culture means an Islam that has been purged of its often-stigmatized Arab and Turkish cultural practices. Once rectified like this, the reasoning goes, Islam will be more in line not only with its original spirit but also with European ideals of democracy, freedom, and tolerance. In that way, a purified Islam, in the German context, becomes an effort to connect German converts to their parents rather than differentiate them. This process sets apart immigrant Muslims, who are delineated by their traditional and hence by definition “wrong” Islamic practices.

This chapter examines the economic integration of first- and second-generation immigrants into thirteen countries in Europe, considering several possible determinants of successful integration, including the immigrant's own education and the education of the immigrant's parents. In general, both the immigrant's own educational attainment and the immigrant's parents' education do affect integration. That is, better-educated immigrants from more educated families are more successfully integrated. Various other factors also strongly affect the degree of integration, however. Country of origin matters: immigrants in the EU from Eastern Europe and Central Asia fare less well than immigrants from Western European countries, for example. The welfare regime in the receiving country also affects immigrant incorporation: immigrants in nations with social democratic regimes have more success integrating than immigrants in the liberal regimes (like the United Kingdom and Ireland), and also more success than immigrants in the conservative welfare regimes of Spain and Italy. Other things held equal, Muslim immigrants were also less integrated economically than others and had lower returns to education than non-Muslims.

The inclusion of immigrants in general and Muslim immigrants in particular is straining liberal democracies in western Europe. This chapter re-examines an earlier and more expansive understanding of tolerance. To be tolerant, it is now agreed, means to be willing to put up with others that one dislikes or ideas that one disagrees with. So understood, tolerance is a synonym for toleration. Toleration has become not merely the primary but also the sole meaning of tolerance as a value in democratic politics. The consequence has been to bury an older understanding of tolerance: to “support, nourish, maintain, sustain, preserve.” The chapter calls attention to this older understanding of tolerance because it points the way to recognizing what contemporary measures of tolerance actually are capturing. It argues that in addition to identifying those with ill will toward immigrants, standard measures of anti-immigrant attitudes also identify those whose stance toward immigrants is supportive, affirmative, and inclusive—so much so that they treat immigrants as full members of a common community.

This chapter begins by reviewing four theories drawn from the social movement literature which have been put forward to account for the response of the state to the religious demands of Muslim immigrants in the West: resource mobilization, political opportunities structures, regime ideology, and preexisting modes of state-church relations. It then argues that the most determinant factors in Senegalese integration in the United States are the favorable perception of state and dominant societal actors of the receiving society and, to a lesser extent, the model of state-church separation. The chapter summarizes the argument of this book and addresses these two factors in greater detail.

This chapter describes the state of the relationship between immigrant-origin Muslim minorities and their Western European host countries in the twenty-first century. Just over 1 percent of the world's 1.5 billion Muslims reside in Western Europe, yet this immigrant-origin minority has had a disproportionate impact on religion and politics in its new and former homelands. For host societies, Islam in Europe is no longer just a matter of ginger diplomacy with former colonies or current trading partners: the integration of Muslims has become a nation-building challenge of historical significance. Moreover, Muslims' long-term integration into European politics and society is a work in progress, as the chapter reveals the unintended consequences, the establishment of the Islam Councils, and other such complications arising from the host countries' engagement with their resident Muslim minorities.

This chapter addresses how Muslims and non-Muslims lived together, side-by-side and having a shared experience. This was the case in Syria from the earliest period of Muslim rule. Arab Muslim immigrants settled in preexisting towns and cities, and al-Jābiya and al-Ramla—two well-known Arab encampments—never took off as significant places of Muslim habitation. Outside Syria, one must also remember that the garrison cities in which Arab immigrants settled were themselves not hermetically sealed off from the populations around them. The chapter then considers some of the social milieux of exchange and vectors by which Muslims came into contact with non-Muslims—milieux where, through shared settings and shared experiences, non-Muslim ideas and practices came to be taken up by Muslims.

This chapter focuses on the difficulty some Muslims have in seeing America as a homeland. It first discusses the concept of home and what it means to feel at home. It then considers the cultural idioms or topoi with which early Muslim immigrants and Muslims in the early stages of their immigration made sense of their presence in America. This diasporic moment and vocabulary changed over time as exposure and interaction led to a more nuanced understanding. There are also crucial juridical tools by which Muslims religiously interpret America and produce an articulation of America as “home.” The fundamental question that this chapter answers is: how do Muslims naturalize the United States in Islam?

This chapter investigates the ways in which the interplay among race, culture, and Islam was made visible in the 1970s, an era of changed immigration policy and a new direction in the state’s management of “Muslim” immigrants. Typically assumed to be the decade of “Islam social” (social Islam), the chapter argues that while there was nothing novel about the state’s decision to use Islam as the medium for managing its relationship with populations presumed to be Muslim, what was new about the 1970s, with its social housing mosques and factory prayer rooms, was the explicitly racial and cultural terms of the debates over access to Muslim religious sites.

This chapter unpacks the interaction between African American Muslims and South Asian and Arab American Muslims, who visited the mosque to make charitable donations. It reveals how believers at the mosque responded to perceptions their Muslim brothers and sisters from other ethnic categories looked down on them, contrasting sharply with the ideal of Islam as a religion without racial hierarchy. Such ethnic cleavages stand in stark contrast to the ideal of an inclusive ummah, but they emerge because all US Muslims live at the intersection of America’s racial and religious orders. While there is much Othering that happens among African American and immigrant Muslims, what tensions ultimately reveal is the enduring legacy of white racial dominance in the United States and its cascading impacts on the everyday lives of US Muslims.

This book concludes with an analysis of how the Identity Mobilization Model and its illustration of movement activists’ efforts to leverage the use of an intersectional movement identity continue to resonate with organizers in the immigrant rights movement and broader social movement contexts as well. In particular, the conclusion points to the immigrant rights movement’s growing emphasis on black undocumented immigrant and transgender undocumented immigrant activist identities as well as the potential for coalition building and allyship with the Muslim immigrant and refugee community. By examining the continued manifestations of an intersectional movement identity in the immigrant rights movement and beyond, the conclusion underscores the importance of such a framework for understanding the movement’s future and its promise to bring about meaningful, transformative social change for immigrants and other members of marginalized groups.

This introductory chapter presents three vignettes that illustrate the four narratives that frame this book: the notion of an identity crisis among young Muslims, the purported conflict between a “pure or true” Islam and a “cultural” Islam, an alleged “Islamization of America,” and the imperative for creating an American Muslim community and culture. It also sketches the methodology employed in the book, detailing the centrality of a narrative framework from the inception of this project to its methods, the challenges encountered, the analysis, and ultimately to the production of this ethnographic narrative. This beginning chapter argues that narrative is a particularly useful way to examine identity.

Chapter 5 considers whether there is a virtuous form of patriotism and if so what role it might play in the scheme of civic virtue and civic education. It analyzes civic virtue as having three components: civic intelligence, civic friendship, and civic competence. It affirms a need for civic virtue in all spheres of civic life, from the local to the global, and it holds that the motivational core of civic virtue in all of these spheres is a civic minded responsiveness to the public interest or the value of all that the community in question entails. Virtuous patriotism is identified as a state-level counterpart of the civic mindedness at the heart of civic responsibility in local, regional, or global civic affairs, expressed both in defense of what is valuable in a country, or conducive to its members living well together, and in loyal dissent that protects and advances that value. The chapter outlines the basic elements of education for civic intelligence, civic friendship, civic competence, and virtuous civic motivation, emphasizing features of a just school community; the disciplinary foundations of public reason, understanding, and judgment; discussion; problem-based cooperative and experiential learning; and a global perspective.

This chapter traces the physical movement of Muslims to Britain. Muslims came to Britain mainly—though not only—from South Asia, and they settled in certain cities and neighborhoods. Although Muslims living in Britain today trace their origins to many parts of the world, the majority have roots in former British India, and mainly in today's Pakistan and Bangladesh. Furthermore, within those two countries, a small number of districts have contributed in strikingly disproportionate numbers to the Muslim population of Britain. The concentrations began with historical accident but, once in place, reproduced themselves through practices of “chain migration,” whereby one generation of immigrants pulled another after it. The results are concentrations of closely related people in certain British neighborhoods. Many of these new residents of Britain have sought to maintain their ties to the homeland through marriage and through forms of economic cooperation. These practices reinforce ties of shared ethnic and religious community within certain British neighborhoods.

This chapter explains that the attainment of marriage equality in Holland in 2001, and the accompanying further “normalization” of homosexuality, has had two troubling effects. First, it has allowed political parties and politicians, across the political spectrum from the far right to the far left, to use acceptance of homosexuality as an ideological benchmark to test whetherother minorities, most prominently Muslim immigrants, can ever be “truly Dutch.” The chapter explores how, from this perspective, Muslim immigration is conceived as a threat to the stability of the Dutch progressive moral order and to Dutch cultural and sexual liberties. Gay rights and gender equality have thus become a normative framework that help to shape a critique of Islam and multiculturalism. Second, the normalization of homosexuality has led lesbians and gay men to embrace heteronormative discourses and presentations that minimize overt expressions of sexuality and gender variance. The chapter explains that this mainstreaming of homosexuality leaves ongoing problems, such as the high rates of suicide attempts by LGBT youth and anti-gay violence in Holland, unaddressed and unchallenged.

The concluding chapter takes up what it sees to be some of the major unresolved issues of Partition politics. While it tries to trace the roots of the violence centred around land in several areas of Assam, especially in the Bodo-inhabited region, it shows how issues such as the controversy over the cut-off year for immigrants to acquire citizenship are carry-overs from Partition days. Other major issues that are discussed include the status of Hindu refugees/displaced persons in the state, the National Register of Citizens, and the larger question of language and Assamese identity. It shows how with the new wave of immigrants being assimilated into the Assamese nationality, its transformation is underway and how this transformation itself throws up new challenges and equations.

This chapter explores the ‘culture wars’ both in Europe and in the United States. In Europe, ‘values’ have probably never before been mentioned so frequently in discourse and political debates as they have since the 2000s. This trend actually dates to the American ‘culture wars’, which have been going on since the 1970s. The expression ‘culture wars’ denotes the war on values within American society, a war pitting liberal culture, which stands against discrimination and in favour of abortion rights, gun control, and some form of social security, against a ‘Christian right’ led by evangelical Protestants in the southern United States, whose core political issues are the fight against abortion and same-sex marriage, and who oppose gun control, universal health care, immigration, and affirmative action. Things are more complex in Europe because the two fronts do not coincide. In the debate on values, the internal front pits Christian conservatives against secularists of all persuasions, liberals and populists alike; the main issues revolve around abortion and same-sex marriage. The external front, on the other hand, puts the idea of ‘Europe’ in opposition to Islam: the issue is concerned with the cultural antagonism between Muslim immigrants and Europeans and with European societies' fear of becoming ‘Islamized’.