Joel Fetzer and Abdur-Rahman Abou Almajd in dialog about Muslims in the west.

Joel Fetzer and Abdur-Rahman Abou Almajd in dialog about Muslims in the west.

Joel S. Fetter
Professor of Political Science, wrote "Muslims and the State in Britain, France and Germany"2006.  with J. Christopher Soper),he does his research on Muslims in the West, for example "How Do National Institutions Promote or Hinder Muslims 2009' Integration in Europe?, 2010. "Immigration, Ethnicity, and Religion in Europe, 2000. Public Attitudes toward Immigration in the United States, France, and Germany, 2002. "Religion and Politics in a Secular Europe: Cutting Against the Grain" (with J. Christopher Soper), Research Award, Society for the Scientific Study of Religion, 2001 Provost's Award for Outstanding Research and Creative Endeavors, Central Michigan University, 2000.

It's very important to chat with him about Muslims in the West as he is very interested in studying Muslims in many western countries.

First of all, why don’t you congratulate us on succeeding the revolution in Egypt?

Yes, I definitely wish to congratulate you and your fellow Egyptians on ridding yourself of the dictator Mubarak despite many obstacles in your way.  Now, of course, the really hard work of building a democracy begins.  I can try to see who the best contact would be at Cambridge and get back to you.  On the questions.

Q: In your book you write, "Over ten million Muslims live in Western Europe. Since the early 1990s and especially after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, vexing policy questions have emerged about the religious rights of native-born and immigrant Muslims. Britain has struggled over whether to give state funding to private Islamic schools. France has been convulsed over Muslim teenagers wearing the hijab in public schools.

Germany has debated whether to grant 'public-corporation' status to Muslims." Which of these countries do you think treats Muslims the best?

Fetzer:  Overall, my co-author Chris Soper and I conclude that Britain accommodates the religious practices of Muslims somewhat more than Germany does and much more than France.  If we take the hijab as an example, Muslim girls and young women in British state schools generally have no difficulties wearing the Muslim head covering.  In German state schools, the situation varies somewhat by Federal state, but students typically are also free to wear a hijab.  As public employees, teachers are another matter, but some more liberal Federal states even allow the instructor to cover her head.  In France, in contrast, wearing the hijab in state schools is illegal according to explicit national law.  Or if we look at government funding for Islamic schools, Britain contains maybe a dozen such institutions, Germany a few, and France almost none.  So the ranking is pretty clear even if details on the ground change rapidly.

Q: I remember Princeton demographer Thomas J. Espenshade wrote,"This ambitious book comprises a systematic, comparative analysis of public opinion about immigrants and immigration in the United States, France, and Germany during the past 120 years... this is the most comprehensive book to date on public attitudes towards immigrants." In this work, you write that there is a convergence of variables but that their weights differ in the three countries according to the cultural context.

Could you elaborate on that statement?

Fetzer: Across the three countries, some of the most important causes of pro-immigration feelings were education and being a cultural outsider of some kind.  I hypothesized at the time that the effect of education would be greater in those countries where the content of schooling emphasizes multiculturalism (e.g., in the United States or Canada) rather than the supposed superiority of the one dominant, "native" culture (e.g., in France).

Democratic countries that are already very diverse culturally should be most likely to adopt a multicultural approach to education and so teach young people how to interact effectively with individuals from different backgrounds.

Secondly, cultural outsiders such as various ethnic and religious minorities usually have less stake in maintaining the de jure or de facto hegemony of the culturally dominant group (e.g., white Christians in the U.S., white nominal Catholics in France, or white nominal Christians in Germany).  Although who belongs to the various ethnic and religious minorities varies across nations, being a religious or ethnic minority tends to increase tolerance in all three countries after one controls statistically for other causes of public opinion.

So being a white Protestant Christian increases xenophobia in the U.S., where this cultural group dominates the society, but being a white Protestant Christian in France produces greater sympathy for immigrants because French Protestants constitute a very small religious minority in that country.  Across all three nations, Jewish respondents were very strongly in favor of immigration, arguably because they also represent a small fraction of the population in each country and have a history of experiencing discrimination themselves.  I've even seen data suggesting that white American Mormons, a tiny percentage of all Americans, are disproportionately pro-immigration after one controls for various other socio-economic factors.

Q: You analyzed the root causes of anti-immigrant feelings in the 1980s in the three countries among several criteria: poverty, cultural marginality and perception of cultural threat. Do you think Muslims are seen as cultural threats and why?

Fetzer:  Definitely.  The majority populations in Europe and North America are very likely to see Muslims as a cultural threat.  Although the perpetrators of  9/11 no more represent all Muslims than George W. Bush represents all Christians, many E.U. and American citizens wrongly blame Islam itself.  But even before 2001, attitudes toward Muslims were not particularly good, especially in Europe.  Samuel Huntington's political tract on the supposed "clash of civilizations" hardly helped matters, yet I think a deeper cause was a simple lack of familiarity with Islam and Muslims.  As a major *domestic* religion, Islam came on the scene relatively late in the day in most of these countries.  Few North Americans or Europeans knew any Muslims personally.  Social scientists often find that immigrant groups who have only recently arrived (e.g., Koreans in the U.S. in the 1980s) are less preferred by natives than are those who have been immigrating to the country for generations (e.g., Irish in the U.S.).

So in the long run, Muslim Germans, Muslim Americans, etc., should be seen as just as much a part of ordinary society as are Catholic Americans today.

Q: Anti-immigrant attitudes are made of the same basic fabric in the United States, in France and in Germany, in spite of their large differences in culture, history and immigration patterns, which is the decisive factor against cultural outsiders?

Fetzer:  Across all three countries, probably belonging to the cultural majority and so having a motivation to try to keep cultural minorities from "usurping" your dominant position.  In politics, few dictators give up power out of the goodness of their hearts.  Rather, in one way or another they leave because the people or a rival faction in the elite group forces them from power.  So too in ethnic politics, the cultural hegemony such as nominally Catholic, white French natives resist rivals for their position at the top of the prestige hierarchy.  As French Muslims organize themselves politically into interest groups or NGOs defending their rights and begin to vote in greater numbers, the dominant "francais de souche" French natives will eventually have to relinquish their monopoly on power.

Q: Immigration is becoming a prominent issue in all Western democracies. You focus on the impact of each nation's church-state relationship. Could you elaborate on that?

Fetzer:  Each of the three West-European countries followed the logic of its respective, previously established Church-State structure when deciding how to treat recently arrived Muslims.  Britain has a kind of pragmatic Establishment model that allowed Muslims to become part of the constitutional system just as Methodists, Baptists, and Jews had in earlier generations.  Germany has a relatively flexible multiple- establishment structure that has permitted Muslims to obtain a limited number of accommodations.  France's laicite, or separatist approach, dates back to the French Revolution and officially allows little public recognition of any religion, not just Islam.  In practice, however, Roman Catholicism is "more equal" than the other religions and so does de facto receive some privileges that other faith traditions do not (e.g., which religious holidays will be national days off).  Many French Muslims object not so much to laicite per se but more to its inconsistent application across all of France's major religions.  Why should Christmas be a national holiday, for example, if Eid al-Fitr and Rosh Hashanah are not?  Some French public holidays, such as the Assumption of Mary, are not even celebrated by Protestant Christians.

Q: What about Muslim reactions?  When and why did the strongest reactions happen? Please comparing Muslim reactions.

Fetzer:  If one defines Muslim in this context as anyone whose family is culturally Muslim, the reactions have taken various forms.  Some Muslims have formed or participated in immigrant-rights groups such as S.O.S. Racism in France and lobbied the government and political parties.  Others have jointed mainstream political movements, voted in regular elections, and even stood for and won elected office.  A few appointed officials in Britain and France are now Muslim, and regional legislatures in France and the national assembly (Bundestag) in Germany also saw the election of a handful of Muslim representatives.  At the more extreme end of the spectrum, some participants in urban insurrections in France have claimed rightly or wrongly to have been inspired by Islamic teaching or at least teachers.

Overall, I would contend that the strength of the reaction depends on the forcefulness of the anti-Muslim actions by the system as a whole.  Where the system is relatively accommodating to Muslims and their condition is comparatively tolerable, European Muslims tend to use moderate means to achieve their goals.  Where the society wholeheartedly rejects them and segregates them into a kind of hermetically sealed box of poverty and discrimination, they appear more desperate and more likely to resort to extreme measures.

Q: Islam is a religion of peace, Yet many in the West remain suspicious that Islam is not at all a peaceful faith, Resolving this crisis of authority will take several generations, Could you elaborate on that?

Fetzer:  It is impossible to understand any religion without comprehending the social, economic, and political conditions under which it arose and is maintained.  Islam as a religion is not necessarily any more violent than Christianity is, but the material situation in which many Muslims find themselves in the 20th and 21st centuries has too often been one of colonialism, autocracy, and economic deprivation.  As the Arabic-speaking world democratizes and develops economically and as individual Muslims in the industrialized West gradually achieve affluence and political influence, claims that Islam is not a peaceful religion should fade. In the United States in the 1800s, many Protestants asserted that Catholicism and liberal democracy were incompatible and that Catholics were more prone to violence.  No reasonable person makes these claims in the U.S. anymore, however, and we have even had a Catholic President.  In the long run, Islam should become part of the "normal" religious landscape of North America and Western Europe just as Catholicism is today in majority-Protestant nations.