On the Misrecognition of Identity: Muslims' Everyday Experiences in Scotland

Political theory is interested in the misrecognition of identity because it impacts individuals' autonomy in their self-definition and thus their ability to articulate and pursue identity-related interests. Here, we explore minority group members' experiences of being seen in terms that do not accord with their self-definition. Our data are qualitative, gathered through walking interviews with 24 Muslims in Scotland. Focusing on interactions in which they reported discrepancies between how they and others saw them, we differentiate four forms of misrecognition: (1) having the meaning of a valued identity (i.e., one's Muslim identity) defined by others in ways that one judges inaccurate and inappropriate; (2) having one's membership of a valued community (e.g., as a member of Scottish society) denied or rejected; (3) having one's identity (i.e., one's Muslim identity) overlooked such that one's distinctive identity-related needs are not taken into account; (4) being seen in terms of just one of one's many social identities (i.e., one's Muslim identity) such that other identities (judged more situationally relevant) are ignored. This empirically grounded typology contributes to wider debates about the forms of identity (mis)recognition and their political implications.     

Between Recognition and Mis/Nonrecognition: Strategies of Negotiating and Performing Identities Among White Muslims in the United Kingdom

This article explores white British Muslim experiences of, and strategic performative responses to, the (mis/non)recognition of their seemingly incompatible religious and ethnic identities. Based on in-depth interviews (N = 26), it highlights how the different identity categories they hold relate to one another, influencing processes of perceived recognition in interactional contexts. White British Muslims perceive their ethnic and religious identities to be (mis/not) recognized in complex and contradictory ways. Their identities are affirmed, denied, erased, and/or incorrectly ascribed, sometimes simultaneously, by relevant others in different contexts. Performative strategies such as the adoption, maintenance, or removal of identity markers are used consciously and agentically in attempts to take back control over how their identities are (mis/not) recognized. At times deliberate performative acts leading to misrecognition are orchestrated by white Muslims themselves to not only minimize the risk of experiencing possible harm or marginalization but also to transgress and challenge norms. They also assert their multiple identities as a response to (mis/non)recognition and claims of their identities being incompatible, regardless of the repercussions that may result in them being placed at the margins of, or excluded from, their ingroups.     

Loss of Religious or Spiritual Identities Among the LGBT Population

Lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) individuals are at risk of having negative experiences with religion because of mainstream religions’ non‐LGBT‐affirming stance. Negative religious experiences can lead to religious or spiritual (R/S) struggles and loss of R/S identity to maintain sexual identity. The authors describe R/S abuse, R/S struggle, and how these can result in loss of R/S identity in LGBT individuals. They provide a case study and discuss counseling implications and areas for future research.     

Classifying Muslims: Contextualizing Religion and Race in the United Kingdom and Germany

Since the late 20th century, public discourse in Muslim-minority countries has centered around the question of how to classify Muslims. In this paper, we compare the state, academic, and self-classification of Muslims in two countries: the United Kingdom and Germany. We propose that the historical experience of anti-Semitism makes religion a more salient master category to understand Muslims in Germany, while the history of both anti-Semitism and anti-Black racism largely resulting from colonial domination means that religion together with race are master categories used to understand Muslims in the United Kingdom. Through this multilayered ethnographic and historical analysis, we challenge taken-for-granted assumptions in both the political and academic milieu about what it means to be Muslim, emphasizing the importance of the interplay between sociopolitical categories and self-identifications.     

Negotiating Multiple Identities,Constructing Western‐Muslim Selves in the Netherlands and the United States

This article evaluates the psychological processes, discursive practices, and sociopolitical mechanisms underlying the identity reconstruction of Muslim immigrant women in the United States and the Netherlands. Specifically, it focuses on the ways in which Muslim immigrant women who are embedded in both Islamic and Western cultures negotiate their traditional and modern identities and self‐representations and construct a coherent self‐narrative about their bicultural existence as “Western‐Muslim.” The qualitative evidence presented here expands existing theoretical and empirical discussions on biculturalism and acculturation by demonstrating the ways in which contextual factors define the negotiation repertoire that is available to bicultural individuals. The findings of this article also call into question some of the earlier findings on cultural conflict hypothesis, because it shows that successful negotiation of bicultural identities depends not so much on whether the individual perceives these identities and cultures to be compatible with each other, but rather on the availability of a coherent self‐narrative of belonging to both cultural worlds.     

Contesting Islam through the 2012 Sydney Protests: An Analysis of Post-protest Political Discourse amongst Australian Muslims

The violent clashes between young Muslim men and police that occurred in and around Sydney's central business district on the evening of Saturday, September 15, 2012 have acted as a catalyst for an increasingly visible political struggle among different sections of the Australian Muslim population in the post-9/11 decade. The protests, ostensibly about the film Innocence of Muslims, have brought the contested nature of Islam and being Muslim in Australia firmly into the sphere of public political debate as Muslims aligned both against and with the protestors. This article aims to explore the extraordinarily open exchanges and contestation primarily between Muslims born and raised in Australia in the immediate aftermath of the protests and the mechanisms utilized to contest power, authority and legitimacy. In doing so, it reveals important insights into the debates defining Muslim political identity and considers the broader implications for Australian Islam and multiculturalism.     

Special Section on LGBT Resilience Across Cultures: Introduction

This special section addresses a gap area of resilience and LGBT well‐being. Although comprehensive global diversity regarding LGBT resilience was challenging to find, the special section includes representation from outside the US (Israel and Hong Kong), ethnic/racially diverse domestic populations, immigration, and one population for which LGBT identities might be considered marginalized—Christians in the US. The full range of LGBT identities are represented in the issue along with persons identifying as queer or questioning, although transgendered people were less well represented than lesbian, gay or bisexual identities.     

The identity struggle within Islam: Discussion of “Thoughts on the inner conflict within Islamic culture: Their existential anxieties and ours,” by Malcolm Owen Slavin,PhD

Abstract

There is nothing more fitting, the author believes, than for psychoanalysts to help our nations better understand the identity struggle that he believes underlies the radicalization process of radical Islamists. This identity struggle is a very deep one. At its core, it concerns what an individual Muslim feels about his or her bonds to the nation-state and what single cause in their life they are willing to die for. In this article, this struggle is characterized as theo-political and Islamo-national. In order to understand this better as psychoanalysts, the importance of the personal narrative – this sense of how an individual’s identity fits and meshes with the world around them – is stressed. To that end, this article will first given an introduction to the author and his family, and then bring readers to the Arab Awakening, which began in 2011. Dr. Slavin’s paper on Tunisia has highlighted so many of the elements of the changes that transformed Tunisia and some of the substrate that led to that evolution; this article provides the context both regionally and, more importantly, within the Muslim consciousness. The author describes the lens through which he was raised in Wisconsin as a devout Muslim and the son of Syrian political refugees. This then overlays an understanding of what was really happening across the revolutions of the Arab Awakening against tyranny and in the global consciousness of individual Muslims.     

Swedish Muslims and Secular Society: Faith-Based Engagement and Place

This article sets out to explore how Muslims in Sweden identify with and create social life in the place where they live, that is, in their neighbourhood, in their town/city and in Swedish society at large. In a paradoxical religious landscape that includes a strong Lutheran state church heritage and a Christian free-church tradition, in what is, nevertheless, a very secular society, Muslims may choose different strategies to express their faith, here roughly described as “retreatist,” “engaged” or “essentialist/antagonistic.” Focusing on a non-antagonistic, engaged stance, and drawing upon a combination of authors' interviews, and materials published in newspapers and on the Internet, we first bring to the fore arguments by Muslim leaders in favour of creating a Muslim identity with a Swedish brand, and second give some examples of local Muslim individuals, acting as everyday makers in their neighbourhood, town or city. Third, we also give attention to an aggressively negative Islamophobic stance expressed both in words and in physical violence in parts of Swedish society. In conclusion, we reflect upon the challenges and potentialities of an emotionally engaged, dialogue-orientated Muslim position facing antagonistic interpretations of Islam, and an ignorant, sometimes Islamophobic, environment.     

Muslim Dilemmas in the Republic of Ireland: Anti-Extremism and Self-Regulation in the Context of Super-Diversity

Since the 1990s, a very small Muslim community in the Republic of Ireland has expanded rapidly and become increasingly diverse. For all that research has identified growing expressions of anti-Muslim racism, mainstream Irish political discourse and political responses to Ireland’s Muslim communities have not reflected the antipathy towards Islam that is identifiable in a number of other European countries. The response of the Irish state towards Muslims has been one of apparent neglect, benign and otherwise, whilst Muslims, for their part, appear to have lived unobtrusively. We examine the position of Muslims in Ireland through the lens of three issues that have been debated within Muslim communities in recent years: the alleged threat of terrorist activity within Muslim communities; calls for regulation of Muslim/Islamic activities; and a 2018 controversy relating to comments made by a leading Islamic figure in Ireland on the topic of female genital mutilation. Our analysis, framed by Steven Vertovec’s concept of super-diversity, emphasizes the need for policymakers to avoid presumptions of homogeneity.     

Media making Muslims: the construction of a Muslim community in Germany through media debate

This article focuses on the ways in which Muslims actively participate in media debates about Islam and Muslims in Germany, and how they challenge or reinforce representations of themselves. It questions the narrative of powerlessness versus dominant actors in media and politics. Even though they were already perceived as part of a Muslim community, several prominent individuals in the German cultural and political sphere took an explicit position as Muslims—some insisting on their distance to religion. This paper aims at describing the various reasons and reflections accompanying this decision and argues that media images of Muslims steered individuals, who are not members of Islamic organizations let alone representatives of them, to become active or change their self-representation and act as Muslims. By demanding recognition as active members of German society, prominent Muslim individuals are creating new images of Muslims beyond an imaginary that is reducing them to their (alleged) religiosity and positioning them outside German national identity.     

Increased conspiracy beliefs among ethnic and Muslim minorities

In the present study, we tested whether Muslim minority members are more susceptible to conspiracy theories than majority members in the Netherlands. We examined conspiracy theories that are relevant (portraying the Muslim community as victim or Jewish people as perpetrators) and irrelevant for participants' Muslim identity (about the 2007 financial crisis, and other theories such as that the moon landings were fake). Results revealed that Muslims believed both identity‐relevant and irrelevant conspiracy theories more strongly than non‐Muslims. These differences could not be attributed to the contents of Muslim faith: Ethnic minority status exerted similar effects independent of Muslim identity. Instead, evidence suggested that feelings of both personal and group‐based deprivation independently contribute to belief in conspiracy theories. We conclude that feelings of deprivation lead marginalized minority members to perceive the social and political system as rigged, stimulating belief in both identity‐relevant and irrelevant conspiracy theories.     

Finnish Teachers’ Attitudes About Muslim Students and Muslim Student Integration

Although there is much discussion of educational needs and how to integrate Muslim students into modern Western contexts, there is a shortage of research on teachers’ attitudes about these issues. Finland offers a particularly interesting context for research, given its relatively new, small, yet rapidly growing Muslim population, its prominence of negative attitudes to visible religiosity, and its official policy of multiculturalism. This article presents the results of a quantitative study of Finnish teachers’ attitudes to Muslim students and to their integration into Finnish schools. A nonprobability sample of Finnish preservice and practicing teachers (N = 864) was surveyed and the resulting data analyzed with exploratory factor analysis, t‐tests, and ANOVA. The results indicate that Finnish teachers consider learning about general democratic values important, but their attitudes to dealing with Islam and Muslims are not quite as positive. However, previous involvement with other cultures indicated more positive attitudes among preservice teachers. Female teachers and practicing teachers were more oriented toward the teaching of commonality, and teaching at a more advanced level indicated more positive attitudes to Muslims and Muslim integration.     

Mahometans on the Edge of Colonial Empire: Antipodean Experiences

ABSTRACT

The public conceptualization of Muslim immigration and settlement in New Zealand has become synonymous with the comparatively recent influx of Asian and African migrants and refugees over the past two decades. However, a noteworthy minority of Muslim immigrants arrived during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, in the colonial period. This article surveys the immigration and settlement of Muslims from the 1850s to the 1950s, focusing on the biographies of the most prominent individuals, broadly tracing their arrival and participation in the Anglo-European Christian society they chose to settle in, through to the creation of the Islamic institutions in this country from the 1950s to 1980s. I will conclude with a brief overview of the significance of this pioneer period in view of more recent immigration and the proliferation of Islam in New Zealand, together with some observations upon the interactions of Muslims with a largely Christian society and what that may indicate for the understanding of relations between Muslims and Christians within New Zealand from the mid-nineteenth century onwards. Although the first century of Muslim settlement has been largely overlooked, or marginalized, much can be revealed about the broader Muslim experience at this extremity of the (former) British Empire.     

In Search for the Many Faces of Community Resilience Among LGBT Individuals

Many countries (e.g., Egypt, Russia, and Uganda) have very draconian laws against LGBT individuals. Despite facing such adversity or hostility many LGBT individuals do strive and maintain their sense of self‐worth. How do they do it? The collection of papers in this special issue attempts to provide some answers to this question. I will attempt to analyze two overlapping issues in these papers, and how they might inform LGBT research using a resilience lens.     

Visions & visualizations: negotiating space for European Muslims

Whether one chooses to view it as a negative or a positive development, history refers us to a difficult fact to ignore; the development of European civilization and consequently European identity, is impossible to imagine without Islam and Muslims. How deep the input has been is open to discussion and debate by historians, but it is clear that it was significant and considerable, and as twenty-first century Europe moves towards creating more cohesive societies in the EU, the impact of Muslims on European society, historically and presently, has become a topic of concern. With such a background, and the effect of Islamophobia on Muslim communities, how can Muslim communities negotiate their space in European societies?     

LGBT Activism and Reflexive Religion: A Case Study from Finland in the Light of Social Movements Theory

In this article we focus on lesbian, gay, bi-sexual, and transgender/-sexual (LGBT) activism that is grounded in some form of religious identification. Using the approach of the study of social movements highlights the features that enable such a movement to operate and proliferate in the heterogeneous, fluid, and distinctly non-institutional context of the contemporary religious or spiritual field and also to effect changes in the ranks of a traditional religious institution. Religious LGBT activism is a process-oriented and network-shaped movement that attributes positive value to and takes advantage of—and gains resilience from—an internal diversity in contrast to being institutionally organised and programmatically or dogmatically defined. We suggest that the current public exposure and treatment of the issues around religion and sexuality should be seen as negations of old and legitimation of new religious identities—not only of sexual identities. Rather than mobilisation through collective identity, religious LGBT activism emerges as part of an active process of value production wherein reflexivity and diversity are central features fostered by both individual and collective negotiations of subjective and emotionally challenging and motivating experiences.     

Religious homophobia: The experiences of a sample of lesbian,gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) people in Ireland

This paper presents the findings of an interpretative phenomenological analysis (IPA) of the experiences of religious homophobia among a sample of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) people in Ireland. In-depth interviews were conducted with 10 LGBT-identified people in Dublin (age range early 20s to 50s; six male and four female), of whom five identified as religious and five as atheist. IPA generated the overarching theme of Religious Homophobia which was experienced and responded to differently by religious and atheist participants. Findings were that, while participants lived in an increasingly pluralistic Irish society, the negative dividend of religious homophobia created intrapsychic tension for participants and led some to abandon religion altogether. Nevertheless the experiences of participants point to the changing nature of Irish society which is characterised by increased diversity, openness and respect for minority rights including LGBT rights.     

Dual Identities and Their Recognition: Minority Group Members' Perspectives

Minorities may define themselves at a superordinate (e.g., national) level and also at a subgroup (minority) level. However, others' recognition of such dual identifications cannot be guaranteed. This paper investigates how members of a minority (Muslims in the UK) constructed their superordinate and subgroup identities in such a way as to assert a commonality with British non‐Muslims whilst asserting their religious subgroup's distinctiveness. Reporting qualitative data obtained through interviews (N = 28), the analysis explores how British Muslims negotiated concerns over commonality and distinctiveness through describing themselves as being British in a Muslim way. The implications of these self‐definitions for the theorization of dual identities, their recognition, and intergroup relations are discussed.     

The vicious circle of religious prejudice: Islamophobia makes the acculturation attitudes of majority and minority members clash

Public discourse often portrays Islam as the main obstacle for Muslim minorities' integration, paying little attention to the contextual factors hindering this process. Here, we focus on islamophobia as one destructive factor that hinders the mutual integration between Muslim minority and Western majority members, affecting both groups. In Study 1, the more islamophobic majority members were, the more they expected Muslims to give up their heritage culture and the less they wanted them to integrate. In Study 2, only when Muslims experienced substantial religious discrimination did religious identity negatively relate to national engagement and particularly positively relate to ethnic engagement. Together, the studies suggest that religious prejudice in the form of islamophobia is a major obstacle to Muslims' integration because it increases the incongruity between majority and minority members' acculturation attitudes.