Legal Integration of Islam: A Transatlantic Comparison
Christian Joppke
Language: English
Pages: 224
ISBN: 0674072847
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
The status of Islam in Western societies remains deeply contentious. Countering strident claims on both the right and left, Legal Integration of Islam offers an empirically informed analysis of how four liberal democracies―France, Germany, Canada, and the United States―have responded to the challenge of integrating Islam and Muslim populations. Demonstrating the centrality of the legal system to this process, Christian Joppke and John Torpey reject the widely held notion that Europe is incapable of accommodating Islam and argue that institutional barriers to Muslim integration are no greater on one side of the Atlantic than the other.
While Muslims have achieved a substantial degree of equality working through the courts, political dynamics increasingly push back against these gains, particularly in Europe. From a classical liberal viewpoint, religion can either be driven out of public space, as in France, or included without sectarian preference, as in Germany. But both policies come at a price―religious liberty in France and full equality in Germany. Often seen as the flagship of multiculturalism, Canada has found itself responding to nativist and liberal pressures as Muslims become more assertive. And although there have been outbursts of anti-Islamic sentiment in the United States, the legal and political recognition of Islam is well established and largely uncontested.
Legal Integration of Islam brings to light the successes and the shortcomings of integrating Islam through law without denying the challenges that this religion presents for liberal societies.
perhaps more apposite response is ridicule. How can one not shake one’s head about the disproportionate measure of passing a law to reign in an ultramarginal practice by less than one-tenth of a percent of France’s Muslim population, and for which a number of administrative restrictions already existed that made French law tougher in this respect than most other jurisdictions in Europe (see Conseil d’Etat 2010: 11–15)? If one of the main instigators of the burqa campaign, André Gerin, ignoring
French and European Islam expert, “At present no town councilor would deny the right to have a mosque and nearly everywhere representatives of Muslim organizations have established relations with local authorities” (Cesari 2005: 1025). The French state has long followed the quasi-multicultural principle of “compensating” Islam for its factual disadvantages vis-à-vis the historical religions of France (Badevant-Gaudemet 2000). Concretely, this means that the French state, also intent on preempting
cultural difference at large. However, as we see it now, this vision of “ethical neutrality” is more germane to the legal than to the political process, more characteristic of the refined casuistry of constitutional law than the populist temptations of democratic politics. Neutrality’s high-water mark was the German Constitutional Court’s famous Crucifix decision of 1995 (given due attention by Huster 2002: ch. 3), which told the Bavarian state that it could not exhibit Legal Integration of
legislative case against the integral veil could be built: “laïcité,” “human dignity,” and “public order”; each avenue, however, is insufficient to deliver the desired result. Accordingly, the lawyers, and grudgingly the commission also, concluded that a “general and absolute” prohibition was not a viable project. Laïcité. If one considers the centrality of laïcité in the adoption of the 2004 law prohibiting ostentatious religious signs in public schools, one is astonished at how quickly and
importance whatsoever in light of the need to protect a subjective religious belief.” More than that, this way of protecting religious liberty explicitly discarded the interest of the child. If the Limits of Including p 61 Muslim girl was forced to be an outsider, with “negative effect on the development of her personality,” she had to “accept” it if “her parents insist on her behalf on the unhindered exercise of religion.”53 If some have argued that multiculturalism is “bad” for vulnerable