Gianni, Matteo and Marco Giugni

Resources, Opportunities, and Discourses: What Explains the Political Mobilization of Muslims in Europe?
2014

In European public discourses, one of the main issues related to Muslims’ presence in western countries concerns either their lack of integration or their (supposed) political mobilization. On the one hand, it is sometimes argued, especially by actors of the radical Right (Skenderovic 2007), that Muslims are surreptitiously mobilizing in order to increasingly Islamize western countries. These claims-by the way never supported by systematic empirical evidence-foster fear and distrust among non-Muslim Europeans. Anti-Muslim sentiments have spread across all the political spectrum (Klausen 2005: 20), and such feelings nurture social and political representations of Muslims which ultimately call into question their full belonging and full citizenship in the European polities. The case of the ban of minarets voted by Swiss citizens in 2009 well illustrates such a trend. On the other hand, Muslim’s political mobilization, if it exists at all, is seen as an indicator of political integration, that is, as a form of participation in the democratic process. This would mean the transformation of a voiceless population, namely those who are spoken about but who cannot speak for themselves (Rancière 1995), in a more politically and socially engaged one. In this light, by mobilizing, Muslims would have partially overcome the lack of social and political resources that characterize immigrant populations.