How the Immigrant has become Muslim. Public Debates on Islam in Europe

Among the ‘figures of otherness’ that sociology have conceptualised, there has been a shift from ‘internal’ foreigners (belonging to a minority: Jews, members of ethnic and religious minorities, etc.), to the different, the foreigner, and lastly the immigrant, which has been for a long period the ideal type of the other, and the most studied. Now it seems to become, in more recent years, the Muslim. There are many reasons to explain this shift, both internal, connected with the transformations of migrations in Europe, and external, connected to the emergence of Islam as a global political actor. But there are also long-term reasons, which are related to the renovated salience of religious categories in the European public space, such as the pluralisation of religious offer, of which Islam in Europe represents in the public debate, correctly or not, the extreme case. The main interpretative problem is that, on the one hand, the religious specificity of Islam is relatively bad acknowledged; on the other hand, it is excessively used as a self-evident explanation of phenomena related also to non religious reasons. Research approaches to Islam risk then to be condemned either to reductionism or to essentialism. This seems to be equally true for the political, religious and particularly mediatic debate about Islam in the European public space. One of the paradoxes of this situation is that today, when Muslims are more and more integrated in European societies, the perception of them and of Islam is more and more conflictual. In this situation of conflict – not necessarily real, but described as such in part of the public imagery – in which the interpretative paradigms (also those of common discourses, not only scientific) are still weak and little attested, reactive forms of identity emerge, both among the autochthonous populations and the immigrant communities. A good example of reactive identities can be seen in the conflicts on Islamic symbols in Europe (hijab, mosques, etc.).