Re-posing the “Muslim Question”

Abstract

The “Muslim Question” (MQ) is an increasingly referenced polysemous schema that constructs and abstracts Muslims and Muslimness in problematizing their integration within a western secular public sphere. The reader is perhaps already questioning this definition and the taken-for-grantedness of all these concepts—integration, Muslim, the West, secularism, and the public sphere—that have themselves been sites of significant scholarly debate and critique. Yet, despite being firmly lodged in these enduring concepts, the genealogy of the MQ is recent. The coinage appears with frequency alongside socio-legal debates about the visibility of Islam in western nation-states, whether through so-called conspicuous religious signs and practices, gendered norms, or through the racialized presence of minorities. The “question” has peaked following terror-related events, beginning with 9/11 and re-appearing most recently following the November 2015 terrorist attacks in Paris. There is no reason to think that the “question” will disappear in the immediate future: many countries (including Canada, Germany, Lebanon, Sweden, and Britain) are receiving a large number of refugees from Syria, and one of the pervasive themes of public discourse is their integration. Mobilizing stark, threatening, and Islamophobic characterizations of Muslims has served as an expeditious “wedge” political tool for some western governments. We saw this in Canada earlier in 2015 on the question of the acceptability of niqabs, a garment worn by a few dozen women.¹ It differs from Islamophobia. The MQ, to cite contributor Matteo Gianni [p. 23], “is a conglomerate of discourses, attitudes, and practices that call into question the agency, subjectivity, and moral equality of Muslims as individuals, as bearers of religious values, and as citizens.” In this way, the MQ includes analysis of discriminations and violences to which Muslims are subjected but is not reducible to these foci. It is also sometimes linked to the “Jewish Question.”

In general, the papers in this issue situate the MQ in two registers: First, in a Huntingtonian sense, in ways that call into question the visibility of Muslims and reify and affirm a variety of secularization projects. In this way, “Islam” as a singular object is positioned as wholly divergent from (or “clashing” with) the social and cultural norms of the similarly constructed West. This binary is conjured when the question is raised by pundits and politicians who find it expeditious to question the socio-political legitimacy of Islam and Muslims in minority contexts.² These instances are ongoing and not necessarily considered to be hateful or racist.³ Second, the MQ is a problematized lens to think about how and why Muslimness is constructed, positioned, and essentialized, again often pejoratively and in contrast to so-called western secular values.⁴ In this way, consideration of the MQ draws attention to the racialization and aforementioned Islamophobia that infuse these discourses. In both cases, the MQ is informed by Orientalist and colonialist interests that, as Gianni [p. 23] summarizes, ultimately “fix the social ontology of Muslimness.” With this second line of questioning in mind, in different ways these five papers aim to interrogate the taxonomies and nature of the question itself. In other words, we “re-pose” the MQ to situate and evaluate its contexts, its politics and its emotional quotient and inquire about how the question might be reposed or dispensed with altogether.

Three vectors came together to press us to undertake this analysis: first, a workshop we held in June 2014 which we framed as “Re-posing the ‘Muslim Question’” and where these papers were shared and discussed; second, a one-woman play by Aizzah Fatima, with which we began our workshop and to which we will return in a moment; and third, the content of interviews with Muslims in St. John’s, Newfoundland, Canada. As a result of this intersection, we came to a number of insights: first, although a great deal of scholarship usefully chronicles significant discrimination experienced by Muslims and those perceived as Muslim, there is an immense scholarly investment, industry even, in maintaining a particular shape to the conversation and “the question”; second, the voices of Muslims tend to remain obscured in these conversations; and third, the essentializing power of “The Muslim Question,” as if there is a singular Muslim identity around which a question can be posed, erases the multiplicity of Muslim identities and their interaction with myriad other changing identities.⁵ In what follows, we situate how we see the MQ in the midst of other questions posed by playwright Aizzah Fatima and the authors of these papers, how it has been understood in relation to the “Jewish Question,” and conclude with thoughts on its utility.

Our interrogation of the MQ

As evidenced by an ever-growing attention to the MQ in recent decades, this lens—whether presented as a binary or as a critique of the question itself—has a great deal of salience. Its range of “answers” tends to be emotionally and politically charged, suggesting that there is a good deal at stake in its discussion, in non-academic and academic contexts. Mahmood Mamdani (2004) calls the central lens through which Muslimness is characterized post 9/11 as “culture talk.” To some extent, culture talk may also impact knowledge production on Muslims in the West. Jennifer A Selby argues that scholarly interest in the most conservative versions of Islam “cannot be causally related to culture talk but reflects the polarities in its binaries (good/bad, philia/phobia) privilege.” Selby acknowledges that scholars are not required to be representative, and that there is no proper object of study. But this over-focus on statistically marginal (highly conservative) groups means that more common practices and versions are less visible in scholarly production and, more significantly, in government reports on Muslims that inform legal projects. Thus, rather than these narrow foci, as all our contributors say in different ways, “Muslim” is a heterogeneous category.

Recent scholarship on Muslims in the West has also been attentive to ways that the MQ relates to studies of secularisms.⁶ In On the Muslim Question, for example, Anne Norton (2013) argues that post-Enlightenment western secularisms have not produced their promised neutrality, impartiality, and rationality and that anxiety regarding their failure has been replaced by a false pejorative singular “Muslim” in Western Europe and North America. While she outlines palpable examples of this substitution, in contrast to Norton, we see the MQ as reflecting more than disillusionment with the equality and justice promised by secularisms. The MQ also signals how the “Muslim” becomes a category that has surfaced related to concerns with racialization, immigration, national identities, democracy, postcoloniality, expressions of sexuality, extremism, and radicalization. Chronicling (and refuting) these often hate-filled and racist positions is important. These visions shape the conditions and possibilities of life for Muslims and non-Muslims in Western Europe and Canada. In relating secularisms to the MQ, we are not saying that all tensions related to Islam reflect other issues. Rather, we seek to consider why at this moment Islam is the site of so much scholarly and popular production and consumption. Our aim, in other words, is to investigate the situatedness of the MQ discourse. To begin, why is it “a” question about Muslims? What are the political conditions that have produced the “question”?

Before turning to how our authors and playwright reflect on these, we briefly address the MQ’s link with the so-called Jewish Question. In response to Bruno Bauer’s work, Karl Marx (1844) depicted the “Jewish Question” in nineteenth-century Europe as seminal to a series of debates around national identity, democracy, capitalism, and modernity. These thinkers held differing views on the question of citizenship: Bruno Bauer as a radical secularist who wanted Jews in Germany to give up their particularity, and Karl Marx as a socialist who saw religion as an obstacle and political emancipation alone as insufficient (see Farris, 2014: 296). More recently, some scholars see the “Questions” as following a continuum, arguing that a European gaze has shifted from anti-Semitism to Islamophobia. Joan W Scott (2012), for one, sees the current demands on Muslims in Europe—particularly requirements to conform to certain citizenship rules—as resonating with the mistreatment of Jews in the 1930s and 1940s. With reference to contemporary France, Scott (2012: 154) argues that it matters “whether they [Muslims] are psychologically sufficiently emancipated and/or egalitarian to be eligible for full membership or permanent inclusion” echoes the former citizenship exclusion of Jews. For Scott, the analogy does not mean that Jews have achieved acceptance or that there was been a “simple shift of hatred” (2012: 153). Rather, she sees a racialized and Othered Islam positioned as being unassimilable in ways reminiscent of previous heightened anti-Semitism in France and Germany. In the same vein, Sara F Farris (2014) maps similitude between the “Jewish Question” as posed in Germany in the 1870s and the 2004 veil ban in France.

Of course, the “Questions” share a number of highly problematic features. Nevertheless, we do not seek to bridge these so-called questions here. We see the “Questions” as differing in their formulation and in their historical, geopolitical and demographic contexts. Matti Bunzl (2007: 52) shows a crucial difference in contrasting the historical role played by anti-Semitism in protecting the purity of the ethnic nation-state and the contemporary role of Islamophobia in a “post-national” Europe. Brian Klug (2014: 447) also argues for the differing orientations of the terms “Islamophobia” and “anti-Semitism.” The first, he says, appears to describe fear in the face of Islam, whereas the latter positions a particular group (or the traits ascribed to them) outside of acceptability. He also questions the purchase of the analogy. With these critiques in mind, we see serious problems and limitations with transposing the “Jewish Question” into the MQ. But rejecting the idea of continuity does not mean that there is nothing to be gained by comparison, which can be done with care and caution to help us gain insight. For example, as Canada, the United States, and Europe face an influx of refugees from Syria in 2015, it might be instructive to learn from the mistakes of the past. As Michael Enright pointed out in his commentary on his popular CBC radio program, “In 1938, more than 80 per cent of Americans believed that Jews should not be admitted to the US, as they might be Nazi agents, spies or communists. Canada turned away 908 Jewish refugees aboard the SS St. Louis in 1939.”⁷ Enright’s analogy offers a cautionary tale of the potential harms of socially constructed characterizations, which Amiraux (in this issue) takes up as akin to gossip.

In thinking through the consequences of the language and frameworks we employ, we aim to recognize how as academics we contribute to the demarcation of particular zones of inquiry that can in turn fuel discrimination or worse. We think here of the example of Denmark’s approach to its Jewish population during the Second World War, documented by Bo Lidegaard in Countrymen (2014). In response to persistent Nazi queries about the Jewish “problem” and how Denmark proposed to deal with it, the government and king held that Jews were well integrated and part of the social fabric of Denmark. The Danes were able to take this position even as the Nazis were insisting that the only possible framework was one of problematization. Through its refusal to differentiate or to create categories of difference, Denmark protected its Jewish citizens more effectively than other European countries. Denmark both recognized the distinct identities of Jews while simultaneously emphasized their integration as citizens. To be sure, the Danish approach was not perfect,⁸ but it did cultivate a sense of protectiveness of Jews rather than persecution such that when the state was no longer able to protect its Jewish population and they were forced to flee, non-Jewish Danes were active participants in their successful evasion of Nazi efforts to deport them. We take this historical example as an illustration of potential outcomes when radically reductive categories are rejected, as could be the case in the language in governmental reports or policy. Put differently, we worry that scholarship around a constructed MQ re-constitutes and reifies Muslim difference in harmful ways. What is the work being done by the insistence that there is a MQ to be answered?

The five papers that follow and two plays by Aizzah Fatima question the MQ from different vantage points. Their interrogations stem from a two-day workshop at Memorial University of Newfoundland with 11 scholars from 6 scholarly disciplines.⁹ As the program came together, we sought to introduce a more creative nonscholarly space to think through the MQ. Beaman came across press for Aizzah Fatima’s one-person show, “Dirty Paki Lingerie,” which conveyed her considerable intellectual engagement with what it means to be Muslim in America. Fatima later explained how she purposefully used a provocative title to challenge the ethnic slur and taboos around speaking about the sexuality of women, even if airing “dirty laundry.”¹⁰ Of interest to us was her commitment to portraying multiple Muslim voices and the challenges her characters face. One of the strengths of her play, other than her incredible ability to move from character to character in one beat, is her commitment to showing many facets of Muslim identities as they are woven through relationships and family life. Fatima agreed to join us in Newfoundland and participated in and listened to us discuss our papers.

Fatima’s play interweaves the voices of six Muslim Pakistani American women of varying ages, ranging from a young girl relaying her experience of being called a terrorist at a public school, to a woman telling her daughter of a new relationship following 40 years of marriage, to an older woman scouring personal ads for a potential marriage partner for her daughter. One scene that generated considerable debate in our subsequent discussion was about a mother seeking a “match” for her daughter (see YouTube, 2012, 2013).

As we watched Fatima in character and smiled, we were reminded of matchmaking relatives who have been too probing in their questions about marital status, raising for us feelings of empathy for the unseen, unmarried woman who is the focus of the marriage partner search and bartering. As captured in these clips available on YouTube, Fatima performs the scene by wrapping a shawl around her head and shoulders, becoming, through a shift in posture and demeanor, a middle-aged woman. Her negotiations related to her daughter provoked not only laughter but also cringing, as we envisage the unseen daughter and her reactions if she could hear her mother. We also imagined different ways audiences could interpret the scene.

Fatima’s play was very productive in our thinking, but not at all in ways we expected. Considerable debate took place among us following her presentation of her play. Some of these concerns reflect one of the central lines in the MQ that scrutinizes the public visibility and representations of women’s bodies and sexuality. In particular, the discussion that followed raised questions about voice and authority (who speaks for Muslims, where and when, what is considered humorous) and ownership (who is best placed to engage in social critique). These are delicate matters. The social contexts and the position of the questioner (her gender, whether she is racialized, whether she self-identifies as Muslim) and the questioned (in this case, the playwright/actor) further impact the way in which the MQ is framed and presented.

Fatima was generous in her responses to our conversation and, at our request, wrote a second short play reacting to her experience with the academics she encountered at the workshop. We gave her carte blanche. The result, which she calls “The Scholar,” subtlety reflects some of the tensions that emerged during our discussion around power and voice. The new play introduces two characters in one scene—a graduate student and a professor in her office—as the former seeks counsel and support for a paper she wrote entitled, “Social media, Dating, and the Muslim using Facebook, Twitter and Minder” [“It’s like Tinder¹¹ but for Muslims only. It’s like the halal Tinder”] and following an Islamophobic incident on a city bus, when a driver would not allow the young woman to enter without ID. We enter the scene as the women are interacting in an office. The professor, Khadija, is just about to leave for the day as the student, Huda, enters. Huda is anxious for reassurance regarding this paper and following this bus incident, which caused her to be late for office hours. To view this scene performed by Fatima, see: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iIha7fbFrn0&feature=youtu.be

***

KHADIJA [the professor]

What was your question?

HUDA [the student]

(Refers to long list) I have a lot of them.

KHADIJA

Let’s start with one.

HUDA

You said my subject seemed “primitive”?

KHADIJA

I was referring to the woman calling Facebook “book face.”

HUDA

But she’s sixty-five. This is what she called it.

KHADIJA

My mother is of that age, and she knows what Facebook is. She even uses it. When you are doing scholarly work, you want to make sure that you speak accurately about the scholarship with which you are engaged. A sixty-five year old woman living in Canada really wouldn’t call it that. It’s just not believable.

HUDA

But this is—

KHADIJA

I really only have time to answer one more question.

HUDA

You said my focus was too broad?

KHADIJA

When you say “The Muslim”… there are 1.6 billion Muslims in the world across different cultures, and their Islam is colored by their culture. What does that really mean?

HUDA

You think I should narrow my focus?

KHADIJA

Yes.

HUDA

I would really like to explore the social media and dating habits of the Ahmadiyya community in Pakistan.

KHADIJA

And why this particular community?

HUDA

That’s my community. No one ever talks about this community. We are too small. A forgotten sect in Islam. Even other Muslims don’t consider us.

(KHADIJA stands up and starts to collect her things. HUDA remains seated.)

KHADIJA

Well, I look forward to reading your next draft. We can discuss more if you drop by during office hours.

***

In this excerpt from “The Scholar,” Fatima takes up a critique that emerged in our discussion about whether a middle-aged immigrant Muslim American woman would incorrectly refer to “book face.” This seemingly trivial slip and the conversation around it is, it turns out, emblematic of much larger issues. We read Fatima’s counter-critique as capturing two elements that recur in a number of academic representations of Muslims. In the first place, which “version” of Muslim identity is authentic? In presenting her play at an academic workshop, Fatima herself sets a scene in which she, perhaps perceived as the “Muslim actor,” is vulnerably situated given the high stakes around representation. Perhaps “bookface” was meant to capture the technological handicap of a middle-aged woman unfamiliar with the application. Perhaps the mistake sought to make fun of the online program’s banal name. In any case, the reversal from “Facebook” to “Bookface” was discussed. In the second place, this scene rehearses issues of authority, and in particular, academic investment in claiming territory around the articulation of the MQ. The professor clearly delineates how “the Muslim” should be characterized, even while pointing to heterogeneity. This reflects a tendency we have noted in scholarship to nod to diversity and heterogeneity, and then slip back into reified categories such as “Muslim,” “the West,” and so on.

In addition to our reading of this commissioned play by Fatima, we also heard concern for narrow representations of Muslimness in public discourse in a number of the interviews we conducted with Muslims in St. John’s, Canada.¹² Qualitative interviews sought to chronicle and think about common or unremarkable moments of navigation and negotiation of religiosity. One academic commentator on some of the results of this work stated: “there is no such thing as a non-event for Muslims.” This point, in fact, is contrary to what the vast majority our interviewees told us.¹³ We collected data that clearly shows discrimination experienced by our interlocutors. At the same time, however, we wonder whether focusing solely on these stories contributes to the foregrounding of religious identity in ways that most of our participants find unrepresentative and tiresome. Although we consider that it is of utmost importance to document biases and discrimination faced by (and at times contributed by) our participants, focusing only on these provides us with a very partial picture of the registers—religious and not—in our interviewees’ lives. Again, sometimes these moments are grave, like with one informant working with police in response to a defacement of her home she describes as a hate crime, or less blatant, as with other participants positioned by non-Muslims to be the resident Islam expert in their workplaces. Yet, along with these discriminations we encountered an overall desire to “get on with it,” with space for an incredibly wide range of religious practices that we have not seen in most contemporary social scientific treatments on Islam.¹⁴

In response to these common threads we see in contemporary knowledge production about Muslims, these papers ask a different series of questions including:

Under which social conditions is a collective and collapsed Muslim Other likely to be constructed?

How and why do western governmental political apparatuses (like commissioned reports and referendums) fuel and undergird the abstract positioning of Muslims as collective questioned Other?

What can the experiences and positioning of Muslim converts (including those who are racialized) tell us about the politics laden in characterizations of Muslim identities?

How does social scientific knowledge production on Muslims fuel and participate in the creation and interest in the MQ?

How does insisting that Muslims are benign (they are “just like us,” seek neighborliness, and have “everyday lives”) contribute to a further decontextualization of Islam that obscures discrimination?

And lastly, how does the idea of “a” singular question deflect attention from issues of authority, power, and identity construction?

Matteo Gianni addresses the inherent politics of the MQ in public policy in contemporary Switzerland through a novel use of political theory on integration. He deconstructs the Swiss example, pointing out that “for the Swiss logic of accommodation, a collective other claiming recognition is the equivalent of a threat that must be securitized, as it conflicts with the non-negotiable criteria that foreign individuals are supposed to fulfill in order to be integrated into Swiss society” [p. 27]. Thus, in responding to the second question above, Gianni links the MQ to a reification (in Switzerland) of a homogenous Muslim identity and unified political actor. A collective Other is positioned by this framework as seeking recognition. In response, in examining approaches to integration (which is a matter for states to consider when accepting immigrant populations), Gianni proposes a “processual” approach to integration. This approach (which he contrasts with a more top-down integration as adjustment) transforms integration into a “political modality,” which offers minority groups the mechanisms, including political resources and opportunities, to contribute to the conversation about the content of a society’s common values. Without this meaningful interaction, or what he calls the “depoliticization of citizenship,” values, laws, and practices to which immigrants are expected to adjust are reinforced, potentially impeding Muslims’ citizenry.

The paper by Valérie Amiraux reflects on these questions, as well. She argues that the MQ construction is not based on substantiation or logic but rather on information that slides past the rigours of evidence and in fact replicated through the circulation of gossip. Amiraux turns to how the 2011 French face veil ban fetishizes and inspires strong opinion on a garment with which most have had little personal contact and no experience. She asks, in other words, how can we talk so confidently about things (i.e., a niqab) that we do not experience and about a person with whom we have had no chance to interact? Troublingly, this circulation of gossip creates an emotional connection and familiarity that constructs a basis for the validation and objectification of authority and subsequent action. In the case of the full-face veil in France, the individual comes to assume the burden of proving her worth, rather than the state proving neutrality. This compulsion is, argues Amiraux, a “profound corruption of the historical principle of secularism in which the burden of neutrality lies with the State” [p. 45]. She also sees the obsession with women’s faces as a proxy for other tensions about shared social norms. Concern with the “backwardness” of some of the older characters in Fatima’s play may have been related to a desire to ensure a complex and cosmopolitan characterization of hijabis.

As does Gianni, Amiraux points to the circulation of a grand narrative of “our values,” which frames the MQ in particular ways. Echoing the Swiss case, Amiraux notes, “social cohesion derived from the unity of shared “national values” is endangered, it is maintained, by the wearing of a religious garment (even one freely chosen)” [p. 38]. Part and parcel of these values is a version of secularism that renders the religious unintelligible. This exclusion is accomplished through the erasure of religion as part of national identity, putting the wearing of religious symbols in direct conflict with being an acceptable French citizen. The collective gaze scrutinizes for worthiness to participate in the Republican pact, reshaping Muslim identities into “the” Muslim, who is defined singularly in opposition to French values, again signalling the problem with a single question posed around Muslim integration.

In her essay, Amélie Barras takes up Québec’s recent entanglements with the MQ. She critiques a commission that in 2007 sought to address the putative integration of Muslims following a number of mediatized Islamophobic incidents and a now-tabled bill proposal to introduce a “Charter of Secularism” that garnered international attention. Referencing qualitative interviews from Montréal, Canada, Barras engages in discourse analysis of the subsequent 2008 Bouchard-Taylor Report on reasonable accommodation and the 2013-proposed Bill 60. Under the rubric of “reasonable accommodation,” the commissioners of the Consultation Commission on Accommodation Practices Related to Cultural Differences and the proposers of Bill 60 positioned religious minorities so that they should make requests. Barras argues that Muslim Quebeckers are disempowered in making requests for accommodation and difference. She shows how “discourses of request”—or moments when someone “‘asks’ for an accommodation or for an adjustment of the norm when she considers that she is being discriminated by this norm”—act as a mechanism to delineate the religious from the nonreligious, and always mobilize asymmetrical power relations. Put differently, the notion of “reasonable” accommodation acts to frame religious needs as requests, thus displacing the onus from states to Muslims (as Amiraux shows is the case in France). Rather than fulfilling the promise of equality in any substantive way through the creation of religious accessibility in society, an expectation of request is promulgated. This framework, says Barras, creates a situation in which Muslims are set up to be characterized as asking too much, as making demands for things to which they are not entitled, or as being unaccepting of “our values.” More concretely, Barras counts the term “conflict” 43 times in the Bouchard-Taylor Report, 39 times in relation to requests. Conflict therefore is central to the “reasonable accommodation” model prevalent in Québec, which itself hinges upon these “discourses of request.”

Although Amiraux argues that religion becomes non-intelligible in the current milieu in France, Barras’ argument is a bit different: religion becomes hypervisible, the defining identity marker that is “called out,” to be scrutinized, assessed, judged, and pronounced upon in relation to its effects, its impact on citizenship, and its compatibility with “living together.” This framework positions religious minorities, and Muslims in Québec particularly, to always trespass the norms of secularity in the Quebecois public sphere: religion should be private, or at least, certain kinds of religion should be private. Being required to make a demand means that these individuals’ Muslimness must, in those moments, be foregrounded in ways they may find uncomfortable and that betrays the care and respect that characterizes much of their daily interactions with non-Muslims and Muslims of a variety of backgrounds. Ultimately these reports position Muslims as “rigid requestors” of “flexible institutions,” therein they become implicit celebrations of the state.

Drawing on interviews with self-defined Muslims in Canada’s most easterly city, Selby questions a recent trend that over-privileges the voices and experiences of the most conservative Muslims in scholarly production related to the MQ and in recent Canadian government reports. She shows how who Mamdani (2004) calls good/bad Muslims “remain[s] powerful because they have been normalized in situations and locations that purport to be neutral” [p. 73]. While aiming to respond to (and even counteract) Islamophobia, an Islamophilic (cf. Shryock 2010) approach solidifies the binary and the “Bad” Muslim. The 2008 Bouchard-Taylor Report Barras critiques in Québec and the 2004 Boyd Report written in response to the “Sharia Debate” in Ontario effectively introduce Islam and a variety of Muslim voices. Selby argues that because they did not address and deconstruct the MQ at the heart of their debates, their impact was significantly limited. Selby also reflects on how some of her own unscripted interview follow-up questions fall back onto more fixed textually-informed “pillars.” She argues that a more rigorous approach in these government reports and qualitative interviews would better critique the apparatuses that enable the creation of this knowledge. So doing would generate a better sense of the politics and limitations within the mechanisms we use to produce knowledge, in this case about Muslims.

Géraldine Mossière argues that the narratives of female converts in France and Québec problematize prevalent differentiating politics and, following Simmel’s (1908) distance and proximity dialectic, maps a bridging possibility. She begins her essay, though, with an important reminder of how history is often excluded from present day conceptualizations of Muslims, or, when it is marshalled, it is called forward for the purposes of emphasizing and highlighting Muslimness and difference. This narrative is in contrast to the easy co-existence and co-constitution that has so often been the case when peoples of different religious identities live side by side. Difference has been emphasized when, as Mossière shows, the dominant story for her respondents is one of blurred boundaries, mutual constitution and collaboration. To forget these historical realities is to facilitate a story of difference, such that we can no longer think outside of “us” and “them.” Mossière identifies a central paradox in the framework of recognition and asks to what extent the recognition process “which allows the majority to identify with the minority”—is contingent on perceived similarity or “Sameness” to the Other” [p. 92]. Mossière’s research with female converts represents another articulation of the blurred boundaries and reconfigured identities around Islam that can be juxtaposed against a purity discourse that is sometimes perpetuated, for often different reasons, by those who identify as Muslim and others. It is here, again, that the limitations and even the misrepresentations of the MQ are foregrounded.

Conclusion

We recognize that in this introductory essay we have, thus far, posed far more questions than we have answered. Continuing in this vein, by way of conclusion, we pose two additional questions. First, to take up a point made earlier, why is the richness of Muslim identity, or, more accurately, Muslim identities, tempered in favor of narratives of oppression or victimization? When we turn to the interactions of the participants in our research and the narratives within Fatima’s two plays, we see an alternative narrative that we have rarely encountered. We wonder whether, in a desire to counteract the escalating and dangerous Islamophobia experienced by many Muslims, scholars have limited the foci of their investigations to focus upon conflictive moments (see for example Göle, 2015 who writes on “average” Muslims in Europe but only through their responses to controversies). Thus, in contemplating alternative narratives we return to our starting point to think about what, exactly, the MQ is. We conclude that in both registers we have delineated the MQ frames discussion in ways that reify “a” Muslim identity. Yet, at the same time as it fixes the ontology of Muslimness, the MQ excludes Muslims.

So, lastly, should the MQ be reposed? In our initial critique of the MQ, we created a workshop, from which the papers in this volume come, in which we suggested questioning or even completely dismissing the question. In the final analysis, we have concluded that even re-posing the question returns us to the problems of the initial question. There is no singular question, nor single Muslim identity. As a last point in what we see as a dynamic and continuing conversation, we invite the reader, when she comes across or experiences the divisive politics mobilized through the binaries of the MQ, to pose a different question: what is at stake in “this” question? For us, at stake are the binaries solidified through normalizing processes (through simplified definitions mobilized through gossip, and located in government reports, and in scholarship, among others) that ultimately guarantee the impossibility of full membership in the contexts we have examined here.

Footnotes

Notes

Author biographies

Jennifer A Selby is associate professor in the department of Religious Studies at Memorial University. She is author of Questioning French Secularism (Palgrave Macmillan, 2012) and co-editor of Debating Sharia: Islam, Gender Politics and Family Law Arbitration (University of Toronto Press, 2012), in addition to other works.

Lori G Beaman is the Canada Research Chair in the Contextualization of Religion in a Diverse Canada and Professor in the Department of Classics and Religious Studies at the University of Ottawa. She is Principal Investigator of the Religion and Diversity Project, a 37 member international research team whose focus is religion and diversity (religionanddiversity.ca) and author of numerous books and articles.

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