Appropriation and Redemption in Contemporary Western Discourses on Islam in Europe

The aim of this paper is to sketch a line of interpretation of certain political-philosophical discourses on 'Islam in Europe' through the interrelated concepts of appropriation and redemption. Muslim presence in Europe is generally perceived as 'problematic.' A specific vocabulary, including terms like 'liberal dilemma,' 'defense of freedom,' 'Muslim exceptionalism', and 'specification of acceptable boundaries,'1 characterizes an academic production which has been particularly stimulated by the emergence of 'crises'2 (the 'Rushdie Affair,' l'affaire du foulard, the French ban on headscarves in schools, and the publication of the 'Danish cartoons,' just to mention those that have hit the front pages of newspapers worldwide).3 Albeit in different ways, this scholarship has 2 displayed a certain agreement on the existence of a distinctive European tradition of liberal-secular humanism and on the idea that cultural and religious pluralism should be assessed against the necessity of preserving this tradition. The scope of this essay is to articulate a reflection on the assumptions (and ensuing implications) of this interpretive framework and thus contribute to fill a gap in the burgeoning and variegated literature on Islam in Europe. This literature, in fact, has been mostly concerned with the question of the transformation of Islam within European settings, namely whether, to what extent, and how European Muslims are undergoing—or should undergo—a process of individualization, secularization, and dislocation of traditional religious authority. Such a focus has had the effect of leaving the variable 'Europe' in the relation 'Islam in Europe' relatively under-problematized and of framing the issue almost exclusively in terms of Muslim 'integration into consolidated models of European secularity,' as if such models represented an unsurpassed example of pluralism and neutrality.4 The aim of this paper is to shift the attention from Islam to Europe through an exploration of how the vindication of a distinctive European tradition of liberal-secular humanism is wielded to perpetuate dimensions of self-understanding and projection of differences, which nourish and reproduce the idea of a rift between Islam and Europe. The argument is that this dynamic is postulated upon an ontological essentialism of the kind expounded by Michel Foucault in his famous essay 3 'Nietzsche, Genealogy, History.'5 In this essay, Foucault lays the foundations of his critical distinction between 'genealogy' and 'traditional history' and warns against the attempts of the latter 'to capture the exact essence of things, their purest possibilities, and their carefully protected identities.' He maintains that this search 'assumes the existence …