Marc Helbling

This paper reveals that while Muslims have a surprisingly good reputation in Western Europe, the headscarf is opposed by a large majority. Several arguments are developed in this paper to investigate why people make a difference between Muslims as a group and their religious practices. While attitudes towards Muslims hardly vary across countries there is a lot of variation of resentment against the headscarf. It appears that the more state and church are separated in a country the more negative are attitudes towards new religious practices. At the individual level it will be tested to what extent general xenophobic attitudes, liberal values and religiosity help us understand why attitudes differ. It will be shown, among others, that religious people are opposed towards Muslims but not towards their religious practices. On other hand, people with liberal values are tolerant towards Muslims as a group but feel torn when it comes to religious practices such as wearing the headscarf that for some people stands for the illiberal values of Islam. Data from a survey in six Western European countries will be analyzed. Despite all the controversial political debates this is one of the first studies that analyzes attitudes towards Muslim immigrants across several countries, and for the first time attitudes towards Muslims as a group and the Muslim headscarf are compared. Introduction In many West European countries Islam has become the third largest religion over the last decades (Pauly 2004; Fetzer and Soper 2005). Western societies must now deal with religious rules and customs—something that can be very difficult for parties that perceive such rules and customs as at odds with the norms of a secular liberal state. As Cesari (2010: 17) and many others have pointed out, Western European states tend to consider faith as misplaced and illegitimate in secular societies. The headscarf and burka affairs are probably the most prominent issues in this context, since it sparked heated political debates in various countries, and also led to academic debates on the limits of liberalism (Thomas 2006; Bowen 2007; Joppke 2007; 2009). In the context of these developments social scientists have begun to describe and analyze a seemingly new social phenomenon—Islamophobia (for an overview see Helbling 2012). For Bleich (2011) Islamophobia can be considered as ‘indiscriminate negative attitudes or emotions directed at Islam or Muslims’. He leaves it open to what extent these attitudes are directed at Islam or Muslims. Some people may have negative attitudes towards Islam but neutral or positive attitudes towards Muslims, for instance. Halliday (1999: 898), however, notes that current circumstances in Western Europe and North America suggest prejudices against Muslims, rather than fear of Islam. There is no fear of Islam in the narrow sense, he argues, since Islam is not threatening to win primary controlling influence in large segments of the Western world. For Halliday (1999: 898) ‘the enemy is not a faith or a culture, but a people. Hence for him the more accurate term is not “Islamophobia” but “Anti-Muslimism”’. 1 I like to thank Evelyn Ersanilli, Oriane Sarrasin and Jolanda van der Noll for very useful comments on previous versions of this paper.