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| Volume XI, Summer 2004, Number 2 |
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| EXCERPT: European, Muslim and Female |
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| Ghada Hashem Talhami |
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Dr. Talhami is D.K. Pearsons professor of politics at Lake Forest College, Illinois. This article had its genesis in an Oxford Round Table.
Perhaps the greatest obstacle to finding a resolution to this ongoing and pervasive conflict is the debate among European anthropologists over the most suitable paradigm for understanding race relations today. Should this be based on racial categories, as has been the case all along, or is there an alternate paradigm based on class, gender or generational difference? In Britain, for instance, the paradigm of race or blackness has recently broken down, resulting in the sudden prominence of other criteria of difference to explain minority/majority conflict. The new emphasis seems to be on ethno-cultural traits that attached undue weight in the case of Muslims to their religious affiliation. An Arab scholar at a British university, Aziz al-Azmeh, lamented this development, calling it the "over-Islamization of Muslims." This has grave consequences for the mutually exclusive cultural perceptions of Muslims and Europeans, particularly where gender issues predominate.1
Thus, it came as no surprise that when recent crises in race relations erupted -- particularly in Britain and France -- they revolved around issues pertaining mostly to gender and the education of girls. Gender issues were the polarizing factor that deepened preexisting cultural chasms based on the historical legacy of misunderstanding, exaggerated fear, prejudice and the absence of civilizational dialogue. Women's issues not only heightened pre-existing prejudices regarding the immigrants' parent culture; they also revealed misconceptions regarding the entire Islamic faith, its dominant ideologies and particularly its lack of secularization and modernity. Such was the gender issue that it tapped into and exposed a plethora of entrenched ideas that completely misdiagnosed the mental framework of the "other." Observers of the breakdown in communal conversation between the "dominant" and "subordinate" cultures, to borrow the late Edward Said's terms, had to resort to an extensive reexamination of the historic contacts of these groups and the legacy of alienation and fear that joined Europe to the Middle East in the past.
Part of the problem can be traced to the historic relationship of Europe and Islam and the role of religion in shaping the European identity. Religion has always been a powerful cohesive force that contributed to the emergence of a unified identity involving a segment of the Eurasian territorial expanse. It was the necessity of blocking the advance of an outside religion, namely Islam, that gave the Europeans the cohesion to resist Muslim Tartars and Mongols and, later, Arabs and Ottoman Turks. Thus, opposition to the Muslim religion led to the consolidation of the European entity, a slowly developing bloc of countries that joined together in fighting Muslims from the Crusades of the eleventh century to the defense of the Hapsburg Empire in the seventeenth.
1 Terence Ranger, "Introduction," Culture, Identity and Politics, eds. Terence Ranger, Yunas Samad and Ossie Stuart (London: Avebury, 1996), p. 1.
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