Incivility and danger: theorizing a Muslim undercaste in Europe

Elisabeth Becker

doi:10.1057/s41290-021-00136-z

Abstract

AbstractPositing Muslim positionality in Europe as an undercaste helps to make sense of how cultural stratification, rooted in associations with incivility, has resulted in deep and unrelenting inequalities experienced by diverse Muslims. Based on two years of ethnographic research with a Muslim community in Berlin as well as a survey of secondary research, this paper both theorizes and empirically showcases the process by which Muslims have become synonymous with incivility, and how this affects opportunities and inclusion across the educational, economic, residential, and private spheres. By drawing parallels with other instances of caste-based status differentiation in the West, specifically the Jewish experience in Europe and Black experience in the USA, it further illuminates how cultural stratification through associations with incivility (as a modern secular coding of impurity) that endures for generations functions in the contemporary world. Employing the concept of caste deepens the cultural turn that has replaced economic or legal explanations of Muslim marginality in Europe. And it awakens a dormant sociological vocabulary that allows for a more precise theoretical understanding of this empirical social phenomenon and thereby the possibilities—and limits—of pluralism in modernity.

Highlights

Seated outside of the Şehitlik Mosque in Berlin, gazing out over a graveyard that divides the building from the street, Mustafa recalls his arrival in Germany in 1971
In the sections that follow, I first engage with the scholarship on Muslim differentiation in Europe, subsequently analyzing how caste has been utilized to understand the systems of subordination that have placed both European Jews and Black Americans3 at the bottom of modern social hierarchies through their associations with incivility
Caste is the step in moving from classor political status-based explanations to cultural status-based explanations, as class mobility and legal citizenship have not translated into the full inclusion of Muslims in Europe (Beaman 2017; Parvez 2017)

Summary

Introduction

Seated outside of the Şehitlik Mosque in Berlin, gazing out over a graveyard that divides the building from the street, Mustafa recalls his arrival in Germany in 1971. In the sections that follow, I first engage with the scholarship on Muslim differentiation in Europe, subsequently analyzing how caste has been utilized to understand the systems of subordination that have placed both European Jews and Black Americans at the bottom of modern social hierarchies through their associations with incivility. The hierarchies that condition and constrain Muslims’ life opportunities today have been built on longstanding notions of impurity—coded as incivility in modernity— that collapse religious, ethnic, racial, and cultural distinctions Such notions of impurity were used to justify the purging of Muslims and Jews from Europe during the Reconquista. “Few things seem to scare the French as much as the sight of Muslim schoolgirls wearing head scarves,” writes journalist Eduardo Cue (1994) These popular narratives at times collapse and at others shift between religious, ethnic, racial, and culture-based differentiation. The marking of Muslims with incivility; notable economic and education inequalities; and the persistence of high levels of residential segregation beyond the second generation together point to significant status-based social closure—not an underclass, but an undercaste

Findings

Discussion

Conclusion