Abstract
Understanding the ways in which Muslims are turned into “a problem” requires an analytic incorporating the insights gained through the concepts of Islamophobia and anti-Muslim racism into a larger frame. The “Muslim Question” can provide such a frame by attending to the systematic character of this form of racism, explored here through biopolitics. This article develops a conceptualization of Europe’s “Muslim Question” along three lines. First, the “Muslim Question” emerges as an accusation of being an “ alien body” to the nation, often expressed through the Trojan horse legend. Second, the “Muslim Question” is elaborated through demands of integration and assimilation, in which the production of difference entangles with calls and measures to regulate Muslims. And third, the “Muslim Question” is brought to life upon the terrain of gender and sexuality, as the imaginary of threat at the heart of the “Muslim Question” is a replacement conspiracy centered on birthrates.
Highlights
What’s in a trope?In the 2004 European elections, the Austrian politician Jorg Haider focused his campaign on the question of Turkey’s membership to the EU, citing Muammar Gaddafi, who purportedly warned that Europe would be accepting a Trojan horse if Turkey became a member of the EU (Bunzl 2005)
The predicament of Muslims in Europe has mostly been charted through the concept of Islamophobia, which resulted in a considerable body of scholarship that documents the discrimination of Muslims in different realms of society all over Europe and that shows how systematic patterns of discrimination profoundly and consequentially “interrupt citizenship,” as Salman Sayyid (2014) argues
This predicament has been apprehended, both in the public debate as well as in academic scholarship, through the frame of the “Muslim Question.”. This frame has a number of advantages: it is attuned to interrogate the systematic character of the discrimination that Muslims in Europe face, and to engage the genealogies of modern European nation-state formation and racial formations, which includes questions of European colonialism, Orientalism, and resonances and differences with another “question” situated both at the race/religion nexus as well as at the heart of the making of Europe, that is, Europe’s “Jewish Question.”
Summary
In the 2004 European elections, the Austrian politician Jorg Haider focused his campaign on the question of Turkey’s membership to the EU, citing Muammar Gaddafi, who purportedly warned that Europe would be accepting a Trojan horse if Turkey became a member of the EU (Bunzl 2005). The framing of Muslims as an alien body within the nation is tightly articulated with a second dimension of the “Muslim Question,” namely the relentless demands of integration and assimilation (Farris 2014, 297), seeking to know, control, regulate, and refashion Muslim populations and individuals This regulation can be initiated or organized on the level of the state, and by civil society initiatives, in schools or neighborhoods, on the labor market, and through quotidian interactions including literal questions or demands that interpellate Muslims on a daily basis, such as the continuous questions posed to Muslim women about wearing the hijab, and even the attempts to enforce its removal. Migration and fertility—a migrant fertile “alien” body entering the gates and spreading through reproduction—as two central demographic dimensions of the biopolitics conceptualized as the “Muslim Question” (Bracke and Hernandez Aguilar 2020) This rich and multilayered character renders the Islamic Trojan horse trope powerful and effective in doing its job of creating that alien body that is cast as a racial, sexual, and violent threat: a force of destruction.
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