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Incorporating Muslim Migrants in Western Nation States—A Comparison of the United Kingdom, France, and Germany

Part of the Islam und Politik book series (ISPO)

Abstract

Only recently has the religious dimension of international migration and integration moved up on the agenda of academic research and public policy. For a long time, and by following mainstream theories of secularization, both researchers and policy-makers tended to assume that traditional and religious attitudes of immigrants would successively dissolve in the process of acculturation and assimilation to industrial societies. Similar assumptions were shared by theorists of multiculturalism who stressed that migration processes were accompanied by new claims for recognition of particularistic cultural or ethnic identities, but ignored the specifically religious dimensions of such identities.

Keywords

  • Public Sphere
  • National Identity
  • Political Organization
  • Collective Identity
  • Polity Model

These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Due to differing citizenship regimes and policies of naturalization, the number of Muslim immigrants with formal citizenship status still varies today. In the UK 80–90 % of the Muslim population, mostly from Pakistan, India and Bangladesh are British citizens; in France, about 50 % of the Muslim population, mostly of Maghrebian origin, hold a French passport; in Germany only 10 % have become German citizens; for details on these demographic data see Koenig (2003).

  2. 2.

    The Migrant Workers Convention (UN Doc. A/Res/45/158) came into force in 2003, although no Western state has yet ratified it. The Convention affirms the rights to religious liberty (Article 12) and demands “respect for the cultural identity of migrant workers and members of their families” (Article 31).

  3. 3.

    The Report to the Président Laïcité et République written by a Commission of political and intellectual leaders under Bernard Stasi to prepare new legislation explicitly places the French tradition in a broader international perspective; see Commission de réflexion sur l’application du principe de laïcité dans la République (2003).

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Acknowledgments

The author is grateful to the participants of the “Immigration and Religion” Workshop at the Eighth Metropolis Conference in Vienna (2003) for their insightful comments on an earlier version of this article. He also thanks Schirin Amir-Moazami, Alexandre Caeiro, and Nikola Tietze for their helpful suggestions on this text. The usual disclaimers apply.

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Koenig, M. (2015). Incorporating Muslim Migrants in Western Nation States—A Comparison of the United Kingdom, France, and Germany. In: Burchardt, M., Michalowski, I. (eds) After Integration. Islam und Politik. Springer VS, Wiesbaden. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-658-02594-6_3

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