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Джоселін Чезарі

The immigration of Muslims to Europe, North America, and Australia and the complex socioreligious dynamics that have subsequently developed have made Islam in the West a compelling new ªeld of research. The Salman Rushdie affair, hijab controversies, the attacks on the World Trade Center, and the furor over the Danish cartoons are all examples of international crises that have brought to light the connections between Muslims in the West and the global Muslim world. These new situations entail theoretical and methodological challenges for the study of contemporary Islam, and it has become crucial that we avoid essentializing either Islam or Muslims and resist the rhetorical structures of discourses that are preoccupied with security and terrorism.
In this article, I argue that Islam as a religious tradition is a terra incognita. A preliminary reason for this situation is that there is no consensus on religion as an object of research. Religion, as an academic discipline, has become torn between historical, sociological, and hermeneutical methodologies. With Islam, the situation is even more intricate. In the West, the study of Islam began as a branch of Orientalist studies and therefore followed a separate and distinctive path from the study of religions. Even though the critique of Orientalism has been central to the emergence of the study of Islam in the ªeld of social sciences, tensions remain strong between Islamicists and both anthropologists and sociologists. The topic of Islam and Muslims in the West is embedded in this struggle. One implication of this methodological tension is that students of Islam who began their academic career studying Islam in France, Germany, or America ªnd it challenging to establish credibility as scholars of Islam, particularly in the North American academic
context.

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Джоселін Чезарі

European discourse on Islam is a microcosm of the debate on Islam’s compatibility with the West. Because Western countries generally associate Islam with the al-Qaeda movement, the Palestinian issue and Iran, their discussion of the religion involves an essentialised approach to a multifaceted faith. In his book Good Muslim, Bad Muslim, Mahmood Mamdani refers to this slant as ‘culture talk’, or viewing the religion as a single unified ideology spreading from Europe to Iraq and Afghanistan. According to this perspective, Islam is steeped in history and absolutely incapable of innovation, and Muslims are defined by an almost compulsive
conformity to their past and an inability to address the current challenges of political development and religious liberal thinking. Тому, culture talk justifies the artificial divide between modern and pre-modern religions and between secularism and Islam.1 Culture talk has become prevalent in modern international relations discourse, in part because it refers to stereotypes that are familiar to the historical consciousness of Western politicians and intellectuals.
The use of these trite depictions of Islam in professional debates has established a paradoxical policy of European governments both fearing and fostering radicalisation in a process I call the ‘securitisation’ of Islam. The conditions that lead to this development have already occurred:
The European state views Muslim groups as a threat to its survival and takes measures to reassure citizens that it will not allow the incubation of terrorism. Однак, the politicisation of religion essentially impoverishes and threatens its survival,2 leading devout Muslims to feel resentful of the interference of non-religious actors. Таким чином, the measures intended to prevent radicalisation actually engender discontent and prompt a transformation of religious conservatism to fundamentalism. This is the process of securitisation. It involves actors who propose that Islam is an existential threat to European political and secular norms and thereby justifies extraordinary measures against it. Ole Weaver best explains repercussions of such actions: “When mobilised as politics, religion represses the transcendence of the divine. Fear and trembling is replaced by absolute certainty.”3 As an existential concept, faith is easily securitized, and it can incite a proclivity for violence in place of pious concepts.