In recent months, mainstream European leaders of nations like Germany, England, and the Netherlands have been fiercely critical of their countries’ policies of multiculturalism. After some of the political rhetoric intensified around last week’s anniversary of the 7/7 attacks in the UK, we discussed the situation with Peter Morey and Amina Yaqin, in the exchange posted below. Morey and Yaqin are the authors of Framing Muslims: Stereotyping And Representation After 9/11, and the leaders of the Framing Muslims project, an international research network exploring the representation of Muslim identities in contemporary cultural discourse. Their book examines the creation and dissemination of those representations in different Western nations, and the effects of the gap between the representations and realities.
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Q: There’s a newly invigorated backlash against multiculturalism sweeping through parts of Western Europe. Where do you think this new vehemence is coming from, and what’s your reaction to it?
The strength of recent political pronouncements can in part be understood as a phase in a cycle that involves scapegoating so-called “outsiders” at times of economic and social crisis. It’s no coincidence that the leaders have picked up on this now when there’s a global recession and their policies appear to be ineffectual in the face of larger forces.
Like so much of the debate around multiculturalism, there is often no clarity in the way the term is used by the press and politicians—although “state multiculturalism” is berated, such speakers seldom take the time to actually give any examples of this insidious phenomenon which is supposedly undermining Western Society.
However, there’s also been a sense in these countries that large-scale migrations are the cause of social tensions and crisis. Again, dominant political discourses can use this sense to their own ends. For example, in the 2010 British General Election all parties were suddenly keen to appear tough on the issue of immigration, based largely on the unproven claim that extremism of both right wing and Islamist kinds was being allowed to fester because politicians had fought shy of the issue in the past. Inasmuch as there is any evidence of widespread popular concern about multiculturalism, you often tend to find the sentiment strongest in areas with comparatively little experience of direct immigration into local neighborhoods. This suggests that this kind of anxiety is second-hand, as it were, and generated by press and media coverage which often takes its cue from political agendas and is sometimes quite hysterical in tone.
So, it’s partly to do with genuine fears and partly to do with political convenience.
Q. Your book, Framing Muslims, is about the ways that Muslims are represented (you use the word “caricatured”) in media and popular culture. Are those representations functionally distinct from how Muslims are represented by government speech and policy? If so, how do you think the two inform one another?
There is a strong connection between political and media and popular cultural discourses around Muslims. However, this relationship isn’t straightforward or easy. On one level, it seems self-evident that the weight of negative depictions since 9/11 has led to hostile views of Islam and correspondingly aggressive actions.
In the case of journalism, for example, it is a result of the proximity of political journalists to centers of power. They report those topics that are topping the agendas in government discussions, details of which are then fed through to them to pass on to their readers and viewers. That’s an inevitable part of the process and has the merit of allowing for an informed citizenry. On the other hand, if journalists and the media become too cozy with politicians and particular agendas—as has happened with certain news organizations as well as certain journalists—the result is the reproduction of a view of the world that may serve particular agendas rather than being interrogative or accurate.
Yet, there’s always a filtering process involved. In our book we point out that these agendas are often subverted in the process of translation from the world of politics to that of culture. For example, several movies and television dramas have been accused of serving these agendas in the way they have depicted Muslim characters as “the enemy” and drawn them in stereotypical ways. However, if you look at most of these instances you find that what is actually on display are much deeper anxieties about how power shifts as societies evolve, how national belonging is always an incomplete and partial project and how there is often a conflict between means and ends when it comes to securing populations.
That’s what makes such representations interesting and that is what our book focuses on too.
Q: Can you point to significant differences between either the governmental or cultural treatment of Muslims in the United States versus in Europe?
There are differences in emphasis, but they tend to be between individual nations, rather than resolving themselves in a straightforward Europe versus the US way. Those differences often have to do with the historical models by which countries have handled incoming populations. For example, the German model—based on heredity and bloodlines— for many years saw its Turkish immigrant populations as temporary; it gave the term “gastarbeiter” (guest worker) to these people to signal their marginal status. In France, citizens both old and new have been expected to adhere to a very specific Republican ethos involving the separation of religion and the public sphere. So the responses to the current so-called multicultural crisis have very much been shaped by these histories, and the French ban on the niqab is an example of the strong action taken when Muslim practices are seen to contravene those twin principles of secular civil society and republican shared values.
As we point out in our book, the differences between the US and Britain are partly explained by the fact that the former understands itself as a nation brought into being by migration—something that’s very deeply ingrained in the whole of American history and culture—whereas in Britain there’s still a historically false but nevertheless powerful idea that immigration is only something that’s really been happening for the last fifty years or so. Muslim political identity is seen as a challenge to both nations, but—for all the recent frenzy over the “Ground Zero Mosque” and the Congressional hearings on radicalization, the US still has a more optimistic and flexible attitude to the possibility of accommodating minorities, whereas Britain is always more wary.
