Madrid’s Muslim Youth: What do Intersectional Discrimination and Resilience Mean for the Interculturalist Project?

Scholarship indicates that Spanish Muslims can face othering marked by migration and securitisation discourses. More recent studies have noted the intersectional discrimination and disadvantage experienced by Spanish Muslim youth, beyond differentiation solely due to perceived migrant background or religious affiliation. At the same time, multilevel Spanish diversity and equality policies and their implementation have attempted to pursue solidarity via recognition of pluralism in various communities, adopting interculturalist language. This work overviews the advent of interculturalist and linked anti-discrimination policy efforts in Spain, and in the Madrid Community and Municipality in particular. Within this context, it presents a recent 2016–2018 qualitative study of self-identifying Muslim youth, which found the majority of participants perceived multiple discrimination, often minimising or dismissing such experiences. It argues that in the Madrid example, Muslim youth discrimination experiences reflect historic, systemic institutional weaknesses and blind spots, particularly with respect to the racialised dimension of their ascribed alterity. Moreover, the participants’ downplaying of and resignation regarding stigmitisation indicates expectations of continued othering. While such strategies illustrate agency, they also speak to the temporal, systemic dispossession in which individuals exercise such resilience. Any authentic equality and inclusion governance or interculturalist efforts must actively address this persistent racialised differentiation.