Re-thinking how we study Muslim minorities in Europe—A call for de-Muslimification

Today, we live in an era of superdiversity and ethnoracial heterogeneity. Walk the streets of any European city and bear witness to diversity brought by people with immigrant family backgrounds. Visually it is striking: from hipsters to hijabs and baseball caps to sharp suits. This transition towards diversity is importantly driven by demographic transformations and new immigration that over time has resulted in increased ethnic, racial and religious mixing and blurring of group boundaries (Alba & Foner, 2015; Statham & Foner, 2024). But listen to dominant political debates or mainstream news about integration problems in European countries and the story is completely different: It depicts societies pulling themselves apart conflictually along cultural dividing lines. While race is the main fault line in the USA, the politicized public debates in Europe focus primarily on Muslims and Islam. This is the popularized version of the influential “clash of civilizations” thesis (Huntington, 2002): that European societies are basically cleaved into two conflicting camps, with “White Christian” majorities pitched against the alien culture and values of Islam imported by people who are Muslim of immigrant origin.

Given the high salience of this viewpoint, it is perhaps surprising to point out that 25 years ago, “Muslim” was a relatively unused category for studying integration. Instead, ethnonational categories “Pakistani,” “Turk” and “Moroccan,” were used, and even “black” or “Asian” in the UK, due to state sponsorship of racial categories. Of course, minorities have several overlapping, intersecting and competing identities, and may at times and within different contexts, hold one of multiple ethnonational, religious or racial identities to be the most important. How they self-identify as groups is constructed in their meaningful social interactions—us and them boundary-marking—with members of dominant majority populations, state institutions and other minorities, but also importantly by how these others see and categorize them. So, how did “Muslim” become the predominant category in Europe for grouping this factually heterogenous and diverse set of people?

The simple explanation is politicisation. Post 9/11, a “War on Terror,” a global Islamic resurgence, and seemingly endless multicultural controversies over Islam, the presence of Muslim minorities in Europe was increasingly politicized as a general cleavage over culture, religion, values and belonging to the national community. Multicultural politics was increasingly propelled by intense debates over the assumed need for Muslims to identify more with their settlement countries, and to accept their core “liberal democratic values,” regarding democracy, separation of church and state, and gender equality (Statham & Tillie, 2016). Policies targeting these groups shifted from goals combatting discrimination and social inequality, towards understanding integration as problems of cultural values and community cohesion. At the same time, Europe's Muslim population, and especially second and third generations, increasingly self-identified as “Muslim” in response to dominant mainstream negative stereotyping—“reactive” ethnicity or religiosity (Voas & Fleischman, 2012)—but being Muslim was also a way of participating in a genuine global resurgence of Islamic beliefs and culture (Berger, 1999). This public politicisation of Muslims as “Muslims” is highly consequential for the opportunities and experiences of people in this category, mostly in a damaging way, because it reinforces and reproduces asymmetric power relations between national majorities and Muslim minorities.

What role has academia played in this Muslimification of Europe's Muslims? I think research has often fallen short of academic goals, by simply mimicking and reinforcing tropes from politics and media. Looking back, I have been increasingly concerned that politicisation has distorted the way we do research. I called this the “Muslimification of Muslims” in a strong critique and empirical rebuttal of core assumptions that are applied in much survey-based research (Statham, 2024). True, anthropologists point out that the question of who and what is a “Muslim” in Europe is never straightforward (e.g. Grillo, 2004), while Brubaker (2013) called out a lack of reflexivity in sociology in a short commentary. Also, there is a longstanding valuable empirical research tradition, that rightly addresses questions on controversies over Islam in European societies within the limited context of minority religious accommodation (e.g. Laurence, 2012). However, there is no doubt that the politicized “culture wars” over Islam and multiculturalism have strongly and influentially shifted the academic terrain in the public opinion field so that research questions asked and answered, and the assumptions behind them, are biased in a way the often reproduces dominant negative stereotypes and tropes about Muslims from the public debates (e.g. see Sniderman & Hagendoorn, 2007). How does this “Muslimification” of Muslims in public opinion research work? And how do the findings from my survey-based analyses (Statham, 2024) challenge the core assumptions?

A first problem is with the category “Muslim.” To state what should be obvious, people who self-identify as Muslim in Europe are a highly heterogeneous category: by ethnicity, race, family country of origin, Islamic faith, immigration history, etc. and that is before we include gender, age or class/status differences. But survey research often unquestioningly simply lumps this diverse set of people into a single category “Muslim” (e.g. see Lewis & Kashyap, 2013). Sometimes, this is because the quality of the data is not good enough to do anything else—for example, the minority samples from large general surveys are often too small to be meaningful unless all Muslims are put together. But this lumping approach is problematic because it reifies “Muslim” into a single homogeneous group and treats them as if they are a single solidary group in the social world—an assumption that is probably false in most contexts, and at least requires empirical verification. Against this, my research findings show that using a different broad macro-category, ethnonational family country of origin, people with “Turkish,” “Moroccan” or “Pakistani” heritage demonstrate very distinctive trajectories of acculturation attitudes (Statham, 2024: 217–9). This implies that one-size does not fit all under the umbrella category of “Muslim.”

A second problem is that when survey research lumps all Muslim people together as “Muslims,” this automatically emphasizes religion and religiosity over all other possible identities and social explanations. But the role of religious belief in shaping social behaviour, or not, needs to be demonstrated within social context, not just assumed because people are Muslim, and then raised to the status of an über-explanatory variable. Against this, my findings show that non-religious cultural factors that connect people across boundaries matter much more than religiosity (Statham, 2024: 219–22). These push in the opposite direction and demonstrate Muslims being part of a shared culture. Especially significant are feeling “British,” “French” or “Dutch,” consuming “British,” “French” or “Dutch” media, and having family experiences of intermarriage. In my sample, only 4 out of 10 people who are Muslims practised their Islamic faith. Survey research that fails to include non-religious cultural variables that can indicate acculturative engagement across boundaries—for example identification with settlement country; intermarriage; social ties to outgroup; bridging social capital; and use of common language and media—presents a biased picture that overemphasizes religion as a barrier (e.g. see Eskelinen & Verkuyten, 2020). It really isn't all about religion, just because they are Muslims.

A third problem is about ideas of democracy. Survey research often repeats dogmas from politics and media about supposed conflicts over “liberal democratic values.” Twenty-five years ago, “liberal democratic values” were seen as the civic stuff that would hold national societies together facing the new challenges of globalisation, including immigration and superdiversity (e.g. Held, 1987). Today, however, “liberal democratic values” are usually introduced as a stick to beat Muslims—as a sort of test of ethnocultural “Britishness,” “Frenchness” or “Dutchness” that they can never pass. Here, “liberal democratic values” are instrumentalized to question the presence and belonging of immigrant-origin Muslims. This perspective is prominent in the work of Sniderman and colleagues (Ivarsflaten & Sniderman, 2022; Sniderman et al., 2014; Sniderman & Hagendoorn, 2007). But their research is based on surveys that only question non-Muslim majorities to assess “liberal democratic value” conflicts—Muslim people are not even included in their samples. Of course, it is well established that acculturation requires cultural adaption on both sides by minorities and majorities (among many, see Alba, 2020). Drawing conclusions by studying only one side of the equation (and making assumptions about the other) is already methodologically flawed before the analyses are run. Nonetheless, such studies emphasising “liberal values” conflicts remain prominent and influential, despite being challenged academically on strong substantive empirical grounds years ago by Norris and Inglehart (2004), who importantly found differences between Muslims and non-Muslims consist in social mores and not over “liberal democratic values.”

Interestingly, my research shows that from the side of Muslims, there is little to suggest that acculturation over democratic values is unlikely. However, when we look on the other side of the boundary, it is the non-Muslim majority who see larger and significant gaps between themselves and Muslims, over “liberal democratic values” (Statham, 2024: 216–7; 223–4). In other words, it seems that a sizeable part of the majority population has taken on board the dominant message of politics and media and sees Muslims as a threat to the democratic way of life. It turns out that a significant part of the problem preventing acculturation lies in the resilient attitudes of a section of non-Muslim majorities and their views on Muslims. Any discussion of threats to so-called “liberal democratic values” should rightly also focus on far-right and white supremacist minorities within majorities, not only Islamist fundamentalism.

An important related point is that integration and acculturation processes are usually talked about in a way that assumes that the more integration or acculturation advances the less conflict there will be over diversity (Alba et al., 2024). Clearly, this is not the case—it is not a zero-sum game. Instead, what we witness today is that the more Muslims adapt and become part of European societies, the more their presence is opposed and made conflictual, by a significant proportion of those who are not Muslim. In other words, we live in a time of factually increasing demographic diversity, hybridity and acculturation between Muslims and non-Muslims, but the predominant political story in town is one of conflict between two opposed ethnoreligious camps. Populists stoke these divisions that are counterfactual to the emerging social reality around us.

The main point I want to make by flagging up my findings is not to offer definitive answers, and we are a long way from that, but to demonstrate that there is a need to restate the questions—that is a need for more sociological imagination and reflexivity in the way that we as researchers define categories and questions, when we design surveys and do research on Muslims in Europe. There is also a need for more intersectional thinking. This would allow the possibility for research that starts to acknowledge the diversity and hybridity that is blurring group boundaries, both within and across minorities and majorities. It requires thinking out of the box and not simply following the dominant narrative that resonates in public debates focussing on controversies over Islam. Religiosity is too often an easy answer plucked from political debates. Researchers need to acknowledge the highly politicized context of using “Muslim” as a category. This does not mean shying away from using “Muslim,” which remains a valid and salient category of practice in specific social contexts, but there needs to be greater reflexivity and awareness when using it as an analytic category. It is time for a de-Muslimification of academic thinking.

The opinions expressed in this Commentary are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the Editors, Editorial Board, International Organization for Migration nor John Wiley & Sons.