CULTURALISM AND THE NEW EUROPE

Since 9/11, multiculturalism has come under increasing attack within public, political, and even academic debates, accused of having encouraged backward cultural practices with its supposedly misleading cultural relativism and leftist permissiveness, as well as the self-segregation of minority communities leading to “parallel societies.” In turn, the claim goes, the permissiveness and self-segregation promoted an environment that ultimately contributed to the growth of Islamic extremism (Lentin and Titley Reference Lentin and Titley2011). These kinds of arguments have constructed a “narrative of culturalist threat” (ibid.: 60), where social unrest and violence are read through a culturalist lens that, in a neoliberal logic, obscures the relevance of power structures. The terrorist attacks in London in 2005, for instance, have been read as a consequence of young British Muslims’ cultural confusion. In this understanding, young British Muslims are seen as torn between traditional and modern culture and the attacks as reflecting their lack of a strong British identity (Fortier Reference Fortier2006: 320). Similarly, in the same year the rioters in the French banlieues were labeled to suffer from a “cultural handicap,” the evidence being the existence of polygamy in said neighborhoods (ibid.). These narratives put forward a “cultural absolutism” (ibid.) that opposed two different, closed and incommensurate cultural systems.

In this climate, renewed emphasis has been placed upon promoting “social cohesion” through what are taken to be the shared national or European cultural norms, defined in terms of key liberal values, such as individual liberty, gender equality, or sexual freedom. Thus, in spite of many critiques of the negative culturalism enabled by multicultural policies, culture has been reaffirmed as a central concept in debates around Islam. In order to not only guarantee better social cohesion and integration of Muslims, but also ensure national security against terrorist threats (following this logic, both aspects are directly intertwined), many European countries came out in defense of “Leitkultur,” “Fundamental Values,” or “identité nationale,” which needed to be asserted and imposed, if necessary through coercive state power (ibid.; Lentin and Titley Reference Lentin and Titley2011; Lithman Reference Lithman2010).

The increasingly passionate connection between legal citizenship and specific ideas about what constitutes a cultural consensus has been discussed in recent literature using the term “culturalization of citizenship” (Geschiere Reference Geschiere2009; Lithman Reference Lithman2010). “Culturalization of citizenship” in Europe has been consistently accompanied by an increasingly intense critique of Islam, culminating in Islamophobia and the racialization of Muslims through the naturalization of culture (Lentin and Titley Reference Lentin and Titley2011; Taras Reference Taras2013). Thus, the promotion of a national cultural identity is directly connected to a discourse of defense against an alien—Islamic—culture. Interestingly, the particular emphasis on national cultural identity with clearly “Herderian determinations about nation-states” (Fortier Reference Fortier2006: 497) is easily aligned with a European identity, with both identities articulated in opposition to its cultural Other, Islam. Furthermore, in both oppositional pairs, a particular temporal nexus (Butler Reference Butler2008) is established wherein Europe or its individual nation-states are defined by a culture that is modern, secular, future-oriented, and based on individual freedom, while Islam delineates a culture that is religiously dogmatic, backward, and represses individuality and freedom.

In the contemporary European “culture talk” (Mamdani Reference Mamdani2005), culture defines membership to Europe. Those populations under suspicion of not possessing a compatible culture are labeled a threat to national security and interpellated to position themselves in relation to the condition of cultural belonging. As we will see in the following discussion of the ethnographic material, first, with pious women activists in France and Germany, and, second, with cultural practitioners in urban Britain, my two sets of interlocutors were also shaped by common and popularized assumptions about culture. Even if critical toward the specific ways ‘culture’ has been employed to criticize Islam and Muslims, they still use the term to prove their belonging. As I will ultimately argue, certain assumptions underlying the culture concept end up limiting the potential to “speak back” through culture.

ISLAM IS NOT CULTURE OR THE CRITIQUE OF “BACKWARD CULTURAL TRADITIONS”

The pious Muslim women in Germany and France whose trajectories and everyday practices I studied for my recent book (2015) were active in institutions of Islamic learning, where they strived to acquire knowledge with the central textual sources of the Islamic tradition. This ambition has been generally caused by a dissatisfaction with the more vernacular religious education received within their families, primarily headed by immigrant parents from working-class backgrounds. The more they immersed themselves in their studies, the more they came to distinguish between “authentic Islam” and something that they alternately called culture, tradition, or custom. In the discourses of these young Muslim women, especially when they tackled the question of gender relations in Islam, they frequently made this distinction. Here, the culture/tradition/custom trope came to decry a way of life that often falsely presumed to be grounded in an Islamic ethos. They argued that Muslim societies’ cultures in fact contained many aspects that did not correspond to, or even outright contradicted, Islamic norms. According to my interlocutors, when operating the distinction between “culture” (tradition/custom) and “religion” (Islam), the former stood for a range of social and religiously connoted practices that were often reprehensible either for their non-reflexive nature or/and for their non-egalitarian, particularly patriarchal character.

The distinction between culture and religion enabled my interlocutors to formulate an internal critique of Muslim cultural practices. Because the practices attributed to culture lay outside the scope of authentic Islam, they could be repudiated as not normatively binding. The female teachers who gave lessons in the Islamic centers, especially, saw their mission in this logic. Salwa, a German-Syrian woman and one of the teachers in a female-led Islamic center in Cologne/Germany, for instance, linked her decision to become a teacher in this center to her desire to empower Muslim women by building their capacity to distinguish Islam from cultural traditions: “Their [the women's] Islamic identity will then be free from cultural aspects. Culture is not always bad, but it is if culture gets mixed with Islamic content, or if religion becomes abused to protect certain cultural atrocities.”Footnote ² While she acknowledged the positive potential of culture, she was especially wary of the dangers for women of non-reflexively mixing culture and religion. In this vein, Umit, a German-Turkish woman who worked full-time in the same center, emphasized along with many others the negative impact of “culture” on women: “You have to distinguish religion from culture. Islam as a religion, as a theory, I do not feel at all disadvantaged. But in the culture, how Muslims live, there you are actually disadvantaged. Unfortunately, sometimes culture weighs more than religion.”Footnote ³

Following this line of argument, I was told repeatedly that the critique of “cultural Islam” and the knowledge of “true Islam” was the condition sine qua non for improving the status of Muslim women. Overtly patriarchal or misogynist interpretations and practices existing within Muslim communities that prevent women from taking their full place in society were regularly discredited in this way. Moreover, in this context it was implied that the believer must be able to distinguish the “authentic” core of Islam from the successive layers of different local cultural practices that have accreted to and ultimately buried much of the core of “true Islam.”

Behind this Islam-versus-culture binary we also find a particular reading of history that works in productive tension with mainstream discourses in Europe, which tend to posit (especially when discussing the “problem” of Islam) a simplistic vision of “Western” modernity in terms of linear progress. My female interlocutors, by contrast, located progress within the original prophetic experience in Medina. While they were aware of history being multidimensional and complex, when opposed to the moral ideal of an “authentic” Islamic core, history was read as a succession of cultural layers that represented a temporal (and moral) regression; as a development involving numerous moments of “falsification” and “corruption” of the original message that now necessitated unraveling.

Also in line with “culture” as understood in terms of a lack of reflexivity, the women I worked with regularly distinguished between themselves and other Muslims they designated as “Muslim by culture.” With this label they sought to describe people who might identify as Muslim and perhaps (still) maintain a certain set of religious beliefs or practices as part of their cultural heritage, but who do not understand Islam in terms of a deliberate commitment. Conversely, my interlocutors generally described their own religious trajectory as a “conscious” turn to Islam. Thus they identified themselves as Muslim either “by choice” or “by conviction,” or as “Islamic.”

Aziza was one of the many women who gave significant weight to this distinction. A twenty-year-old French-Tunisian woman and university student at the time we met, Aziza's trajectory was slightly different in the sense that she had received a thorough Islamic education from parents who had been active in the Islamic revival institutions in France for the past twenty years. One time, for instance, while discussing with me the broader state of Islam in France, she employed the term “Muslim by culture” to describe the majority of the French-Maghrebi community in France: “Their parents are Muslim, so they are Muslim. They are proud of that; you can see it. They might not necessarily pray, but they fast during Ramadan, so there is this Muslim identity present.” In contrast to this group, she defined Muslims like herself as “Muslim by conviction.” She described her own journey accordingly: “I understood that religion should not be a heritage, a culture, like it is for many people, but it should be about something fundamentally intimate within the human. Really, this search for God and for oneself, and, in fact, for truth.”Footnote ⁴ Thus, true religiosity was located in a personal space, actively cultivated rather than passively inherited (with passive inheritance here referring to the domain of culture), requiring deep awareness and reflection, rooted in understanding and sincerity. While this approach did not deem outward practices inconsequential, it demanded that Islamic practices and beliefs had to emanate out of a particular self-reflective understanding (see Jouili Reference Jouili2015).

Their skeptical stance toward the term culture in Muslim contexts was equally evident when the women stressed their own “cultural affinities” with Europe. Here, culture, because European, took on a liberating and modern connotation. This position could also be sensed in the women's occasional valorization of (European) converts who were considered, and considered themselves, to be free of negative cultural baggage when they “entered” Islam (see also Özyürek Reference Özyürek2014; Rogozen-Soltar Reference Rogozen-Soltar2017). Observing similar culture discourses among diasporic Muslims, Katherine Ewing (Reference Ewing, Garnett and Hausner2015) notes that distinctions between a purified notion of Islam and local cultures generate the idea of Islam as a mobile “universal” that could easily fit into different cultural contexts. Ewing argues further that such a universalist argument significantly challenges the exclusivist claims of European secular universalism, as well as common perceptions about the incompatibility of Islam and European values.

As a vast body of literature has shown, the discourse put forward by my interlocutors is commonplace within contemporary articulations of Islam, in both Muslim majority and minority contexts.Footnote ⁵ It has its roots in Islamic Reform movements, especially of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, which emerged in response to the colonization of Muslim lands by European powers. Against the colonizer's critique of Islam as being historically inert, backward, and irrational, reformers distinguished a “real” Islam from practices found in Muslim societies. Concretely, Islamic reformers established an opposition between a “pure,” timeless Islam and a Muslim civilization characterized by cultural decay, stagnation, or decline (see, for instance, Haj Reference Haj2009; Hourani Reference Hourani1962; Safdar Reference Safdar2013). By establishing this opposition, the reformers accepted the colonizers’ critique of their backwardness, as well as some of the temporal assumptions that sustained the colonizers’ critique. But they shifted the ideological fault lines from “Islam” to a sphere identified as social and cultural in order to defend Islam from the accusation of being the causal factor of the decadent cultural state.

For the reformers of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, a multitude of customs and practices—irrational, superstitious, and oppressive—were symptomatic of this cultural decay. This is fairly well known. What I want to stress here is the particular cultural critique introduced at this moment within Islamic discourse, which resonates with some of the deployments of the emerging modern culture concept that began to circulate within the colonial world. One particular meaning of that concept refers to the idea of “backward cultures” located within the “non-Western world”—in this case, the Muslim world. This notion of culture grew out of an evolutionary paradigm that described history as linear progress.

The work of nineteenth-century anthropologist Edward B. Tylor (Reference Tylor1958 [1871]) is key to understanding the emergence of the anthropological culture concept, and clearly exposes an evolutionist understanding of the term. Nonetheless, Tylor refuted polygenetic theories and defended the idea of a single human nature as endowed with human reason and freedom.Footnote ⁶ He theorized the discrepancy entailed in the acknowledgement of different stages within a pan-human culture concept through his theory of “survivals.” This theory claims that certain practices made sense in the past, but have lost their intelligibility with the evolution of knowledge. Tylor claimed that in spite of their obsolescence, survivals continued to play a role in the beliefs and practices of some contemporary societies and were particularly persistent in non-European cultures (see Keane Reference Keane2007; Ratnapalan Reference Ratnapalan2008). For Tylor, the term “custom” stood in for culture in the colonies, defined by artifacts, beliefs, and practices from the past, asynchronous with modern temporality. In his study of “primitive culture,” religion as a subfield within the broader field of culture took a vital, if not perhaps the most important, place. Tylor identified the essence of the “primitive” through animism, which he saw as the ur-religion per se. This claim thus perfectly fulfilled the task of making an evolutionary yet monogenic argument.

In this discursive context, Christian missionaries as well as religious reformers indigenous to the colonies sought highly divergent means of clarifying the relation between religion and culture. In these configurations, religion could become the purest and highest expression within a broader domain of culture. Alternately, culture could appear as an inconsequential contingency or even as a corrupting force in relation to something called “religion” (e.g., see Keane Reference Keane2007; Sartori Reference Sartori2008; van der Veer Reference van der Veer2001). Yet, no matter the specific relations and distinctions established, in the process of these clarifications, missionaries and reformers constituted religion as an objectified and reified entity, defined crucially around its capacity to realize free subjectivity and rationality. In their re-reading of Islamic traditions, the abovementioned Muslim reformers also tried to define an Islam that secured individual subjectivity by stressing notions like interiority, rationality, and freedom, most often by returning to original textual sources (Haj Reference Haj2009; Safdar Reference Safdar2013; Tareen Reference Tareen2013). In contrast, “culture” in the sense of “custom,” denoted a degrading influence that materialized, according to these thinkers, in despicable folklore, superstition, or magic. Henceforth, in Islamic modernist and reform thought—now crucially impacted by the experience, expectations, and demands of a modern sense of time (Koselleck Reference Koselleck2004)—customs and cultural traditions from the past, unreflectively and passively transmitted from generation to generation, were frequently described as a negative foil for evaluating what is pure Islam, timeless, universal, in line with reason and individual agency, and thus with the demands of the modern age.

Without a doubt, these purifying trends within reform movements have built on longer traditions of tajdid (renewal) and islah (reform) contained in the Islamic discursive tradition, because the normative boundaries of Islam have always concerned Muslim theologians and jurists. However, the particular epistemological and ontological claims that underlie these new discourses concerning religion are also connected to a new set of questions triggered by colonial modernity. In this case, normative Islam was embedded within a broader civilizational language and grafted onto a project of cultural reform intended to turn around the temporal delay, which the Muslim world was supposed to have accumulated in comparison to Europe's advanced state. This advanced state was ultimately seen as the reason for Europe's dominance in the world.Footnote ⁷

With its painstaking effort to tease out a timeless Islamic core against time-bound and now obsolete cultural customs, this argument elaborated during the reform movement has become a common trope within contemporary Islamic discourses, and has been integrated into a vast range of Islamic projects.Footnote ⁸ As I alluded to above, my interlocutors’ own distinctions between cultural and religious cores are heirs to this history of reformers and various successive groups. Distinguishing “culture” from “religion” helped these women to define themselves in certain ways as agents and as believers out of personal conviction and choice, not oppressed by backward (and misogynist) cultural traditions. In order to ground these modern conceptions of the self into an Islamic lens, the women engaged the Islamic textual tradition in particular ways, selecting from the multifarious body of Islamic textual tradition those elements that emphasized notions of interiority, responsibility, and consciousness. Thereby, they also aimed to entrench their understanding of a modern self within a robust sense of agency rooted in the divine, suggesting a model of intersubjective connectivity (see also Jouili Reference Jouili2015).

On first glance the culture-versus-religion maxim seemed to prove empowering for my female interlocutors. It enabled them to negotiate or refute certain gendered norms in their communities and to make Islam plausible for themselves in light of the various social ideals by which they have been shaped. But I want to draw attention here to the complicated discursive terrain upon which their efforts to put religion and culture into their respective proper places fall. As discussed in the previous section, in the contemporary European neoliberal and Islamophobic discursive climate, where social problems within Muslim communities are generally viewed through a culturalist lens (Lentin and Titley Reference Lentin and Titley2011), my interlocutors’ somewhat essentializing distinction between religion and culture risks reinforcing rather than dismantling the simplistic yet powerful Islamophobic narratives about Muslims, in spite of the efforts to the contrary. Similar to mainstream discourses, these pious women's discourses tend to “depoliticize” social problems and social inequality (Brown Reference Brown2006). A concrete example can be found in public debates around certain forms of gendered violence, such as so-called “honor killings” among Muslim populations in Europe that regularly make headlines in the European press (see Ewing Reference Ewing2008; Ticktin Reference Ticktin2008; Weber Reference Weber2013). My interlocutors would not necessarily elaborate upon the multiple causes that lead to this violence in a complex way, such as socio-economic marginalization or the transformation and disruption of established patriarchal patterns. Seldom did they connect it to a broader debate on patriarchy and domestic violence within European societies. Rather, like mainstream public discourses, they tended to reduce these questions to a matter of “Muslim culture.”Footnote ⁹ For the mainstream public, culture is impacted by religion. In reaction, for the Muslim practitioner, culture has to be distinguished from religion. In both cases, culture becomes the overarching explanatory frame for a set of complex social problems.

Moreover, the particular distinction proposed by my interlocutors, which posits religion as flawless and culture as fallible, still falls short of satisfying the demands of contemporary liberal-secular discourses that locate religion within the domain of human-made culture. As becomes evident in popular European Islam debates condemning non-Western “backward cultural practices,” as well as in academic debates about post-multicultural cosmopolitanism in Europe, what is now at stake beyond the mere critique of certain cultural practices is a group's supposed relation to culture, its cultural attachments, affinities, and modes of belonging.Footnote ¹⁰ Here, again, religion is not conceptually distinguished from culture—it falls within the scope of culture and even becomes the epitome of culture, understood in terms of subjectivity-declining culture as custom. What matters is the capacity to distance oneself self-critically from inherited beliefs and associated practices and consequently relativize them (see, for instance, Ewing Reference Ewing, Ernst and Martin2010; Jouili Reference Jouili2015; Scott Reference Scott2003). It is this capacity to critique religion as culture that coheres with hegemonic notions of a modern European temporality (see Koselleck Reference Koselleck2004). In the eyes of their critics, this is the failure of my interlocutors’ discourse: they neither relativize nor criticize religion—that is, the religious core. As a consequence, their multiple, heterogeneous temporal frameworks remain anachronistic, since they are unable to endorse the notion of a linear, homogeneous, and empty time.Footnote ¹¹

“ISLAM IS ALSO CULTURE,” OR THE CRAFTING OF AN “AUTHENTIC” BRITISH MUSLIM CULTURE

My research with pious British Muslim culture practitioners provided an interesting context for observing the articulation of a very different variety of contemporary Muslim culture discourses. Here, I examine the primarily London-based Muslim music and performing arts scene in the political context following the July 2005 London bombings, defined by increasingly intrusive counter-terrorism and radicalization-prevention programs that target the Muslim community at large. On one hand, these policies vigorously push for a “moderate” Islam and, in this optic, sometimes even fund Muslim culture and the arts. Yet the discourses underlying these policies regularly question the loyalty of Muslims to the state. In this context, this heterogeneous Muslim cultural scene continuously and critically (re)negotiates piety and ethical norms, definitions of Britishness and citizenship, as well as ideals of “authentic” Islamic artistic creativity. Attempts within the scene to create space for observant Muslim artists have generated controversial discussions as to what constitutes halal (permissible) art in form and content: What should halal art sound (or look) like? How should it be performed? And how do Islamic gendered norms, which are interpreted in extremely divergent ways, fit into all of this?

While the Muslim artists I talked to also voiced comparable culture-critiques to those previously mentioned when discussing contentious practices and customs within their communities (again, especially when it came to gender relations), as culture practitioners they also had to lay claim to a positive notion of culture.Footnote ¹² In this sense, these art practitioners and event organizers acted within an even more complicated terrain, precisely because culture, now also understood in terms of arts and creativity, had been treated negatively in many contemporary Islamic discourses articulating the religion-versus-culture dichotomy.Footnote ¹³

In fact, the “British Muslim cultural project” my informants envisaged and promoted was often expressed in explicit opposition to what they described as a hardliner and/or “Salafi” anti-culture and anti-arts position.Footnote ¹⁴ But they also opposed their project against the elder generation, which was seen to dominate mainstream Islamic organizations and criticized for either lacking any interest in culture and the arts or for being stuck in the cultural folkloric traditions of their home countries. Several interlocutors described this situation in terms of “Muslim culture wars” going on in Britain, but also globally. Many of the art practitioners and event organizers I interviewed related anecdotes about critiques and even aggressive verbal attacks with which their work was met. I was able to follow some of these disputes on social media and occasionally witnessed tensions during events. Therefore, it is not surprising that the arts and culture practitioners saw themselves on the front line of that struggle and, interestingly, they often framed that struggle in terms of “defending cultural diversity in Islam.”

The question of cultural diversity was a substantive and concrete one for my British interlocutors, since the cultural scene they constituted is comprised of an extremely diverse group of people in terms of ethnic origins. The artists’ parents hailed not only from South Asia or the broader Middle East and North Africa, but also from different West African and East African countries. Moreover, a substantial number of practitioners were Muslim converts, some of them from an Afro-Caribbean background and some white Europeans. Many culture practitioners integrated some aspects of their racial, ethnic, and regional backgrounds into their cultural work. While doing so, they tended to reflect explicitly upon the relation between their origins (whether they framed it as cultural background, identity, or heritage) and the particular art forms they created. In the context of my fieldwork, discussions of the legitimacy of different (authentic) Muslim cultures was sometimes articulated, especially by Muslims of sub-Saharan African and Afro-Caribbean backgrounds, as a critique of the “ethno-religious hierarchies” (Abdul Khabeer Reference Abdul Khabeer2016) of the British Muslim community, dominated by South Asian and to a lesser extent Middle Eastern Muslims.

While their ideals of cultural diversity were also framed in a language congruent with British discourses on pluralism and multiculturalism, these arts and culture practitioners wanted to embed their defenses of culture especially within an Islamic framework. This approach was not merely in reaction or opposition to the “hardliners” to whom they did not want to relinquish the field. It was also pivotal to their own moral and intellectual investments in specific Islamic traditions, which often but not always happened to be more Sufi-inclined traditions. My interlocutors generally rejected what they described as the “Salafi” anti-cultural or mono-cultural stance and considered the relationship between culture and religion as intrinsic and symbiotic. In this sense, they saw culture as a complementary field that enables and gives expression to religion. Thus, the arts and culture practitioners I talked to related the question of culture to local and regional differences as well. This is evident in the following statement by Luqman Ali, the African-American artistic director and founder of Al-Khayyal Theatre, an established, London-based Muslim theatre company that aims to explore “Muslim world literature” in its plays: “From my point of view, it is very difficult in Islam to separate faith and culture. When you have Muslims from China to West Africa sharing the same faith, and religious customs will over time integrate and synthesize with local subculture, you do end up with a mosaic type of religious culture.”Footnote ¹⁵ Likewise, in my interlocutors’ discussions of the Islamic legitimacy of artistic practices, they articulated an Islamic defense of particular local cultural expressions and folklore. In this way they tied the issue of arts and culture to a broader discussion on pluralism, as well as to questions of sameness and diversity within Islam. Consequently, defending the arts project became tantamount to defending cultural pluralism within Islam.

Tariq Ramadan, a European Muslim intellectual whose thoughts had been relevant not only for my interlocutors in Germany and France but also for many of those involved in the Muslim culture scene in the UK, dedicated a chapter in his book Radical Reform (Reference Ramadan2009) to the question of arts and culture in relation to Islam. While he does make (in the tradition of modern Islamic reform discourse) a conceptual difference between “religion” and “culture” in order to sustain his belief in certain universal fundamentals within the Islamic traditions, he ventures to articulate the close and complex relationship between culture and Islam. Such a relationship is also meant to go against a Salafi “reductionism,” with its mono-cultural normative stance (ibid.: 184). He does so in a way that nicely elucidates the idea that many of my British interlocutors hinted at or implied:

If Islam is universal, as Ramadan argues, and thus provides transcendent and eternal values, then the Islamic ethic “must provide its faithful with the means to approach the diversity of cultures appropriately” (ibid.: 184); a model that he sees to have existed throughout the history of Islam (ibid.: 185). Ramadan refers to the Sunna (deeds and sayings of the Prophet) in order to advocate for lenience toward a variety of customs and cultural expressions. A similar argument is made by Muslim-American scholar Umar Faruq Abd-Allah, another contemporary supporter of culture and arts in Islamic contexts, whose pamphlet “Islam and the Cultural Imperative” (Reference Abd-Allah2004) several of my interlocutors explicitly invoked as an inspiration and/or to justify their own activities. Abd-Allah, like Ramadan, responds to what he calls the Islamists’ “culturally predatory attitude” to make the case for Islam to be “culturally friendly” (ibid.: 1–2). He, too, invokes the Prophet's Sunna as well as its inscription within the Islamic legal tradition that has developed a flexible body of law recognizing the validity of local cultures (al-‘urf and al-‘ada), applicable as long as they do not explicitly contradict the clear textual sources.Footnote ¹⁶

Both Ramadan and Abd-Allah make these arguments to emphasize the importance of people living in step with their local societies. Both see culture as the seedbed in which Islam may take root, and in turn, Islam can shape culture by orienting cultural ethics and values. And while they acknowledge that this interdependent relationship already constituted a central feature of premodern Islamic history, which Muslims have a duty to cherish, their arguments are particularly geared toward the future and meant to address Muslims in a globalizing world. For Ramadan, one of the major tasks is to enable Muslims to productively respond to the cultural challenges in the contemporary world, notably what he considers the “pressures” of a money-driven “contemporary global culture” (Reference Ramadan2009: 204). For Abd-Allah, who writes about the U.S. context, the challenge is to build a new Muslim community in a diasporic setting. He urges Muslim Americans to creatively shape a “sound Muslim American cultural identity” that he defines to be among the “community's vital priorities” (Reference Abd-Allah2004: 2–3). Cautioning against viewing American Muslims as one monolithic group, he advocates for different “sub-group[s]” cultivating their “own self-image and unique cultural expression” (ibid.: 10).Footnote ¹⁷

Thus, when talking about a future-oriented project of shaping or creating either a contemporary thriving artistic culture with an Islamic ethos (Ramadan) or a thriving indigenous Muslim American culture (Abd-Allah), we see a subtle shift from culture in terms of custom (al-‘adat, habits that are inherited) to culture in terms of a creativity that expresses inner truths and reflects “imagination,” the “inner self,” and the “spiritual quest,” as Ramadan puts it (Reference Ramadan2009: 206), or, in Abd-Allah's words “a culture that gives us the freedom to be ourselves” (Reference Abd-Allah2004: 12).

With their shifts between different meanings of culture, the arguments brought forth by these two contemporary Muslim thinkers summarize well the claims of my interlocutors.Footnote ¹⁸ Many professed a desire to contribute to the formation of a “British Muslim culture” that is “truly British” and “authentically Muslim,” thereby also providing alternatives to mainstream cultures with which many religious Muslims cannot easily identify. Bilal Hassam, for instance, the British-born South Asian and Creative Director of British Muslim TV, has defined in a conversation with me the channel's task of shaping British Muslim culture as one that seeks to “move from a narrative of cultural baggage to one of cultural heritage where we are proud of our cultural heritage and not held back by the baggage.”Footnote ¹⁹ It is from this more liberating understanding of heritage (which removes the connotation of culture as exerting pressure or imposing constraints, thus “holding back”) that my interlocutors claim they want to forge a “British Muslim culture.” In their view, this culture should take heritage into account, but should also reflect the local experiences and ways of life of British Muslims. Additionally, and similar to Abd-Allah's plea, key in the culture discourse of my interlocutors that placed religion and culture in a close relationship was the notion that a rich “British Muslim culture” becomes part of the necessary conditions for guaranteeing not only a thriving British Muslim community, but also its very survival.

My interlocutors offered a variety of interconnected rationales to explain the vital role of culture and arts for the British Muslim community. One key claim is related to the recognition of the rich pedagogical and formative potential of arts and culture for the individual self, as well as for the community at large. A young woman and founding member of the City CircleFootnote ²⁰—a network of young professional Muslims—made this argument to me within a broader critique of British Muslim mainstream organizations: “The big [Muslim] organizations don't really consider culture important, that culture helps you to grow as a person, individually, and this also makes you grow as a Muslim, develop your faith, they don't see this.”Footnote ²¹

Another, related claim is the assumed capacity of arts and culture to provide an environment that shapes strong identities in a long-term, inter-generational perspective. This is the rationale of Abdul-Rehman Malik, a London-based Pakistani-Canadian and until 2011 the cultural director of the Muslim organization Radical Middle Way. Malik repeatedly asserted to me that identity formation was the key reason for his own investment in the Muslim cultural sector.Footnote ²² For him, culture provides references key to the construction of a strong identity, which in turn allows Muslims to resist the pressures of assimilation: “For my children, for your kids, I need a vibrant cultural space, because that's what's going to frame their Islam, it's the music, they listen to, it's the art that they see. […] I fear that the assimilationist trend, and the cultural power of the societies around us, how long can you hold this, how long can you hold that level of [Muslim anti-culture] conservatism, you'll hold the street for one more generation, two generations, it will break down.”Footnote ²³

At the same time, these cultural references, as Abdul-Rehman put it, not only craft a strong Muslim identity but a British Muslim identity that allows British Muslims to feel a sense of belonging. In this logic, it is by providing the space to “express themselves,” to express their own “experiences,” their “struggles,” and their “identity” that culture becomes so vital in this regard: “From my point of view, from our point of view, culture is the battlefield. I mean you create a culture, a dynamic, Islamic culture, Muslim culture in Britain, [expressing] our stories, our thoughts, you know, our books, poetry, our music, our dance, our plays, that gives us a sense of being here.… Culture creates the necessary ground for belonging and being, and we have to recognize that.”Footnote ²⁴

Another key argument that my interlocutors have made over and over is that culture and the arts can help British Muslims to gain recognition within a multicultural Britain. Again, in the words of Abdul-Rehman, “[Culture] allows us to have social capital, it also gives us a confidence to be who we are in the world.” Here, in an almost Bourdieusian sense, Abdul-Rehman recognized how culture in European societies constitutes “social capital”—what Bourdieu defines as “a capital of honourability and respectability” (Reference Bourdieu, Karabel and Halsey1977: 503)—which potentially enables ascending social hierarchies. It offers social recognition, which ultimately is one of the important conditions for building self-confidence. And it is with such “capital,” the argument often continues, that the community will be able to enter into conversation or dialogue with broader mainstream society. Art practitioners as well as cultural event organizers all stressed to me repeatedly the power of art for “building bridges,” engaging in “cultural dialogue,” “overcoming stereotypes,” or “showing a positive image of Islam.”

In this vein, artists again and again stressed their responsibility as artists to represent Islam in a positive light to mainstream society, and also to deconstruct stereotypes. Frequently, when speaking within cultural spaces where their opinions are solicited, religious scholars appealed to the artists’ extraordinary capacity to represent, and urged them to take seriously their duty of being something akin to “ambassadors” of Islam. Artistic expression, as well as the atmosphere of joy and fun that often goes along with these practices, seemed here particularly apt to counter images of violence, austerity, and rigidity so often associated with the Islamic faith.

To understand the specific assumptions that underlie my interlocutors’ positive evaluations of culture, I want to pause here in order to scrutinize a different moment in the history of the culture concept, one that in fact precedes the anthropological formulation I addressed earlier. From the Enlightenment onward, the term “culture” became integrated into a humanist project and began to stand in for what distinguishes humans from animals and their biological determinism, so as to delineate the nature-commanding human, endowed with rational control (Sartori Reference Sartori2005: 685). Historian Andrew Sartori, who investigates the evolving modern culture concept, shows that culture in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century debates refers not only to the human capacity for mastering nature, but also to the process that enables humans to do so. Thus it has been theorized as cultivation and perfection of humanity and various, exclusively human capacities (ibid.).Footnote ²⁵ In the words of Matthew Arnold, culture is the “idea of perfection as an inward condition of the mind and spirit” (Reference Arnold2006: 37). With Herder, the term becomes intrinsically linked with Volk, which turns culture into “the process of unfolding the inner propensities of each people” (Sartori Reference Sartori2005: 687), thereby laying the groundwork for the later anthropological culture concept I discussed above.Footnote ²⁶

If at first art is merely subsumed by the humanistic culture concept as one aspect among others and as the possible materialization of this cultivation—in other words, as its objectified results—toward the end of the nineteenth century the term took on an additional meaning. It also came to explicitly denote the whole field of arts (Williams Reference Williams1983: 46). But as Raymond Williams explains, this latter sense of culture grew out of the former, at a time when the artist (rather than the artwork) gained new attention as creative agent, which enabled “the association of the idea of the general perfection of humanity with the practice and study of arts” (ibid.). Romanticism placed such a value on creative expression that it not only defined the artist but humanity in general as endowed with “imaginative and spiritual aspirations, […] emotional depths, […] artistic creativity and powers of individual self-expression and self-creation” (Tarnas Reference Tarnas1993: 367). Art was seen as the expression of artistic subjectivity, the materialization of interiority.

Thus, from Romanticism onward, art was theorized as representing the epicenter of the humanistic culture concept. As the pure materialization of interiority, the expression of a personal and original truth, it also became intrinsically connected to the new ideal of “authenticity” (Taylor Reference Taylor1992). In addition, Talal Asad argues that Romanticism has contributed to the development of a secular aesthetic theory by shifting the understanding of “inspiration” from the realm of the divine to the creative genius (Reference Asad2003: 52–53). It is at this moment, then, that artists began to be celebrated for resisting social constraints or pressures (such as religion) in their pursuit of realizing one's inner potential and personal truth, which cannot be found elsewhere.

At the same time, art came to be seen as analogous to the broader culture concept and as a pivotal tool for the cultivation and perfection of various human capacities. Tony Bennett (Reference Bennett2000), for instance, demonstrates that since the nineteenth century, cultural activity has been lauded by liberal politicians for its “reforming capacities” that reflect a belief in art's “ability to effect an inner moral transformation that would give rise to changed forms of behavior” (ibid.: 1415). The power of art could be used to uplift entire populations, thus also lending itself, Bennett argues, to becoming a tool for state building or state consolidation when deployed to unify and manage a national people and make them aware of their responsibilities to this end (see also Lloyd and Thomas Reference Lloyd and Thomas2013).

This framing of culture in terms of arts and a general artistic environment has, next to the anthropological one, become one of the most widespread understandings of culture (Williams Reference Williams2014 [1976]: 90). Many of the assumptions underlying this culture concept are also echoed in my interlocutors’ discussions about the relevance of art and culture for the British Muslim community. As described previously, they see culture and art as essential for developing a strong sense of self, because it provides a means of shaping and then expressing oneself as well as of creating identity and a sense of belonging. Furthermore, my interlocutors emphasized the role of art and culture in building a thriving and strong diasporic community. They, too, believed in the power of art to uplift entire communities.

Finally, they connected it to authenticity, and, because art is generally perceived as expressing the inner nature of a community, they also had strong faith in the representative power of art for shaping a more positive image of Muslims in the larger British society. This kind of appreciation of the arts in contemporary pious Muslim life is not specific to my interlocutors but is also part of a growing trend within contemporary Islamic movements, which have begun to valorize art to various extents as conducive to strengthening Muslim subjectivities, communities, and nations (see Winegar Reference Winegar2014).Footnote ²⁷

It is important to indicate here as well the important ontological shifts that occurred in my interlocutors’ deployment of a popularized culture-as-art concept. This became especially apparent when the question of freedom arose, which is often closely associated, in European public debates, with the idea of art. Indeed, the Muslim artists in my research have a complex relationship with ideals of freedom, agency, and self-formation, but also with the notion of authorship. Their specific approaches only partially map onto the (post-)Romantic ideal as it is cherished today (however simplified) in popular European art and culture discourses as they are promoted in public debates. In spite of my interlocutors’ emphasis on self-expression and artistic agency in their promotion of British Muslim culture, their articulation of an authentic interiority and agency when talking about artistic “self-expression” was not indicative of notions of a pure, autonomous space within an inner, unencumbered self.Footnote ²⁸ It is in this sense that British-Mozambican rapper Mohammed Yahya explained to me his own understanding of self-expression: “Every artist has the right to express himself like he wants to, but for me, I don't feel I am compromising my art form, for me Islam is not just like praying five times a day. For me, my whole life is based around Islam, from how I speak, to how I rap, to my relation I have with my wife. So the fact that I am trying to follow the Islamic principles as a performer, that I set boundaries that I don't cross, I don't see that as compromising, I just see this as me being myself.”Footnote ²⁹

The self that my interlocutors wanted to express through the arts was thus conceptualized as a complicated product of a variety of elements. First, it was generally accepted among these pious interlocutors that the self must be shaped by God-consciousness (taqwa), honed with the help of various religious techniques of self-cultivation. Yet my informants also recognized the impact of personal and collective life trajectories on the self, which is why the project of British Muslim culture as the venue for self-expression was so important to them.

All of these elements appeared in my interlocutors’ discourses to fashion the inner self that then is expressed through the arts, an expression that is itself also often read as partially originating from the sphere of the divine. In this sense, art could, for instance, be understood as the celebration of divine beauty, as Luqman said: “Art for us is about celebrating and expressing the beauty of the divine, whatever form it takes and that as an ethos governs our heart.” But art could also be viewed in terms of individual artistic talent being comprehended as a divine gift.Footnote ³⁰ Sukina, member of the British-Jamaican female Hip Hop duo Poetic Pilgrimage, explained her work as a lyricist, poet, and hip hop artist in this way: “What you've got is something that Allah has given you for you to look after for a while, it's a gift […]. So that you know creativity is something which one day may not be here and I, just looking at it as it's something that's from Allah and being grateful to Allah.”Footnote ³¹

Following this understanding, self-expression for these artists is not meant to necessarily go against any structures or norms that hinder the sovereign self from expressing itself freely and spontaneously. The Islamic norms deemed authentic are incorporated into creative expression, not only because the artist feels committed to abide by them but also because culture and the arts are seen in terms of their pedagogical mission to contribute to the shaping of Muslim audiences (da'wa), thereby, again, enhancing and refining the pious self (see, for instance, Winegar Reference Winegar2014). However, my informants also believed that norms and structures could and should be critiqued through art if they contradicted the ethical norms of “authentic” Islamic tradition as they saw it, which they defined often in terms of justice and equality. The anti-racist or anti-imperialist messages often reflected in their art indicate that stance.

Contestations over how to define the rules of conduct and the norms that would best delimit Muslims’ artistic productions recurrently generate passionate debates among British Muslims. There are a variety of interpretations as to what such an ethics should consist of and whether and to what extent one can and should define normative boundaries around Muslim cultural projects. These debates are partially related to the different affiliations of artists and their promoters with particular religious groups and schools of thought. Thus, the religious norms that should or should not govern artistic projects were constantly discussed and redefined depending on how my interlocutors interpreted, at specific moments through their personal trajectory, the vast and multifarious body of the Islamic discursive tradition and what elements were referred to and highlighted. While some artists pushed against orthodoxies and narrower interpretations, others did not. But for most of the artists with whom I worked, it was a matter of a difference of opinion sanctioned by the Islamic tradition itself and it should be up to one's individual conscience. This was also the response to their more “Salafi” inclined peers my interlocutors would typically articulate.

As I have shown so far, my interlocutors aptly employed the culture concept in order to accommodate their specific ontological assumptions as well as their congruent ethical commitments. However, this is never quite accepted by the European mainstream societies with which they seek to engage. The lack of acceptance becomes evident in observing how public media seem to pay special or near-exclusive attention to Muslim artists who are perceived (rightly so or not) to be the most disruptive to, or even rebelling against, Islamic orthodoxies and restrictions.

Such a preference poses an important challenge to the representative aspect of my interlocutors’ cultural project, so closely connected to their broader quest for recognition. If most Muslim artists I talked to imagine their work contributing to the deconstruction of stereotypes against Muslims and Islam by showing, as they usually put it, “a positive image of Islam,” they quite often only succeed in this if their art indicates some transgression of an imagined Islamic normativity. It is for this reason that female British Muslim performance artists in particular are solicited to do this kind of “deconstructive” work of representation, given the simplistic notion that Muslim women become transgressors simply by being Muslim women and performance artists. The two members of Poetic Pilgrimage are probably the most popular British Muslim hip hop band in the UK and abroad, and they spoke to me about the reception of their work and their efforts to resist being branded in this way. Sukina, one of the band members, explained: “We are very passionate, we express ourselves, they [journalists] are like wow, sometimes they like to read us differently, like there is this Norwegian singer, born-Muslim, very much like a Muslim Madonna,Footnote ³² who tries to rebel against [Islam], so they think we are like this. But no, we don't want to rebel against anything, we love it, so that comes across, so it is confusing to them, but people like to use it to their advantage.”Footnote ³³

Thus, there is an imbalance in what is legible for recognition and who is granted the possibility to “dialogue.”Footnote ³⁴ It seems to me that this possibility is distinctly tied to a requirement to demonstrate freedom.Footnote ³⁵ Again, this requirement maps only partially on the artists’ own desire to represent Islam positively, to oppose what they deem the “Salafi” purism and severity as well as to vehemently denounce the “perversion” of the Islamic teachings by extremists.

The release of the controversial “British Happy Muslims” video is another interesting example that highlights the extent to which the broader reception of Muslim culture risks entrapment within a narrative of freedom versus constraint, alongside the “moderate versus extremist Islam” mantra. In 2014, an organization called Honesty Policy released a cover video of Pharrell Williams's original “Happy” song, but with the same soundtrack. That year, the Williams’ song and video had taken the world by storm and triggered covers of the video by groups and communities across the globe. The video “Happy British Muslims” shows British Muslims, young and old, male and female, of all ethnic backgrounds, walking, dancing, and bicycling through the streets of London with smiling faces. Many of the artists and cultural brokers I have worked with over the years appeared in it.

As might be expected, a debate divided the Muslim community about the permissibility of this video, in particular on social media. Certain voices took issue with music in general as not permissible, and with women and men moving (or dancing) together. Another crucial controversy took shape around the appropriateness of performing Britishness and happiness at a time when the entire community was under attack by the media, politicians, and counter-terrorism policies. As might also be expected, this internal community debate was quickly taken up by the mainstream British media. In the shift from an internal Muslim debate to a mainstream debate on Muslims, some of the parameters of the debate were transformed as well. The initial statement on the blog of Honesty Policy made a case for diversity and cosmopolitanism in Britain where, interestingly, “Brits” were in need of some image work rather than Muslims: “We Brits have a bad rep for being a bit stiff, but this video proves otherwise. We are HAPPY. We are eclectic. We are cosmopolitan. Diverse. Creative. Fun. Outgoing. And everything you can think of” (Gander Reference Gander2014). When I spoke to several video participants about this issue, they explained their participation not too differently, either in terms of “just having a good time” or the welcome possibility of changing the negative narrative about Muslims in British society by showing a positive image.

However, once the critiques appeared online and the debate was taken up by the British media, the comments took on another tone. In the Independent, the critique was covered in an article entitled “‘Sinful’: Video of British Muslims Dancing to Pharrell Williams's Hit Happy Comes under Attack.” It speaks of a “vocal minority” that criticized the video. The article then quotes Honesty Policy's spokesperson, who responded to the controversy in this way: “Lots of people have an idea of Islam that you have to conform to prescribed rules to be a good Muslim, but to us, as young second and third generation British Muslims, that's not the case. We're thankful to have grown up in a British society with freedom of expression…. And we're thankful that our faith gives us the room to be British and to be a Muslim. Some people don't see that. They don't see Islam as pluralistic [as we do]” (Merrill Reference Merrill2014).

Thus, a video meant to showcase British Muslim normalcy became yet another occasion to situate Muslims in opposition to one another, on one side those who accept freedom of expression (“second and third generation British Muslims”) and on the other, those who conform excessively to “prescribed rules,” who also seem to be implicitly excluded from Britishness. In a climate where extremism has been articulated in relation to fundamental British values such as individual liberty (Miah Reference Miah2017), considering such a video haram might even become an extremist position.Footnote ³⁶

CULTURE “AS” OR “VERSUS” RELIGION: RELATING THE TWO NARRATIVES

The culture concept discourse of the participants in the Muslim cultural scene I studied in the UK, with its emphasis on the connectedness between culture and religion, seems, on the face of it, to be opposed to the pious women's culture discourse from my research in Germany and France, which insisted on the separation between “religion” and “culture.” But I remind that in spite of this apparent opposition, these two culture concept tropes are not mutually exclusive—that is, they can and do occur together—precisely because they highlight two distinct aspects of culture. In this section, however, I want to point to the important convergences between these two tropes, which can reveal crucial insights about shared assumptions underlying both culture terms.

Both discourses reveal deep concerns over the right or wrong approach to culture. Both define themselves in opposition to an Other who is engaged in the “wrong” relationship with culture. Both also see Muslims’ handling of culture as central in creating a sense of belonging and acceptance in Europe. Central to both of these concerns is a capacity to properly tease out obsolete cultural practices from either the Islamic universal principles or those cultural practices that qualify as one's rich cultural heritage. As we have seen, underlying all these vexations in both culture discourses is a common concern for possibilities for agency and notions of free subjectivity. This is not a coincidence, because the two different strands of the culture concept—which are reflected in my interlocutors’ distinct culture discourses—emanate from a common origin. As Sartori argues, the “anthropological” definition of culture has grown out of the earlier “humanist” approach to the term. He shows how the concern for grasping human agency, which postulates “the fundamental underdetermination of human subjectivity” (2005: 677), and therefore a capacity for self-creation, has been carried over from the humanist to the anthropological definitions of the term. This capacity for self-creation was, if we read Sartori together with Reinhardt Koselleck (Reference Koselleck2004), embedded within a new experience of secular time, which made possible a progress narrative that self-consciously ruptured from religious time (defined by religious prophecy), where the future, now undetermined, became “an extensive space of possibility” (ibid.: 70).

By acknowledging the particular ontological and epistemological implications of the culture concept we can properly understand how the term appears in contemporary debates about Islam and in Muslims’ responses to it. Let me return here to Tylor's culture concept, in which lies ingrained not merely a more socially defined humanist framework, but also a dual understanding of culture with two distinct temporalities that are mapped geographically. As addressed earlier, Tylor's concept argued for a global culture term that could potentially demonstrate the “underdetermination” of human subjectivity by biology. But when it came to the “primitive cultures” he studied, he especially emphasized “customs” that he saw as senseless “survivals” from the past. In this sense, these survivals became implicitly connected to an argument about the actually existing overdetermination of human subjectivity—rather than the promise of its opposite—by (primitive) culture grounded in a particular (backward-looking) temporality. If anthropology has gone some way in developing a more subtle culture discourse, such a reductively dual culture concept persists, not only in contemporary popularized discussions or common sense parlance but also among certain liberal political thinkers (Scott Reference Scott2003).Footnote ³⁷ Thus today there is a culture concept in use that is rife with earlier humanist inflections, providing the necessary conditions for securing and promoting free subjectivity. When it appears in discussions around the failure of multiculturalism and Muslim populations in Europe, this concept seems to have become almost an exclusive descriptive for Western (liberal) societies. At the same time, the earlier anthropological discussion of “primitive culture” in terms of “survival” and “custom” now becomes freedom's antipode, the context that thwarts its realization (because it is not liberated from the past), and is mainly associated with non-Western, especially Muslim, societies.

As Wendy Brown's (Reference Brown2006) discussion of the uses and abuses of an only vaguely defined culture concept in contemporary liberal discourse shows, liberal theory has identified Western societies in terms of an individualism that limits the reach of “culture” (as custom)—including religion—while valorizing “culture” (in the humanist sense). This seems to stand in contrast to non-Western societies, whose culture is almost exclusively defined in terms of “custom” and fully determines behavior (see also Mamdani Reference Mamdani2005). Here, culture represents the power of the collective rather than the possibilities for subjectivity (see also Scott Reference Scott2003).

Thus, the two culture concepts constitute an interesting pair. One is defined through the other, situated on opposite ends on a spectrum regarding the question of the over- or under-determination of individual subjectivity. As I showed in the previous sections, in this dominant discursive framework established through “culture” my European Muslim interlocutors tried to distance themselves from an association with the all-encompassing and oppressive culture (as past and obsolete custom) concept and to lay claim instead to a more “humanist-inclined” (universal, timeless, and/or future-oriented) concept in order to overcome the stigmatization and exclusion stemming from their assumed incapacity to endorse and enact the ideal of individual freedom. They did so by gesturing toward a distinction between the universal, timeless Islamic values, practices, ethics, and modes of life that are “mobile,” fitting into diverse local contexts, and those other cultural aspects that are potentials or “variables” that must differ from context to context and be able to adapt to their time. As the participants in the UK Muslim culture scene highlighted in particular, those who inhabit that space should actively and dynamically shape these potentials. In this sense, culture as a “potential” that is realized in the future rather than rehearsing the past (but may creatively engage with the past), is nonetheless essential and becomes the central domain of investment, what some called the “battleground.”

As with everyone, European Muslims have been shaped by prevalent culture discourses, reflected in their own interactions with culture. Plus they are situated within a discursive field that operates on culturalist terms. These terms have determined how their presence in Europe has been debated for the last fifty years. Still, my interlocutors’ own culture discourse is also inflected by the particular (and for them, urgent) world-making project in which they engage. Without being exclusively defined by them, their world-making project pays tribute to certain modern concerns about subjectivity. Such a project poses some important epistemological and ontological questions that stand in interesting tension with earlier Islamic epistemologies and ontologies. The specific answers my interlocutors tried to give are always sought within the Islamic discursive tradition, thereby contributing to interesting reconfigurations of these frameworks. Yet, however productive and enriching these internal debates may be, they risk never being quite enough to be fully successful in the quest for recognition.