Feeling at Home on the Margin

Abstract

In the current debate on migration to Europe, a central concern has emerged over the “marginality” of Muslim communities, in other words, their seeming failure to “integrate” into the mainstream life world. Migrants congregating in mosques or Muslim community centres, attending Islamic schools, wearing headscarves and exotic “traditional” clothes, and turning to non-European television programmes are seen as an anomaly in the social body of European societies. Underlying this anxiety is the implicit assumption that Muslim peoples have an exceptionally primordial attachment to “tradition”—some immutable “Islamic ways of life”—that is incompatible with modern European values and which stands in the way of their integration.