Migrants and religion

"Theoretical Background and objectives In the context of the combination of escalated sectarian conflicts in Iraq and Syria, and home-grown conflicts around real and perceived attacks on Islam and its symbols in the West (from Rushdie to Charlie Hebdo), increased numbers of Muslim youth in Western countries have embraced radical forms of Islam and have sometimes become actively involved in violence, both at home and abroad. Beyond impressionistic evidence on a few active radicals, extremely little is known about the incidence among countries’ Muslim populations of adherence to radical versions of Islam and support for religiously-motivated violence. To answer these questions, cross-national surveys across Muslim populations in different countries are necessary, but apart from the very descriptive surveys by the US American Pew Research Institute, which are moreover not publicly accessible for secondary analysis, no such information is available. Existing research also leaves another major question unanswered, namely to what extent religious radicalism is specific to current Islam or whether it is comparable to what we find in other contemporary religions, particularly within Christianity. This project wants to fill these voids. A first step was an analysis based on the SCIICS survey. This was the first representative survey study to compare religious fundamentalism and outgroup hostility between Muslims and Christians (Koopmans 2015), and as such it attracted worldwide media attention. While the study revealed large differences between the two religious groups even when controlled for a range of socio-economic and demographic variables, the limitation of the study to two Muslim ethnic groups as well as the fact that it compared Muslims of immigrant origin to autochthonous Christians limits the generalizability of its findings. Moreover, the SCIICS survey did not include questions about support for religiously-motivated violence and extremist religious organizations. Research design To overcome these shortcomings, we are conducting two studies: Religious Fundamentalism and Radicalization Survey and Jihadi Radicalization in Europe Database. The first project is a representative survey study of Muslims, Christians, Jews, and non-believers in 2017 in the following 8 countries: Germany, the United States, Cyprus, Turkey, Israel, Palestine, Lebanon and Kenya. The choice of countries allows for a broad range of cross-national and cross-sectional comparisons. For instance, all three of the world’s Abrahamic religions are represented in our sample, allowing us to investigate similarities and differences between these three religious groups. In addition to comparisons across religious groups, we are also interested in examining variances within the religious groups. Therefore we sampled across different branches of Islam, i.e. Sunni Muslims (Turkey, Lebanon, Israel, Palestine, Kenya, and Cyprus), Shia Muslims (Lebanon) and Alevites (Turkey, Cyprus); of Christianity, i.e. Catholic and Protestant Christians (Germany, and the USA), Greek Orthodox Christians (Cyprus, Lebanon), Maronite Catholics (Lebanon) and the generally more conservative Christianity of Sub-Saharan Africa (Kenya); and of Judaism, i.e. both Orthodox and Reformist branches (Israel and the USA). Our research design also allows us to investigate the role of immigration and integration experiences in religious radicalization. The study not only includes two Western immigration countries with strongly divergent immigrant integration policies (Germany and the United States), but also three countries with autochthonous Muslim and Christian populations (Kenya, Cyprus, and Lebanon). Furthermore, both in Germany and the United States, we oversample Christians of immigrant origin, thus extending the range of comparisons to a variety of immigrant and native groups and augmenting the possibility of isolating the role of immigration. Apart from the usual socio-economic and demographic control variables, the surveys included questions on religiosity, religious knowledge, fundamentalism, out-group hostility, intergroup contacts, discrimination, adherence to conspiracy theories, violence legitimation, and support for extremist groups. Moreover we employed a survey experiment to test the effect of religious scripture on religious violence legitimation. The broad range of variables and the experiment included in the surveys will enable rigorous hypotheses testing, which will help us uncover causal mechanisms behind religious fundamentalism and radicalization. In the second project Jihadi Radicalization in Europe Database, we aggregate profiles of Jihadist individuals from publicly available information. The main units of analysis of this database are people from four European countries (Germany, France, the Netherlands and the UK) who fit in any of the following characteristics: People (including their partners and children from the age of 15 who accompanying them), who have traveled to Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan or other conflict regions involving Muslims, acting out of their Islamist conviction (the so-called foreign fighters); people who have actively recruited others as foreign fighters or motivated others to join through propaganda activities; people who were involved in the aiding, planning or conducting of Islamist terrorist activity in Europe or were suspected thereof; people who supported, justified or glorified the use of violence in the name of Islam through propaganda activities; people who are members of jihadi-Salafist and Islamist organizations, which support the use of violence. The database will primarily consist of biographical and sociodemographic information on individuals, with the aim of identifying common characteristics. Using the sociodemographic data, we aim to investigate, what kind of people are more susceptible to radicalization, whereas we will use the biographic data to gain insights into contexts of radicalization. In addition to these characteristics, social contacts and networks of the individuals will also be registered, in order to analyze the social network structures. This information will be used to explore group-specific radicalization processes as well as to identify central influential figures within the networks. The relevant data will be gathered through an online and media research. A variety of sources of data will be used to collect relevant information such as newspaper articles, interviews, online-blogs, biographies, news databases such as LexisNexis®, and court proceedings, in order to gather as much data as possible on the individuals. The database can be understood as an aggregation of publicly available data on European Islamists."

"The theoretical background and objectives The project EURISLAM provides an encompassing view of the integration of Muslim immigrants in six West European countries by linking information on the institutional status of Islam and religious rights for Muslims, public debates on Muslims and Islam in the mass media, and individual attitudes, behavioural patterns, and interethnic contacts of both Muslim immigrants and native populations. Using an institutional and discursive opportunity structure perspective, the project investigates to what extent cross-national differences in religiosity, socio-economic position, interethnic contacts, and identification of Muslims vary as a function of the way in which Islam has been incorporated in different countries and to what extent they are affected by differences in the salience and content of public debates on Muslims and Islam. Similarly, we ask how such contextual conditions affect the ways in which majority populations see and interact with Muslims. Research design, data and methodology The study combines several types of data: indicators of Muslim rights, content analyses for the period 1999-2008, a new survey among four groups of Muslims (Turks, Moroccans, Pakistani and ex-Yugoslav Muslims) and a comparison group of native non-Muslims, and finally focus groups with members of ""transnational families"", of which members have migrated to different countries. This part of the project is quasi-experimental in nature because it compares groups with a very similar background before migration (namely members of the same family) who have ended up in different immigration countries. Findings Our findings show that Muslims have been able to gain the most religious rights in the Netherlands and the United Kingdom and the least in France and Switzerland, which are both strongly influenced by a laicist tradition of church-state relations. Germany and Belgium occupy intermediary positions. A first analysis shows that these different opportunity structures have important consequences for the nature of public debates about Muslim rights. In order to compare the debates across countries, we distinguish between claims on rights within and outside public institutions, claims asking for parity with existing regulations for Christians (and sometimes also Jews) versus those that refer to special arrangements for which there is no direct Christian equivalent, and finally those that refer to mainstream (e.g., mosques or headscarves) or minoritarian (e.g., the burqa) Muslim practices. We find evidence that accommodation of Muslim rights leads to a process of claim shift, as it encourages both Muslim groups and their opponents within the public domain to shift attention from private, parity, and mainstream issues to more “obtrusive” issues. In line with the expectations of the political opportunity perspective we find that this tendency is strongest in the United Kingdom and the Netherlands, where much of the debate refers to special rights in the context of public institutions, which are often related to religious practices of small groups of orthodox Muslims. In the other countries, and especially in France and Switzerland, more basic religious rights, referring to practices such as mosques, minarets, and headscarves dominate the debate, which are not important as issues of controversy in the Netherlands and the United Kingdom. These results indicate that although the incorporation of Islam is highly controversial in all countries, the terms of the debate vary starkly, and do so largely in line with national integration policy and state-church traditions. In that sense the debate about Islam is, in spite of highly visible international events around Islam in the period of study, not genuinely transnational. For the moment, the incorporation of, and controversies about Islam largely follow national paths."

The communities of the Western Sephardic Diaspora were founded in the 16th and 17th centuries by New Christians from Iberia who returned to Judaism that had been abandoned by their ancestors in the late Middle Ages. This project will concentrate on the changes in the religious conceptions and behavior as well as the cultural patterns of the communities of Amsterdam, Hamburg, Leghorn, London, and Bordeaux. We will analyze the vigorous activity of their leaders to set the boundaries of their new religious identity in comparison to the policy of several Christian “communities of belief,” which went into exile following religious persecution in their homelands. We will also examine the changes in the attitude toward Judaism during the 17th century in certain segments of the Sephardic Diaspora: rather than a normative system covering every area of life, Judaism came to be seen as a system of faith restricted to the religious sphere. We will seek to explain the extent to which this significant change influenced their institutions and social behaviour. This study will provide us with better understanding of the place of the Jews in European society. At the same time, we will subject a central series of concepts in the historiographical discourse of the Early Modern Period to critical analysis: confessionalization, disciplinary revolution, civilizing process, affective individualism, etc. This phase of the research will be based on qualitative and quantitative analysis of many hundreds of documents, texts and the material remains of these communities. Using sociological and anthropological models, we will analyze ceremonies and rituals described at length in the sources, the social and cultural meaning of the architecture of the Sephardic synagogues of that time, and of other visual symbols.

Since the early 2000s, Muslim Diasporas in Europe and the USA have raised a growing interest in the public and academic spheres. While building upon this interest, the proposed research aims to bring an original contribution to the field by adopting a transnational perspective that focuses on the religious policy of Turkey towards its diaspora. The study will concentrate on the imams sent to Europe and the USA to work in the mosques managed by the Turkish Directorate of Religious Affairs (Diyanet). The ethnographic study of these “transnational imams” aims to go beyond a state-centered analysis of Turkish religious policy abroad in terms of “soft power” or “religious diplomacy”. Instead, it proposes to evaluate the modalities and limits of this policy by concentrating on the training, motivations, mobility and achievements of these imams, as well as the ways they are perceived by different components of the Turkish diaspora, with special focus on France, the UK and the USA. The interdisciplinary approach at the crossroad of political science, sociology and anthropology will address the political and religious dimensions of the ideology conveyed by the Diyanet imams and question their impact on the Turkish communities settled abroad, in terms of religious practices, political affiliation, integration and possible radicalisation. The comparative perspective will take into account the history and social characteristics of these distinct Turkish diasporas and the different traditions of state/religion relationship in the three countries under study to analyse the strategies of the Diyanet and evaluate its results. Thus, by focusing on Turkey’s religious policy abroad, the proposed study aims to bring an original contribution on political Islam as a transnational ideology that mobilises state resources, religious establishments and local communities to spread a polymorphous political and religious discourse.

FLOS will focus on the metamorphoses of Greek Christian thought in Syriac (Aramaic) and Arabic in Late Antiquity, within the timeframe of the first millennium CE. Syriac Christianity was a pivotal mediator of culture in the Late Antique epistemic space, but is little-known today. FLOS aims to bring to light for the first time a body of highly relevant Syriac and Christian Arabic sources that have hardly ever been studied before. At the end of the millennium, in Islamic-ruled Syria, Mesopotamia, and Iran, Syriac Christians strived to define their religious identity. One of their strategies was the production of florilegia, i.e. anthologies that they used to excerpt and reinvent the patristic canon, a corpus of Greek Christian works of the 2nd–6th centuries shared by European and Middle Eastern Christian cultures. A Greco-centric bias has prevented scholars from viewing these florilegia as laboratories of cultural creativity. FLOS will reverse the state of the art through two groundbreaking endeavours: 1) open-access digital editions of a set of Syriac florilegia of the 8th–10th centuries; 2) a study of many neglected writings of Syriac and Christian Arabic authors of the 8th–11th centuries. These tremendously important writings drew from Syriac patristic florilegia to pinpoint topics like incarnation and the Trinity against other Christians or Islam, showing how patristic sources were used to create new knowledge for the entangled environment of the Abbasid era. FLOS will thus dramatically improve our understanding of the cultural dynamics of Late Antiquity; patristic Christianity will emerge as a bridge between the intellectual history of Europe and of the Middle East. By studying how this shared patrimony was transformed in situations of interreligious interaction, especially with Islam, FLOS will facilitate the comprehension of Europe’s current religious discourses, and the preservation of the endangered cultural heritage of the Syriac Christians.

AJAPP investigates the integration of religious minorities amid the rise of nation-states in Central Europe in the late modern period. Specifically, AJAPP focuses on political representation of ancient Judaism by Catholics, Jews, and Protestants throughout Prussia, Austria, and Bavaria in the course of the 19th century. The goal is to understand how portraits of the past reflected both the concerns and the conditions of modern times and, in turn, how these portraits impacted contemorary debates on issues of national, cultural, religious, and ethnic identity. It analyses how political and social differences - as opposed to strictly ethnic or cultural ones - as well as subtle prejudices manifested themselves in discussions of the past, how boundaries were made within a shared tradition, and how identities were configured in regional and national entities. This period is especially imortant as this was a time when distinct regions were negotiating their political relationships to one another (often with violence), when public discourse was debating which communities had which stakes in and rights to the political realm, and when the past became especially contested territory for determining which groups were insiders and which ones were outsiders. Given the current rise in regionalism, nationalism, and right-wing extremism across Europe, AJAPP addresses a central problem palpable on the local, international, and global levels today. It reveals how implicit assumptions inscribe the conceptualisation of the past, which then find their way back into the present.

The two fundamental challenges of this project are the integration of medieval Jewries and their histories within the framework of European history without undermining their distinct communal status and the creation of a history of everyday medieval Jewish life that includes those who were not part of the learned elite. The study will focus on the Jewish communities of northern Europe (roughly modern Germany, northern France and England) from 1100-1350. From the mid-thirteenth century these medieval Jewish communities were subject to growing persecution. The approaches proposed to access daily praxis seek to highlight tangible dimensions of religious life rather than the more common study of ideologies to date. This task is complex because the extant sources in Hebrew as well as those in Latin and vernacular were written by the learned elite and will require a broad survey of multiple textual and material sources. Four main strands will be examined and combined: 1. An outline of the strata of Jewish society, better defining the elites and other groups. 2. A study of select communal and familial spaces such as the house, the synagogue, the market place have yet to be examined as social spaces. 3. Ritual and urban rhythms especially the annual cycle, connecting between Jewish and Christian environments. 4. Material culture, as objects were used by Jews and Christians alike. Aspects of material culture, the physical environment and urban rhythms are often described as “neutral” yet will be mined to demonstrate how they exemplified difference while being simultaneously ubiquitous in local cultures. The deterioration of relations between Jews and Christians will provide a gauge for examining change during this period. The final stage of the project will include comparative case studies of other Jewish communities. I expect my findings will inform scholars of medieval culture at large and promote comparative methodologies for studying other minority ethnic groups