Imagining Muslims/Imagining Others: South Asia, Southeast Asia, and Europe

On September 14 th and 15 th, 2007 at the Kahin Center, scholars from diverse fields of interest came together for an international colloquium and series of panel discussions entitled “Imagining Muslims/Imagining Others: South Asia, Southeast Asia, and Europe.” The gathering attempted to blend perspectives around three elements pertaining to questions of religious pluralism: positive images (good others), negative images (bad others) and historical contexts and causes (historical others). Bassam Tibi, professor of international relations at the University of Göttingen and A.D. White Professor-at-Large at Cornell University, was among the presenters of the set of public lectures and workshops.

Tibi’s statements drew on his paper “Euro-Islamic Religious Pluralism for Europe: An Alternative to Ethnicity and to ‘Multiculturalism of Fear.’” Tibi’s paper presented a concept of Euro-Islam based on the idea of religious pluralism, describing pluralism as a combination of diversity and a consensus over values and rules. He posed Euro-Islam as “an alternative to an ethnicization of Islam in Europe resulting in a multiculturalism of fear.” Tibi argued that pluralism is an absolute necessity in a world where people of different cultural and religious backgrounds must live with one another. In addition, he argued that previous models of multiculturalism and diversity have revealed themselves to be insufficient for coming to terms with the contemporary situation. Tibi insisted upon the importance of Euro-Islam as a model by which locals reinterpret Islam for Europe and render it European. He proposed several strategies for achieving pluralism, including the integration of Muslims into civic and civil culture and the maintenance of diversity, which implied consensus over values. Tibi highlighted the importance of refashioning European civil society as a home for the Muslims of Europe, which could help “relieve Muslims and Europeans from the effects of diasporic identity politics that uses cultural tensions for elevating the fault-lines into deeper conflicts.” (Gizem Arslan)