Liberalism’s primary medium is that of values, principles, and laws. One of the ways to de-absolutize liberalism in relation to multiculturalism and the respectful inclusion of minorities is to recognize the sociological and normative significance of other features of social life. I do so by focusing on the significance of identity and by highlighting the normative role of dialogue in a context of cultural and value conflicts. This offers a bottom-up basis for a political theory of multiculturalism, which is not simply about trends in academic liberalism but is about claims on national citizenship and national identity by those seeking inclusion in a new sense of the national. While a focus on identity, both in terms of recognition and in terms of fostering commonality and societal unity is not sufficient, it is a necessary dimension that political theorists who frame things in terms of liberalism miss, and thereby miss both what needs to be addressed and what is needed for liberal – amongst other – values to be secured. (Nor do socialists, human rights champions, cosmopolitans, or localists.)

It is now a truism to observe that over the last decade religion has reasserted its presence in public consciousness. One must still question just how broad or how deep this reassertion is. Perhaps the secularization thesis – and its contemporary reversal – were only ever plausible in the contexts of Northern European liberal democracies. Perhaps, with hindsight, these societies had only ever experienced a temporary lull in the ‘furiosity’ of their religions (Berger, 1999). Perhaps the religion which is now reasserting itself is a set of peripheral concerns bound to come into conflict with surrounding culture and even masking, or responding to, a general decline (Bruce, 2011). Or perhaps surrounding cultures are themselves changing in ways which make religious beliefs and practices more unusual and more awkward to accommodate. But as all these questions suggest, the public presence of religion is widely perceived to represent a growing problem, which, however one might explain, receives concrete expression in increased political contestation and even litigation.

There are other more general and familiar trends which suggest that ‘the problem of religion’ is new, or at least has new dimensions. The first of these is globalization. Globalization in its technological manifestation enables real-time awareness of movements and events across the world, as well as networks of the like-minded, who might be mere mavericks at home. It is easy to forget that the Internet started being widely used only from the late 1990s. Globalization brings with it a strengthened awareness of diversity, which in turn is reflected in politicization as different options for the public and collective expression of religions vie for adherents. The sacred canopy has become a contest of importunate umbrella salesmen. Politicization in its turn feeds juridification, as disputants seek solutions by reference to legal norms and processes in desperate recourse to the only remainder of society’s ‘crumbling cement’ (Habermas, 1999).

In discussion of free speech and incitement to religious hatred there is a tendency to draw an analogy with blasphemy. This becomes the point of departure or more than the point of departure. But I want to suggest that a better analogy, as a starting-point, is incitement to racial hatred or (in a slightly different but related challenge) the legal and other issues around Holocaust-denial.

Clearly there is sometimes a public order concern about the forms of dangerous speech that incite hatred. We recognise occasions on which the law has to intervene to stop people saying certain things or things in a certain way or saying those things in a certain time and place. For a classic illustration used by political theorists and others, take a situation in which there is a threat of immediate violence. Such a case is sketched by John Stuart Mill in On Liberty. He is championing freedom of speech but he says:

Introduction

Savage, Warde and Devine (2004) argue that if we accept the shift in definition of class as macro-relationships such as exploitation to the possession of resources by individual actors – as many sociologists have done – then an argument can be made for the importance of concepts like cultural capital. They argue: ‘If social class is a matter of categories of people accumulating similar volumes and types of resources, and investing them in promoting their own and their children's life chances, the metaphor of capital is helpful’ (2004, p 7). I find this conception of social class as a likelihood of members achieving certain socio-economic goals (eg sustaining a position in or entering certain kinds of occupations) helpful. For the idea of class as life chances means that the definition of a class system depends not just on the existence of a hierarchy of classes, but on the probabilities of movement between classes. I also find the metaphorical extension of the idea of capital beyond the financial helpful. Yet, I want to argue here that both class and a Bourdieuian concept of cultural capital have certain important limitations in that neither of them is able to deal sociologically with some contemporary ethnic phenomena in relation to resources, capital and the likelihood of mobility.

This chapter arises in the context where, among sociologists, class is seen to be a much more substantial concept than ethnicity (see eg Fenton, 1999, 2003); where the influence of Bourdieu in the sociology of education is immense (Reay, 2004) and is believed to be transferable to ethnicity studies (May, 1999); and where the concept of cultural capital is enjoying a currency and an expectancy among those who believe that cultural pursuits have something to contribute to the amelioration of social exclusion. I want to challenge these positions by focusing on a major empirical question: why are non-white minority ethnic groups in Britain so over-represented in applications to and among students in higher education? The fact that they are is so counter-intuitive that while British sociologists have developed several lines of inquiry to explain the scholastic underachievement of non-whites (a phenomenon that has failed to occur, except in pockets), there are no theories to explain the phenomenon that has occurred. Initially, one might expect that this phenomenon might be most amenable to a cultural capital class analysis, given that it is about the acquisition of credentials for upward mobility in a stratified society and, after all, ethnicity is something to do with ‘culture’.

Introduction

Some decades ago, 'race' and gender became objects of equality struggles in Britain, as in many other places. For example, racial equality and sex-equality legislation was passed in the 1960s and 1970s. On the other hand, legislation in relation to religious discrimination and equality in the UK (outside Northern Ireland) has only been enacted in the past few years. This chapter considers how religious equality, and in particular the civic status of Muslims, has become a central feature of community relations and equal rights in Britain in the twenty first century. This involves considering the evolving and complex political and legal conceptions of racial and ethnic equality and how extending these conceptions to Muslims has created dilemmas for liberal egalitarians. Moreover, it is clear now that the political accommodation of Muslims and other post-immigration religious groups does not involve simply a commitment to religious pluralism but rethinking the nature and limits of secularism in the British context.

Introduction

There is an anti-Muslim wind blowing across the European continent. One factor is a perception that Muslims are making politically exceptional, culturally unreasonable or theologically alien demands upon European states. My contention is that the claims Muslims are making in fact parallel comparable arguments about gender or ethnic equality. Seeing the issue in that context shows how European and contemporary is the logic of mainstream Muslim identity politics.

Muslims in Europe

European anxieties and phobias in relation to immigration and cultural diversity focus on Muslims more than on any other group. This does, however, beg the question: in what way are Muslims a group and to whom are they being compared? Here I can do no more than note that there is no satisfactory way of conceptualising people of non-European descent, what Canadians call ‘visible minorities’, and therefore also of conceptualising the constituent groups that make up this category. Nevertheless, it is clear that the estimated 15 million people in the European Union (EU) who subjectively or objectively are Muslim, whatever additional identities they may have, form the single largest group of those who are the source of public anxieties.

Introduction

Most European countries do not collect data on non-White citizens and residents, only on foreigners, but it seems that more than 5% and possibly up to 10% of citizens of EU15 are of non-European descent. Currently most of the largest, in particular the capital, cities of North West Europe, are about 15%–30% non-White (that is, people of non-European descent). Even without further large-scale immigration, being a young, fertile population, these proportions will grow for at least one generation more before they stabilise, reaching or exceeding 50% in some cities in the next few decades. The trend will include some of the larger urban centres of South Europe. A high degree of racial/ethnic/religious mix in its principal cities will be the norm in 21st-century Europe, and will characterise its national economic, cultural and political life, as it has done in 20th-century US (and will do so in the 21st). Of course there will also be important differences between Western Europe and the US. Among these is the fact that the majority of non-White citizens in European countries are Muslims (the UK, where Muslims form about a third of non-White citizens or minority ethnic groups is the exception). With an estimated 15 million plus Muslims in Western Europe today, about 4% of the population (Savage, 2004), they are larger than the combined populations of Finland, Denmark and Ireland. Many people in Europe fear this newly settled population. It is popularly associated with terrorism, and many centre-left intellectuals and social scientists see it as threatening the Enlightenment heritage of Europe. In virtually every country in Western Europe, there is a perception that Muslims are making politically exceptional, culturally unreasonable or theologically alien demands on European states. To counter this I shall show in this chapter that the claims Muslims are making in fact parallel comparable arguments about gender or ethnic equality. Seeing the issue in that context shows how European and contemporary the logic of mainstream Muslim identity politics is. In addition I argue that multicultural politics must embrace a moderate secularism and resist radical secularism. I shall focus on the case of Britain in particular.

British equality movements

Muslim assertiveness became a feature of majority–minority relations only from around the early 1990s; prior to this, racial equality discourse and politics were dominated by the idea that the dominant post-immigration issue was ‘colour racism’.

Exclusion and Inclusion

Ethnic identities as publicly projected self-concepts have proved to be unexpectedly popular in Britain among members of ethnic minorities, especially compared to earlier migrant groups and their descendants, say, Jews from eastern Europe. Minority groups have played a major role in determining the public character of these identities, as well as in relation to the prevalence and decline of specific labels. A key feature of these self-concepts has been their politically oppositional character. This was less salient initially – when one might have expected migrants to have had a greater sense of “otherness” – and became more prominent as migrants became more settled and a new generation reached adulthood. Oppositional stances increased as interaction with mainstream British society and policy participation rose, when one would have expected, if not assimilation, a softening of ethnic identities.

The explanation of this paradox begins with racism: Non-Whites were perceived and treated as racially defined groups of inferiors, outsiders, and competitors whose right to be in Britain and to be treated as equal citizens was not fully accepted. That they were marked out as “racial” groups and understood as racialized ethnicities has three implications (Modood, Berthoud, & Nazroo, 2002). First, migrants were perceived as a collectivity or more precisely as collectivities rather than merely as individuals, neighbors, fellow-workers, citizens, and so on.

By European standards Britain has good data-sources for identifying the current educational profile of the key ethnic minorities, and for tracking them over time. Data-sources include the census, though it was only in 1991 that an explicit ethnic group question was included; the PEP-PSI (Policy Studies Institute) surveys; the Labour Force Surveys (LFS); local education authority data; the Youth Cohort Survey; and national data on university entrants collected by the Universities Central Admissions Survey (UCAS) and the Higher Education Funding Councils. There is also an ethnographic literature about schools and young people, and a related theoretical and policy literature. In general, however, the data are nothing like as extensive or as detailed as those available in the USA.

The statistical data tend to show that scholastic achievement does vary by ethnicity but that at least on some measures racial disadvantage is declining and the circumstances of the minority groups are diverging. Some groups are poorly placed in educational and occupational hierarchies, others have overtaken the white population in the acquisition of qualifications and, consquently, in entry to some prestigious professions, though perhaps all minorities are underrepresented as managers in large establishments.

A developing pattern

The importance of educational attainments lies not just in their importance in accessing the better jobs and achieving social mobility. It is also significant because the attainments of (most) ethnic minority groups have proven to be quite remarkable, bearing in mind that one of the main stimuli to research on the educational attainments of nonwhite ethnic minority groups was the concern in the 1970s that children from these groups were “underachieving” in schools.