1. Reluctant pluralists: European Muslims and essentialist identities.
- Author
-
Gest, Justin
- Subjects
IDENTITY & society ,ESSENTIALISM (Philosophy) ,BANGLADESHIS ,MUSLIMS ,SPANISH Muslims ,MOROCCANS ,NATIONAL character ,MANNERS & customs ,PHILOSOPHY & society - Abstract
An emerging consensus among scholars of Muslim political and social identity suggests that Western Muslims live out an anti-essentialist critique of identity construction. Considering this view, this paper examines a cross-national comparison of British Bangladeshis in London and Spanish Moroccans in Madrid that solicits the perceptions of working-class Muslim men. While the results indeed reaffirm respondents' concomitant relationships to a variety of identity paradigms, interview content demonstrates that subjects' multiplicity is complicated by their desire to meet – not reject – the essentialist standards of belonging to the identity paradigms discursively available to them. Rather than defiantly cherry-picking preferred characteristics of religion, ethnicity and nationality, individuals' responses suggest that they are trying to fulfil perceived standards of authenticity. Such a contention helps explain the prevalence of Western Muslims' expressed and well-documented ‘identity crisis’, suggests the enduring relevance of identity essentialisms, and more broadly, complicates post-modern conceptions of identity formation. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]
- Published
- 2015
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