PROJECT ENDED
[this page is no longer updated]
Religious Discrimination of Muslims in the European Union:
Experience of Injustice, Fight for Recognition, and Implementation
of Equality in a Plural Society
[DISCRIMUSMIN]
Directed by Valérie Amiraux
The project addressed religious discrimination (defined as the discrimination of people for belonging to a religion, for holding a belief or for manifesting it) of Muslim populations in the broader perspective of religious pluralism in the European Union. It has concentrated during two years (01/2005-12/2006) on the various interpretations, processes of implementation and uses of the European anti-discrimination provisions in four EU member states (France, Germany, Great-Britain, Italy), emphasising the conflicting narratives that can be articulated around the notion of religious discrimination. By narratives, it is referred to the different ways the story of injustice done to Muslims is told in the four studied EU members states.
Most of the results have been published as articles or chapters.
This project raised different sets of questions related to broader frameworks such as religious pluralism, regime of secularity, minority religion, claim making, equality of treatment and recognition. As a more empirical focus of study, it concentrated on specific court-cases in which Muslims have been trying to defend their right to live as Muslims in non Muslim secular European contexts.
In this project, the notion of religious discrimination has been used as a way to look at the processes through which what is taken for granted and in most of the case what is unquestioned (the religious believing and belonging of European citizens), is made first visible, second problematic in the particular cases of Muslims. In secular contexts, the simple fact that religion are not just ideas and opinions but may manifest themselves as a way of living according to the requirements of the religion/belief is directly questioning the historical compromise that lead in most European contexts to secularization of societies (though interpreted differently depending upon the country), i.e. the believer performs his religion 'according to religious rules and convictions in daily life'.
The central hypothesis is the following: religious discrimination may be relevant in helping to map the specific forms of inequality and injustice that certain Muslim individuals are experiencing in specific sectors, in particular education and employment. From a pure academic and social sciences perspective, introducing the notion of 'religious discrimination' may help to observe and demonstrate new frames for analysing the situation of Muslims in EU member states. Discrimination could illustrate of new grammar of social conflicts.