The ways in which Islam provides new definitions of self and intimacy in public is at the intersection of culture and politics. Especially in contexts of secular and modern publics, the coming out of Islam from the private to the public sphere takes place with performative acts, such as veiling and segregation of sexes, which underpins religious difference and Muslim habits but also expresses resistance to assimilative and secular modernity. The redesigning of the frontiers between private and public spheres and (...) the control of gender socialization becomes a central stake for islamist politics. Through these micro-practices and gendered frontiers between private and public spheres, an Islamic social imaginary is at work generating new definitions of religious Islamic self in counterdistinction with liberal and emancipatory definitions of modern subject. (shrink)

In_ Islam and Secularity_ Nilüfer Göle takes on two pressing issues: the transforming relationship between Islam and Western secular modernity and the impact of the Muslim presence in Europe. Göle shows how the visibility of Islamic practice in the European public sphere unsettles narratives of Western secularism. As mutually constitutive, Islam and secularism permeate each other, the effects of which play out in embodied and aesthetic practices and are accompanied by fear, anxiety, and violence. In this timely book, Göle illuminates (...) the recent rethinking of secularism and religion, of modernity and resistance to it, of the public significance of sexuality, and of the shifting terrain of identity in contemporary Europe. (shrink)

The public visibility of Islam reveals new political stakes in European democracies around issues of immigration and citizenship. By focusing on the societal debates and the controversies around the construction of mosques and minarets, this article explores the ways in which Islamic difference is manifested, perceived and framed in public life. The ‘visibility’ of Islam in public is conceptualized as a form of agency, a manifestation of religious difference that cannot be thought independent of the materiality of culture, namely aesthetic (...) forms, dress codes, or architectural genres. It is argued that the debates for or against the banning of the construction of mosques and/or minarets reveal the tumultuous transition of Muslims from the status of the invisible migrant-worker to that of visible Muslim citizenship. The public visibility is approached therefore as a radically disruptive, transgressive, provocative form of transformative agency that is intrinsically related to the political process of becoming citizens. (shrink)