Coping with Islamophobia: The effects of religious stigma on Muslim minorities’ identity formation
Highlights
► We investigate whether religious stigma affects Muslim minorities' national affiliation. ► We examine the degree to which religious identity mediates these effects. ► Perceived Islamophobia, religious discrimination and negative representations in media predicted national affiliation. ► The effects were mediated by religious identity in one of the study samples.
Introduction
Anti-Muslim and islamophobic sentiments in the Western world have gained increased scientific attention following the September 11, 2001 terror attacks (Sirin & Balsano, 2007). Although the identity formation of ethnic minorities in general has been a frequent topic of research, the effects of religious stigma on the identity formation of Muslims living in societies that are suspicious of Islamic beliefs have been a neglected topic. Accordingly, this study set out to explore the extent to which perceptions of an islamophobic society, experiences of religious discrimination and negative representations of Muslims in the media influence Muslims’ religious identity, national identity and national engagement in a group of Norwegian-Pakistani and German-Turkish1 Muslims.
While the religious composition of many Western European countries have remained stable over long periods of time, increasing south-north migration in recent years is contributing to the development of multireligious societies (Simon, 2004). Many of the immigrants come from countries where Islam is the majority religion, and currently, between 13 and 14 million people living in Western Europe have Muslim backgrounds (Maréchal, 2002). The changing intranational religious composition of many European countries, however, is not embraced by everyone. As Poynting and Mason (2007) point out, there has been a shift “from anti-Asian and anti-Arab racism to anti-Muslim racism” (p. 61) and this has been heightened following the terror attacks of 9/11. Likewise, political debates have increasingly focused on questions regarding Muslim immigrants, who are often seen as difficult to integrate (Field, 2007), whereas right-wing political parties and individuals in many countries have promoted the idea of insurmountable cultural differences, creating an atmosphere of hostility (Betz & Meret, 2009).
The term ‘Islamophobia’, which was reportedly introduced at the end of the 1980s (Runnymede Trust Commission, 1997), has increasingly been used to describe this fear of Islam and of Muslims as a social group. Furthermore, various studies and reports have reported a rise of Islamophobia in many Western majority populations and in Western media (e.g., EUMC, 2006, Poynting and Mason, 2006, Saeed, 2007).
In Germany, immigration has been the subject of highly charged and partly inflammatory political discourse over the last four decades (Thränhardt, 1995). Since the beginning of the 21st century, public discourse on immigration has increasingly focused on Muslims and Islam as a major challenge to “liberal democracy and Germany's political order” (Bauder & Semmelroggen, 2009, p. 20). A 2004 opinion poll in Germany indicated that a vast majority of the participants associated Islam with terror and with the oppression of women. Moreover, more than half of the respondents did not believe in the peaceful coexistence of Christianity and Islam (Noelle, 2004, PEW, 2006).
This development ultimately peaked in August 2010, when ThiloSarrazin, a representative of the German Social Democratic Party, in a bestselling book stated that migration from Islamic countries constitutes a major threat to the European cultural model and that Muslim migrants generally are uninterested in education, unwilling to integrate and a threat to the nation.
Although Sarrazin's views were spurned and criticized by some, they seemed to reflect the Zeitgeist. In recent representative opinion polls, about half of the German participants agreed with Sarrazin's statements, and nearly 20% indicated that they would vote for a political party with Sarrazin as a leader (Consumer field work, 2010, Silalahi, 2010). Moreover, an opinion poll published in 2010 showed that most participants agreed with the statement that “Muslims’ religious practice in Germany should be substantially restricted” (Decker, Weißmann, Kiess, & Brähler, 2010). Finally, the recently appointed interior minister, Hans-Peter Friedrich, publicly asserted that “Islam does not belong to Germany” (Vitzthum, 2011).
In Norway, since the 1980s, negative attitudes against immigration have received increased public attention and support from the majority population (Andersen and Bjørklund, 1999, Blom, 2009). As in other Western countries, Muslims in Norway have received a lot of attention in the media following 9/11, reaching its climax in 2006, when the Norwegian magazine “Magazinet” reprinted the Danish caricatures of the prophet Mohammed, which caused Muslims all over the world to protest (Steien, 2008). As a result, questions related to the compatibility of Islam with basic Norwegian societal values have repeatedly been raised, specifically dealing with Muslim women's veiling practices, oppression of women, freedom of speech and democracy in general (ECRI, 2009). Not surprisingly, increasing numbers of Norwegians are skeptical to Muslim immigrants and immigration (IMDi, 2007). On the 22nd of July 2011, the terror attacks by Anders Behring Breivik, a self-declared Islam-hater and enemy of multiculturalism, tragically indicate that these sentiments also have become part of the Norwegian society in a radicalized form.
Norwegian-Pakistanis and German-Turks constitute the largest Muslim minority groups and the largest non-Western groups of labor immigrants in their respective countries. However, whereas nearly 55% of the Norwegian-Pakistanis possess a Norwegian passport (Statistics Norway, 2010), only about one fourth of the German-Turks have a German passport (German Federal Foreign Office, 2010), suggesting that the naturalization process of labor migrants to Europe has come a longer way in Norway.
Lastly, German-Turks and Norwegian-Pakistanis are often seen as unsuccessful minority groups compared to other ethnic minorities. Several reports have described both groups as poorly integrated in light of their high unemployment rates, low academic achievements and relatively poor proficiency in the national language (see, e.g., Daugstad, 2008, German Federal Statistical Office, 2007; also see Table 9 of Statistics Norway, 2009).
For immigrants in plural societies, the task of reconciling their cultural and ethnic heritage with a new national identity constitutes a central issue (Sam & Berry, 2010). The process of acquiring a national identity does not imply that immigrants abandon their cultural roots. Rather, according to Stepick and Stepick (2002), given that the new country encourages cultural variation, immigrants become part of the multicultural composition within the nation's territory. Thus, immigrants can maintain their cultural identity while adopting a new national identity.
In a settlement society where cultural diversity is not celebrated, immigrants may perceive their cultural identity as being derided and may experience discrimination, negative stereotypes and prejudice based on their group membership. In this regards, because individuals’ self-concepts are based to a large extent on their social identities derived from various group memberships (see, e.g., Brown, 2000), individuals who perceive that they lack the resources to deal with being a target of stigma may experience threats to their selves (Major, Quinton, & McCoy, 2002). When individuals face identity threats, they employ diverse coping strategies. One strategy is to trivialize stigma-related events by simply diminishing the discriminatory value of a potential stressor (Major et al., 2002). Nevertheless, members of groups that are chronic targets of discrimination may be highly vigilant to stigma (Major et al., 2002) and may not be able to simply minimize the discriminatory value of an respective event. Conversely, they are likely to choose an “intropunitive or extropunative focus” (Major et al., 2002, p. 257) by either attributing negative treatment to themselves or to external factors.
Another strategy to cope with identity threats may be to disengage from, and avoid identity-threatening domains (Major and O’Brien, 2005, Steele et al., 2002). However, research has also shown that individuals may choose the opposite approach. On the one hand, they may engage in counter-stereotypic behavior in an effort to appear as different from their stigmatized group (Steele et al., 2002). On the other hand, they may choose to further increase their engagement in threatening domains, developing innovative strategies to circumvent obstacles and to achieve positive outcomes (Miller & Major, 2003).
Yet another possible way of coping with identity threats is to alter one's identification with the stigmatized group. Although there is no consensus about the causal relation between individuals’ group identification and the experience of stigma, altered group identification may result from, rather than predict identity threats (Branscombe, Schmitt, & Harvey, 1999). In this situation, individuals with a low group identity may further reduce their in-group identification when faced with stigma, whereas persons with a high group identity may increase their identification (Major & O’Brien, 2005).
In multicultural societies, the experience of stigma may crucially affect the formation of minorities’ identities (Mähönen, Jasinskaja-Lahti, & Liebkind, 2011). Two models have attempted to explain the consequences of stigma for minorities’ identity formation. According to the rejection-identification model (RIM) developed by Branscombe et al. (1999), minority group members increase their group identity as a response to stigma. In contrast, in their rejection-disidentification model (RDIM), Jasinskaja-Lahti, Liebkind, and Solheim (2009) suggest that individuals decrease their national identification as a coping strategy. However, while the RIM model does not include multiple in-group identities and has only gained partial support in replication studies (see, e.g., Leach, Mosquera, Vliek, & Hirt, 2010), the RDIM was developed only recently and has not yet been tested in other studies to the best of our knowledge. Thus, the distinct effects of stigma on minorities’ identity formation remain an area for future research.
Considering that many ethnic minorities are also members of religious minority groups, it is striking how little this emerging field has paid attention to religious identity. According to Foner and Alba (2008), religion can act as a mediator by helping minorities to cope with acculturative stress and social isolation, thereby easing their adaption to the society. Consequently, members of religious minority groups may strengthen their religious identity in order to cope with stigma-related experiences (Verkuyten and Yildiz, 2007, Ysseldyk et al., 2010).
Given the societal climate and the aforementioned theoretical framework, Muslims may experience stigma based on their religious group membership, which, in turn, may affect their affiliation with the dominant society and with their religious group. To our knowledge, only Verkuyten and Yildiz (2007) and Sirin et al. (2008) have estimated these relations to date. In the Verkuyten and Yildiz study, religious identity negatively impacted the national identification of the Dutch-Turkish participants. Furthermore, perceived group rejection was found to be a positive predictor of religious identity, whereas it negatively predicted national identity. However, Sirin et al.’s study focused on U.S. Muslims from various ethnic backgrounds and their results indicated that the participants’ religious identity was positively correlated with their national identity.
In short, the studies conducted so far do not provide an unambiguous finding of the influence of stigma on Muslim minorities’ identity formation. Moreover, the studies have not explicitly distinguished between different mechanisms of stigma, which may vary in their strength of impact on different constructs measuring Muslims’ national affiliation.
Against this background, the present study seeks a better understanding of how religious identity and religious stigma might influence Muslims’ national identification and engagement. For religious stigma, we distinguished between religious meta-stereotypes, specifically perceived Islamophobia, religious discrimination and negative collective representations of Muslims in media. To investigate the degree to which these relations are universal or dependent on cultural and contextual factors, the study explicitly compared the experiences of the two largest Muslim minorities in two Western European countries, namely German-Turks and Norwegian-Pakistanis.
Specifically, we examine the following hypotheses:
- 1.
Religious identity will be inversely related to national identification and engagement. Given the opinion climate in Norway and Germany, where being a Muslim is frequently presented as irreconcilable with being a member of the nation, we expected that participants would cope with a religious identity threat by decreasing their involvement in, and identification with their nation of residence.
- 2.
The three stigma constructs (i.e., perceived Islamophobia, negative representations in media and religious discrimination) were expected to have direct negative effects on the participants’ national identity and engagement. In other words, the various forms of religious stigma were expected to induce a religious identity threat, to which the participants would respond with national disengagement and disidentification.
- 3.
All stigma constructs were expected to also have indirect negative effects on the outcome variables that are mediated by religious identity. When coping with a religious identity threat resulting from religious stigma, the respondents were expected to strengthen their religious identity. In line with the first hypothesis, this was expected to impinge negatively on their national identity and engagement.
Section snippets
Participants
A total of 426 respondents completed the survey, of whom 210 were Norwegian-Pakistanis and 216 German-Turks. The majority of participants in both samples were young adults, most of whom were female, Sunni Muslims and belonged to the second-generation of immigrants (see Table 1). Most of the Norwegian-Pakistani participants had naturalized as Norwegian nationals, whereas only about half of the German-Turkish participants were naturalized German nationals.
Procedure
The data were obtained through online
Differences between the samples on the different measures
Before testing our hypothetical model, we compared the German-Turks with their Norwegian counterparts (Norwegian-Pakistanis) on the main instruments. With the exception of National engagement at the private level, the two groups differed on all the scales. Sometimes the difference was in favor of the Norwegian sample, and sometimes in favor of the German sample. The effect sizes also varied from small to large. A summary of these differences can be found in Table 2.
Discussion
The goal of the present study was to investigate how Muslims, as a stigmatized minority group, negotiate their national affiliation in contemporary Western European societies. Our results suggest that religious stigma indeed plays an important role. The results also suggest that religious identity does not only influence Muslim minorities’ national identification and engagement, but also mediates the influence of religious stigma. While all our hypotheses were partially supported, a number of
Conclusion
To recap, politicians and nationals of many Western societies have frequently expressed concerns about an apparent lack of integration of Muslim minorities. In public discourse, the main responsibility for this situation has been given to Muslims themselves, whereas little attention has been paid to societal circumstances. However, our study suggests that religious stigma constitutes a major obstacle to Muslims’ national affiliation. In order to achieve a common national cohesiveness and
Acknowledgments
Special thanks go to the Islamic Council of Norway, the Norwegian Muslim Student Association and the Association of Alevi Youth in Germany for supporting this research. Finally, we thank all participants in Norway and Germany who volunteered to participate in this study.
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