Random Variable

This second part of my report on the religion and politics conference is rather late. I was busy.

Specifically, I was busy madly dancing to this:

The first afternoon session was entitled “Europe’s Soul”. For some reason, this was heavily Italy-based with papers on spiritual conceptions of politics in the catholic church and the development of Secularism in the Italian legal system.

Carin Laudrup presented a paper on the battle of EU’s soul, focusing on the impact of religious education. She made a strong case for John M Hull’s three models of RE:

1. Learning religion
2. Learning about religion
3. Learning from religion

Laudrup claimed that RE is responsible for the entrenchment of nations and religions, which reduces the possibility of integration.

The final session was on Islam in the EU.

Benoit Challand did a temporal comparison of the question of Turkey over the last fifty years. What was interesting was that Turkey was seen as a vanguard of Europe in the fight against communism in original discussions over integration into the EU in 1959. Ultimately, they were rejected on the grounds of economics alone. Religious identity simply didn’t come into it. However, modern representations of Turkey in school textbooks looks like this:

Thus, Turkey is being dehumanized in textbook representation.

He claims that the question of religion and Europe is a very recent one.

On a similar theme, Luca Mavelli looked at the very core of European identity - “freedom”, “tolerance” etc… For him, these are very empty signifiers based on a selective memory of Europe’s world role - a memory which isn’t selective for Europe’s colonial victims. He ultimately believes that Europe doesn’t have an identity, and is in the process of forming one.

Katherine Brown looked at the impact of British policy towards mosques on female agency. Ultimately, British security policy is predicated on a orientalist myth of women as subservient wives and mothers, but are responsible for running the family. There is a belief that Muslim women are all Western liberals, if only they could be liberated, and that therefore they are the frontline of counter-terrorism operations. This ignores, for example, female piety movements which are highly orthodox. In addition, British policy around getting women into mosques is practically patriarchal chivalry. The end result is a securitization of mosques based on a lack of knowledge, and a denial of female agency.

Parveen Akhtar presented an ethnography of Unity FM, the successor to Ramadan FM which now has a 5 year license in Birmingham. She looked at non-classical forms of political participation, as expressed in radio discussions and local action. She explained how first generation migrants did not originally get involved due to the myth of return back to the homeland. As they gradually got more settled in Britain, they got involved, but bought over South Asian modes of politics to Britain. So votes for party candidates run along the lines of kinship networks and family patriarchy. Key to her argument was the claim that it is not apathy that reduces ethnic minority participation in British politics, but alienation.

[1] The Contribution of Religious Education to Religious Freedom

Due to an incident involving not being able to find my tickets for the Wireless Festival later today, and planned engineering works on the Underground which I completely forgot about, I arrived an hour late.

As a result, I only caught François Foret’s presentation on legitimation issues for the EU, and Max Fras and David Herbert’s presentation on European Enlargement and Secularizaton in Eastern Europe.

Foret’s take home message is that religious institutions may become banalised to private individual practise or play a larger role in the creation of a European polity. However, he doesn’t believe religion is a particularly special case for the EU, in the fact that the European identity still has yet to be established, and the EU’s current method of building functionalist institutions doesn’t lend itself too well to the creation of legitmacy and identity.

Fras and Herbert presented a few examples of Eastern Europe, namely Poland, Romania and Hungary within the context of secularisation and religion. They believe that what is currently taking place is a deprivitisation of religion in Eastern Europe, after experiencing decades of forced-secularisation by the Soviets, it is natural that religion reemerges. Their talk ties in with Sabah Mahmood’s claims that we need to challenge notions that greater affluence, open markets, education, healthcare etc… neccesarily results in secularisation.

Norman Doe presenting a paper on a possible common law for Europe, came in for a lot of flak, which he treated with very good humour. He’s the kind of person you’d like as a supervisor but you know would make a flippant remark when you need some crucial assistance.

Anyway, next session in ten minutes.