In the media and among politicians in recent years it has been common to point to tendencies among Muslim communities which seek to either isolate themselves from the surrounding society or seek actively to position themselves in public opposition to it. This especially happens around national elections when isolationist tendencies are interpreted as a sign of a deep incompatibility between Islam and democracy while oppositional voices are interpreted as proof of such incompatibility. At several recent general elections in the United Kingdom, party election posters in some districts of Muslim residential concentration, certain districts of, for example, Birmingham and Bradford, have been defaced with slogans calling on Muslims not to vote in a kafir system. While John Bowen's study on Islam in France (Bowen 2010) does not directly investigate Muslim activity during elections his account identifies a sector, especially among young Muslims, that withdraws from society into their own religio-cultural enclaves. At the other end of the spectrum have been the instances of political parties seeking to attract a Muslim vote (see Didero and Peace in this volume)

Introduction

Compared with other major European cities, the Brussels- Capital Region has a unique configuration in terms of the political representation of elected representatives descended from diverse ethnocultural groups, and in particular Muslim elected representatives. Nearly one out of five members of the Parliament of the Brussels-Capital Region is of Muslim origin. This is all the more unique given that, for the first time in Brussels and in the entire European Union, one of the seats in the Brussels Parliament is held by a Muslim member who wears a headscarf (Mahinur Ozdemir).

This political representation lies within the scope of a city where more than 50% of the inhabitants are foreigners or of foreign origin. It is, however, difficult to have precise figures regarding the number of Muslims in the capital. Nevertheless, their presence is significant enough – especially in certain municipalities of Brussels – to have a relative impact on electoral results.

The objective of this chapter is to understand the explanatory factors regarding this political representation, which is quite unusual in Europe, by formulating the hypothesis of the deciding influence of institutional parameters combined with the demographic evolution and community mobilisation of Muslims.

Political participation covers a large scope including different modes of individual or collective action. This chapter is aimed at examining the political participation of Muslims – in the conventional sense1 (Mayer and Perrineau 1992) – in the Brussels Region, and more precisely its political representation through the examination of the evolution of the electoral behaviour of Belgian Muslim citizens and elected representatives in the Brussels regional elections.

Introduction

In Britain and France Islam is a faith encompassing many cultures, which has created very significant political issues in terms of the visibility and number of Muslims. The most recent official United Kingdom Census of 2001 estimated that there were 1.6 million Muslims in the UK, mainly of South Asian origin, representing 3% of the total population (Summerfield and Baljit 2005: 182). Sean McLoughlin and Tahir Abbas reported that the Office for National Statistics estimate was 2.4 million Muslims in 2009 in the United-Kingdom (McLoughlin and Abbas 2010: 545). This places Islam, as in France, as the second main religion in the country. In France, where Muslims are mainly of North-African descent, it is more difficult to evaluate the exact number of Muslims since any census of the population on religious or ethnic criteria is forbidden. Despite this, one estimate has given a potential number of 4.1 million, and in 2007 the National Institute of Statistics estimated that Muslims represented 7.1% of the total population (Zwilling 2010: 184). At a European level, these figures place British and French Muslim communities as the third and the first largest in western Europe respectively.

Introduction

In comparison with many other European countries, Britain's ethnic minorities have been very successful at achieving political representation and making an impact on the political system. Whereas migrants and their descendants in other countries may have struggled for years to gain the right to vote and stand in elections, Commonwealth migrants to Britain from her former colonies were automatically given the right to citizenship, including full political rights. This even pre-dated the mass migration to Britain of the 1950s and 1960s, and three Members of Parliament (MPs) from the Indian subcontinent, though none Muslim, were elected to the House of Commons before World War II (Anwar 2001). Even today, citizens of the Commonwealth countries have full voting rights at all levels and can stand as candidates. Muslims have certainly played an important role in British electoral politics – be they migrants, British-born or even converts to Islam. The vast majority of Muslims in the UK trace their heritage to South Asia and it is they who have made the biggest impact. The first Muslim in Britain to hold elected office was Bashir Maan who emigrated from Pakistan to Britain in 1953. He became a City Councillor in Glasgow in 1970 and it was in that same city that Mohammad Sarwar was elected as the first Muslim MP in 1997.

Introduction

This chapter examines the debate on the supposed crisis and even death of multiculturalism in Europe. It aims, in particular, at analysing the limits and potentialities of the Italian (Allievi 2010: 147–80; Triadafyllidou 2006: 117–42; Zincone 1994) and UK (Malik 2010: 11–64; Modood 2006: 37–56; Parekh 2006; Phillips 2007) political systems, two interesting and contrasting case studies. To address this issue, a strategic point of view has been chosen, namely the participation of Muslim women in the traditional spaces of politics, both at the local and at the national level. It should be recognised at this juncture that for women in general this kind of involvement is the most difficult to gain access to, even within contemporary Western settings. The additional merit of choosing the perspective of minority women stems from the fact that, in their case, participation not only implies the achievement of citizenship rights, a precondition that, for instance, in Italy has not yet been fulfilled, but also mastery of the material and symbolic tools of the political and cultural setting of the country; not to mention the capacity to clear the traditional social and cultural obstacles that keep women away from political representation in the first place. Adopting the lens of Muslim women's experiences, therefore, offers an insightful diagnosis of the Italian and British approach to cultural and religious pluralism and of the influence of gender on mainstream notions of citizenship and national identity.

Introduction

The issue of the political representation of Maghrebi (North African) immigrants and their descendants in France, now redefined as a question of representation of Muslims, has been a long-standing debate in the French policy arena. The importance of representation in the French case is perhaps more heightened than in other EU countries because of France's particular model of secularism (laïcité) and statist political ideology. More so than other countries, the French state has raised numerous obstacles to Islamic practice, thus making political participation among Muslims a high-stakes endeavour. In order to make claims on the state and demand religious rights and recognition – in an era of anti-Islam discourse and in political and cultural fields that seek the elimination of religion from public space – French Muslims critically require means of political participation. But the question of who can represent the diversity of French Islamic practices and religious needs looms large, especially when the state demands Muslim interlocutors. It is commonly thought and argued that representation is difficult because Muslims in France are divided by ethnic background. While there are important ethnic differences among Algerians, Moroccans, Turks, and black Africans, I suggest that these are not nearly as salient as they are usually made out to be. For the younger generation of Muslims, they are even less consequential.

Islam in Lithuania – the background

The last census (that of 2001, in which, among others, a question on religious identity was included) for which there is publicly available official statistics produced the following figures for Lithuanian inhabitants adhering to Islam: 2,860 Sunni Muslims or 0.1% of the total population, 1,679 of whom (or 58.7% of all Sunni Muslims) identified themselves as ethnic Tatars, 362 (12.6%) as Azerbaijanis, 185 (6.5%) as Lithuanians, 74 as Russians, 15 as Belarusians, 13 as Polish, five as Ukrainians and even four as Jewish (Department 2002: 204–5). There is no data available on Shi'is.

The biggest group of Lithuania's inhabitants with a Muslim background, the Lithuanian Tatars (3,235 in 2001, (Department 2002: 188–9)), have been living in the eastern part of today's Republic of Lithuania since the fourteenth century when they started settling in what then was the territory of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania (GDL, the lands of which are now divided among Lithuania, Belarus and Poland) as mercenaries and political immigrants (Račius 2009: 16–17).

Though precise data are not available, it can, from anecdotal evidence, be safely assumed that at no time in history did the Muslim population of the GDL exceed 100,000. Despite or because of the fact that Muslims have been only a tiny minority of the citizenry of the GDL, they enjoyed almost all the rights and freedoms that their Christian fellow citizens did.