Interrogating Muslims

Well-written, perceptive, and un-flinching in its analysis, Schirin Amir-Moazami’s Interrogating Muslims is an important and timely intervention into the conversations and contestations around the Muslim Question in Germany. Amir-Moazami shows with rare clarity that we should think of ‘integration’ less as the incontrovertible good in the contested terrain of majority-minority relations and more as a crucial element in the governance of Muslim minorities—and in the identity formation of the majority. Through the lens of the Muslim Question, what comes into focus here is in fact the question of Germany’s liberal identity itself. * Heiko Henkel, Associate Professor of Anthropology, University of Copenhagen, Denmark * Schirin Amir-Moazami carefully studies how the structural interrogation of Muslims by state institutions in Europe forms an intrinsic part of the politics of integration. It does not stem from 9/11 and its aftermath, but has a much longer and more structural genealogy that connects it to the ‘liberal-secular matrix,’ the politics of recognition, and the colonial mindset. This book provides the fundamental critique of integration in relation to Muslims in Europe that we needed. * Yolande Jansen, Associate Professor of Social and Political Philosophy, University of Amsterdam, the Netherlands * By tracing the connections between the current political occupation with the integration of Muslims and the longer trajectories of nation-state building and European colonial projects, this book provides an important and refreshing contribution to the literature on integration and its discontent. * Birgitte Schepelern Johansen, Associate Professor of Cross-Cultural and Regional Studies, University of Copenhagen, Denmark *