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Revised Research Proposal

 

Muslims in Southeast Europe, like Muslims worldwide, are turning Islam into a significant public force. The re-emergence of Islam in the public sphere is a plural and varied process. In some contexts, State Islam is government imposed and implemented by contrasting ruling regimes (monarchs, military, and clergy), and Islamic organizations and movements have taken many different forms. Likewise, re-Islamization is a diverse and complex process which occurs not only in countries and regions with Muslim majorities as those in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) but also among the large Muslim minorities in North America and Europe. Even before the tragedy of September 11, 2001 yet even more thereafter, the Western approach to Muslim politics and the Islamic factor in politics has been predominantly selective and crisis-oriented, focusing on the acts of extremists.

One of the unfortunate effects of this approach has been that Islam as religion and culture has been frequently misperceived and sometimes even identified with terrorism. In the last years, this resulted in the establishment of a destructive image of a militant Islam as opposed to moderate mainstream Islam. Yet “religion is obviously central to the political life of peoples around the world, not simply to Muslims” (Dale Eickelman and James Piscatori, Muslim Politics, Princeton University Press: Princeton, New Jersey, 1996, p.56); however, the notion of an “Islamic threat” coming mainly from Arab political regimes and movements has been created in the West. Observers speak of the alleged incompatibility of Islam and democracy, of the fanaticism of “Islamic fundamentalists” and of the strong opposition to the secularization and modernization of Middle Eastern societies that have completely different cultural values than those of the West.

Islamic actors with an agenda in the public sphere challenge the domestic politics of various EU countries as well as the political life in many of the EU ‘candidates’ and ‘neighbours’. Both the Muslim-majority world and the Muslim minorities in Europe outside the EU are perceived as a challenge for the Wider Europe Initiative and the new European Neighbourhood Policy (ENP) which seeks to share the benefits of the EU’s enlargement with the neighboring Eastern and Southern countries. For these Muslim-minority communities the long-standing cultural links with the region of MENA or with Turkey are getting more and more important in the period after the Cold War. In this context Bulgaria is the only Balkan country with a substantial Muslim minority (more than 12%) which is expected to become a full EU member in 2007. In this context of regional and increasingly globalizing Islam-related challenges, the policy of Bulgaria to the Muslim-majority world, and sometimes even to the local Muslim community, since the democratic changes in early 1990s has been erratic and virtually non-existent on a conceptual level. As a result Islam is underestimated and misused as a factor in the design of the public policy in Bulgaria.

This project is based on the assumption that Islam should be used as a factor trough which the EU can make its ‘neighbourhood’ project more effective. Further, sharing its experience during the century long interethnic and interfaith coexistence Bulgaria can contribute to the Wider Europe processes. There is an urgent need to search for new strategies, continually re-thinking the role of Islam and its potential to collaborate in addressing the more trenchant problems of domestic and international affairs.

Thus, the overall goal of the project is to contribute to the development of new strategies and neighbourhood policies that bear in mind the cultural and religious factors, particularly Islam, from the perspective and within the context of Wider Europe processes. The research will consist of:

• Interdisciplinary research on Islam and the manifestation of Muslim identity in the public sphere in Europe and the Middle East;
  
• Debate the capacity of the new Muslim publics to participate in a public process of overcoming the broader cultural divide between “Islam” and the “West”
  
• Exploring the Bulgarian, and more generally the Balkan, model for interethnic and interfaith coexistence in the ENP context;
  
• Identify and propose new secular mechanisms for working with and through religion, particularly Islam, in the process of policy design rather than to by-pass religion as traditional secular approaches suggest;

The end-products of the project will be a research paper and a policy paper containing policy recommendations for the Bulgarian government and the European institutions in Brussels devoted to the issue at which extent Islam should play a role in the further design and the implementation of the European 'neighbourhood' project. The research is also envisaged to provoke academic interest in its methodologies. The results might be applied by both state policy institutions and NGOs. The publications in specialized periodicals will also contribute to the resonance of the research’s results among the expert community in the region and internationally.

Methodologically, the basic working hypothesis of the project is that policy analysis and policy design should not simply rely on the modernist strategy which identified religion as the problem and proposed the solution by way of “classical” secularism, which is to avoid religion’s conflictual terrain by setting it outside the public sphere. Obviously, this vision of national and international life purified of religious strains has not come to fruition. This, namely, suggests a turn to the second path: starting with the potential of religion to contribute to the solution by working with and through religions. Further, one of the research challenges within this project is to study if Islamism could not be seen only as a product of conflicts wrought by modernizing social and economic changes but also as a significant modernizing factor within Muslim communities in different regions of Europe and the Middle East.