Joppke, Christian and John Torpey. Legal Integration of Islam: A Transatlantic Comparison

JOPPKE, Christian and John Torpey. Legal Integration of Islam: A Transatlantic Comparison. Cambridge, Mass., Harvard University Press, 2013. 211pp. Cloth, $39.95--The aim of this treatise is to determine how four democracies--France, Germany, Canada, and United States--have responded to Islamic immigration and demands made by their new immigrant population. As described by Joppke and Torpey, liberal institutions may be ill-suited to deal forthrightly with those demands. Given that liberal institutions are designed to remain indifferent to creeds and comprehensive doctrines, this complicates matters when it comes to assimilating Muslims. Such institutions are compelled to remain agnostic with respect to what Islam really is and to treat it as just another religion in Western sense. That Islam may not be commensurate with liberal principles or pose a threat to liberal societies cannot be addressed. In our era of procedural, postnational state, governing institutions are required to remain equidistant from majority and minority claims, in fact, even indifferent to good. Neutrality, authors claim, is tantamount to liberalism itself. It remains a fact that full accommodation of Islam and its practices has yet to be achieved within Western democracies. Islamic immigrants tend not to assimilate but choose to retain their inherited customs and desire to live under their own law. This sets them apart, and yet they claim a right to be treated equally with other religions. Thus aim of this book is a comparison of success Muslims have achieved through litigation as contrasted with what they have not been able to achieve through social integration or through legislation. To illustrate some of social tensions observed, beginning with France, Nicolas Sarkozy, even before he became president, insisted that newcomers from North Africa and Middle East meet certain language requirements and pledge to adhere to principles, values, and symbols of French democracy. Under his presidency, legislation was passed requiring candidates for citizenship to be tested on French culture and history and to prove that they could speak French as well as average native fifteen-year old. Displaying a limit to its tolerance, French National Assembly, over opposition from legal fraternity, passed in July 2010, a law banning full facial veil, nijab, as well as burqa. In Germany, from a legal point of view, final frontier in accommodation of Islam is granting to Islamic organizations status of corporations, which status would allow them to teach, as part of normal school curriculum and at public expense, tenets of their religion. Under German Basic Law, a religious organization must be judged to be a religious community capable and willing to cooperate with state in fulfilling a public function. Paul Kirchhoff, a legal scholar, has argued that legal status should be denied if no participation in culture underlying Basic Law is to be expected. Kirchhoff explains that only Christian religion is to be considered the humus of German constitutional state. …

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