Case that many people may be muslims in a sense which

case; that many people may be “Muslims” in a sense which has little to do
with piety and religious obligation; that many of the customs which repel us
in certain Muslim societies, like female circumcision or honour killings, have
If the path to more rewarding work and education
is blocked, a sense of alienation and hostility
to the receiving society can grow
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no sanction in the religious tradition. Above all no allowance is made for the
fact that this tradition is very various and contested.
But this global fear of “Islam” is not only mistaken in fact, it is supremely
damaging as policy. Granted that we want to avoid and even outlaw
certain practices, such as the two I have just mentioned; that we want to
inculcate certain values, such as those of male-female equality, it would
seem to be much wiser to make allies of all those who can be brought to
agree, rather than alienating whole communities by stigmatizing them as
the source of a hideous cultural-moral danger. To talk in a register of the
high threat of “Islam” and a threatened “Islamization” is not only to invent
non-existent dangers, but also to drive a rift between religions and
cultures, which cannot but be damaging to a modern democracy.
And when one adds to this that a principal source of hostility to our liberal
societies among immigrants comes from their experience of failed
integration, the folly of harping on the bogeyman of religion, rather than
acting to facilitate integration, and by that stigmatization to make
integration still more difficult, becomes more and more evident.
10
Looking at the problems and issues of diversity through the lens of
Secularism A, with its negative focus on religion, turns out to be an error
of major proportions. To the extent that we want to grasp these problems
in terms of secularism, it should rather be secularism B, that which is
diversity-oriented. But to be truly diversity-oriented is to focus on the
issues of multiculturalism. And in that sense, we can say that secularism
in our Western societies needs to take a multicultural turn, which is to say
that the two need to converge. That is the thesis which I have been
defending here.
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BIBLIOGRAPHY
Gauchet, Marcel. 1998. La Religion dans la Démocratie . Paris: Gallimard, 47–50.
Rawls, John. 1993. Political liberalism . New York: Columbia University Press.
Rousseau, Jean-Jacques. Du Contrat Social I, 6.
Smith, Christian. 2003. The Secular Revolution. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Taylor, Charles. 1996. “Les Sources de l’identité moderne.” In Les Frontières de l’Identité:
Modernité et postmodernisme au Québec , edited by Mikhaël Elbaz, Andrée Fortin,
and Guy Laforest, 347–364. Sainte-Foy: Presses de l’Université Laval.
Taylor, Charles. 2004. Modern Social Imaginaries. Durham: Duke University Press.