How Muslims respond to secularist restrictions: reactive ethnicity, adjustment, and acceptance

ABSTRACT

Secularist laws limit the public expression of ethnoreligious identities and reinforce symbolic boundaries excluding especially Muslims from the majority society. Existing scholarship has neglected the question of how Muslims respond to secularist restrictions and attendant political rhetoric. Drawing on in-depth interviews conducted in the Canadian province of Quebec, we find that some Muslims embrace political countermobilization (reactive ethnicity), while others downplay their faith to avoid discrimination (adjustment) and still others consent to restrictions (acceptance). We identify two mechanisms that explain why responses to restrictive policies diverge: individuals who (1) personally wear religious clothing or (2) have strong social ties to those who do usually experience restrictions much more negatively than those who do neither, and thus respond with reactive ethnicity or adjustment rather than acceptance. Locating political experience and behaviour in specific individual contexts, this article provides a path for advancing research on minority responses to restrictive policies and discrimination.

KEYWORDS:

• Islamophobia
• reactive ethnicity
• mobilization
• secularism
• discrimination
• Quebec

Acknowledgements

The authors thank Laura Doering for her comments on a previous version of this article.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 Individuals may also reduce their religious visibility for other reasons. Jouili (2009, 457) reports that some Muslims in France and Germany do so out of a “desire to change the negative image (religious) Muslims have”. None of our respondents reported reducing their visibility for this purpose, however.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Fonds de recherche du Québec – Société et culture [grant number 2019-NP-253921].