The issue of multiculturalism, its definition, its practical import, and its normative implications is one which has generated much debate, academic and political, over the last 30 years. The book under review is determinedly scholarly in its orientation and will be of interest to sociologists, political scientists, and philosophers. Its focus, however, is at least as much on the work of the leading public intellectual of multiculturalism, Professor Tariq Modood of Bristol University, for whom it is a festschrift, as it is on the phenomenon itself. Fellow members of the “Bristol school of multiculturalism” are represented among the book’s 16 authors, but they are balanced by essays from such luminaries as David Boucher, Cecile Laborde, Charles Taylor, and Will Kymlicka. Their contributions are broken down into four aspects of the multicultural debate, dealing with (1) intellectual underpinnings, (2) inclusion and diversity, (3) nationalism and transnationalism, and (4) secularism.
Modood’s own ideas get fully ventilated, not least by the editors’ concise introduction and by the sympathetic chapter from Simon Thompson. Although his own “friendly responses” at the end suggest an inward-looking family discussion overall, there is enough careful scrutiny and disagreement to ensure that the difficulties as well as the strengths of his position emerge clearly—for example, Laegaard provides a trenchant criticism of his treatment of the Danish cartoons controversy. Modood is a philosopher by training and a sociologist by profession. We learn from both his account and Boucher’s chapter that he was shaped in the first instance by the ideas of Michael Oakeshott only to be converted to the contrasting approach of R.G. Collingwood. But Modood is also a migrant who came to the United Kingdom from Pakistan as a child with little English, in the tradition of so many other migrants who became masters of the language. Maleiha Malik shows how he developed into a courageous critic of racism. But he also became a defender of how British society has “the most developed multiculturalist legislation and sense of multiculturalist nationhood in Europe” (p. 282). He has a strong normative commitment to multiculturalism within a national frame, by which he means that a state must acknowledge groups’ distinctiveness and need for recognition (including in his recent thinking even the majority qua group).
Within the paradigm of multiculturalism, this approach has been countered over the years by scholars like Taylor and Kymlicka who continue the discussion here. They emphasize the need for accommodating national rather than the ethnocultural groups which are Modood’s concern. Canada is the main case in point for them and achieving social justice through solidarity their main aim. Their model is “interculturalism” rather than multiculturalism, although Geoffrey Brahm Levey’s chapter tries hard to square that circle. While the United Kingdom in principle is also multinational, it is mostly viewed here through the multiculturalist lens. In Modood’s view, it is an example of “moderate secularism,” whereby an established church has encouraged the state to take a positive view of other faiths and to promote tolerance of diverse identities linked to faith. His main concern is to encourage a feeling of belonging to the national community on the part of a minority. Parekh agrees making the important point that a healthy civil society cannot ignore the fact that religion is central to the lives of many. Those who take a strictly separatist view of church and state, as is common with laïcité in France, contest this but their voices do not figure much in this book. Laborde’s chapter does examine the tensions between equality and religious freedom (as over the issues of free speech and blasphemy), but in the end her careful philosophical reconstruction tends to restate the familiar, difficult, dilemmas.
Religion is central to the debates about multiculturalism. Moreover, Islam tends to be central to the contemporary discussion of religion, even if evangelical Christianity, and the more militant versions of Judaism and Hinduism also draw much attention. Modood defends the right of people to define themselves primarily as Muslims or indeed as anything else, even at the risk of producing “Islamophobia.” Whether this catch-all term amounts to oppression is part of the issue at stake if group rights are justified on the basis of ethno-religious-cultural identity. It can be asked why someone should identify as British Muslim rather than, say, as a hyphenated Pakistani-British, as a German-Turk or Greek-American might do. Modood rightly accuses Islamophobes of blurring the distinction between majority Muslim opinion and fundamentalism and prefers to oppose them by stressing loyalty to the nation-state while “changing everybody’s understanding of the national imaginary” (p. 285). He is accordingly less comfortable with the phenomena of diasporas and transnationalism anatomized in the chapters by Riva Kastoryano and Anna Triandafyllidou. The former argues that the ideas of a Muslim group identity and a Muslim diaspora—that is, going beyond the ummah of general feelings of solidarity with co-religionists—have been mostly invented, helped along by the errors of western foreign policy. The relative silence over Gaza by Muslim states like Indonesia or Saudi Arabia, and the theological schism within Islam, would seem to bear this out.
Underlying the religious issue is the fundamental question of group rights and majority-minority relations. In a world of multiple parallel identities for individuals is it right to privilege any one, whether national, ethnic or religious? Conversely is it practical to avoid privileging one (or at most two) if we are to live in stable, peaceful, societies? The case of India crops up frequently in this book, particularly in the chapters by Gurpreet Mahajan and Rajeev Bhargava. The latter for the most part praises India’s tradition of constitutional secularism and tolerance before going into reverse right at the end to admit that Narendra Modi’s BJP government has fostered Hindu nationalism at the expense of the Muslim Other, 200 million citizens whose collective identity is thereby insisted on. Modood has always been careful to acknowledge the differences within groups and the importance of national integration but arguably the logic of his belief in the recognition of separate religious communities is that members look to their own group for protection and that nonmembers feel alienated. As Mahajan observes, given that multiculturalism “speaks of the community, the tendency to view the minority as a collective [that is prejudicially] gets reinforced” (p. 117). Bhargava places his hope in the state intervening to prevent intolerance both by minorities and the majority, via his notion of a “principled distance.”
The Resilience of Multiculturalism is an essential read for specialists in the area. By the same token, its fine scholarly distinctions will make it difficult for the newcomer to the subject. It also does not really live up to its subtitle as it says far more about ideas than about “practice,” while politics in the sense of raw competition over ways of being is rarely brought to life. Issues such as “parallel lives,” riots, and at the most extreme the jihadist terrorists who have exploited the opportunities to hide amongst semi-closed communities, barely figure in these pages. The range of empirical and country examples used is narrow. Multiculturalism is argued over in terms of its various manifestations—but it is always taken for granted as being a good thing. This is understandable in the basic sense of the cultural diversity we increasingly take for granted in daily life. It is less so in terms of multiculturalism as a sociopolitical project. That project can hardly be accused of being responsible for jihadist atrocities, let alone for the rise of right-wing violence. But nor is it completely irrelevant.
