Identity: Contemporary Identity Politics and the Struggle for Recognition

by Francis Fukuyama

The identity problem is particularly acute for young second-generation Muslims growing up in immigrant communities in Western Europe. They are living in largely secular societies with Christian roots that do not provide public support for their religious values or practices. Their parents often came from closed village communities offering localized versions of Islam, such as Sufi saint worship. Like many children of immigrants, they are eager to distance themselves from their families’ old-fashioned ways of life. But they are not easily integrated into their new European surroundings: rates of youth unemployment, particularly for Muslims, are upward of 30 percent, and in many European countries a link is still perceived between ethnicity and membership in the dominant cultural community—an issue that we will return to in later chapters. Under these circumstances, confusion about identity becomes acute, just as it was for newly urbanized Europeans in the nineteenth century. For some Muslims today, the answer to this confusion has not been membership in a nation, but membership in a larger religious group—an umma, or community of believers, represented by a political party such as Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood or Turkey’s Justice and Development Party or Tunisia’s Ennahda. Like classic nationalists, contemporary Islamists have both a diagnosis of the problem and a clear solution: you are part of a proud and ancient community; the outside world doesn’t respect you as a Muslim; ...