Erdem Dikici - Transnational Islam and the Integration of Turks in Great Britain

Erdem Dikici

Transnational Islam and the Integration of Turks in Great Britain

1st ed. 2021

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To Nazmiye Nur,

Nusret and Elif Neva

Diversity in terms of race, ethnicity, culture and religion is not a new phenomenon. Yet, ways of living with and responding to diversity have differed drastically. The politics of difference in diverse pre-modern empires (such as the Roman and Ottoman) was different from that of modern liberal nation-states (Karpat & Yildirim, , p. 15). This study focuses on post-immigration-led diversity and post-war political responses of liberal nation-states to it.

In the twentieth century, two world wars resulted in histrionic population changes: millions of deaths, refugees and immigrants. WWII in particular furthered the need for a large labour force in Europe. To consolidate their economic development, most Western European countries imported labour from their former colonies; countries like Germany with fewer or no colonial links imported labour through bilateral guest-worker agreements with Mediterranean countries such as Turkey and Morocco (Paine, , p. 1).

Since the 1960s, discussions and concerns about immigration and immigrants have gradually moved to the centre of politics in Western Europe, taking place in various realms regarding the states political responses to these phenomena (Castles et al., , p. 630).

Perhaps in response to such critics, in the last decade, numerous scholarly works, notably three special issues, on national models of integration were published in leading academic journals in Europe and the United States.).

In sum, the idea of integration has been a broadly acknowledged and applied political framework to deal with newcomers in Western Europe. This study concentrates on the ways in which transnationalism impacts immigrant integration in contemporary Western societies. My objective is to provide, with as much precision as possible, a framework for rethinking through who the key actors are in the debates on, and process of, immigrant integration in contemporary Western European societies. In particular, this book focuses on transnational Islam, as a form of transnationalism writ large, and seeks to explore how transnational Muslim organisations might impact the integration of Muslims in the West. To this end, this book first addresses some general questions such as what is the relationship between integration and transnationalism and how do transnational actors affect integration; then some specific questions, including does transnational Islam inherently hinder the integration of Muslims, how do transnational Islamic organisations affect the integration of Muslims and so on. In the light of these and other questions, this book develops several avenues of inquiry: first, it critically analyses existing approaches to and theories of integration; second, it unpacks the concept of transnationalism, focuses on the relationship between transnationalism and migration scholarship and then elaborates on the ways in which transnationalism and transnational Islam impact immigrant integration; third, it identifies and evaluates possible transnational state and non-state actors that might be involved in and impact the debates on, and processes of, integration. As this study focuses on the question of how transnational Muslim organisations impact (Muslim) integration in the West, it undertakes a case study. It focuses on a transnational Turkish civic Islamic organisation namely the Glen movement (GM), and its possible impacts on the debates, activities and politics of the integration of Turkish-speaking people in Great Britain. Studying a particular unit in depth by looking at causal and complex relationships, that is, undertaking a case study (i.e. a transnational Muslim network) is one of the most effective ways of exploring the ways in which transnational Islam impacts Muslim integration.