In recent years, Muslims living in the US have become more visible in society, and have been facing serious accusations about their loyalties to the US. Various arguments are made that discuss the inherent incompatibility between Islam and modernity. This paper explores the data of the Muslim American Public Opinion Survey (MAPOS) to examine whether being Muslim is incompatible with living in the US. Can Muslims simultaneously live in non-Muslim societies and be true Muslims? Through the use of MAPOS (N=1410), Muslim respondents were asked about certain issues. These responses provide insight into the Muslims living in the US. This paper evaluates the claim of compatibility/ incompatibility between Islam and the West.

France and Turkey are two countries facing novel demands from their citizens to revise the existing social contract and amend it with novel understanding of citizenship that gives greater space to religion. These two states as ardent followers of secularism, have built their conception of the ideal citizen around the principle of invisibility of their religious beliefs. Accordingly, the ideal citizen would refrain from using symbols and attire that disclose his/her beliefs in the public space. Now these two states are increasingly challenged by their devout Muslim citizens who wish to revise this principle and revisit the social contract allowing them to be full citizens while publicly displaying their religious identities. While in Turkey this demand has been increasingly the driving force for recent discussions for a new constitution, in France Muslims, who are a minority and have less influence, have been using a legal discourse and sending complaints to international instances, notably to the ECHR, to put further pressure on the French state. This paper focuses on the recent discussions around the challenge to old conceptions of citizenship in Turkey and France, contending that these attempts to modify the existing social contracts are not necessarily challenges to secularism per-se; instead they are attempts at constructing an understanding of secularism more compatible with public piety.

Based on an extensive, 50-interview qualitative analysis of the community of second-generation Moroccans in the southern barrios of Madrid, this article illuminates significant sociopolitical alienation derived from a distinct set of perceptions about the Spanish state and society. To understand the nature of this sociopolitical alienation, the article evaluates the civic structures available to the young men interviewed and finds a very green, discriminatory Spanish democracy that is struggling to establish a culture of activism and associationalism among Spaniards, let alone Muslim Moroccan migrants. Many members of the second generation of Moroccans, some of whom have lived under a democracy about as long as any Spaniard, have not only maintained their parents' detachment from Spanish society, but cling more tightly to a enduringly relevant Moroccan ethno-religious identity. According to the data, for a variety of reasons, young people continue to clutch a lingering "myth of return" that prevents them from investing in a future in Spain. Many participants perceived their Moroccan identity to be irreconcilable with not only the ethno-religious Spanish identity, but also the civic Spanish identity. In analysing Spain's ability to win their engagement, the data point to a variety of obstacles to organising Moroccan activism and a remarkably flawed structure of representative governance in Spain--leaving an expanding community of Moroccan-origin people withdrawn from the civic sphere of their country with little expectation of change.

‘Enlarging the social basis of small Gulf states’ certainly does not refer to the entry of masses into politics; yet, for two decades now, the seemingly immutable –or designed to be so- alliance between ruling families and the powerful merchant elites has come under strain from more popular, more religious-minded and later incorporated parts of the citizenry. Although these relatively newcomers on the political scene reinforced at first the rulers’ side of the bilateral contract, they seem nowadays to have grown into independent and vocal critics of the alliance, leading to political stalemate in both countries. In Kuwait, the executive and legislative powers have been waging a internecine war paralysing the country’s decision process since at least 2006, while in Bahrain, the government is desperate to enlarge its Sunni support to thwart its Shiite majority opposition. How fragile has the initial social contract become? To which extent has its legitimacy been affected? And above all, is it renegotiable and how? These are the questions that this paper intends to address. Based on a 1.5-year fieldwork in the two countries, it will contend that the two regimes are now faced with the pressing demands for a renegotiation of the social contract from newly empowered segments of their citizenry and that unsurprisingly any attempt to level privileges is indeed being resisted by the beneficiaries of the former social contract. After recalling the composition of the founding alliances (rulers-city dwellers in Kuwait, ruling family-Sunni tribal elements from Najd in Bahrain), this paper will identify the mechanisms accounting for the citizenry enlargements. It will show how, in Kuwait, the policy that turned the historical clientele of the merchant elites into state’s services recipients and state’s supporters eventually backfired when this supporters, emancipated from its state patron and rallying followers along tribal-religious lines, started to challenge the legitimacy of the founding alliance and fiercely renegotiate it. Similarly, the paper will assess how successful has been the steady program of naturalisation of foreign Sunni elements in Bahrain in counterbalancing the effects of the enfranchisement of the indigenous Shiite population in 1999, eventually addressing the question of whether these freshly-made citizens, unlike in Kuwait, will proved staunch enough to salvage the already damaged legitimacy of the existing social contract.

The law in Lebanon recognizes eighteen religious t?’ifa (“sects”) as moral persons. It also consigns personal status and family laws under their full jurisdiction. Each t?’ifa thus applies its private laws in its own courts. Personal status and family laws remain outside the jurisdiction of civil courts. In 1997-1998, the President of the Republic proposed a draft law, known as “The Optional Civil Marriage Law”, which would open up a civil legal space for those who choose to manage their conjugal affairs outside t?’ifa jurisdictions. The proposal launched a polemic pitting supporters and opponents against each other for the duration of four months. Those who opposed the draft proposal were the Muslim and Christian religious authorities. It is tempting to see in this event a typical case of religious figures and institutions intervening in public affairs – it is not an unusual sight in Lebanon after all. It would be too hasty, however, to dismiss this as representing a frustrating failure of secularism. This paper analyzes the discourses that opposed civil marriage, and proposes instead that, contrary to our initial judgments, these discourses are articulations of a distinctive secularism. Indeed, when examined closely, they appear to be the discourses of secular citizens. A close reading of the Sunni, Shi’i, Druze and Catholic Maronite discourses during the polemic reveals that each inflects the relationship between religion and the state in unique ways. Yet, a crucial element in this is the relationships among them, indicated by secular concepts such as t?’ifa, civil society, citizenship, security and consensus, in other words, by confirming their social contract. This suggests also that what is often called sectarianism in Lebanon is actually the exercise of a secular citizenship. One reason for this is that any public discourse is inevitably shaped by the fact that it is public. I thus intentionally use material collected from two of the most widely read newspapers in Lebanon to see how the structuring of a public event by the mass media is constitutive of the secular. I present a detailed analysis of the discourses as they appeared in the two newspapers. I trace their development from their initial genesis to their termination four months later. I analyze carefully the language that articulates their relationship to each other and to the state. This task is supported by fourteen months of field research conducted in Lebanon for a doctoral dissertation in cultural anthropology.