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Taboos as a Cultural Cleavage Between Muslim Immigrants and Secular Western Publics: Bridging the Gaps by Viewing Integration as a Two-Way Process
Abstract
A taboo is an activity that is forbidden or sacred based on religious beliefs or morals. Taboos are usually culturally specific. That which may be discussed or done in one culture (incest, abortion, out of wedlock pregnancy, forced marriage, same-sex-marriage, legalizing drugs, etc.) may be highly taboo in another culture. Arab and Islamic societies are strongly religious in their values, while in comparison most Western countries are almost always more secular, and hence religion is represented as a barrier that seems to hamper the integration and inclusion of Muslim minorities into Western societies, an element that poses a challenge to the Western lifestyle and may even encourage the legitimacy of public Islamophobic discourses. So, to what extent do Muslim immigrants carry their cultural practices with them, including taboos, and to what extent do they integrate into Western countries, where civic laws have replaced religious sanctions when taboos are broken? The knowledge of taboos and the ability to deal with them is one of the keys to successful integration as a two-way process between Muslim immigrants and the receiving society.
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Assuming that all individual members of a certain culture think, believe and behave exactly alike can, however, result in stereotyping and an insensitive approach. I should therefore make it clear that in different Islamic societies and social groups, the norms and ideologies are very different. Besides, there are communities in Arab countries to this day that are regarded as ethnically and linguistically Arabic but adhere to other ancient Christian communions, such as the Coptic Orthodox in Egypt and the Maronite Catholic in Lebanon. So, Arabs are an ethno-linguistic group of people, most of whom are Muslim in religion but many of whom are not. Likewise, the largest Muslim populations in the world are all in non-Arabic speaking countries: Indonesia, Pakistan, Bangladesh, and India, among others.
It should be noted that I am not suggesting here that all countries in the West are homogeneous and that they share the same culture. Because of different history, geography, ideology, economics, politics, culture, language, lifestyle, social customs, and classes, etc., people in different parts of the West, especially those in the North (Britain and Germany, for instance) and those in the South (Spain and Greece, for instance) do differ profoundly in their cultural patterns and orientation.
Throughout this study, I will be referring mainly to (Western) Europe because, first, it was Europe which resorted to Muslim immigrants after the Second World to offset labour shortages, not the US. Second, as Leiken (2012, 104) argues, unlike the US, where Muslim immigrants are geographically diffuse, ethnically fragmented, and generally well off, in Europe many of its immigrants live in societies wholly separate from those of the host countries. Third, as Leiken points out, “Most European Muslims are descendants of illiterate labor migrants from rural regions, while American Muslims began to arrive in the country as college students” (ibid.). Muslim immigrants in Europe thus seem to retain powerful attachments to their native cultures because Europe is, at most, a two to four-hour flight from their home countries. And, finally, asylum seekers and refugees, whose numbers have substantially increased in the last years, have poured from neighboring Muslim countries into Europe, not into the US or Canada. These factors, among others, significantly differentiate Muslim immigration to Europe from the Muslim expatriation in the USA and explain, to a certain extent, why Islam and Muslims are rather a major concern in Europe.
The Quran has 114 surahs, “chapters” of varying length, with each surah consisting of a number of verses, ayaat.
See Triandis (1990) for a detailed discussion of Hofstede's cultural dimensions “individualism vs. collectivism” (Hofstede 1980).
The perception that a man's honor is dependent on the proper behavior of female relatives is not only common in Arab-Islamic societies but is also found in Western societies such as Spain, Greece, and Italy. For a detailed discussion of why the concept of honor killing has increasingly become associated with Muslim societies in general see Doğan (2011).
So far we have dealt only with incest and honor killing or shame killing. When it comes to taboo transgression within Muslim family circles, there are other cultural practices associated with taboos that are also problematic, such as divorce, parallel justice, forced marriage etc. Unfortunately, it is not possible within the scope of this paper to discuss all these issues. However, the issue of honor killing will be returned to below when discussing the social determinants and characteristics of Muslim communities and the environment conducive to the transmission of the values and ideas from generation to generation.
For an analysis of the impact of religion on taboos and the issue of taboo-based misunderstandings in cross-cultural communication, especially between Arabs and Germans, see Bouchara (2009, 2018).
Sunnah is the way of life prescribed as normative for Muslims on the basis of the teachings and practices of the Islamic prophet Muhammad and interpretations of the Quran. The Sunnah is the second source of Islamic jurisprudence, the first being the Quran.