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About This Book

A RIDDLE IS A PARADOX that can be solved by rethinking the terms in which it is posed. When Oedipus was asked what walks on four legs in the morning, on two legs at noon, and on three at night, he cracked this famous “Riddle of the Sphinx” by rethinking the meaning of the riddle’s crucial term. A leg meant any support on the ground—toddlers move on all fours, adults walk on two legs, and the old may use a walking stick—thus the riddle was about human beings, and the day was their lifetime. The answer seems simple, but it required rethinking the terms of the question. Multiculturalism, too, is a riddle. It asks how we can establish a state of justice and equality between and among three parties: those who believe in a unified national culture, those who trace their culture to their ethnic identity, and those who view their religion as culture. To solve the riddle, one needs to rethink what is meant by nationality or the nation-state, by ethnic identity or ethnicity, and by religion as a basis of culture. What all three acts of rethinking have in common is a new concern with the meaning and making of culture. Multiculturalism is not the old concept of culture multiplied by the number of groups that exist, but a new, and internally plural, praxis of culture applied to oneself and to others. This is what this book tries to show.

The book is concerned with North America and Europe for two reasons. First, these two parts of “the West” have been in constant

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The Multicultural Riddle

interchange about the meaning of the multicultural riddle: They are like two, or maybe two hundred, different people who are busy with the same riddle, each trying to solve it their own way. Comparing their approaches allows us to study the riddle in all its different contexts, for as we will see, there is no such thing as a multicultural society within the boundaries of one nation-state. Secondly, the multicultural riddle is North American in its origins, but the most varied attempts to tackle it are found in Europe. To say this is not to adjudicate high grades in virtue, but to point to some astonishing historical shifts between the two continents. An alertness to comparison is the lifeblood of all multicultural thinking.

The first ideal readers I kept in mind for this book were my second-year students in political anthropology at the University of New Mexico. Two further rounds of student critique at Brunel University, London, and the University of Amsterdam convinced me that the third multicultural focus, on religion, should be sharpened by concentrating on one faith. I have chosen Islam in the West because this is the most contentious and thus the most revealing site of the multicultural riddle across the two continents. The ideal critics for the first and second draft were my colleagues at the Research Centre Religion and Society of the University of Amsterdam. I thank Peter van der Veer, Patricia Spyer, Peter van Rooden, Birgit Meyer, and Peter Pels. I further thank Marie-Benedicte Dembour (Sussex University), Marie Gillespie and Tom Cheesman (Swansea University), Steven Vertovec (Oxford University), and Bryan Mohamed (Rietveld Academy, Amsterdam), as well as the staff at Routledge, all of whom gave me their generous help and advice.

For ease of use, the literature is divided into two parts: There are some two hundred references that I have used and therefore need to credit at the end, and there are recommendations for further reading appended to each chapter. I have been ruthless in keeping these short to guarantee page-for-page value: When there

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About This Book

was no summary article, I have selected only parts of the best books I know. I thus recommend the Further Reading sections to anyone who wants to come to their own conclusions in this search for the basics of multicultural thinking.

Gerd Baumann

Research Centre Religion & Society

The University of Amsterdam

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