# The Political Quarterly Publishing Co. Ltd. 2003 Published by Blackwell Publishing Ltd, 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA 100 Muslims and the Politics of Dierence TARIQ MODOOD There is an anti-Muslim wind blowing across the European continent. One factor is a perception that Muslims are making politically exceptional, culturally unreasonable or theologically alien demands upon European states. My contention is that the claims Muslims are making in fact parallel comparable arguments about gender or ethnic equality. Seeing the issue in that context shows how European and contemporary is the logic of main- stream Muslim identity politics. Muslims in Europe European anxieties and phobias in relation to immigration and cultural diversity focus on Muslims more than any other group. This does, however, beg the question: in what way are Muslims a group and to whom are they beingcompared?HereIcandonomorethannotethatthereisnosatisfactory wayofconceptualisingpeopleofnon-Europeandescent,whatCanadianscall `visible minorities', and therefore also of conceptualising the constituent groupsthatmakeupthiscategory.Nevertheless,itisclearthattheestimated 15 million people in the EU who subjectively or objectively are Muslim, whateveradditionalidentitiestheymayhave,formthesinglelargestgroupof those who are the source of public anxieties. Muslims are not, however, a homogeneous group. Some Muslims are devout but apolitical; some are political but do not see their politics as being `Islamic' (indeed, may even be anti-Islamic). Some identify more with a nationality of origin, such as Turkish; others with the nationality of settlement and perhaps citizenship, such as French. Some prioritise fund- raisingformosques,otherscampaignsagainstdiscrimination,unemployment orZionism.Forsome,theAyatollahKhomeiniisaheroandOsamabinLaden aninspiration;forothers,thesamemaybesaidofKemalAtaturkorMargaret Thatcher, who created a swathe of Asian millionaires in Britain, brought in Arab capital and was one of the ®rst to call for NATO action to protect Muslims in Kosovo. The category `Muslim', then, is as internally diverse as `Christian' or `Belgian' or `middle-class', or any other category helpful in ordering our understanding of contemporary Europe; but just as diversity doesnotleadtoanabandonmentofsocialconceptsingeneral,sowiththatof `Muslim'. My contention, then, within the limitations of all social categories, is that Muslimisasusefulacategoryforidentifying`visibleminorities'ascountryof originÐthe most typical basis for data collection and labelling. It points to