By showing how Muslim Canadians successfully navigate and negotiate their religiosity in their everyday lives, Beyond Accommodation critiques the reasonable accommodation framework and proposes an alternative picture of how religious difference is worked out.
Description
Problems – of integration, failed political participation, and requests for various kinds of accommodation – seem to dominate the research on minority Muslims in Western nations. Beyond Accommodation offers a different perspective, showing how Muslim Canadians successfully navigate and negotiate their religiosity. The authors critique the model of reasonable accommodation, suggesting that it disempowers religious minorities by implicitly privileging Christianity and by placing the onus on minorities to make formal requests for accommodation. Through interviews, Muslim Canadians show that informal negotiation takes place all the time; scholars, however, have not been paying attention. This book proposes an alternative picture of how religious difference is woven into the fabric of Canadian society.
Reviews
"In sum[...]Beyond Accommodation offers a useful contrast to the more politically oriented approach of reasonable accommodation. It shows the potential for ethnographic research to highlight the local particularities of secular political discourses and frameworks and, in doing so, to productively critique representations of secular neutrality claims that tend to reproduce a kind of ‘view from nowhere’."
- Samuel Victor