Islamic Inclusion, Justice and Deliberative Democracy

Deliberative claims in the public sphere may be taken as valuable interventions to deal with the shortcomings of representative democracy. Indeed deliberation can be seen as a moral and political resource for discriminated and marginalized groups to overcome their lack of representation and power in the polity. Some religious groups, and particularly Muslims, are often represented and reified in public discourses as having a religiosity and values which are at odds with what is needed to foster (deliberative) public reason. According to this view, Muslim’s claims-making or discursive presence in the public space would not be oriented towards reaching deliberative agreements to settle religious or political conflicts, but towards the (strategic) protection of (presumed) non-negotiable religious values or practices. Is this the case? Are Muslim’s public claims intrinsically lacking of deliberative quality? To address such issues, in this paper we aim at fruitfully using empirical data to contribute to the normative assessment of the deliberative reason of religious groups, and therefore to the possibility and the legitimacy of including religious claims / groups in the public reason. To do that, we tackle two levels of reasoning. On the one hand, at the empirical-analytical level, we measure the extent to which Muslim actors use deliberative claims across public spheres in three countries, namely France, Switzerland and the UK. By addressing the relationship between public deliberation and the political inclusion of Muslims in these countries, the paper aims to shed new light on the role of Islamic actors across asymmetric public spheres. In particular, we first assess the degree and forms of deliberative claims on Islamic issues in each country as well as their impact on the deliberative strength and its relationship with other non-verbal forms; second, we investigate the deliberation by looking at the variation of claiming forms between religious and non-religious actors. On the other hand, at the normative level, we will assess the empirical results in discussing, firstly, whether there are significant differences between religious and non-religious reasons in deliberative claims. Second, whether such differences can be regarded as having an impact on the political inclusion of Muslims actors in the public spaces of the three countries. Finally, whether religious reasons are necessarily at odds with forms of deliberative reasons and, if this is the case, what such an original empirical results can entail with regard to the tensions between deliberative theory and religious reasons. Link to the project “Public Deliberation, Network Analysis and the Political Inclusion of Muslims Living in Switzerland, France and Britain”: https://www.unige.ch/sciences-societe/incite/bienvenue/projets-de-recherche/projets-en-cours/