Sorry, this entry is only available in Italiano.

Sorry, this entry is only available in Italiano.

The proposal to study muslim religion in school, made by a bipartisan agreement between left and right intelligentsia, reminded me of what Amartya Sen wrote in Identity and Violence:

Increasing reliance on religion-based classification of the people of the world also tends to make the Western response to global terrorism and conflict peculiarly ham-handed. Respect for “other people” is shown by praising their religious books, rather than by taking note of the many-sided involvements and achievements, in nonreligious as well as religious fields, of different people in a globally interactive world. In confronting what is called “Islamic terrorism,” in the muddled vocabulary of contemporary global politics, the intellectual force of Western policy is aimed quite substantially at trying to define-or redefine-Islam.
However, to focus just on the grand religious classification is not only to miss other significant concerns and ideas that move people, it also has the effect of generally magnifying the voice of religious authority. The Muslim clerics, for example, are then treated as the ex officio spokesmen for the so-called Islamic world, even though a great many people who happen to be Muslim by religion have profound differences with what is proposed by one mullah or another. Despite our diverse diversities, the world is suddenly seen not as a collection of peopIe, but as a federation of religions and civilizations. In Britain a confounded view of what a multiethnic society must do has led to encouraging the deveIopment of state-financed MusIim schools, Hindu schools, Sikh schools, etc., to suppIement preexisting state-supported Christian schooIs, and young children are powerfully placed in the domain of singular affiliations well before they have the ability to reason about different systems of identification that may compete for their attention. Earlier on, state-run denominational schools in Northern Ireland had fed the political distancing of Catholics and Protestants along one line of divisive categorization assigned at infancy, and the same predetermination of “discovered” identities is now being allowed and, in effect, encouraged to sow even more alienation among a different part of the British population.

The fact that the proposal was heralded as an attempt to avoid ghettoization of young muslims (”Adolfo Urso propone l’introduzione nelle scuole pubbliche e private di una nuova materia, facoltativa e alternativa a quella cattolica, per evitare di lasciare i piccoli musulmani <<nei ghetti delle madrasse e delle scuole islamiche integraliste>>”, Corriere della Sera, 17 ottobre 2009 p.9) and that it was attacked by the leghisti advocating “our” identity (Roberto Cota: “Noi dobbiamo difendere la nostra identità, non cancellarla.”) shows by itself, if compared to what Amartya Sen wrote, how far we are from having a decent debate on the issue. And how far we are from what is really at stake here.  Sadly enough, I might add, the bipartisan proposal manage to appear educated and even progressive, if compared to what another leghista said, about a mandatory catholic education for muslims: “Ora di religione? Si, quella cattolica obbligatoria per gli islamici. L’ora di religione cattolica obbligatoria per i musulmani nelle nostre scuole serve a far capire i motivi per cui il cristianesimo e il cattolicesimo sono profondamente radicati nella nostra società e perchè noi siamo così” (Padania, 18 ottobre 2009, p.2). So, basically, not only we want to ghettoization of immigrants, but of immigrants and Italians together in a new happily self-ghettoized Italy.