Should Muslims Integrate into the West?
Middle East Quarterly, Fall 2007, FALL 2007 • VOLUME XIV: NUMBER 4
http://www.meforum.org/article/1761
Uriya Shavit
"The veil has become the center of a European fight over how to balance expressions of Muslim identity with the Western idea of citizenship. How can states achieve a balance between republicanism and minority rights? Can majorities in liberal, Western nation-states, force a dress code upon minorities? While Muslim societies have debated various garments and coverings for women through the twentieth century, the issues are broader. Often, Muslim commentators in the West couch their arguments in the Western discourse of the balance between individual rights and public interest. However, the personal freedom versus integration debate is only one context of the polemic; another is the dichotomy between two types of nationality and between two sources of legitimacy. Here, Muslim scholarship on migration sheds more light than Western political theory."