Towards a pluralistic society: Good practices in the integration and social inclusion of Muslims in Italian cities - synthesis Verso una società plurale: Buone pratiche per l'integrazione e l'inclusione sociale dei musulmani nelle città italiane - sintesi En It

Résumé 0

Across Europe, the number of Islamic prayer rooms increases with the increase of the number of Muslims residing in the continent, but rather than a normalization and a gradual acceptance of the Islamic presence, we are witnessing a constant rise of conflicts about the presence of Islam in the public space and, in particular, conflicts over Islamic places of worship (Allievi 2009; Bombardieri 2011). The mosque, rather than gradually becoming a "normal" fact, tends to become an "exceptional" fact that provokes disputes, debates and conflicts more than any other building or place of worship. In theory, the question of the mosques should not even exist because Europe claims that every religious minority, including the Muslims, is entitled to have its places of worship, that should be regarded as absolutely legitimate elements of the public space. Instead there is an exceptionalism of the mosque, which points to a more general exceptionalism regarding Islam and Muslims, which in Europe tend to be looked upon more and more as a special case, which requires a specific interpretative framework and ad hoc actions . More than any other social actor and / or minority, Islam has also the property of inducing questions about the host society and in particular their relationship to otherness, their degree of openness or the limits of their system of "acceptance" (Dal Lago, 1999). The public debates about Islam and Muslims are in fact revealing the issues across European societies, their identity and their relationship to otherness. In this complex relationship, the issue of mosques becomes central because, more than other issues like the status of women or the relationship between politics and religion, it directly relates to the control and management of a territory increasingly shared or, I should say, contended. In the European panorama, Italy is not an exception, even though the presence of Islam is quite recent. In fact, over the last fifteen years, the issue of mosques concerns many urban centers, small or large, where there is an organized Islamic community, that emerged from the private sphere to assert its presence in the public space. Faced with the fears expressed more or less explicitly by part of the native population, public institutions adopted an uncertain and contradictory policy, which ended up becoming a real modus operandi, if not to say a political strategy: that of not deciding, and, consequently, of not taking responsibility. The policy of not deciding first had consequences on the rights of the Muslim minority, but indirectly also negatives consequences on social cohesion, with the exacerbation of conflicting attitudes, stigma and, ultimately, mutual closure to the Other, either native or foreigner. Faced with the fragmentation of the social body and the phenomena of exclusion and precariousness, public institutions are now called upon to review their way of thinking and acting. The need to adapt the institutional response to an increasingly complex society is now advocated by many, but it remains difficult to overcome the inertia and the blockages to identify appropriate methods and practices. Towards Muslims, and more generally towards Islam than other marginalized or excluded minorities, the Italian institutions are faced with the difficulty of reconciling respect for the rights guaranteed by the Constitution and the social fear of the Other, or, in other words, the reluctance to include the Other into Us, Us being understood as a social body empowered to make decisions and govern a specific territory. In recent years, although in a contradictory manner, some attempts have been performed, sometimes crowned with partial success, to reconcile the right to religious freedom with what we might define the "fears" or the "prerogatives" of the native population. It is just from these concrete experiences that we should start to open a new phase in institutional practice toward Islam and Muslims, which would allow at the same time the gradual legitimization of the Islamic presence in the Italian public sphere and the gradual opening of Muslim communities, often still folded on themselves and unable to build forms of dialogue with the rest of the Italian society. This work intends to contribute to the building of the institutional response regarding the inclusion and visibility of Islam and Muslims in the Italian public sphere. In particular, it aims to indicate tools and good practices through which the public debate around the opening of the mosque would abandon the ideological ground to take the path of inclusion and social cohesion. It is in this context that this work assumes that any demand or claim may have a certain measure of legitimacy and therefore should be fully understood so that it can find an appropriate response. This assumption stems from the fact that only by seriously considering social fears, more or less explicitly expressed, can the institutional responses be legitimate and effective.This study is structured in three parts. The first aims to contextualize the actual social processes, first through a brief description of the emergence of Islam in the Italian public sphere, then by defining the functions and the role of the mosque, the legal framework and content and forms of conflict that result from the opening of mosques in Italian cities. The first part concludes with an analysis of the public debate on Islam and Muslims in Italy and in particular of those actors who have given form and content to the public sphere. The second part describes the two cases examined, those of Bologna and Florence, the cities that were the scene of an important debate on whether to build a mosque, and that resulted practically in opposite outcomes: if in Bologna, the debate has produced a greater conflict, a rise of anti-Islamic discourses and an additional closure of the Islamic community on itself, in Florence, the participatory process has contributed in legitimizing the presence of Islam in the public space and has encouraged the opening of the community towards the city. To understand why the two paths have produced such different results, first we will describe the preconditions to the debate and then we will analyze the institutional instruments that have regulated the public debate. This work will conclude by pointing at methods and tools that can help local institutions to build a local public policy on Islamic places of worship, thus reconciling social inclusion and cohesion.