A basis for and two obstacles in the way of a multiculturalist coalition

There is a deepening crisis between oppressed and disaffected religious groups such as Muslims in western societies and some of the principal sources of anti-oppression doctrines and movements.The centre-left seems not only to be dividing between those who see the contemporary minority–majority relations challenge to be the egalitarian inclusion of groups like Muslims, and those who see Muslim political claims as a threat to the legacy of the Enlightenment and to the Left itself; this division seems to be becoming one of the defining cleavages of contemporary European politics. One of the expressions of this dynamic are some of the uses of feminism; while it is mainly the Right for whom it has become a missionary ideology to express the supremacy of the West and the backwardness of the Rest, the tendency is not absent on the Left. Another manifestation of the above tensions on the Left is how the ‘war on terror’ and the problematizing of Muslims have become features of some of the Left as well as the Right. I am therefore in profound sympathy with Judith Butler’s contention that this growing cleavage must be reversed and in particular that we need to think of the coalitional possibilities between sexual politics and religious multiculturalism (Butler 2008: 1–23).