There are a number of aspects to be considered in discussing pluralism, as this term includes race, and culture as well as religion.
The US has had a very long pre-occupation with the colour of its citizens’ skin. The recent article “There's No One as Irish as Barack O'Bama: The Policy and Politics of American Multiracialism” by Jennifer Hochschild and Vesla Mae Weaver in the Cambridge Journals, describes, how laws have been promulgated to separate people of different races in the US, even to the extent that they prohibited interracial marriage. Things have changed however; quoting from the article: “The Hart-Cellar Immigration Act of 1965 that removed immigration restrictions based on national origin and the 1967 Supreme Court decision in Loving v. Virginia that struck down laws forbidding interracial marriage jointly facilitated powerful demographic changes in the United States. Immigration rose, to over a million people a year in some years. Interracial and interethnic marriages occurred much more often than before; the number and proportion of mixed-race children grew; and multiple ways of recognizing group mixture arose in the society, culture, and economy.” So those recent changes seem to have taken skin colour out of the equation in the US, and some commentators suggest that by 2050 this will no longer be an issue. I suggest, that it should never have been an issue in the first place.
Multiculturalism is a mix of a very different nature. In Australia it is actually being celebrated, as it has, since WWII contributed to a much richer cultural mix in the population. It also drove a bottom-up influence for the government to give the original owners of the land, the aborigines, equal rights as citizens, accompanied by an apology for their prior mistreatment.
Religion is, however, still a major risk to achieving a unified people, even though the emphasis on the differences is driven by a minority in most countries..
In his book, The Law of Peoples, The American philosopher John Rawls suggested a way how a number of peoples could form a society of peoples. Such a society, he argues, can only be formed by well ordered peoples, which are liberal, democratic, and just, terms that include pluralism, justice as fairness, and human rights.
To reach an outcome with regard to pluralism, he prefers to discuss his theory on a purely political basis to the exclusion of other topics including religions by using a veil of ignorance. This then creates the problem of leaving conflicts between adherents of various comprehensive doctrines, both religious and secular, unresolved. Rawls answer to this is that their differences can be contained by reason, in that these adherents can be expected to find reasonable consensus for the sake of the common good, and that the citizens will live together peacefully in the society of peoples. This he calls overlapping consensus.
The European Union could be seen as one of such societies of peoples, and even John Rawls cites it as an example. However, as Jürgen Habermas pointed out to John Rawls in an article in the Journal of Philosophy 92 (March 1995), “Reconciliation Through the Public Use of Reason: Remarks on John Rawls’ Political Liberalism” (Political Liberalism (Columbia Classics in Philosophy)
), the reliance on faith in reason does not remove the risk of substantial disagreement and even unrest.Most nations these days are becoming more multicultural as a result of massive migration resulting from inequality between the world’s nations, and because of increased mobility. As a consequence people from many different cultures and religions are living together in close proximity to each other, mostly in an urban environment, and ignorance can create fear or at least dislike of the unknown other on both sides In addition, the newcomers, often coming from an unstable national environment, find it difficult to see that the rule of law in their new situation is in fact a reliable system to achieve justice.
Education, especially at an early age, will contribute towards a better understanding of the differences between and similarities of these cultures. Religious practices can, however, become the more obvious and visible obstacles to a better understanding, as is currently the case with the Burqa in France, or the building of mosques in Switzerland. As the EU is a union of European nations that have much of their history in common, Islam is immediately more visibly different in such an environment, and requires considerable patience to explain any differences.
Islam is already changing internally in removing some of the shackles that were imbedded by centuries of consensual development in its laws, the Shari’a. Many countries with a majority of Muslims in their populations have signed the UN charter of human rights, which means that their constitutions provide for the equality of the gender and freedom of choice of religion, which in turn represents a clear break from a traditional interpretation of the Shari’a. This has brought about a process of internal modernisation of Islam. Started by Ustadh (revered teacher) Mahmoud Mohammed Taha of Sudan, who believed that the part of the Qur’an received by the Prophet during the first thirteen years of his mission in Mecca is the true Islam, while the one received in Medina after that period was to be used merely as an introduction to Islam for people not familiar with the Arab traditions of the time. He and his ardent follower Abdullahi An-Na’im argue that with a generally much higher level of education now in the twenty-first century, the Medinan part of the Qur’an is no longer necessary and should now be abrogated, and that those clauses in the Shar’ia referring to them also be removed. To some Muslims this may appear rather drastic, but it would then take out those parts that have called for gross inequality of women and members of other religions.
It should therefore be possible for the imams and the other religious leaders in the EU to go beyond the idea of faith in reason as suggested by John Rawls, and negotiate the removal or modification of those parts of the Qur’an and Shari’a that are in the way of achieving true consensus rather than overlapping consensus between the different cultures within the peoples of the EU. Naturally, such negotiations may also need to bring about some adjustments in doctrines of other religions or secular groups to satisfy the needs of Muslims or atheists for that matter, to remove any such points of friction that may exist. A successful outcome of such negotiations would then create an example or role model for other societies of peoples, such as the African Union, and for that matter for the USA.
Now it is up to citizens to help their governments to bring about true pluralism from the bottom up.
