Discourse of Secularism

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Recently, scholars in European societies such as France, the Netherlands, Great Britain, and Germany have identified the tendency to invoke a nation’s ‘secularity’ as a possible means of delineating the inside and outside of the nation in immigration politics and at times specifically in anti-Muslim discourses (Fassin 2010; Mepschen, Duyvendak, and Tonkens 2010; Modood, Triandafyllidou, and Zapata-Barrero 2006; El-Tayeb 2011). In these discourses, “Western-European democracies see the separation of religion and politics as one of the unique features of their normative self-conception” (Behloul 2013, 30). Such arguments specifically draw on understandings of ‘secularity’ as inherently linked to modernity, individualization and gender-specific values, such as gender equality. Following Asad’s elaborations, an assumption of ‘secularity’ as central to modernity underpins secularism “as a political doctrine [that] arose in modern Euro-America” (Asad 2003, 1). In a similar manner, Scott talks about the discourse of secularism and states that “the point is that secularism is a political discourse, not a transcendent set of principles, or an accurate representation of history” (Scott 2018, 6).

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I understand secularism to include all discourses that draw on normative notions of ‘secularity’ and ‘religion’ in order to manage the state and its relationship to religious institutions as well as to minority groups and individuals that are identified via their religious affiliation. Central to current secularist discourses is not only the classical distinction between state and church but more generally the necessity of seeing public principle as ‘secular’ and placing the ‘religious’ in the realm of private reason in modern societies (Asad 2003, 8). Asad understands such a concept of modernity not as a verifiable object but rather as a political project that aims at specific ways of being in the world (2003, 12–139). Within the project of modernity, images of ‘the secular’ and ‘the religious’ are conceptualized “in terms of which modern living is required to take place, and nonmodern peoples are invited to assess their adequacy” (Asad 2003, 14).

Religion, Gender and Secularism

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In current discussions on the possibility of living in and belonging to ‘modern’ European nation states or to Europe as a whole,⁸ gender-specific issues, such as gender equality or sexual freedom, have been noted to be central, discursive benchmarks against which an assumed misogynist, sexually oppressive and potentially violent Muslim ‘Other’ is to be measured (Fassin 2010; Mepschen, Duyvendak, and Tonkens 2010; Modood, Triandafyllidou, and Zapata-Barrero 2006; El-Tayeb 2011). For the context of Germany, for instance, Weber outlines the evidence of, as well as potential challenges to, the “narrative of an enlightened German secularism that is juxtaposed to a religious, misogynist Muslim Turkish culture” (Weber 2013, 21).⁹ This narrative is drawn on most strikingly in debates surrounding the headscarf, in which gender equality is perceived as achieved in contemporary Germany and “the German woman” is seen as an embodiment of “Western democratic and liberal values”, and, most importantly, as emancipated, while “the Muslim woman” is seen as oppressed (Rottmann and Ferree 2008; Rommelspacher 2010).

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Similar, yet not identical variations of such arguments have been identified and examined across Europe, all building on the presupposed notion of a discernible distinction between the ‘modern secular European Self’ and the non-modern religious, specifically Muslim ‘Other.’ In this way, the current version of secularism “has become synonymous with an [often] (ill-defined) gender equality that distinguishes West from East, the Christian secular from the Islamic” (Scott 2018, 16) and the ‘modern’ from the ‘premodern.’

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The entanglement of gender, religion and secularity in public debates on societal norms and ideals is, as Scott (2009, 2013, 2018) outlines, in no ways new. Yet the specifics of what comes to be framed as the ideal gender relation secularity supposedly facilitates—and religion allegedly hinders—as well as the particular version of religion that is framed as problematic, are continuously re-negotiated and context-specific. Scott’s recent historical analysis of the secularism discourse (2018), though selective in the time periods covered¹⁰ as well as at times methodically vague and simplifying, convincingly outlines these two points. Firstly, she outlines that in the secular/religious binary, Christianity has been included on the secular side not only in recent debates on Islam’s perceived incompatibility with Western democracy but that Christianity, and in particular Protestantism, have at times been equated with the secular state ever since the mid-seventeenth century in Euro-American discourses (2018, 43–51).¹¹ A similar view is expressed by Behloul, who points to a Protestant understanding of religion as pertaining to the private sphere and to individual subjects rather than to religious communities that he sees as the consequences of the Thirty Year’s War (Behloul 2013, 18). According to Behloul, this discourse not only primarily defines religion in relation to politics, based on the notion that (communal) religion potentially disturbs social peace, but can also be seen as the epistemic framework of both inter-denominational (Protestants vs. Catholics) conflicts in the nineteenth century¹² as well as current anti-Muslim discourses (Behloul 2013, 18–21).

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The point I want to take from Scott’s and Behloul’s elaborations is that the religious/secular divide is not clear cut but rather an oftentimes strategically filled set of oppositions tied to normative notions of modernity, in which (Protestant) Christianity may come to figure on the side of the secular. Secondly, Scott (2018) outlines that the particular relations between gender, religion and secularity have shifted throughout history.¹³ By pointing to the central position the difference of sex, and hence a notion of gender inequality, had for explaining social and political organization in secularist discourses of the nineteenth century, Scott argues against current conceptualizations of secularity as a facilitator and at times even as a prerequisite for gender equality (2018, 25).

Secular Feminism and its Critique

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Such imagery of the secular as beneficial for gender equality and women’s rights and of the religious as oppressive and misogynist has been evident in certain versions of feminist activism and thought in the last couple of decades. A prominent example is the political philosopher Okin’s widely discussed critique of multiculturalism in her work Is Multiculturalism Bad for Women? (1999). The central argument of Okin’s text postulates that minority cultures, a concept that comes to be strongly linked to a notion of “Muslim culture,”¹⁴ are potentially more likely to be patriarchal and misogynist than the majority culture and that hence, from a feminist point of view, minority group rights “may well exacerbate the problem” (Okin 1999, 22). Similarly, in their text The True Clash of Civilizations, Inglehart and Norris (2003) draw on Huntington’s notorious concept of the “clash of civilizations” and argue that “when it comes to attitudes toward gender equality and sexual liberalization, the cultural gap between Islam and the West widens into a chasm” (2003, 67). Such views have been criticized as particular to a secular or secularist version of feminism that contentiously accuses the religious and specifically the Muslim ‘Other’ of necessarily being misogynistic and oppressive of women and at the same time denies the possibility of female agency from within religious and Muslim thought.

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Many scholars have criticized the underlying assumption of patriarchal structures in minority cultures, or specifically in “Islam” as resting on “an essentialist understanding of culture in general and of Muslim cultures in particular,” as well as revealing a blindness towards the unmarked liberal backdrop “for evaluating the level of freedom or unfreedom of ‘other cultures’” (Amir-Moazami, Jacobsen, and Malik 2011, 2). Abu-Lughod further invites her readers to contextualize secularist feminist discourses in their (post-)coloniality and think of the colonial violences exerted and presumptions made in narratives about the “Muslim women [who] need saving” (2002, 788–89). Specifically, drawing on the notion of “colonial feminism,” Abu-Lughod points to the secularist continuance of colonial instrumentalizations of the “woman question” in the contemporary focus on the “Muslim woman” in the US (2002, 783–85) as well as in secular-feminist frames in “the ‘government’ of European Muslims” (Amir-Moazami, Jacobsen, and Malik 2011, 6).

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In addition, prominent scholarly interventions, such as those by Mahmood (2001, 2005) and Abu‐Lughod (2002), have questioned the supposition of feminism as something secular and outside of religion. Mahmood mainly problematizes what she sees as the dominant narrative in current feminism, namely the assumption that freedom and agency is inherently progressive and located outside of religious traditions (2001, 203). In her delineation of piety as a discourse of self-empowerment, although arguably based on a potentially oversimplified and somewhat decontextualized binary between liberal feminist discourse of agency and the piety discourse, she points in a direction feminist understandings could develop that allows to grasp notions of religious agency. More recently, feminist scholars have addressed other kinds of relationships between feminism, agency and Muslim women in Europe, thereby exploring a variety of positionings, “including Muslim women’s cultivation of pious sensibilities within liberal-secular European societies, as well as the cultivation of ‘secular’ sensibilities” (Amir-Moazami, Jacobsen, and Malik 2011, 1). Hence, even though there is evidence of dominant tendencies to conflate feminist issues with secularism, the discourses on how gender, secularity and religion are to be understood in relation to each other are in flux.

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In the following, the contemporary public discourse in the German-speaking part of Switzerland is taken as an example to illustrate the normative dimension of current discourses of secularism and to elaborate on their particular interrelation with gender-specific issues. In a second step, the self-positioning of the secular Muslims is analyzed in relation to such discourses in the German-speaking world, as illustrated with regards to the Swiss-German discourse on Muslims in Switzerland. This is taken as an intriguing and productive starting point for raising further questions about the relationship between discourse and agency, as well as discourse and subjectivation.

Data and Method

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In the following, I draw on six Swiss-German news media outputs discussing Islam and Muslims in Switzerland in 2016 in order to outline the specific ways notions of the ‘secular’ and the ‘religious’ figure in current images of national identity and belonging. The approach to data collection, selection and analysis was guided by the operationalization of discourse analysis as developed within the sociology of knowledge (Bormann and Hamborg 2016; Keller 2011b, 2011a, 2001).¹⁷ First, a comprehensive corpus of material was gathered containing all Swiss-German radio and television shows by the publicly funded Swiss Radio and Television broadcasting company (SRF)¹⁸ and all newspaper articles published in 2016 that directly discussed Islam and Muslims in Switzerland.¹⁹ Second, this data was screened for media outputs (a) that set an in-depth thematic focus on Muslims in Switzerland and on questions of national belonging, (b) that are argumentative in nature²⁰ and (c) in which ‘secularity,’ ‘secularization’ or the attribute ‘secular’ is invoked at some point. In this procedure, six media outputs were identified as significant when analyzing the discursive construction of images of ‘the secular’ and ‘the religious’ in current debates on Muslim belonging in Switzerland.

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These six media outputs can be differentiated into two thematic threads; The first three media outputs identified continued ongoing discussions with regard to Muslims in Switzerland that gained salience in the aftermath of 9/11, such as religious violence and terror and an overall ‘clash of cultures’ narrative. The three broadcasts on this topic are the Swiss Radio and Television (SRF) television debate on Fear of Islam²¹ on April 1 (SRF 01.04.16), the SRF Kultur radio segment called Debate: Is Islam a Threat to the Free West?²² on September 9 (SRF 09.09.16) and another SRF Kultur radio debate on the question What are the values of the Occident?²³ on December 26 (SRF 26.12.16). The second three broadcasts discussed two instances that took place in 2016, namely the New Year’s Eve events in Cologne, where a number of sexual assaults and robberies allegedly performed by young men of predominantly “North African or Arab” descent were reported to the police, and an incident in the small town of Therwil, in Basel, where two school boys refused to shake their female teacher’s hand on religious grounds, developed into key media events that covered questions of integration and acceptable intra-national difference. Thereby, specifically gendered notions of the Swiss ‘Self’ and the Muslim ‘Other’ attracted renewed attention and were tied to notions of Muslims as refugees and migrants in the context of an overall German-speaking media discourse on the so called “refugee crisis” that gained ground in 2015 and early 2016. The media coverage around these two events and the overall investigative media gaze directed towards Muslims in Switzerland in the context of the “refugee crisis” are exemplified in the SRF television debate Assaults from Cologne—Ignition of Cultures²⁴ on January 12 (SRF 12.01.16), the debate on July 12 specifically discussing the incidence in Therwil under the title Tolerance without Limits?²⁵ (SRF 12.07.16) and lastly the August 2016 NZZ²⁶ Folio publication titled Muslims in Switzerland: How much Islam can the country bear?²⁷ (NZZ 02.08.16).

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In the last step, the selected media outputs were analyzed based on the premises of qualitative-interpretive analytics (Bormann and Hamborg 2016, 103). For this study, transcripts of the radio and television broadcasts and scans of the NZZ Folio articles were fed into the computer program NVivo for qualitative coding. In the text-based coding process, the specifics of the discursively constituted notions of ‘the secular,’ ‘the religious’ as well as gendered narratives of progress were detailed. Lastly, by analyzing the entanglements of these notions, I was able to establish the gendered positionalities that serve as markers of acceptable difference in Switzerland.

The Secular, Christian Self and the Muslim Other

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In all six media outputs, explicit or implicit notions of ‘religion’ and ‘secularity’ figured in the delineation between ‘Swiss’ and ‘Muslim,’ and more specifically between acceptable, unproblematic and potentially integrated Muslims on the one side and threatening, unacceptable and foreign Muslims on the other. On a first level, “secularity” and “secularization” is explicitly attributed to a “Western,” European or specifically Swiss “we/us.” This is evident in the following statement by Norbert Bischofsberger, SRF religion expert on the program Tolerance without limits? (SRF 12.07.16):

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We have secularization, the people here who gradually abandon faith. And we have migration, we have people who come to us with other customs, not only with other religions, also with other cultures (SRF 12.07.16, my translation²⁸).²⁹

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On the one hand, this establishes an image of a secular “we” in Switzerland, an idea centrally present in the overall framing of the analyzed debates, for instance when the moderator in the debate on the values of the Occident stated that “we are in a very secularized world, religion is largely on the retreat” (SRF 26.12.16)³⁰ or when the introductory text of the NZZ Folio talked about “our secular, open society” (02.08.16). On the other hand, Bischofsberger attributes religion to “other cultures” and to migrants coming to Switzerland, which both externalizes religion as well as potentially culturalizes the migrant ‘Other.’ Because this statement is made in a debate that explicitly revolves around Muslims in Switzerland and the extent to which they are “tolerable,” the “other religion,” perceived as arriving via migration, is framed as Islam.³¹ This delineation between a secularized Europe and Switzerland and a religious, currently Muslim, migrant is echoed in the other broadcasts and remains largely unchallenged. By framing Swiss people as secular, that is as largely dissociating or dissociated from “the faith in God” or participating only “pro forma in religious communities” (NZZ 02.08.16), religion is framed as an attribute of migrants and (once migrated) minorities. A tendency to ethnicize³² religion can also be found in recent anti-Muslim media discourses in Great Britain, in which secularity was not only aligned to “Britain” but a “baffling” and “fierce” commitment to religious belief was further attributed to “ethnic minorities” such as people that have migrated from “Asia” or “Africa” (Aeschbach 2018, 47–48).³³

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In addition to allocating a specifically Muslim religiosity to migrants and minorities, Christianity is portrayed as tied to and part of the ‘Swiss secular Self.’ The alignment of Switzerland with both secularity and Christianity can be seen in in the debate on Fear of Islam in a short dialogue between Nicola Blancho, a Muslim representative of the Islamic Central Council of Switzerland (IZRS), and the moderator of the segment, Jonas Projer. Projer identified Switzerland as a “Christian country,” to which Blancho reacted with the words “it [Switzerland] is not (…) a Christian country (…) it is a secular state” (SRF 01.04.16). In this instance, invoking a secular state while opposing the notion of a Christian country can be read as a strategic moment that may enable Muslim belonging to Switzerland to be perceived as equally likely and possible. However, the short quarrel ended in the moderator’s statement “let’s correct it (and say) Christian history,”³⁴ thereby simultaneously imagining a secular state and re-aligning Switzerland to Christianity. In a similar manner, the link between Christianity, secularity and the ‘Western Self’ is negotiated in the debate on the Values of the Occident (SRF 26.12.16). Here, although “Christian values” are seen as retreating or as fading, secularity itself is still aligned with the “Christian world” or the “Christian West.” This link is clearly stated by the moderator of the debate, who asks:

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Individualization tendency, no matter in which religion. Secularization tendency, especially now in the Christian world. Do common values exist in the West? (SRF 26.12.16, my emphasis)³⁵

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Interestingly, although the question “Do common values exist in the West?” is posed as an open question, the way it is framed arguably suggests that “individualization” and “secularization” should be considered common denominators in “the West,” “especially (…) in the Christian world.” Keeping in mind Asad’s (2003) and Scott’s (2018) view that secularization—and individualization as well, for that matter—should not—or at the very least not only—be seen as categories of analysis but rather as part of political discourses that aim to establish a certain way of being in the world, this framing in itself can be read as promoting the norms of “individualism” and “secularity.” In this way, current Swiss-German media discourses (re-)produce a normative image of a secular/religious dichotomy in which Christianity comes to figure on the ‘secular’ side with Islam as its opposition (Behloul 2013; Scott 2018). Moreover, the media outputs analyzed portray the ‘Christian secular’ as tied to notions of individuality and individual religiosity and assess such religiosity not only as acceptable but even as a “triumphant” marker of progress (SRF 26.12.16).³⁶ This further emphasizes the embedment of the concept of secularity in a political project of modernity (Asad 2003, 12–13) in concrete Swiss-German discourses on Islam in Switzerland.

Acceptable Muslimness and the “Secular Muslim Woman”

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However, the overall dichotomy established between an imagined ‘secular Christian West’ and a ‘Muslim Other’ is, of course, not the full picture. As early as 2002, Mamdani pointed to the increasingly utilized rhetorical fault line between ‘good Muslims’ and ‘bad Muslims’ in American post-9/11 discourses expressed by the Bush administration. In this line of argument, the notion of a threshold that separates “moderate, called ‘genuine’ Islam from extremist political Islam” (Mamdani 2002, 767) was conjured, centrally implying that “unless prove[n] to be ‘good’, every Muslim was presumed to be ‘bad’” (Mamdani 2005, 15). The initial version of this discourse primarily targeted countries such as Afghanistan, Palestine, or Pakistan, thereby simultaneously culturalizing these countries as “Muslim cultures” as well as problematizing them to the extent to which military intervention was deemed justifiable (Mamdani 2002, 2005). Increasingly, however, the idea of a fault line between ‘good’ and ‘bad’ Muslims has also been used in discussions on the acceptability of Muslims living in European nations. This idea is taken up in immigration and integration policies that aim to both distinguish between ‘good’ and potentially ‘bad’ Muslims as well as to discipline Muslim migrants to be ‘good’ (Fassin 2010).³⁷

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In current Swiss discourses, although never explicitly marked as a ‘good Muslim’ vs. ‘bad Muslim’ dichotomy, the idea of problematic Muslims on the one hand and acceptable, “well adapted” Muslims on the other hand is wide-spread in discussions on Muslims in Switzerland. Thereby, the specifics of what comes to mark acceptable intra-national versions of Muslimness are closely tied to “secularity” and forms of religion and religiosity perceived as connected to it. In the media debates analyzed, there is a continuous thread in which debate participants clarify that “the majority of Muslims [in this country] are (very) secular(ized)” (SRF 01.04.16; SRF 09.09.16; NZZ 02.08.16). This is either directly evaluated as positive and/or contrasted to problematic forms of Muslimness, such as in the statement of the religious expert Hugo Stamm, who stated that “fortunately, the vast majority of Muslims [here] are very secular (…) but they suffer because there (simply) are radicals”³⁸ (SRF 01.04.16). Similarly, Saïda Keller-Messahli, herself a Muslim woman often marked as progressive or secular, contrasted “secularized” Muslims with the IS interpretation of the Quran (SRF 01.04.16) and the NZZ Folio differentiated between Muslims that “do not much care about faith” with “strictly devout” and “ultraconservative” Muslims, who supposedly think “there’s only one true God” and “those who are not for Islam are against it” (02.08.16). Finally, the idea of “secularity” as a prerequisite of Muslim compatibility with “Western societies” is made explicit by Saïda Keller-Messahli when she states that Islam is “in principle not compatible [with Western enlightenment] as long as Islam makes political demands. That is, it is only compatible if (…) this secular principle is always defended and upheld” (SRF 09.09.16). In this way, secular Muslims come to figure as ‘good Muslims’ that are potentially compatible with Swiss society in contrast to ‘bad Muslims’ that are portrayed as orthodox, and hence as potentially violent and close to terrorism.

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Both the notion of acceptable “secular[ized] Muslims” as well as of problematic, “strictly devout” Muslims are closely tied to gendered imagery in current Swiss discourses, as evident in the editorial introducing the NZZ Folio Muslims in Switzerland: How much Islam can the country bear?:

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What to do if the last available parking space in a multi-story car park in the city of Zug is occupied—by three men kneeling on their jackets and bowing to the concrete wall behind which Mecca must lie? “Honk! Scold!” advises Saïda Keller-Messahli, because one should not allow oneself to be restricted by believers who mark their presence in public. Religions should be respected, but they are a private matter.

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Saïda Keller-Messahli, head of the “Forum for progressive Islam” is one of the ten Muslims we visited for our magazine. Many Europeans have become suspicious of Islam in recent years, for it is not Buddhists or Christians who spread terror in the name of their faith. Fundamentalist Islam has long since arrived in our secular, open society. How do we deal with this? How do Muslims living in Switzerland react to this? Is it none of their business? Or is it?

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“Of course it is”, says the Egyptian (woman) who is fighting for the sexual liberation of the Arab women’s world from Zurich with Youtube films. “No,” says the (female) student who only decided to wear a headscarf a year ago… (NZZ Folio 02.08.16, my emphasis)³⁹

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Two points in this introductory paragraph of the NZZ Folio seem quite striking. First, while the overall magazine portrays ten Muslims, four of which are women, the first three people mentioned in the editorial are Muslim women. In placing emphasis on the positionality of Muslim women in introducing the overall title question of “how much Islam can the country bear”—that should arguably rather read “what kind of Islam can the country bear”?—Muslim women come to mark acceptable intra-national Muslimness.

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Second, the position of acceptable and unacceptable Islam are both portrayed in a highly gendered manner; On the one hand, “three kneeling men” come to symbolize strongly discouraged “public” religiosity, which is contrasted with “private” religion marked as aspirational. On the other hand, the Muslim woman Saïda Keller-Messahli both embodies as well as calls for a ‘secular,’ i.e. private, Islam, which, in line with her and her group’s self-positioning, is labelled “progressive.” Her position is further aligned with Switzerland, by identifying Switzerland as “our secular, open society.” Moreover, the two other women mentioned come to mark the positively assessed female positionalities of “sexually liberated”⁴⁰ as well as “self-determined”⁴¹ Muslimness. By portraying the positionality of a “secular,” “progressive,” “sexually liberated” as well as “self-determined” Islam as embodied by women, and contrasting it with an Islam that is not only publicly visible and visibly male but also “fundamentalist” and potentially terrorist, the suggested fault line between ‘good’ and ‘bad’ Muslims is introduced in a clearly gendered manner in which Muslim women figure as markers of acceptable difference.

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Such interrelations of secularity and gendered positionalities as well as issues in notions of acceptable and unacceptable Islam are echoed in further 2016 media broadcasts on Islam in Switzerland. The religious expert Hugo Stamm, for instance, contrasted “secularization” with “the radicalization of Islam” and suggested emphasizing “that there is secularization” as a “counter-measure” to “islamization”, which he saw as evident in the gendered image of “girls” who are “forced” to wear a headscarf (SRF 01.04.16). In a similar manner, one of the participants in the debate on the values of the Occident stated that ever since “secularization,” “dogmatic” religion, seen as embodied by “of course in the end always men who say what is valid in religion” (SRF 26.12.16, my emphasis), is supposedly not accepted “anymore.” While such evidence of narratives of progress tied to secularity and its supposed overcoming of dangerous as well as misogynistic versions of religion is widespread, Saïda Keller-Messahli makes explicit the often underlying understanding of a causality between secularization and gender equality:

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The woman is worth less, she only inherits half (of it), her voice is only half as valuable. But that’s, I don’t blame Islam here either, in the Torah and in the Bible women don’t get away well either, only these societies simply did more culturally and could relativize that. That means (…) assigning religion a place where it does not determine what is going on in politics. So whenever we [Arab countries] politically advance we actually always take the religious further with us (…) a great step backwards. (SRF 12.01.16, my emphasis)

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In this statement, ‘secularization,’ understood as the separation of religion and politics, is not only directly linked to “Christian”—and in this case also “Jewish”—“societies,” but is also seen as the necessary causal factor that helped “relativize” misogynist tendencies in religious texts. In this way, gender equality is not only seen as a marker of progress that accompanies secularity but is rather explicitly seen as possible only because of secularity and as impossible within religions, specifically within un-seculariz(able) Islam.

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Moreover, the way Muslim women figure as embodiments of potentially acceptable Islam and hence of the possibility of Muslim belonging to Switzerland can be seen as part of a larger European discourse in which the bodies of Muslim women serve as “crucial markers of national belonging and function as boundary markers between communities” (Moors and Salih 2009, 376). I understand the emphasis on Muslim women as the current specific intersectional manifestation of the overall centrality women play in the delineation of national communities, as prominently outlined in the work of Yuval-Davis (1997, 1996, 1993) and McClintock, who has demonstrated that “nationalism is […] constituted from the very beginning as a gendered” (1993, 63). In the context of what Asad criticizes as “culture talk” (2003), or rather as a tendency to culturalize difference in contemporary delineations of ‘Self’ and ‘Other,’ women, and specifically Muslim women and their ‘appropriate’ behavior, figure as cultural transmitters as well as signifiers of national and cultural collectivities frequently perceived as internally homogenous (Yuval-Davis 1993, 627–28). Drawing on a variety of examples from European countries, including recent poster campaigns in Switzerland depicting veiled Muslim women, Barras outlines the way the “‘veiled’ woman remains a passive actor—a marker” (2013, 88, my emphasis) in discourse that suggest both the necessity of Muslim women to be saved as well as their potentially embodying a threat to the polity (Barras 2013, 87–88).

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At the same time, however, Muslim women actively take part in the public negotiation of how and what kind of Islam may be integrated into European societies (Fernando 2009; Rommelspacher 2009). Figures of secular Muslim women or female Muslim Islam critics, for instance, are highly public in current European discourses, with women such as Fadela Amara in France (Fernando 2009), Necla Kelek and Seyran Ateş in Germany (Rommelspacher 2009), and Saïda Keller-Messahli in Switzerland. Based on the notion of discourse as producing specific effects, I suggest that such public appearances could be seen as responding to the “pressure to perform” acceptable Muslimness produced within an overall discourse on secularism that establishes “a national belonging that claims to be secular” (Moors and Salih 2009, 376). In the remainder of this paper, I argue that the positionality of the group called secular Muslims, prominently co-founded by Saïda Keller-Messahli, may be interpreted as a moment of discursive agency that draws on the gender-specific implications of current Swiss notions of secularity and belonging outlined above.