Muslim citizenship in the West : editor's introduction

Modern democracies have been identified by scholars as dealing with two rather incongruous principles. As they are organised around issues of scarce resources, where the resources are differently distributed among various segments of the society, the result often is exclusionary structures such as social classes, age clusters and status groups. Despite this, they must also produce and protect social solidarity by emphasising the interdependence between individuals in a society and allowing them to engage in mutual enhancement of lives. In increasingly plural societies in the age of globalisation this is not easily achievable. States are constantly struggling to deal with pressures created by increasingly plural and complex societies. In modern social sciences, especially sociology, these incongruous principles are usually referred to as the allocative efficiency and integrative necessities. In modern liberal secular plural societies, particularly in those cases where social inequality has increased under the weight of neoliberal governmentality, citizenship plays a key role in the establishment of social solidarity where a citizen denotes an individual with rights, responsibilities and membership to a political community.