Inclusion of Socially Excluded Muslims: A Review of Government Initiatives

Abstract

The term ‘Social Exclusion'has its origin in France in the work of Rene Lenoir in 1974 (Vani, 2010) and later on it developed under the former French President of the European commission, Jacques Delors who connected this notion with the poverty programmes of the union in the beginning of 1990s (Ziauddin and Eshwarappa, 2009). This economic interpretation of exclusion continued in the work of Amartya Sen in a multidimensional view of poverty. He argued that the function of the concept of social exclusion was not to widen or otherwise alter our concept of poverty, but rather to highlight the relational aspect and processes which reinforce poverty (Sen, 2000). Social Exclusion deals with the areas which are related to poverty such as unemployment, homelessness, poor health, low educational qualification, etc. Social exclusion evolved from this economic aspect to become the concept of all social scientists from 1990s. The broad aspect of exclusion refers to lack of participation in social life. It discriminates people from social, political, economic, cultural, educational domains of societal life. Social exclusion can be broadly defined as the process through which individual or the group of individuals are discriminated from full participation in the society in which they live (Hann, 1997). So, generally, exclusion is the inability of an individual to participate in the basic political, economic and social functioning of the society. Thisarticleis an attempt to review the various initiatives of the government to include the socially excluded Muslims into the main stream of the society.