[update by nadezhda] Several months ago, MCMasterChef shared with us a paper he wrote during his final semester at Boston University. The paper, which is an overview of the history and challenges facing Europe and European Muslim communities, has unfortunately become all too relevant to debates in the wake of the London bombings.

It seemed to me a reprise of the Chef's paper is in order. First, it's a good review of recent writings by some of the more thoughtful scholars and commentators working on the topic of Islam in Europe. The paper is also a useful corrective for some of the more sweeping claims about "Europe" -- the Chef highlights important differences among European countries, especially Britain and France, in the distinctive histories and demographics of their Muslim populations, and consequently some major differences among countries in the issues each faces. He also distinguishes among a variety of strategies European countries have adopted over the years. Finally, and especially important in light of the London bombings, the Chef doesn't restrict himself to the heated debates on the politics of immigration. He stresses the problems being presented by failure to integrate a second and third generation and the attendant radicalization of many young Muslims who are European-born citizens.

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[originally posted May 16 2005]
Clash of Identities
Integration, Islamism, and the Question of Europe’s Muslims

Historian and Princeton scholar Bernard Lewis provoked an outcry recently when he suggested in a July 2004 interview with the German paper Die Welt that Europe will become a part of the Muslim world by the end of the 21st century. Citing demographic and immigration trends, Lewis claimed that Muslims would comprise a majority of Europe’s population by 2100, resulting in its becoming “part of the Arab West or the Maghreb” (Vinocur). Lewis is not the only one making such claims: Bat Ye’or, an Egyptian-born British writer living in Switzerland, has been embraced by conservatives on both sides of the Atlantic for her coinage of the term “Eurabia” to describe the Islamization of Old Europe. A menacing fusion of two civilizations deemed hostile towards the United States, Ye’or’s Eurabia is “fundamentally anti-Christian, anti-Western, anti-American, and antisemitic”, and its development ultimately entails the subordination of Europe to the status of “a cultural and political appendage of the Arab/Muslim world” (Ye’or). Many American conservatives have endorsed the idea, interpreting the tense cross-Atlantic relations of the past several years as the outgrowth of European impotence in the face of the “Islamic challenge”. Lewis echoes this analysis in his comments, suggesting that the European Union “could rename itself the community of envy”, and that European-Muslim sympathies can be explained by their mutual jealousy of American strength (Vinocur).

Not surprisingly, these comments have been provocative in Europe, where right-wing politicians and parties across the Continent have seized upon the perceived threat to their identities, advocating stricter immigration controls and other measures in an effort to limit the influence of European Muslims. The 9/11 attacks and, to an even greater extent, the Madrid bombings of March 2004 and the murder of Dutch filmmaker Theo Van Gogh half a year later, have further polarized the debate. The presence of a cell of 9/11 operatives led by Egyptian engineering student Mohammed Atta in Hamburg, Germany, raised fears that radical jihadists were using Europe as a staging ground for their violent attacks abroad, but the Madrid bombings and the Van Gogh murder heightened those fears further by making it clear that Europe itself could be a target. Differentiating between the religion of Islam, political Islamism, and its violent jihadi offshoots is extremely difficult. The marginalized economic and social status of Europe’s Muslim population; colonial legacies of racism and communalist strategies for dealing with minority groups; and the outright resistance by many European Muslims to the process of cultural assimilation does not make dispassionate consideration of European-Muslim relations any easier.

This paper attempts to examine those relations and trace their development, from the arrival of large groups of Muslim immigrants following World War II to the spread of political Islamism through those communities in the 1970s to the current tensions born out of 9/11 and other recent attacks by terrorists proclaiming an Islamic jihad against the West. Contrary to — or perhaps partly in reaction to — Ye’or and Lewis’ assertions, political bifurcation and division, not convergence, appears to best summarize the relationship between European Muslim subcommunities and the larger societies they inhabit.

As Timothy Savage carefully admonishes, it is worth remembering that

To talk of a single Muslim community in Europe ... is misleading. Even within individual countries, ethnic diversity, sectarian differences, cleavages within communities arising from sociopolitical and generational splits, and the nonhierarchical nature of Islam itself mean that Europe’s Muslims will be more divided than united for decades to come. Like European Christians and Jews, European Muslims are not a monolithic group.

With this caveat in mind, some level of generalization must necessarily take place in order to study the experience of Muslims within the unique context of Europe. This paper focuses generally on Muslims in Western Europe (which skews the issue by omitting discussion of the historical Muslim presence in Southeastern Europe and the Balkans), and most particularly in the United Kingdom and France. Broadly speaking, their experience has been one of social marginalization. Full blame for this situation can be ascribed to neither group entirely. While the native European population’s reaction to the growing number of Muslims living next door can hardly be described as welcoming, influential theories of Islamist communalism that emphasize social and political isolation from the corrupting influence of the kuffr (infidels) have further set back the integration process. Attempts at reconciliation will require an understanding of the historical and political factors that have produced the current standoff, but the multiple layers of separation between native Europeans and their Muslim counterparts and the aggravating factor of jihadi terrorism make prospects of future rapprochement daunting.
more below the fold   more »

I realize I'm about nine years too late to this argument by now, but I finally got around to reading Samuel P. Huntington's Clash of Civilizations during the course of my paper on him for my "Ideas in American Foreign Policy" course, which has been one of many things keeping me preoccupied lately. Anyone who's interested can find the final draft after the break — it's a little book-reportish at points, and my conclusion was a little muddled since I'm still not sure what I ultimately think of Huntington's arguments, but maybe some will find it interesting.   more »

So in addition to keeping up with readings in class and around the web, attempting to manage my campus Habitat chapter's activities, personally planning and leading a trip of 20 people down to Florida for spring break as a part of those duties, and oh yeah, trying to figure out what I'm doing with my life when BU boots me out of here with a wave and a dorky hat to remember it all by (I've got an interview with the JET program within the month and am going to be dashing off applications to the CSIS and State in short order), at some point this semester I'm going to need to write some papers.

I expect the big one is going to be a term paper for my current course with Professor Haqqani, Islamic Political Movements, and I think I have the glimmerings of a topic after reading and hearing more and more about it recently — namely, the experience of Muslims in Europe, how their integration (or lack thereof) has shaped their views of the West and their sympathies towards Islamist politics or, at the extreme, jihad.

You can check out some potential sources on the subject I've accumulated so far just through daily browsings here. I have a tendency to read a lot more than I actually write on, at least till I've gathered up a large enough body that I can sit down and synthesize it in one big go (which makes me a pretty bad blogger, I guess), but if nothing else that might give you an idea of some of my sources at the start going into this.

Europe is obviously a pretty big place, and not an area I've studied in any particular detail prior to this, so I'm not sure yet how I'm going to restrain myself from sprawling all over the place, but since the focus of this class is generally geared towards the progression of ideas and the sort of philosophical underpinnings, I will probably be approaching it from that general angle.

Of course I've got to top myself from last semester, so I full well expect the thing to be huge, meaning the time to start is now. If anybody has any particular suggestions for more reading on the subject, feel free to drop them here; for starters I'm going to try and plow through (or at least skim) Petter Nesser's Jihad in Europe dissertation for the Norwegian Defense Research Establishment, and then dig through the Frontline supplementary resources for their recent program on the subject, which I thought offered an interesting introduction to the issue but which I'd like to pursue deeper.

Ideally, I'll be able to make more use of primary source material then in my Uyghur paper, since many of these groups have websites than anyone can browse through. We'll see how it goes.

Also, at some point I have to write a biography on an influential thinker in American foreign policy — I'm thinking Samuel Huntington, just because I'd enjoy verbally smacking him around for a couple thousand words' length — and something on "an issue relating to homeland security or intelligence"... yeah, I'm hoping for more clarification on that soon.

I also really want to write something tying together several threads that've been twisting around in my head on the notion of full spectrum warfare as a reshaping of traditional American warfighting doctrines, but I am afraid I won't have the time to devote myself to that particular endeavor for quite a while. We'll see.

From ArmsControlWonk comes news of an interesting-sounding new book entitled Code Names:

The war on terrorism and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have led to a secrecy explosion. In the 9/11 world the U.S. military and intelligence organizations have created secret plans, programs, and operations at a frenzied pace, each with their own code name. In a perfect world, all of this secrecy would be to protect legitimate secrets from prying foreign eyes. But in researching Code Names, defense analyst William M. Arkin learned that while most genuine secrets remain secret, other activities labeled as secret are either questionable or remain perfectly in the open. The sheer volume and complexity of these operations ensures that the most politically important remain unreported by the press and shielded from the scrutiny of the American electorate. Despite the intelligence failures of 9/11 and the questionable assumptions that led to the war in Iraq and govern the war on terrorism, the U.S. government argues for massive amounts of funding and resources, while at the same time claiming that public accountability would compromise their missions. Arkin didn’t accept this argument during the Cold War – when he published two books that revealed U.S. nuclear “secrets” and led directly to a healthier public discussion of a “nuclear warfighting” emerging in the Reagan era – and he is challenging it again today.

From “Able Ally” to “Zodiac Beauchamp,” this book identifies more than 3,000 code names and details the plans and missions for which they stand.

Regular readers of the Federation of American Scientists' Secrecy News may already be familiar with issues of overclassification in American government, but in my first Homeland Security class on Tuesday, I got a bit of a first-hand account of it from my professor, who was a former Air Force intelligence and CIA officer for many years. Part of your training as an officer involves learning the process of classification, and not suprisingly in the CIA's secrecy culture (where even widely known information like the intelligence budget is never "confirmed") it is an extremely easy thing to do: your officer sitting at a desk stamps the top and bottom of the document with "Secret", and then adds on the line the reason for classification, which comes from a list of various coded categories. The biggest is, not suprisingly, the catch-all in-the-name-of-national security category, although he said that a newly popular one these days was "Sensitive But Unclassified" — information which people have been actually prosecuted for distributing, even though it is not technically "secret". And as for at what future date the classification of material can be later reevaluated, "ImpDet" — Impossible to Determine — is literally built into the stamps they use.

This is all on the first day, so I only have broad anecdotes to share right now, but I think it's going to be an interesting class. (P.S. to Nadezhda - Can you add new categories for my four new courses this semester? Thanks!)

Tomorrow is the first day of my last semester as an International Relations student at Boston University. My courselist as originally laid out here has since been updated; the revised version with accompanying booklists and syllabi outlines (principal required texts only so far; there are several other shorter excerpts and recommended readings for most of the classes that I've ommitted) is below.

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I have come very late to the field of South Asian studies in my college career (prior to Prof. Haqqani's arrival at the university, I don't believe anyone was really teaching any courses specifically related to either India or Pakistan, which is kind of unbelievable when you think about it.. I think European and Russian studies are still a little over-represented in our IR department right now, but hey, to each his own turf).

The more I learn the more interested I am in the region, so it's interesting when my studies to date, which have mostly focused on China and East Asia, overlap — as they did in my Uyghur paper and as they do in these articles about recently increased Sino-Pakistani cooperation here, here, and here (all coinciding with a visit by Pakistani PM Shaukat Aziz to Beijing and Shanghai) which recieved little attention in the U.S. press (even though Hu's diplomatic efforts in Latin America, East Asia, and Africa have caught a good bit of notice as China becomes increasingly assertive) but which look to have been a big deal in Dawn, the establishment newspaper of Pakistan.

It's my understanding that the military alliance between Pakistan and China actually dates back several decades — I think Steven Cohen's The Idea of Pakistan may cover it somewhat, but does anyone have a recommendation for a book specifically on Sino-Pakistani relations, military or otherwise? — since you have the whole border war between India and China from the 60s as well as the Sino-Soviet split playing out there. I believe Cohen makes the point that in the absence of real committed American support, Pakistan has frequently turned towards other regional powers such as China, especially after the Bangladesh crisis and when we departed after the Afghan jihad in the 1980s. Since Pakistan under Musharaff post-9/11 has been shedding most of its overt support for the training of Islamic guerrillas in the Kashmir region (which China had previously complained was bleeding over into Xinjiang and riling up the Uyghurs) and since China is content to participate in the war on terror to the extent that it legitimizes its own moves in Central Asia, increased cooperation between the two countries is not surprising now.

With that in mind, Timothy Dunlop's relating of the reaction of Indian officials (via Drum and Pandagon) to a visiting U.S. Congressional delegation — "We consider ourselves as in competition with China for leadership in the new century. That's our focus and frankly, you have made it very difficult for us to deal with you." — strikes me as very interesting indeed. TJ in Pandagon comments has CIA factbook figures for India, China, and the US that suggest to him India may actually be the most dynamic of the three major powers for the future. I don't know anything about the Indian economy to judge whether that's true or not, but China certainly has its share of structural problems yet to be confronted for the future. Right now the U.S. is engaging both the Chinese and the Pakistani regimes, but it's not clear to me to what extent (since the Bush administration hasn't made much of a priority of anything besides a professed commitment to counter-terrorism) or how long that will last (since American relations with Pakistan have generally been utilitarian and limited, and its as yet unclear how deep our cooperation is outside the current hunt for Al Qaeda — one reason Pakistan should be in no rush to deliver, by the way). I really don't think we want to see some sort of Sino-Pakistani vs. India-American face-off in South Asia at any point in the future, but India's dismissal of American efforts is not a particularly encouraging sign either, since with its current political and economic ties (of varying degrees of strength) to all major parties in the region the U.S. would presumably be in the best position to uphold a peaceful status quo between them.

And to conclude this bout of semi-informed speculation, let me just add that if I were an apocalyptic science fiction writer these days, I would totally start it all off with Kashmir.

I've made an invitation to my classmates from my Islam in South Asian Politics course to share their final term papers here on the site, in order to satisfy my interest, theirs, and hopefully our readership's, for what they found in the course of their research and writing. It was possible to approach this course from so many angles, it would be a shame just to limit myself to the one I wrote on in my particular paper, so I hope many of them will indulge us and volunteer their work for others to peruse. We'll put them up here as they come: watch this space for more details.

Enclosed is my term paper on postwar Japanese military policy. While considerably more academic and probably less general-interest than my Uyghur piece, it is still somewhat relevant today. This paper mainly sprang out of my frankly flabbergasted disbelief at the kinds of operational restrictions the Japanese government puts on their Self Defense Forces. After reading more on the subject in an effort to understand, I've constructed an argument for why that might be. I lost this paper once when my computer crashed and died, so this version didn't have as much cumulative effort devoted to it as the Uyghur one just on the basis of time constraints; to some extent I think this may have lead me to overstate my case (that of a realist leadership calculating costs and benefits of a particular national strategy), and I don't believe that it alone is the sole explanation by any means. Nonetheless, it's one explanation, and hopefully one that's sufficient for my professor, whose views on the matter I happen to arguing against.

In any case, it's done, and now I can move on to my even more obscure study of the Chinese danwei work units, which I expect to spend the entire weekend frantically trying to finish by Monday!   more »

Warning: fairly shameless praise. Professor Haqqani — who I believe may be reading this blog — may want to cover his ears.   more »

Revised December 6, primarily illustrations and format

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Uyghur Separatism and the Politics of Islam in China's Western Frontier

Colin Cookman

From its earliest inception, the modern Islamic terrorist movement has been transnational and pan-Islamic in character. Osama bin Laden's Al Qaeda network had its origins in the corps of volunteers known as the "Islamic Internationale", or "Arab Afghans": young men hailing from Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, and the whole breadth of the Middle East who flocked under the banner of jihad to the mountains of the Hindu Kush and the training camps of Peshawar. There they gathered to wage guerrilla war in the name of Islam against the godless Soviet Communists, while the American government looked on with grim satisfaction as it covertly supported efforts to bleed the Russians in their own "Soviet Vietnam".

Following the United States' campaign to topple the Taliban and disrupt Al Qaeda's base in Afghanistan in the aftermath of the September 11th attacks, news reports tracking captured fighters and key figures in the Al Qaeda leadership regularly reiterated, either explicitly or through non-commental labels of ethnicity, the multinational character of the terrorists' network: U.S. President George W. Bush's "coalition of the willing" was facing off against a stateless, loosely affiliated coalition of the dispossessed, the globally marginalized, and the violently revivalist. Although the biggest names and largest percentage of captured Al Qaeda members continue to be primarily of Middle Eastern or South Asian origin, every now and then reports mention other, more exotic figures in the mix of captured and killed: Chechens from the Caucuses, Uzbeks, Filipino Moros, and, infrequently but not unnoticed, Uyghurs from China's Xinjiang province.

What motivates those small handfuls of anonymous young men to cross the Pamir mountains into Afghanistan and fight alongside the militants of Al Qaeda and the Taliban? In order to attempt an answer, we must examine the origins of Xinjiang's oasis peoples, the Uyghurs, and their aspirations for nationhood; the nature of Chinese rule over them today, and its effects on those aspirations; and the extent to which militant Islamic revivalism may have infiltrated China's western hinterlands, and what implications that holds for the Uyghurs and their region. This paper argues that China's discriminatory policies have, more than any other factor, served to alienate the Uyghurs and increase the appeal of militant Islam, in effect making Beijing's worst fears a reality.
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