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.
[originally posted May 16 2005]
Colin Cookman
IR 508 - Islamic Political Movements
May 4, 2005
Integration, Islamism, and the Question of Europe’s Muslims
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.
Origins of Europe’s Muslim Population
Getting accurate demographic information on the number of Muslims living in Europe is challenging, since many nations prohibit the collection of such data (Savage 26). The Eurostat statistical service of the European Union, which catalogs an impressively detailed array of economic information and other social indicators, does not track data on religious affiliation (European Union). This paper thus relies primarily on the U.S. State Department’s International Religious Freedom Report for 2004 (the most recent year for which figures are available) for data on the subject. It should be cautioned that varying collection methodologies and the difficulty of obtaining precise figures make these numbers more useful as a general guide than an exact scientific measure. In cases where an upper and lower estimate range was offered in the original State Department report, this tally has used the midpoint between them, so it is an admittedly imprecise sum.
A tally of the fifteen core European Union nations (Austria, Belgium, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Ireland, Italy, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Portugal, Spain, Sweden, and the United Kingdom) shows a population of slightly over 14 million Muslims, or 3.3% of the total population (Religious Freedom Report). These figures are roughly comparable to Timothy Savage’s own analysis of the data in the 2003 draft of the State Department report, which found 15.2 million Muslims in the 15 European Union countries, comprising 4.0% percent of the total population (Savage 27, 32). Of these, France hosts the largest Muslim presence both in absolute terms (5 million persons) and as a relative share of the population (8.3%) (Savage 32). Whatever the exact number, the visibility of the European Muslim population has steadily increased, and Islam is now the second-largest faith in eight of the fifteen EU core countries. Only in Finland is it not one of the top three religions (Savage 32).
With the exception of the populations of the Balkans and Turkey, most European Muslims trace their ancestry abroad to the traditional core nations of the Muslim world. In France, they are primarily North African in their origins, in Germany, Turkish, and in England, South Asian. Not surprisingly, this distribution is a reflection of the colonial legacy, and more specifically the impact of World War II upon the Western European economies. The terrible devastation wrought by internecine conflict between the European powers increased their need for a new source of cheap labor through which to fuel the Continent’s reconstruction. An influx of immigrants from the outlying imperial colonies was one way to alleviate the shortage of working-age men for Europe’s factories. According to Gilles Kepel, this process was understood at the time to be a temporary one: “the workers, like the European authorities, saw themselves as itinerants rather than immigrants, who would go back home once their contracts ran out and would be replaced by others, according to the regular ebb and flow of migration” (Jihad 191). An ongoing population boom in the former colonies provided plenty of impetus for job-seekers to travel abroad to the European metropoles, and their pattern of concentrated, short-term settlement has had a large role in shaping the contemporary distribution of Muslims throughout Europe. The transient nature of these workers’ forays into Europe and the relative weakness of political Islamism at this time meant visible displays of Islamic faith were generally rare. In one notable exception, British Muslims, who had long endured the experience of minority religion status on the Indian subcontinent, began forming social organizations and tight-knit communities soon after their arrival, which would later expand in size and influence (Jihad 192).
This history means that discourse on Europe’s “Muslim problem” is frequently carried out in terms of immigration issues — to the point where, according to Savage, “the words ‘Muslim’ and ‘immigrant’ are virtually synonymous” in many European countries (27). Despite pervasive unemployment throughout Europe and restrictions on entry, illegal immigration persists to this day, much of it originating in North Africa and the Middle East (Tibi 35). What this construction fails to appreciate, however, is the fact that approximately half of today’s Muslims living in Western Europe were in fact born there (Savage 28). (For clarity’s sake, this paper uses the term “native Europeans” to refer to the predominantly white, traditionally non-Muslim population of Western Europe, but the term can in fact be applied just as accurately to many non-white Muslim Europeans.) When Europe’s postwar reconstruction boom gave way to recession and economic contraction following the 1970s oil shocks, government officials began restricting immigration as a way to alleviate unemployment, on the presumption that Muslim migrant workers would return to their home countries. Instead, the reverse happened: “immigrants realized that they would be better off being unemployed in Europe than unemployed at home” (Jihad 192). The generous provisions of the European welfare states were far more attractive than returning to a life of poverty in their underdeveloped former colonies, and young men from the Muslim world soon arranged for their wives to join them, with children following soon after. The “guest workers” are now effectively here to stay, and are today well into their third generation.
To the alarm of European nativists, those generations appear to be growing at a considerably faster rate than the rest of Europe’s population. The well-documented decline of European birth rates (which are the lowest in the world today) has not yet spread to its Muslim population, who have on average three times as many children as their non-Muslim peers. Based on these projections, Omer Taspinar predicts a doubling of Europe’s Muslim population by 2015, in comparison to a 3.5% decline in the population of non-Muslim Europeans (Taspinar). Although long-distance projections are notoriously imprecise — especially given their assumption that subsequent generations of Muslims will continue to follow the procreation habits of their predecessors, rather than adapting to the prevailing norms of European society, an uncertain proposition at best — most agree that the size of Europe’s Muslim population as a proportion of the larger society will continue to grow. This is particularly true given that by virtue of their birth rate Europe’s Muslim population tends to be much younger than their aging non-Muslim counterparts (Savage 28).
This changing demographic picture, the controversial nature of Islam’s entry into Europe, and the many centuries of historical tension between the European and Islamic worlds — Samuel P. Huntington has described each as “the other’s Other” — has made the prospect of a permanent Muslim presence particularly challenging to traditional European identities. (Huntington 209). At ultimate issue is whether it would be more accurate to describe the focus of this paper as “Muslims in Europe” instead of the “Muslims of Europe” — with proponents (both Muslim and non-Muslim) of the former definition depicting Islam and its practitioners as alien to the European idea, and incapable of ever truly becoming a part of it.
The European Muslim Community
While the history of Muslim immigration during the 1970s offers a partial explanation for Muslims’ continued isolation within European societies, many other factors have also reinforced and compounded this sense of separation. One has been persistent economic disadvantage; Muslim unemployment runs twice that of non-Muslims, and is considerably worse than that of non-Muslim immigrants (Savage 31). Another legacy of the itinerant origins of many European Muslims has been their geographic concentration in particular cities and neighborhoods throughout Britain and the Continent — the phenomenon of “ghettoization”. Partly a product of self-selected patterns of settlement and partly a result of native European “white flight”, from the neighborhoods of “Londonistan” to the banlieues suburban slums surrounding Paris, Muslims in Europe generally live physically segregated from their fellow citizens. “Two-fifths of Muslims in the United Kingdom reside in the greater London area,” Savage relates, while “one-third of Muslims in France live in or around Paris; and one-third of Muslims in Germany are concentrated in the Ruhr industrial area” (29). These communities tend to be peripheral to the major urban centers, are predominantly poor or working-class in economic terms, and are overwhelmingly populated by Muslims. The poverty of these surroundings further reinforces popular conceptions of Muslims as a social underclass, just as the homogeneity of their neighborhoods underscores their position outside the mainstream European culture.
The culture clash is a source of considerable tension between Muslims and native Europeans, who, while historically Christian in their faith, have also developed an emphatically secular tradition that provokes new strains with Islam. PBS’ Frontline quotes Harvard visiting professor Jocelyne Cesari on this matter, who says that “What Europeans share is a very strong feeling that religion has nothing to do with citizenship. ... One of the big misunderstandings between Muslims and non-Muslims in Europe has to do with the fact that Muslims have to build a religious minority in a context where religion doesn't make sense anymore in the public space for most Europeans” (Telvick). Several European nations, who define minority status as a matter of ethnic origin, do not even officially recognize Islam as a religion, despite its wide observance (Savage 26). A survey by the Christian Science Monitor revealed that despite the fact that Muslims only make up a fraction of the total British population (3%, according to their studies), “more people attend Friday prayers than go to Sunday church” (Ford). The traditionalist Islamic subculture is confronted by a Europe that appears to be hedonist, materialist, and incorrigibly secular, which has the effect of further alienating Muslims from their social surroundings. Christine Ogan, in her study of Turkish migrant media viewing patterns, emphasizes this when she notes that
In her study Ogan explores in particular how the development of new media technologies and distribution methods (such as international cable and satellite channels, the internet, and other signals of globalization) have enabled European Muslims to sustain those barriers. The relative proximity of Europe to most of the rest of the Muslim world has allowed former migrants to maintain closer ties to their home countries and culture, reaffirming and reinforcing their separation from the societal mainstream.
The first migrants to Europe from Turkey may have been religious, but could not be thought of as fundamentalist in their views. Over time some of them adopted such a position. This partially grew out of a resistance identity perspective. As they observed Dutch society and its mores, they determined that the Dutch were socially and politically overly liberal, dressed too revealingly, didn’t appropriately value family relations, etc. So they built stronger barriers between themselves and the Dutch majority by taking more extreme positions on religion and the education of their children (Ogan 10).
The fact that many Muslims, coming as they do from North Africa, Central, or South Asia, share a different skin color than predominately white Europe further complicates integration and assimilation. While the United States continues to deal with the aftermath of its own long and turbulent history of race relations, in Europe these issues are further aggravated by the colonial legacy, language barriers, differing religious practices, and the Muslims’ stronger identification with a larger community of the faithful outside the nation’s boundaries — one which includes parties of violent jihadists whose terrorist acts do nothing to reassure suspicious Europeans about the trustworthiness of their Muslim neighbors. Initially, native Europeans were inclined to view the influx of immigrants to their countries not as an arrival of Muslims per se, but rather as “blacks”, “coloureds”, or other racial groups. British immigration laws reinforced divisions by initially only granting passports to those born in or with ancestors from the territory of the United Kingdom, restricting the immigration of non-whites while permitting whites from the Commonwealth to enter on claims of British heritage (Allah 100). Official government efforts at combating racism in late 1960s Britain sought to establish “color consciousness” rather than “color blindness”, through a program of “positive discrimination”. The result was a “trend towards an institutionalization of minority identities by granting sizable sums of money and legal recognition to the representation of ‘minorities’ and by encouraging leaders who would give a concrete status to minority identities”. This policy had the effect of further encouraging the development of exclusionary, communalist politics (Allah 101).
The experience of young men and women growing up disconnected from their surrounding European societies inevitably produces crises of identity on a personal level. In the specific context of Britain, Farhan Nizami and others have termed this dilemma that of “Being British, Feeling Muslim”; in a January 2005 article in the liberal British Guardian newspaper, Jonathan Freedland aptly articulates the thoughts of
young people from Pakistani and Bangladeshi families who feel no connection with an "old country" they may never have seen, and who therefore reject the label associated with it: they are not from Pakistan, so why should they be called Pakistanis? But nor can they easily swap "Pakistani" for "British" when so many of them feel rejected, or at least suspected, by Britain (Freedland).“‘Muslim’”, Freedland concludes, “has stepped into the gap” as a new defining identity for these youth. His conclusion has been corroborated by numerous other observers, who all detect an increase in the “Islamization” of second- and third-generation European Muslims. Gilles Kepel argues that
two factors combined in Britain to create a particularly fertile ground for re-Islamization ‘from below’. Firstly, immigrant communities had a recognized existence. Secondly, the reduction of state welfare provision encouraged Muslims to turn to self-help networks run by the mosques. The break ... found a territorial basis in districts that were developing into a sort of ghetto, organized around the mosques and controlled by the imams (Revenge 38).A similar situation exists in France, where the sons and daughters of Algerian immigrants — popularly known the “beurs” — have developed their own political identity independent of both their parent’s home country and that of France that makes extensive use of Islam as a distinguishing marker (Leveau 148). Like the Pakistanis in Freedland’s article, young French Muslims feel marginalized within society and reject the metropole with cries of “Naal bou la France”, a North African epithet roughly translated as “Damn France”. This curse serves as the title of a popular 2002 publication by Farid Abdelkrim. In it Abdelkrim, who has subsequently become leader of the Young Muslims of France (JMF), reiterates that
Neither the blood spilled by Muslims ... during both world wars nor the sweat of migrant laborers, living under deplorable living conditions, who rebuilt France (and Europe) for a pittance after 1945, has made their children, as far as the French or indeed Europeans in general are concerned, full fellow citizens (Muslim Minds 268).The only identity for these dispossessed youth to turn to is their Islamic heritage, fueling the rise of explicitly Islamist-oriented political movements among Europe’s young Muslims.
Islamist and Communalist Political Organization
Numerous factors have influenced the rise of Islamism as a political ideology throughout the broader Muslim world. Gilles Kepel traces its rise particularly to the apparent collapse of Arab nationalism as a viable political program following the disastrous defeat of the 1967 Arab-Israel War (Jihad). Equally important in the movement’s worldwide spread has been the mass distribution of the writings of influential theorists like Pakistan’s Sayyid Abul Ala Maududi and Egypt’s Sayyid Qutb by the post-oil shock, petrodollar-rich government of Saudi Arabia. The internationalization of the anti-Soviet jihad by activists like Abdullah Azzam in the 1980s further shaped the development of Islamism as a political theory by introducing a military dynamic. Instead of representing a personal religious bond between worshipper and deity, or serving merely as a broad cultural identifier, Islam was characterized by these theorists as an all-encompassing ideology for political and social life, one which rejected the worldviews of the kuffr and which held Muslim societies that failed to follow the Islamist political program to be jahilliyah (“ignorant”)
While the intellectual roots of political Islamism go as far back as Ibn Taimiyah writing in the 13th Century, centuries of European dominance over large swaths of the Muslim world have also had profound effects on its development. While Islam has always maintained a strong sense of a community of believers (the ummah) united through their shared faith, European colonial policy further reinforced this through its endorsement of the communalist or communitarian political system. Faced with the prospect of administering vast territorial empires, the British in particular, and the European imperial powers more generally, often relied on the practice of indirect rule through the co-opting of local elites. While helpful in minimizing administrative costs, such policies were also specifically intended to minimize the need for any extensive — and doubtlessly messy — interaction between social groups. The Europeans preferred instead to deal through recognized community leaders, who could mediate their constituencies’ demands and translate the policies of the European authorities for native consumption (Nasr 31-33). The practice of using officially endorsed interlocutors for a particularly defined population segment has the effect of institutionalizing those divisions, as the designated political leaders have a natural interest in perpetuating the distinct status of their community in order to maintain their positions of power (Allah 95). The idea that the Muslim community should go so far as to constitute its own separate state in order to maintain that status was instrumental in the movement to partition Pakistan from British India in the 1940s; within Europe, members of the Muslim minority have frequently sought and received a similarly stand-offish treatment from the government.
The turn to communalist Islamism was initially encouraged by a proliferation of pietist groups that exhort Muslims to return to fundamental Islamic practices and, as a means of preserving those traditions, to isolate themselves from the corrupting influences of the dar-el-Kuffr. The Tablighi Jamaat is one such organization, which has spread from its founding in India in 1927 to become an international mass movement that enjoys particular influence in Europe, especially amongst the British South Asian and French Moroccan and Algerian communities (King 129-130). As a voluntarist proselytizing organization operating at the grassroots level, Tabligh builds a deep sense of group loyalty and identity among its followers, transcending racial or national origins to emphasize pan-Islamic solidarity through the perpetuation of the traditions of the Prophet (King 129; Smith). While traditionally nonviolent and apolitical, these pietist movements reinforce the detachment of the Muslim community from European society; as Gilles Kepel explains,
[t]he Tabligh and similar movements answer to a social need. By its influence over the groups of ‘true believers’ who were breaking with the ‘godless’ societies they lived in, it offered a refuge to individuals who felt wholly at sea in an atmosphere of rapid modernization, flight from the countryside and the breakdown of the old, close-knit rural society (Revenge 35).In this threatening environment, Islamic identity became a rallying point for political and social organization. Tablighi recruitment, which frequently focuses on delinquent, disaffected young Europeans who have lost touch with their faith, offers a clear alternative program, providing detailed guidance on everything from clothing to grooming to eating habits as a means of indoctrinating followers in the ways of fundamentalist Islam (Smith).
Social marginalization within Europe, the political doctrines of Islamism and communalism, and the increasing identification of Muslim European youth with Islam has also produced many activist political movements that seek to assert leadership over the Muslim community. The Muslim Brotherhood (Jamiat Ikhwan al-Muslimin), originating in Egypt in the 1920s, sought to reinvigorate the Muslim world through political activism and the development of a network of social services parallel to (and in some case, surpassing) those offered by the government. Successor or affiliate organizations to the Brotherhood exist throughout the European community. In Great Britain, the UK Islamic Mission is one such group, which also maintains ties to the Jamaat-i-Islami of Pakistan; the French Union of Islamic Organizations of France (UOIF) is another major party. These organizations are led by and composed of members of the pious intellectual bourgeoisie, and draw considerable support from the growing population of college-educated, Islamized European youth (Muslim Minds 266). The UOIF has since been designated by the French government as the official representative of the Muslim community, giving their leaders some voice in the process in exchange for their serving as interlocutors for and (it is hoped) moderators of Muslim political passions (Muslim Minds 273-74).
Steven Vertovec and Ceri Peach summarize arguments by Muhammad Khalid Masud that based on historical precedents,
Muslims in a non-Muslim polity should either: (1) struggle for the establishment of dar al-Islam (the realm of Islam); (2) migrate to dar al-Islam; (3) withdraw from or do not co-operate with non-Muslims; or — what appears to be the favoured option evidence in the recent Muslim politics of religion and community — (4) engage in a kind of pact with the non-Muslim state in order to ensure their own religious freedom (37).Unlike mainstream African-American civil rights leaders in the 1950s who challenged the practice of “separate but equal”, many Muslim community leaders have sought to extract such status from European governments as a means of preserving the cultural purity of their political constituency. In order to do so, they must frequently resort to “lowest-common denominator issues” — Gilles Kepel offers the example of a campaign to ensure the provision of halal (in keeping with Islamic dietary laws) meals for Muslim schoolchildren. “Their leaders could therefore move from a situation of defensive communalism and fragmentation ... to demands for a publicly recognized separate identity” (Allah 108). Similar demands have been made for the government to sanction Islamic private education as an alternative to public schooling. In Britain mainstream schooling was explicitly Christian in character according to the 1988 Education Act, which had the effect of “[encouraging] communalism by favouring community institutions which have the necessary resources to promote separate religious identities” (Allah 121). At its extreme, this separatism has been demonstrated in provocations like the establishment of a parallel “Muslim parliament”, established in Britain for a short time during the outcry against Salman Rushdie’s Satanic Verses, as a means of further increasing the profile of protest against Rushdie’s publication (Jihad 201). Cultural wedge issues are as effective in mobilizing the European Muslim community as they are the American electorate, and the political leadership of the Islamist organizations have become adept in their use to pressure the state for separate privileges.
Jihad in the Dar el-Harb
The rising profile of militant Islamist terrorism at the turn of the 20th Century has caused many Europeans to reconsider the wisdom of policies that tolerated (or even encouraged) the development of isolated Islamic communities within their larger society. The Muslim population which many Europeans had previously been happy to ignore is now fearfully viewed as a potential Trojan horse — a menacing advance force of what Gilles Kepel has termed “citadels of jihad” on the European continent (Frontline). The allure of Europe’s generous welfare system is also coupled with strong protections of civil liberties, which many militant jihadi groups seek to use to shield themselves from prosecution while simultaneously inciting violence against the West. With the growth of globalization, the expansion of the internet, and the decline in travel costs, Islamist organizations based out of Europe are increasingly able to criticize, organize against, and even attack governments in the Middle East or the West whom they consider to be jahiliyyah or kuffr (Nesser 24-5). This strategy resonates strongly within the militant Islamist community as an echo of the Prophet Mohammed’s own hijra (emigration) from Mecca to Medina, from whence he built up an army of followers to retake the holy city and rid it of the impious (Nesser 21).
The transient origins of the European Muslim population and the absence of historical Muslim institutions in the region has frequently meant that communities of the faithful are dependent on organizations from the larger Islamic world for their religious leadership. While some of these transplant imams come from pietist traditions of the Tablighi Jamaat or the austere quietism of the salafi movement, a vocal few are veterans of jihad, from Afghanistan to Bosnia. Their sermons emphasize the duty of dispossessed young Muslim men to take up arms against the nations of the dar el-Harb (“house of war”) and the corrupt ruling regimes of the Muslim world. The plotters of the 9/11 attacks received their initial indoctrination from a Syrian veteran of the Afghan jihad, Mohammed Haydar Zammar, at a Hamburg mosque, who introduced lead hijacker Mohammed Atta and the rest of the cell to Al Qaeda as potential recruits (9/11 Commission Report 164). Concerns persist to this day about the influence of radical imams, particularly in Britain. Bin Laden apologists like Omar Bakri Muhammad and Abu Hamza have gained notoriety for their praise of the Saudi terrorist’s actions and their endorsement of jihad against the West, even while they take shelter under British asylum law. Bakri’s al-Muhajiroun organization calls for the imposition of sharia law in Britain and the replacement of Parliament with a council of ulema (Islamic scholars), and is known to have urged its members to join Al Qaeda and the insurgency against American forces in Iraq. Hamza — an Afghan veteran, missing an eye from an encounter with a land mine and with a distinctive hook hand — presided as imam over the Finsbury Park mosque, which was attended by alleged terrorists Zacarias Moussaoui and Richard Reid. Hamza was arrested in 2004 and currently faces deportation charges, and authorities are attempting to put together a similar case against Bakri for inciting terrorist acts (Goldberg). German police conducted a series of raids on mosques across the country in January of 2005 in an effort to combat similar problems there, and European scrutiny of vocally militant Islamists has greatly increased since the attacks of September 11th.
As worrisome as Europe’s potential as a staging area for external terrorist operations has been, the recent internal attacks carried out by radicalized Muslim youth have spurred even greater levels of concern. The bombings of the Madrid commuter trains in March of 2004 and the murder of Dutch filmmaker Theo Van Gogh shocked many Europeans — Muslim and non-Muslim alike — and heightened fears that European “Islamization” was taking on an actively militant cast. French Muslim leader Mamoun Abdelali, a self-described moderate, explains the mentality of these newly recruited jihadis in an interview with the PBS newsmagazine Frontline:
There is an ideal breeding ground: unemployment, ignorance, academic failures, professional failures, rejection by French society due to the fact that there is no work or housing, and, for the most part, a very low education level and therefore very little knowledge of Islam, and in addition, an enormous level of frustration and a huge identity complex. So when these young people, who for the most part are former delinquents, are told to continue to be delinquents in the name of Allah, to continue to steal, but in the name of God, it creates new breeds of incurable delinquency ... it is transformed into an act of worship (Abdelali).Psychological studies of jihadi recruits by experts like Marc Sageman and Olivier Roy tend to confirm Abdelali’s analyses. It is predominantly the second and third-generation Muslims who embrace jihadi fundamentalism, frequently after going through personal crises and rejecting both their past histories of secular Westernization and the more traditional or quietist Islam of their parents’ generation. Some jihadis were homesick migrants who had come looking for professional education in the West; others, alienated youth seizing on a new purpose for their lives by dedicating themselves to jihad (Sageman; Roy). The difficulty of identifying these individuals is further compounded by the strategy of taqiyya, a tradition in Shia Islam wherein the minority worshippers follow mainstream practices in order to protect themselves from detection. “According to the principles of taqiyya,” Petter Nesser’s Jihad in Europe counterterrorism paper for the Norwegian Defense Research Establishment reports,
While European authorities have made concerted efforts to surveil and arrest militant radical Islamists and their intellectual and financial sponsors, the challenge of knowing just who is harboring dreams of violent jihad means the larger population of law-abiding Muslim citizens regularly falls under suspicion, increasing their sense of persecution.
the ‘Vanguards’ are permitted to cooperate on an ad hoc basis with basically anyone as long as it serves their cause ... radicals can ‘blend into’ western societies, using western clothes and even drink alcohol in order not to attract unwanted attention to their activities (Nesser 23).
European Responses
European attempts to better integrate their Muslim populations have frequently served only to exacerbate existing tensions. The French tradition of state secularism, known as laïcite, differs from the American conception of separation of church and state in the degree to which public displays of religion are viewed as a potential threat to the social and political order. Originating in republican opposition to the Catholic Church’s support for the rule of King Louis XVI, laïcite prohibits overt expressions of faith by state employees and does not make special exceptions to secular laws for members of any faith, lest one religion gain the power of an establishment endorsement (Fetzer 69-74). While laïcite supporters insist that this strict separation of state and religion offers individual citizens the freedom to worship as they please, critics say that it amounts to an official policy of atheism that is hostile to religious practices — particularly minority ones. Attempts by French government officials to enforce this policy in the public schools “as a way to ‘organize humanity without God and without a king’”, in the word of one laïcite advocate, has inflamed relations with religious communities on several occasions, most visibly with French Muslims who wear the hijab or veil (Fetzer 71). In 2003, the Code of Education was amended to ban the wearing of “conspicuous religious symbols in French public, primary, and secondary schools”, leading to widespread protests by devout Muslims (as well as members of other religious faiths) and reinforcing the perception of an Islam under attack by the West (Wikipedia).
Another state strategy has been corporatism — the establishment of officially registered organizations, nominally representative of their constituent political and social groups, that serve as intermediaries with the official government. A natural outgrowth of the communalist political system discussed earlier, corporatism sets up the state as the legitimizing agent through its power to bestow recognition upon the public leadership of a given religious, social, or political community.
These efforts favor certain Muslim groups over others; seek to educate imams locally, require them to speak the vernacular, and understand the local culture; facilitate construction of mosques and religious instruction in the hopes of reducing Arab state financing and influence; restrict wearing the hijab (Islamic head scarf); and virtually shoehorn Muslim organizations into structures that correspond to national criteria and objectives, such as Belgium’s Central Body for the Islamic Religion, Germany’s Central Council of Muslims, and the French Council of the Muslim Religion (Savage 41).While European states have had some success at mitigating the political influence of Muslims through these organizations, by co-opting their leadership and giving them a political channel through which they can focus their energies away from the central government, corporatism and communalist politics are not successful when it comes to integrating or assimilating Muslims into European society. “This outcome is not all that surprising”, Timothy Savage notes, “given that the governmental goals are primarily control and regulation, not outreach and accommodation” (Savage 42). Corporatism reinforces the shared communal identity of European Muslims by giving them an official outlet as a recognized political constituency, but the absence of genuine representation on these bodies and the segmentation and segregation of society they produce only makes problems worse for relations between native European and their Muslim fellow citizens.
A few nations, like Britain, have attempted to alleviate these tensions by propounding an official doctrine of multiculturalism, endorsing discrete communalist politics at the expense of national political or social unity. This strategy, purportedly carried out in the name of tolerance or some sense of political correctness, does little to help incorporate Muslims into the larger British identity. There has recently been some recognition of the limits of multiculturalism by British officials; in March of 2004, the president of the United Kingdom Commission on Racial Equality “declared to the media that ‘the word is not useful, it means the wrong things. Multiculturalism suggests separateness. What we should be talking about is how we reach an integrated society, one in which people are equal under the law, where there are some common values’” (Muslim Minds 245). Farhan Nizami has spoken of the need for “more and better tolerance” that embraces European Muslims and encourages their membership and participation in mainstream society, but many Islamist communalist leaders react to suggestions that they should adopt a more European identity with hostility and suspicion, making genuine integration a considerable challenge (Nizami).
Compromise is not necessarily any more rapidly forthcoming from the native Europeans, either. At its worst, the European reaction has been one of “Islamaphobia”: vigilantism, harassment, xenophobic anti-immigration movements, “white flight”, and other extremes. Discussion of Islam in Europe is highly emotionally charged, with security and terrorism fears, cultural clashes, and economic and racial tensions all polarizing relations between native Europeans and the growing Muslim population. Right-wing nativist political parties have seen a resurgence in recent years throughout Europe, from the National Front in France lead by Jean Marie Le Pen to the German Republikaner party to the Denmark Progressive Party (Vertovec 5). Muslims and those who associate with them have been harassed, threatened, and in some cases physically assaulted by nativist groups motivated by fear of terrorism, racism, or cultural xenophobia (Quartly). Even absent the threat of direct violence, attitudes have sharpened. A recent survey by the European Monitoring Center of Racism and Xenophobia (EUMC) suggests that arguments for forced repatriation of immigrants — and presumably their European-born descendants — were showing an increase in popular support, and nearly 40% of respondents across the European Union opposed granting full civil rights to legal immigrants (Kabel). This suspicion is, unfortunately, mutual: a 2003 Ipsos poll indicated that only a quarter of French Muslim respondents under 25 believed that French values were compatible with those of Islam (Savage 43). Some Europeans appear to have given up entirely, and are abandoning the Continent altogether; this reaction has been particularly visible in places like the Netherlands, where the murder of Theo Van Gogh shocked many native Europeans and caused them to fear for their safety, leading to a rising tide of emigration (Simons).
Conclusions
The modern nation-state and the principles of nationalism had their origins in Europe, and their centuries of development have created a strongly rooted sense of shared identity, of being “a people”. The countries of the European Union are currently in the process of expanding that identity into something broader, transcending territorial, language, and historical boundaries, a process that inevitably raises the question of just what it means to be “European”, and who exactly qualifies for that status. European Muslims, stigmatized by racial identifiers or their colonial immigrant labor origins, are placed under intense scrutiny and suspicion in such an environment, and have often found themselves excluded from the “European club”, regardless of their place of birth. The communalist-corporatist political system, the cultural barriers that separate European Muslims from mainstream society, and the resistance to social integration by both parties makes it unfortunately easy for nativist Europeans to demonize Muslims as an undifferentiated group of violent fundamentalists whose worldviews are incompatible with local traditions.
This situation is not entirely a reflection of European resistance to the influx of Muslims, either; salafis and other cultural isolationists have done much to retard prospects for reconciliation, as have political leaders whose power rests on the premise that Muslim citizens are incapable of being represented by the political mainstream and require a separate community status. While commentators like Bernard Lewis or Bat Ye’or may fear the “Islamization of Europe”, many Islamic purists have similar fears that living in the West will inevitably corrupt their values and traditions. The growing Muslim minority presence has important implications for Europe’s political identity, but also for its physical security, as numerous counterterrorism reports emphasize the social and cultural alienation of Muslim youth as a major factor in their entry into jihadi terror cells. Some form of rapprochement is necessary if the process of radicalization and division is to be halted, as fantasies of mass deportations of second and third-generation Europeans to “home countries” they have never known are just as unrealistic as dreams of imposing sharia law in nations with long traditions of Western jurisprudence. If current trends continue, however, the prospects of integrating Europe’s Muslim population into the larger European identity appear bleak within the foreseeable future.
Note from MCMasterChef: This is the final draft of a paper on European Muslims I wrote for my recently concluded class [at Boston University] on Islamic Political Movements with Professor Husain Haqqani. Unlike my previous paper on the Uyghurs of Xinjiang, this one covers a lot of already well-trod ground, and my lack of a background in European studies makes me think it is probably rather less interesting than the Uyghurs were. But, I haven't blogged anything in the past month or more now, so I might as well share what (among the other travails of the college senior) has been keeping me busy.
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