[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 »

About the death of Pope John Paul II, I have no personal thoughts to share, other than to extend sympathy to the millions around the world who are experiencing his death as a source of considerable sorrow. The wall-to-wall media coverage about the significance of John Paul II or the religious reactions of members of the Catholic faith are mostly over-the-top hagiography, good TV visuals, or simply remote to those of us who don't share that faith. Most of the non-religious commentary on the life of the Pope or the future of the Church has been just another excuse for the commentariat and puditocracy to trot out their favorite over-exercised hobby-horse.

Enlightenment of either the spiritual or intellectual variety has been equally rare in the blogosphere. I've come across two notable exceptions, that weren't simply stale rehashes of ancient debates seen through one predictable worldview or another. Taken together I found they implicitly challenge most of the narratives being imposed on the story of the Pope's death, and thereby challenge a number of assumptions, casually shared by many American and European commentators, about the political valence of religion in the culture of the "West" and in the rest of the world.

The first is a highly personal and entertaining tale by Kieran Healy of Crooked Timber on his family's excursion to see the Pope when he came to Ireland in 1979, and an extraordinary portion of the entire population of the country went to see him. Kieran follows with the unhappy story of what has happened to the Catholic Church in Ireland since the Pope's famous visit.

The Irish story contrasts sharply with Ed Kilgore's thoughtful assessment of John Paul II's significance for the Church in the Southern hemisphere, where the tensions perceived in the Northern hemisphere -- between the "liberal" and "conservative" Pope -- have certainly played out differently.

Yet nearly everything about the powerful and perhaps irreversible trajectory he set for the Church points South, to the Third World, and away from Europe and the United States. Many obituarists of this Pope have struggled to categorize him ideologically as "conservative" on faith and morals yet "liberal" or even "radical" on issues of globalization, poverty and war, even as they acknowledge the unity of his own thinking.

But these are Eurocentric ways of looking at his teachings, which may confuse and distress American Catholics and what's left of the faith in Europe, but make perfect sense to most Catholics in Africa, Latin America and Asia.

A deeply illiberal approach to issues involving sexuality and gender; a rejection of capitalism as a necessary counterpart to democracy; and an abiding hostility to U.S.-European political, military, economic and cultural hegemony: this is a consistent point of view with strong support in the global South, among Catholics and non-Catholics alike. Indeed, in many respects what John Paul II represented was a living link between the pre-modern traditions of European Catholicism and the post-modern realities of much of the rest of the world.
[...]
Catholic, Protestant, Jewish, and irreligious, who are outdoing each other this week in viewing this pope's legacy through the lens of their own cultural and political obsessions. This pope's opposition to "American exceptionalism" invariably embraced opposition to the death penalty, to capitalist triumphalism, and to George W. Bush's unilateralist foreign policies, as well as to abortion or birth control or the removal of feeding tubes from the hopelessly dying.

Many conservatives accuse John Paul II's American flock of practicing a "Cafeteria Catholicism" of selective obedience to Rome. But the American Right, I would argue, is practicing "Cafeteria Conservatism"--an equally selective interpretation of this pope's teachings and legacy, which lead not Right or Left but South. [em. added]

To relate these observations to my most recent blog entry -- when those of us from developed liberal democracies embrace the prospect of promoting greater political freedoms and development across continents where genuine freedom is scarce and poverty is endemic, Kilgore's observations should remind us that that large portions of people in those worlds share the "mentality" of a Pope whose attitudes and core beliefs are often hard for us to integrate, reconcile or fully understand. That recognition should be reflected both in the actions we choose and in our expectations about the probable results of our actions.

This evening I was finally able to set aside the time to finish up Stephen Cohen's recent book The Idea of Pakistan. In this post I aim to summarize his key conclusions and in the process offer a review of the work.

As the title of this post suggests, The Idea of Pakistan is intended primarily as a guide to the political, social, and economic makeup of the country, its major political actors (the military, the Establishment, the Islamists), and the future trends and issues that the Pakistani and American leadership confront when making policy. Each of these topics are capable of sustaining multiple books of their own (and have), but Cohen's ability to provide a comprehensive briefing on each subject makes this a valuable introductory resource for readers new to the country. Since this information is presented categorically rather than chronologically, it can be at times difficult to hold all the factors operating at a particular point in time in your mind when reading on a different section, but Cohen compensates for this fairly well by starting off the book with an account of Pakistan's history from the struggles of Partition and the founding of the state to the coup that installed Pervez Musharraf in 1999, then going deeper in the subsequent chapters.

A well-balanced book (hey, this is the Brookings Institute we're talking about here), Cohen offers what are in my view key assessments on the following subjects (not, it should be noted, an exhaustive list):
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It's perhaps a little early to start the nostalgia-for-college-days-of-yore process just yet, but yesterday was the final screening that I'll have a chance to enjoy here at BU of the annual fall IR Film Festival (hosted by Prof. Bacevich), of which I have been a loyal attendee for the past four years.

The first year I got here they were showing Cold War movies, and I got a chance to see such classics as Them!, Strategic Air Command, and of course Doctor Strangelove. Subsequent years brought themes of "Dirty Wars" and "Elvis In Arabia", the latter of which's schedule is still up there on the film series web site (I think the department events coordinator is new this year, so promotion efforts have been somewhat scattered. I am not infrequently the only one there... yet another reason to disparage the tastes of my college peers). The Elvis movie last year was sublimely bad, but for my money the best was the vastly underrated Ishtar; I really cannot believe that movie bombed at the box office, because it was hilarious.

Well in any case, this year the theme was "Foreign Correspondents", international relations through the eyes of journalists reporting from abroad and the final movie was Welcome To Sarajevo, which I'm assuming no one else has heard of either.

Although a little heavy-handed narratively at points, it was a suprisingly well done (cept for maybe some weird soundtrack choices) advocacy piece for the suffering of the Bosnians during the siege of that city, as seen firsthand by a British reporter. He becomes wrapped up in publicizing the plight of an orphanage (and one orphan in particular) unable to evacuate its young charges from the ruined city. It's based on a true story, I gather, and was much more powerful than I expected, but I don't know very much at all about the Balkans and lacked a lot of the context that might've helped me appreciate it better.

Fortunately, Prof. Haqqani dropped by early on (his office is upstairs from the screening room) and stayed to watch the whole thing. Naturally enough, he had visited there during the siege while working as an assistant to Benazir Bhutto. One point he suggested at the end, perhaps vaguely apropos praktike's post below, was that the general Muslim reaction to Bosnia was: it doesn't matter how Westernized, how secularized, how moderately you practice Islam, when it comes right down to it the West is not going to intervene to help out Muslims. Bin Laden in particular has apparently made this point, and Woody Harrelson's character in the movie makes it explicitly with a quote to effect of (paraphrasing from memory) "I can't help but thinking if this had been Muslims attacking Christians we would've done something by now".

Whether this is true or not (and sadly, there may be something to it), the perception as such is a dangerous one. Haqqani made the point that the reaction among a lot of British and European Muslims in particular to this episode has been greater estrangement from the local cultures. This would seem to reinforce the point that Marc Sageman makes about alienation among Muslim immigres being a large factor in the rise of militant Islamism on the Continent.

I don't have an answer to any of this (particularly since, like I said, I know essentially nothing about the Bosnian situation beyond this), but thought it was worth sharing. It really is stuff like this that makes me appreciate college.

The highest rank one can attain in Shi'ism is that of Grand Ayatollah, or marjah al-taqlid, which translates roughly as "object of emulation." The good folks at GlobalSecurity.org explain the matter thusly:

A marjah is the highest authority on religion and law in Shiism. Where a difference in opinion exist between the Marjah, Aalims (Religious Scholar) try to provide different opinions. Four senior Grand Ayatollahs [Ayat Allah] constitute the Religious Institution (al-Hawzah al-`Ilmiyyah) in Najaf, the preeminent seminary center for the training of Shiite clergymen.

Taqlid means acting according to the opinion of the jurist (mujtahid) who has all the necessary qualification to be emulated. So you do what the mujtahid's expert opinion says you should do, and refrain from what his expert opinion says you should refrain from, without any research [in Islamic sources] on your part. It is as though you have placed the responsibility of your deeds squarely on his shoulders. Among the conditions which must be found in a jurist (mujtahid) who can be followed is that he must be the most learned (al-a'lam) jurist of his time and the most capable in deriving the religious laws from the appropriate sources.

There are generally six ranks among Shi'ite clerics. The highest, grand ayatollah means "great sign of God". In the past, there were usually no more than five grand ayatollahs in the Shi'ite Islamic world. Today however it is suspected that there are at least seven and possibly more. Under grand ayatollah is ayatollah ("sign of God"). Below ayatollah is the rank of hojat al Islam, which is Arabic for "authority on Islam". Next is mubellegh al risala or "carrier of the message". While mujtahid often refers to clerics in general, it is also a specific rank, which denotes one has graduated from a religious seminary. At the bottom of the ladder are religious students, talib ilm. Besides the obvious factors such as graduation to be promoted to mujtahid, promotion in the ranks is a rather subjective matter. Two important factors behind promotion are the size and quality of one's student following and authorship of scholarly works on Islam.

As noted above, there are only a handful of guys alive who have reached the top level. Here's the list I was able to assemble from online sources: Al-Sayyid Ali al-Sistani, Muhammad Said Hakim, Muhammad Ishaq Fayyad, Bashir Hussein al-Najafi, Mohammad Taqi al-Modarresi, Hassan Tabataba'i-Qomi, Muhammad Sadeq Ruhani, Kazem al-Hosseini al-Haeri, and Hossein-Ali Montazeri, the first five of whom are in Iraq.

Sistani, whom we all know about by now, is the top dog. Grand Ayatollah Muhammad Said Hakim is the uncle of Ayatollah Muhammad Baqir al-Hakim, who was murdered last August by a massive car bomb outside the Imam Ali Shrine in Najaf. Tawhid wal Jihad, Zarqawi's group, is the most likely culprit. Grand Ayatollah Hakim himself was wounded in the neck during a bomb attack on his home at around the same time. Fayyad and al-Najafi put the quiet in quietist; they tend to stay out of political matters altogether. Al-Modarresi I hadn't heard of before because he isn't generaly mentioned among the top four Iraqi Grand Ayatollahs, but from what I can tell he's a moderate based in Karbala. The English website of one of his younger relatives is here, and his own site is here. Grand Ayatollah al-Haeri is a hardliner based in Qom, Iran, and had until their recent split been Muqtada Sadr's mentor. As of 2002, Tabataba'i-Qomi and Ruhani had been under house arrest for many years, and there's another Grand Ayatollah named Ya'sub al-Din Rastgari who was placed under house arrest in 1996, but I'm not sure whether Rastgari is alive or dead. I think Ruhani may have a brother who is a Grand Ayatollah as well, but I'm not certain.

I'm in the middle of reading Ken Pollack's new book, The Persian Puzzle, and it made the following point that for some reason I hadn't realized before. As you can see from the above list, the current Supreme Leader of Iran, Ayatollah Khamenei, isn't a Grand Ayatollah. The rules had to be changed to allow someone of his low stature to succeed to the rulership over Grand Ayatollah Montazeri, who had been Khomenei's designated successor but was deemed insufficiently radical when he criticized some of Khomenei's repressive policies (Khomenei's letter to Montazeri is pretty harsh). Khamenei's website reveals his insecurity about his position; everyone knows he didn't get where he is by scholarly merit. The unshackling of Iraq's Shi'ites represents a direct threat to Khamenei's legitimacy in the sense that now the center of Shi'ite learning is in Najaf, which is led by several clerics of higher rank and with a different judicial philosophy. In addition, Khamenei's rival Montazeri has recently re-emerged in Qom after serving five years under house arrest for criticizing him and the regime, and has since been surprisingly outspoken on reform, civil rights, relations with the United States, and, most recently, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. I'm not sure why Montazeri has been so emboldened, but my guess is that the return of Najaf has something to do with it. Sistani has showed signs of picking off Qom's other top religious scholars, according to Amir Taheri and the good folks at Benador Associates. Even if the Sunni areas of Iraq continue to be chaotic and violent, the undermining of the Islamic Republic's radical, klepto-theocratic rule may make the whole thing worthwhile after all.

This cri de coeur from the editors of the Daily Star in Beirut underlines how the Bush Doctrine has left the post-WWII international order in tatters, in the ways described by John Ikenberry and Andrew Bachevich.

Iraq beyond tragedy: A country gripped in the twin jaws of absurdity

What is happening in Iraq today and that is presently epitomized by the American-led coalition's assault against Fallujah is beyond sad. It is a tragedy, yes, but it goes beyond tragedy: it is an absurdity.

American conduct in Iraq has been characterized by a brutality and blundering that have not even been vaguely disguised by the mask of democracy and by the rhetoric of bringing democracy to that war-shattered country. [...]

However, in Iraq, what are the alternatives? [...]

On the one hand there are the remnants of Saddam's power base and, on the other hand, there are the representatives of a fundamentalist, militant Islamist international. [...]

What program do they offer other than killing? How can anyone support their cause without becoming a killer or without in some implicit way condoning their killing? [...] Quite simply, in the course of trying to oust America from their country, these terrorists and thugs are, in fact, killing Iraq. [...]

It is time for the broader international community to step in and impose the sanity that is necessary to end the absurdity.

Although I have great sympathy for the views expressed above, the call for internationalization is all well and good, but who will lead, and with what will they impose sanity?

The Europeans and Asians, with Russia in the middle, are surely as or more threatened as the US by interminable chaos in Iraq and the spilling over of Islamist radicalism across the Crescent of Instability. But they will not, and as the system stands now, cannot come together to act in the absence of US leadership.

This is the profound hole that the Bush Doctrine has punched in the international order. Without the "indispensable nation," the dynamics of collaboration for broader public goods are simply short-circuited. 

MC MasterChef's post on modernity and terrorism spun off an entire tangent about comparative religion as an area of knowledge, and how part of solving some of our conflicts will involve being open to learning about the "other" or the "alien". The discussion has been asking why this is especially a challenge in the field of religion, and some of the areas where greater learning should be promoted.

The topic is getting increasingly long and complex, so I thought moving it to the front page might help. The main part of the conversation starts here between Oscar and me.

This post responds to ideas Bondra presented about the frequent tension between personal faith and knowledge about other religions.

It is also a very belated attempt to respond to some of the observations JC made last week, responding to MC MasterChef's Christianism post, about the tensions between the personal and political in religious experience and matters of faith.

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When we deal with faith or religiosity at the individual level, rather than at the level of a religion's theology, institutions, history, etc. there are clearly a bunch of factors that come into play. Here are a few observations tossed out. Not as well organized as I'd like, but you'll get the drift.

One of the big problems we've had with this whole post-election brouhaha is that nobody pays attention to level-of-analysis. Here we're dealing with indvidual voting decisions and trying to claim causality from an institutional affiliation, where we keep focusing on personal attitudes on one topic (religion) being extended to other topics (abortion, gay marriage, etc) and we're paying less attention to the institutional affiliation aspects.

By that I mean that we don't know what the actual beliefs are of a voter who "belongs" to a specific denomination, who "regularly practices" the religion (which we measure by the proxy of church attendance), how strongly those beliefs are held, the degree to which the beliefs are internal (related to the experience of faith) or external (related to membership or loyalty to group), and so on and so on.   more »

I wish I were knowledgeable enough to regularly refute the biases of people like Daniel Pipes. People whose understanding of Islam that I respect find him to be intolerant and often wrong, and that's generally been good enough for me. But I want to share one example that shows why Pipes cannot be trusted.

This spring, the government of Maldives (a small island nation in the Indian Ocean) and the United Nations Development program asked Paul Robinson, a law professor at the University of Pennsylvania, to write a new version of its criminal code. The catch: the code had to be consonant with Shari'a. Robinson set up a special seminar this fall and is having his students do most of the work. When Pipes heard about this (via the detestable Little Green Footballs, no less), he screamed bloody murder:   more »

President Musarraf has been making the tour of Rome, ending his visit Thursday with a meeting with the Pope. High on his list of themes, both at the UN in NY last week and in Rome, is discouraging the development of what he called an "iron curtain" between Islam and the West.

While he's at it, he had time to agree with Italy's President, Carlo Ciampi, that the two countries are opposed to an enlargement in the permanent membership of the UN Security Council. Their opposition was, of course, couched in the most noble of sentiments:

Pakistan and Italy has agreed to block the expansion of permanent members of the United Nations Security Council (UNSC) to ensure equality of nations in the world body.

Issuing joint press statement with the Italian President in Rome Tuesday after one on one meeting, the President said Pakistan and Italy are in total consonance on the issue of expansion of UN Security Council.

He said we would be against any attempt to violate the basic tenets of democratic norms of certain equality of nations and oppose any increase of nations in the UN Security Council having special privilege of being more equal than others.

The Italian President Carlo Ciampi speaking on the occasion said Pakistan and Italy both envisage a role that could enable the United Nations to more effective performance in its charter and respond to any threat to the security and the problems to any development.

The two countries are mobilizing against the four-country bid of Germany, Japan, Brazil and India which was launched last week in NY. Needless to say, Italy is opposed to Germany joining Britain and France without Italy being represented, and Pakistan is mortally opposed to India's bid.

"The day that it is able to absorb and digest satire without death threats and burning effigies I will be satisfied that the Muslim world has undergone the much-needed reform that I am always talking about."

Read all about how this may already be in the works here.