Muslims - Europe's New Jews
They inhabit self-imposed ghettoes, subject to derision and
worse, the perennial targets of far-right thugs and populist
politicians of all persuasions. They are mostly confined to
menial jobs. They are accused of spreading crime, terrorism and
disease, of being backward and violent, of refusing to fit in.
Their religion, atavistic and rigid, insists on ritual slaughter
and male circumcision. They rarely mingle socially or
inter-marry. Most of them - though born in European countries -
are not allowed to vote. Brown-skinned and with a marked foreign
accent, they are subject to police profiling and harassment and
all manner of racial discrimination.
They are the new Jews of Europe - its Muslim minorities.
Muslims - especially Arab youths from North Africa - are,
indeed, disproportionately represented in crime, including hate
crime, mainly against the Jews. Exclusively Muslim al-Qaida
cells have been discovered in many West European countries. But
this can be safely attributed to ubiquitous and trenchant
long-term unemployment and to stunted upward mobility, both
social and economic due largely to latent or expressed racism.
Moreover, the stereotype is wrong. The incidence of higher
education and skills is greater among Muslim immigrants than in
the general population - a phenomenon known as "brain drain".
Europe attracts the best and the brightest - students, scholars,
scientists, engineers and intellectuals - away from their
destitute, politically dysfunctional and backward homelands.
The Economist surveys the landscape of friction and withdrawal:
"Indifference to Islam has turned first to disdain, then to
suspicion and more recently to hostility ... (due to images of)
petro-powered sheikhs, Palestinian terrorists, Iranian
ayatollahs, mass immigration and then the attacks of September
11th, executed if not planned by western-based Muslims and
succored by an odious regime in Afghanistan ... Muslims tend to
come from poor, rural areas; most are ill-educated, many are
brown. They often encounter xenophobia and discrimination,
sometimes made worse by racist politicians. They speak the
language of the wider society either poorly or not at all, so
they find it hard to get jobs. Their children struggle at
school. They huddle in poor districts, often in state-supplied
housing ... They tend to withdraw into their own world, (forming
a) self-sufficient, self-contained community."
This self-imposed segregation has multiple dimensions. Clannish
behavior persists for decades. Marriages are still arranged -
reluctant brides and grooms are imported from the motherland to
wed immigrants from the same region or village. The "parallel
society", in the words of a British government report following
the Oldham riots two years ago, extends to cultural habits,
religious practices and social norms.
Assimilation and integration has many enemies.
Remittances from abroad are an important part of the gross
national product and budgetary revenues of countries such as
Bangladesh and Pakistan. Hence their frantic efforts to maintain
the cohesive national and cultural identity of the expats. DITIB
is an arm of the Turkish government's office for religious
affairs. It discourages the assimilation or social integration
of Turks in Germany. Turkish businesses - newspapers, satellite
TV, foods, clothing, travel agents, publishers - thrive on
ghettoization.
There is a tacit confluence of interests between national
governments, exporters and Islamic organizations. All three want
Turks in Germany to remain as Turkish as possible. The more
nostalgic and homebound the expatriate - the larger and more
frequent his remittances, the higher his consumption of Turkish
goods and services and the more prone he is to resort to
religion as a determinant of his besieged and fracturing
identity.
Muslim numbers are not negligible. Two European countries have
Muslim majorities - Bosnia-Herzegovina and Albania. Others - in
both Old Europe and its post-communist east - harbor sizable and
growing Islamic minorities. Waves of immigration and birth rates
three times as high as the indigenous population increase their
share of the population in virtually every European polity -
from Russia to Macedonia and from Bulgaria to Britain. One in
seven Russians is Muslim - over 20 million people.
According to the March-April issue of Foreign Policy, the
non-Muslim part of Europe will shrink by 3.5 percent by 2015
while the Muslim populace will likely double. There are 3
million Turks in Germany and another 12 million Muslims -
Algerians, Moroccans, Pakistanis, Bangladeshis, Egyptians,
Senegalese, Malis, or Tunisians - in the rest of the European
Union.
This is two and one half times the number of Muslims in the
United States. Even assuming - wrongly - that all of them occupy
the lowest decile of income, their combined annual purchasing
power would amount to a whopping $150 billion. Furthermore,
recent retroactive changes to German law have naturalized over a
million immigrants and automatically granted its much-coveted
citizenship to the 160,000 Muslims born in Germany every year.
Between 2-3 million Muslims in France - half their number - are
eligible to vote. Another million - one out of two - cast
ballots in Britain. These numbers count at the polls and are not
offset by the concerted efforts of a potent Jewish lobby - there
are barely a million Jews in Western Europe.
Muslims are becoming a well-courted swing vote. They may have
decided the last election in Germany, for instance. Recognizing
their growing centrality, France established - though not
without vote-rigging - a French Council of the Islamic Faith,
the equivalent of Napoleon's Jewish Consistory. Two French
cabinet members are Muslims. Britain has a Muslim Council.
Both Vladimir Putin, Russia's president and Yuri Luzhkov,
Moscow's mayor, now take the trouble to greet the capital's one
million Muslims on the occasion of their Feast of Sacrifice.
They also actively solicit the votes of the nationalist and
elitist Muslims of the industrialized Volga - mainly the Tatars,
Bashkirs and Chuvash. Even the impoverished, much-detested and
powerless Muslims of the northern Caucasus - Chechens,
Circassians and Dagestanis - have benefited from this newfound
awareness of their electoral power.
Though divided by their common creed - Shiites vs. Sunnites vs.
Wahabbites and so on - the Muslims of Europe are united in
supporting the Palestinian cause and in opposing the Iraq war.
This - and post-colonial guilt feelings, especially manifest in
France and Britain - go a long way toward explaining Germany's
re-discovered pacifistic spine and France's anti-Israeli (not to
say anti-Semitic) tilt.
Moreover, the Muslims have been playing an important economic
role in the continent since the early 1960s. Europe's postwar
miracle was founded on these cheap, plentiful and
oft-replenished Gastarbeiter - "guest workers". Objective
studies have consistently shown that immigrants contribute more
to their host economies - as consumers, investors and workers -
than they ever claw back in social services and public goods.
This is especially true in Europe, where an ageing population of
early retirees has been relying on the uninterrupted flow of
pension contributions by younger laborers, many of them
immigrants.
Business has been paying attention to this emerging market.
British financial intermediaries - such as the West Bromwich
Building Society - have recently introduced "Islamic"
(interest-free) mortgages. According to market research firm,
Datamonitor, gross advances in the UK alone could reach $7
billion in 2006 - up from $60 million today. The Bank of England
is in the throes of preparing regulations to accommodate the
pent-up demand.
Yet, their very integration, however hesitant and gradual,
renders the Muslims in Europe vulnerable to the kind of
treatment the old continent meted out to its Jews before the
holocaust. Growing Muslim presence in stagnating job markets
within recessionary economies inevitably generated a backlash,
often cloaked in terms of Samuel Huntington's 1993 essay in
Foreign Affairs, "Clash of Civilizations".
Even tolerant Italy was affected. Last year, the Bologna
archbishop, Cardinal Giacomo Biffi, cast Islam as incompatible
with Italian culture. The country's prime minister suggested, in
a visit to Berlin two years ago, that Islam is an inherently
inferior civilization.
Oriana Fallaci, a prominent journalist, published last year an
inane and foul-mouthed diatribe titled "The Rage and the Pride"
in which she accused Muslims of "breeding like rats", "shitting
and pissing" (sic!) everywhere and supporting Osama bin-Laden
indiscriminately.
Young Muslims reacted - by further radicalizing and by refusing
to assimilate - to both escalating anti-Islamic rhetoric in
Europe and the "triumphs" of Islam elsewhere, such as the
revolution in Iran in 1979. Tutored by preachers trained in the
most militant Islamist climates in Saudi Arabia, Yemen, Somalia,
Pakistan and Iran, praying in mosques financed by shady Islamic
charities - these youngsters are amenable to recruiters from
every fanatical grouping.
The United Kingdom suffered some of the worst race riots in half
a century in the past two years. France is terrorized by an
unprecedented crime wave emanating from the banlieux - the
decrepit, predominantly Muslim, housing estates in suburbia.
September 11 only accelerated the inevitable conflict between an
alienated minority and hostile authorities throughout the
continent. Recent changes in European - notably British -
legislation openly profile and target Muslims.
This is a remarkable turnaround. Europe supported the Muslim
Bosnian cause against the Serbs, Islamic Chechnya against
Russia, the Palestinians against the Israelis and Muslim
Albanian insurgents against both Serbs and Macedonians. Nor was
this consistent pro-Islamic orientation a novelty.
Britain's Commission for Racial Equality which caters mainly to
the needs of Muslims, was formed 37 years ago. Its Foreign
Office has never wavered from its pro-Arab bias. Germany
established a Central Council for Muslims. Both anti-Americanism
and the more veteran anti-Israeli streak helped sustain Europe's
empathy with Muslim refugees and "freedom fighters" throughout
the 1960s, 70s and 80s.
September 11 put paid to this amity. The danger is that the
brand of "Euro-Islam" that has begun to emerge lately may be
decimated by this pervasive and sudden mistrust. Time Magazine
described this blend as "the traditional Koran-based religion
with its prohibitions against alcohol and interest-bearing loans
now indelibly marked by the 'Western' values of tolerance,
democracy and civil liberties."
Such "enlightened" Muslims can serve as an invaluable bridge
between Europe and Russia, the Middle East, Asia, including
China and other places with massive Muslim majorities or
minorities. As most world conflicts today involve Islamist
militants, global peace and a functioning "new order" critically
depend on the goodwill and communication skills of Muslims.
Such a benign amalgam is the only realistic hope for
reconciliation. Europe is ageing and stagnating and can be
reinvigorated only by embracing youthful, dynamic, driven
immigrants, most of whom are bound to be Muslim. Co-existence is
possible and the clash of civilization not an inevitability
unless Huntington's dystopic vision becomes the basic policy
document of the West.