Part 1 : Tolerating Intolerance:
The Challenge of Fundamentalist Islam in Western Europe
Bruce Bawer
I grew up in New York, the world’s most multicultural city, and for some time lived only a few blocks from the imposing Islamic Center on Third Avenue between 96th and 97th Streets. But it wasn’t until I moved to western Europe in 1998–living first in Amsterdam, then in Oslo–that fundamentalist Islam became a daily reality for me.
The reason this took so long seems pretty clear. Owing partly to different immigration patterns, but partly also to America’s genius for turning immigrants into proudly integrated citizens with realigned loyalties, Muslims in America tend to be more affluent, more assimilated, and more religiously moderate than their co-religionists in Europe. A perhaps not terribly atypical example is Walter Mourad, a secularized Lebanese-American businessman who was profiled a while back in the New York Times. Mourad has two children in a Montessori school, a wife "who says she would shoot him in the head if he suggested she cover her head with a scarf," and a love for America that drove him to respond at once when the CIA, FBI, and NSA put out the call for Arabic translators after September 11.
Every American Muslim is not Walter Mourad, to be sure, but his like is considerably easier to find in the United States than in Western Europe, where Islam, generally speaking, offers a somewhat different picture. For various reasons, Western European Muslims are more likely than their American counterparts to live in tightly knit religious communities, to adhere to a narrow fundamentalist faith, and to resist integration into mainstream society. The distance between mainstream society and the Muslim subculture can be especially striking in the Netherlands and in the countries of Scandinavia, whose relatively small, ethnically homogeneous native populations had, until recent decades, little or no experience with large-scale immigration from outside Europe.
The distance I speak of was certainly striking in Amsterdam, where I resided for a time in a neighborhood–the Oud West–where I grew accustomed to the sight of women in chadors pushing baby carriages past shops with signs in Arabic. A few doors from my flat, a huge Turkish flag flew over the entrance to the neighborhood center. (There was no Dutch flag.) One day I peered inside. A dozen or so men, middle-aged and older, scowled back at me. I did not go in.
Curious about my new neighbors, I did some reading. I learned that upwards of 7 percent of the Netherlands’ population–and nearly half of Amsterdam’s–was of non-Dutch origin. The Turkish and Moroccan communities dated back to the 1970s; immigration from Surinam and the Dutch Antilles had peaked in the 1980s. Most people of non-Dutch origin were fundamentalist Muslims, and most, even after years or decades in the Netherlands, remained largely unintegrated. The attitudes of Dutch officialdom, and of the Dutch generally, hadn’t helped: although in America the U.S.-born children of immigrants are American citizens, in the Netherlands the Dutch-born children of immigrants are called "second-generation immigrants." (The same is true in Germany, where even "third-generation immigrants"–and, yes, they do use that term–aren’t automatically entitled to citizenship.)
To an American, such a generation-by-generation perpetuation of outsider status can only make one think of the enduring social marginality of many American blacks. Yet at least we Americans have been taught by our bloody history that "separate but equal" is not a viable democratic option, but a cruel delusion. This lesson, I soon recognized, had not yet been learned in the Netherlands. Downtown Amsterdam and the Oud West felt almost like two different worlds. Moving among the native Dutch, whose public schools teach children to take for granted the full equality of men and women and to view sexual orientation as a matter of indifference, I felt safe and accepted. Yet many Muslim youngsters in the Netherlands attend private Islamic academies (many of which receive subsidies from the Dutch state as well as from the governments of one or more Islamic countries). These schools reinforce the Koran-based sexual morality learned at home–one that allows polygamy (for men), that prescribes severe penalties for female adulterers and rape victims (though not necessarily for rapists), and that (in the fundamentalist reading, anyway) demands that homosexuals be put to death. If fundamentalist Muslims in Europe do not carry out these punishments, it is not because they’ve advanced beyond such thinking, but because they don’t have the power. Like Christian Reconstructionists, a small U.S. sect that wishes to make harsh Old Testament punishments the law of the land, fundamentalist Muslims–whose numbers are, of course, many times larger–believe firmly in the implementation of scriptural penalties.
Let it not be forgotten, after all, how countries ruled by Koranic law treat their homosexual citizens. Under the Taliban, Afghanistan put at least ten homosexuals to death; on New Year’s Day, 2002, our good friends in Saudi Arabia beheaded three men for sodomy. According to one report, Iran has executed several thousand men for homosexuality since 1979. Even in Egypt, with its relatively moderate and secular government, a widely publicized mass arrest of suspected homosexuals in early 2001 resulted in the torture and imprisonment of dozens of males as young as fifteen. And these figures are undoubtedly dwarfed by the annual number of "honor killings" of female family members who have strayed sexually (or who have shamed their families by being raped)–a form of murder that is so much a part of traditional Muslim culture that it goes unprosecuted even in relatively moderate Islamic countries like Jordan. In May 2002, Amnesty International reported that in Pakistan at least three honor killings occur every day, and that the perpetrators are usually not even arrested, although their identities tend to be known to family, neighbors, and even the police.
It was hardly surprising, then, that in the Netherlands, a country with same-sex marriage and legally regulated prostitution, there was cultural friction between natives and the Muslim community. Yet few Dutch people discussed this friction openly. To do so, it appeared, was taboo. One night over dinner, a Dutch writer of my acquaintance–a maverick gay conservative who could usually be counted on to speak his mind unflinchingly–insisted proudly that the Netherlands, unlike the U.S., had no Religious Right. I knew very well, of course, that the Netherlands did indeed have a Religious Right; that it consisted of Islamic, not Christian, fundamentalists; and that sooner or later the Dutch would be forced to deal openly with the challenges it posed. For the time being, however, they were plainly too uncomfortable with the idea. Criticizing any kind of Islam at all, I gathered, felt too much to them like voicing racial or ethnic prejudice. While freely condemning Protestant fundamentalism–which hardly exists nowadays in that once strictly Calvinist country–they couldn’t bring themselves to breathe a negative word about Islamic fundamentalism. There was no logic in this; but the Dutch were clearly still at a point where it seemed possible, and easier, simply to avoid such uncomfortable issues.
What does the future hold for a Western world with a growing minority of fundamentalist Muslims? It was only after moving to Amsterdam that I found myself asking this question. It seemed to me a fair and important one. But it was, I found, a question that startlingly few writers had addressed. To be sure, there were plenty of books about Islam and the West, but I could find only a handful about Islam in the West. Most tended to take a sanguine view of the topic, more or less echoing academic Islamists like John Esposito, whose influential 1992 book The Islamic Threat? exhaustively argued that there was no such threat, period. More than one of these books, indeed, put a decidedly upbeat spin on the subject, maintaining that Muslim immigrants’ "spiritual" propensities were precisely what decadent Westerners need nowadays. For example, in When Cultures Collide (1989), the Norwegian writer Peter Normann Waage, while admitting that there were indeed challenging aspects to the presence of Islamic fundamentalism in Europe, characterized fundamentalist Muslim "moral" strictures as an overall virtue and perhaps the West’s best hope of salvation from rampant capitalism and secularism. (And this in a book occasioned by the Salman Rushdie case!)
Adam LeBor, whose A Heart Turned East (1997) was the only non-academic English-language book I could find in Amsterdam about Muslim immigrant communities in the West, was even more fundamentalist-friendly. Routinely, LeBor contrasted what he saw as the high spiritual and moral values of Islamic fundamentalists with what he characterized as Western decadence. LeBor quoted with obvious approval a French Muslim leader on the desirability of letting "Muslims in the West introduce [Westerners to] a new approach [to both family life and life in society]–or rather a much older one–founded in spiritual values, rather than material ones." Islam, wrote LeBor, "can bring to Europe [something] immeasurable, intangible, but nonetheless vital"–namely, "God and spirituality. The missing part of the jigsaw puzzle of life in the late twentieth century." LeBor complained at length about the "challenge" that the United States offers
to those Muslims wishing to live fully as Americans, but maintain and cherish their Islamic heritage. Not because of any institutionalized anti-Islamism, but because the values and mores of much of contemporary America–widespread use of recreational drugs, alcohol, promiscuity, homosexuality, teenage dating, gun ownership, values that are ubiquitous across the media–clash completely with the demands of Islamic morality.
LeBor sympathetically raised the case of an Islamic fundamentalist father in the U.S. who "knows he will have to maintain a difficult juggling act to raise his children according to the values of Islam, while living in a consumer society that sells and markets sex, which for Muslims is a sanctification of marriage, as just another commodity."
LeBor seemed to view fundamentalist Islam in the West as being akin to a spice that enriches an otherwise bland dish. But fundamentalist Islam doesn’t work that way. It doesn’t flavor–it transforms, subdues, conquers. Islam means "submission," and in its fundamentalist form it demands nothing less. Far from being content to serve merely as part of a culture’s "jigsaw puzzle," it demands that the whole puzzle be shaken up, the picture entirely redrawn. A Western society that accepted such a religion as its spiritual component would soon prove itself highly inhospitable to, among much else, any of LeBor’s fellow writers who might wish to dissent from his unadulterated admiration for fundamentalist Islam. Nowhere in his book, indeed, did LeBor serve up a single positive word about Western freedoms, Western individuality, Western sexual equality, or Western protections for the rights of minorities; instead there was simply an unwavering insistence on the virtue and piety of fundamentalist Muslims and the greed and decadence of their Western oppressors.
Nor did Waage, Lebor, or anybody else pay much heed to the problems posed by European Muslims’ views on homosexuality–views that Muslim leaders have been less and less shy about advertising. In 1999, for example, the Guardian described a student conference on "Islamophobia" at King’s College, London, at which a speaker began by announcing politely, "I am a gay Muslim." That effectively ended his presentation: "For members of the majority Muslim audience, the expression was enough to ignite the most passionate opposition. Some people began to shout, while others came raging down to confront the speaker. Security was called and the conference came to a premature end." Then, in October 1999, the Shari’ah Court of the U.K. declared a fatwa against Terence McNally, who in his play Corpus Christi had depicted Jesus Christ as gay. (In Islam, Jesus is counted among the prophets.) Signing the death order, judge Sheikh Omar Bakri Muhammed emphasized the concept of honor, charging that the Church of England, by failing to take action against McNally, had "neglected the honour of the Virgin Mary and Jesus." The Daily Telegraph reported that according to the sheikh, "Islamic law states that Mr. McNally can only escape the fatwa by becoming a Muslim. . . . If he simply repents he would still be executed, but his family would be cared for by the Islamic state carrying out the sentence and he could be buried in a Muslim graveyard."
A few weeks later, British Muslim leaders were busy battling the repeal of Section 28, Great Britain’s notorious antigay law. Dr. Hasham El-Essawy, director of the Islamic Society for the Promotion of Religious Tolerance in the U.K., told the Telegraph that it was Muslims’ obligation "to discourage homosexual behavior." El-Essawy, who according to the Telegraph is "considered an Islamic moderate," found it appropriate to quote the Koran’s punishment for lesbians–"Keep the guilty women in their homes until they die, or till God provides a way out for them"–and for homosexual men: "If two of your men commit the abominable act, bother them. But, if they repent . . . then bother them no more." El-Essawy made clear his "moderation" by contrasting his view with that of some other Muslims, who, he explained, "believe that the punishment for homosexuality is death."
Apparently, such views don’t disturb the likes of Waage and LeBor–at least not enough to affect their conviction as to Islam’s overall value to the West. Nor, one must assume, do these facts give any pause to the leaders of Britain’s Labour Party, which recently introduced a bill that would make it illegal in Great Britain to criticize any religion. This would not only make possible (as Matthew Parris noted in the London Times) the prosecution of this year’s Nobel laureate V. S. Naipaul for his writings about Islam, it would effectively rob gay people of the right even to challenge imams who call for their extermination.
Of all the English-language books I found in Amsterdam that devoted substantial attention to Islam in the West, one stood out for its straightforwardness about the fundamentalist bent of most European Muslims today and about the unpleasant implications of their antipathy for Western values. The book was The Challenge of Fundamentalism by Bassam Tibi, a professor of international relations at Göttingen University–and a liberal Muslim. Indeed, he was the only Muslim in the pack–and the only one engaged neither in blatant whitewashing nor in wishful thinking.
In 1999 I moved from Amsterdam to Oslo. I soon found that in Oslo, as in Amsterdam, the cultural gap between natives and the Muslim immigrant minority (which, in Norway, consists largely of Pakistanis) was miles wide. Here, too, the native-born children of immigrants were called "second-generation immigrants," not Norwegians. (Indeed, in Norway these days the words "immigrant" and "Muslim" are effectively synonyms.) Here, too, the authorities, presumably fearing accusations of insensitivity or cultural imperialism, tended to avoid addressing undemocratic practices within immigrant communities.
Forced marriage is one of these practices. Among Muslims in Europe, it’s quite common for young people to be compelled by their parents to accept spouses they don’t want. Some women manage to escape these situations and seek protection in women’s shelters. In 1999 the Guardian published an article by Faisal Bodi, a British Muslim who complained about these shelters, which in Great Britain are called "women’s refuges." Charged Bodi, "Refuges tear apart our families. Once a girl has walked in through their door, they do their best to stop her ever returning home. That is at odds with the Islamic impulse to maintain the integrity of the family." (Bodi made certain to note–as if it definitively established the loathsome character of women’s shelters–"the preponderance of homosexuality among members and staff.") Citing universal Muslim belief in "the shariah, the body of laws defining our faith"–which he described, a bit unsettlingly, as "a sharp sword capable of cutting through the generational and cultural divide"–Bodi argued that British authorities must recognize the Muslim community "as an organic whole" and thus accord it a larger role in resolving conflicts over forced marriage. Bodi’s plaint was phrased with extreme delicacy, but the point was clear: when Muslim girls or women flee the tyranny of father or husband, the government should essentially hand them over to a group of Muslim men. In short, British law should effectively be subordinate to Muslim law. Group identity trumps individual rights.
Nothing, of course, could be more undemocratic. Yet time and again, governments in western Europe have shown themselves to be exceedingly susceptible to such arguments by Muslim leaders. The same is true of the mainstream media, whose main concern in such matters, it often appears, is to avoid offending Muslim sensibilities. Representative of the media’s standard approach to issues involving Muslim subcultures was an article about forced marriage that appeared in 2000 in the Norwegian newspaper Aftenposten. The article tamely characterized the difference between Western-style consensual matrimony and forced Muslim marriages as a "collision between the individual-oriented West and the family-oriented East." The reporter went on to express admiration for the "family-oriented" approach and even cited the low Muslim divorce rate to support the contention that the Muslim way was better–ignoring entirely the fact that wives who are forced to marry are hardly in a position to decide to divorce.
Then, in September 2001 (only five days, in fact, before the destruction of the World Trade Center), the Norwegian newspaper Dagbladet reported that 65 percent of rapes of Norwegian women were performed by "non-Western" immigrants–a category that, in Norway, consists mostly of Muslims. The article quoted a professor of social anthropology at the University of Oslo (who was described as having "lived for many years in Muslim countries") as saying that "Norwegian women must take their share of responsibility for these rapes" because Muslim men found their manner of dress provocative. One reason for the high number of rapes by Muslims, explained the professor, was that in their native countries "rape is scarcely punished," since Muslims "believe that it is women who are responsible for rape." The professor’s conclusion was not that Muslim men living in the West needed to adjust to Western norms, but the exact opposite: "Norwegian women must realize that we live in a multicultural society and adapt themselves to it."
It is in such ways that freedoms begin to erode.
Two people who plainly understood this were Shabana Rehman, a woman who grew up in Oslo’s Muslim community, and Hege Storhaug. In a courageous article that appeared in the Norwegian newspaper VG in April 2000, Rehman and Storhaug accused Norway’s Muslim leaders of presenting the general public with a misleading picture of what was going on inside their community–a picture that Norwegian authorities gladly accepted, the article charged, even though they knew better.
Noting "the lack of freedom and the violence [that] reign in a large part of the Muslim immigrant community," Rehman and Storhaug asserted that many Muslims in Norway were engaged in "a life and death struggle to secure fundamental human rights." Pointing out that Muslim community leaders routinely "deny that [Muslim] women [in Norway] are lacking in freedom or that they are the victims of violence," the article argued that "it is impossible for Norwegian authorities to clean up these problems as long as the immigrants’ representatives continue to veil the truth." Rehman and Storhaug went on to say,
The Norwegian public has let itself be fooled by the [Muslim] community’s dissemblers ever since the beginning of the integration debate. In one voice, they have delivered an unambiguous message: that the problem for today’s immigrants, both young and old, is discrimination and racism in Norwegian society. This is a lie–a distorted picture that conceals the real obstruction to integration. That obstruction is found within the immigrant community itself: in its lack of respect for human rights and its prevailing notions of honor and shame.
"We fear for Norway’s future," Rehman and Storhaug wrote. "We fear distance and antagonism between ethnic groups." In time, they predicted, "Norway may become a country that lives in segregation, violence and hate. . . . So far no political leaders in our country have chosen to take this seriously."
Rehman and Storhaug concluded their article with the observation that "a whole generation of minority youth is being betrayed by their own as well as by well-meaning ‘anti-racist’ Norwegians." Change the word "Norwegians" to "Britons"–or, for that matter, "Swedes" or "Dutchmen" or any one of a number of other national labels–and the statement would have remained true. The simple fact is that many Western Europeans, from the man on the street to the cop on the corner, from the politician in parliament to the immigration official at the border, have long considered it their obligation to turn a blind eye to the more disturbing aspects of the immigrant Muslim reality–in short, to tolerate intolerance.
partisanreview.org
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