Here's the link to the Ash piece on Muslims in Europe in The New York Review of Books.
nybooks.com
It is a review of two recent books on the topic, Ian Buruma's Murder in Amsterdam: The Death of Theo Van Gogh and the Limits of Tolerance and Ayaan Hirsi Ali's The Caged Virgin: An Emancipation Proclamation for Women and Islam
But, as is the charge the NYRB has for all its reviewers, it's more of an essay on the topic in which the reviewer engages the authors of the books in a conversation on the topic. When the reviewer is knowledgeable, almost always, and writes well, much of the time, there is nothing better.
Here's the last, summary, section, which will give you an idea of where Ash is going with his argument. But his observations on Dutch and French society are fascinating.
Long but well worth the time.
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4.
The very Dutch stories of Theo van Gogh, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, and Mohammed Bouyeri fill only a small corner of the vast, complex tapestry of Europe and Islam. If we ask "what is to be done?" the answer is: many different things in different places. We must be foxes, not hedgehogs, to recall Isaiah Berlin's famous use of a fragment of Archilochus: "The fox knows many things but the hedgehog knows one big thing." Against the strident hedgehogs of Fox News we must continue to insist that this is not all just one big War on Terror, to be won by the Good Guys eliminating the Bad Guys.
Buruma rightly emphasizes the cultural diversity of Muslim immigrants: Berbers from the Rif mountains are not quite like Moroccans from the lowlands; Turks have different patterns of adaptation from Somalians, let alone Pakistanis in Britain. In the nineteenth century, European imperialists studied the ethnography of their colonies. In the twenty-first century, we need a new ethnography of our own cities. Since European countries tend to have concentrations of immigrants from their former colonies, the new ethnography can even draw on the old. At the same time, the British, French, Dutch, and German ways of integration—or nonintegration—vary enormously, with contrasting strengths and weaknesses. What works for, say, Pakistani Kashmiris in Bradford may not work for Berber Moroccans in Amsterdam, and vice versa.
We have to decide what is essential in our European way of life and what is negotiable. For example, I regard it as both morally indefensible and politically foolish for the French state to insist that grown women may not wear the hijab in any official institution—a source of additional grievance to French Muslims, as I heard repeatedly from women in the housing projects near Saint-Denis. It seems to me as objectionable that the French Republic forbids adult women to wear the hijab as it is that the Islamic Republic of Iran compels them to wear the hijab, and on the same principle: in a free and modern society, grown men and women should be able to wear what they want.[7] More practically, France surely has enough difficulties in its relations with its Muslim population without creating this additional one for itself.
On the other hand, freedom of expression is essential. It is now threatened by people like Mohammed Bouyeri, whose message to people like Ayaan Hirsi Ali is "if you say that, I will kill you." Indeed, Buruma tells us that Bouyeri explained to the court that divine law did not permit him "to live in this country or in any country where free speech is allowed." (In which case, why not go back to Morocco?) But free speech is also threatened by the appeasement policies of frightened European governments, which attempt to introduce censorship in the name of intercommunal harmony. A worrying example was the British government's original proposal for a law against incitement to religious hatred. This is a version of multiculturalism which goes, "You respect my taboo and I'll respect yours." But if you put together all the taboos of all the cultures in the world, you're not left with much you can speak freely about.
Skilled police and intelligence work to catch would-be terrorists before they act (as the British police and security services appear to have done on August 10 this year) is essential not just to save the lives of potential victims. It's also vital because every terrorist atrocity committed in the name of Allah hastens the downward spiral of mutual distrust between Muslim and non-Muslim Europeans. One young Moroccan-Dutch woman tells Buruma that before the September 11 attacks on New York, "I was just Nora. Then, all of a sudden, I was a Muslim." Heading off this danger will also mean closer surveillance of the militant Islamist imams whom we repeatedly find radicalizing disaffected young European Muslim men.
From another angle, European economies need to create more jobs and make sure Muslims have a fair crack at getting them. A recent Pew poll found that the top concern among Muslims in Britain, France, Germany, and Spain was unemployment. In view of the historic sluggishness of job creation in Europe, fierce competition from low-cost skilled labor in Asia, and the reflexes of xenophobic discrimination in many European countries, this is easier said than done. Housing conditions are another major source of grievance. However, to try to remedy that through public expenditure will strain already stretched budgets; if it is seen to be done at the expense of the "native" population living nearby, it could also translate into more votes for populist anti-immigrant parties.
Europe's problem with its Muslims of immigrant origin, the pathology of the Inbetween People, would exist even if there were an independent, flourishing Palestinian state, and if the United States, Britain, and some other European countries had not invaded Iraq. But there's no doubt that the Palestinian issue and the Iraq war have fed into European Muslims' sense of global victimhood. This is made amply clear by the personal stories of the Madrid and London bombers. In a recent poll for Britain's Channel 4 television, nearly a third of young British Muslim respondents agreed with the suggestion that "the July bombings [of London] were justified because of British support for the war on terror."[8] Establishing a workable Palestinian state and withdrawing Western troops from Iraq would, at the very least, remove two additional sources of grievance. An attack on another Muslim country, such as Iran, would exacerbate it.
In the relationship with Islam as a religion, it makes sense to encourage those versions of Islam that are compatible with the fundamentals of a modern, liberal, and democratic Europe. That they can be found is the promise of Islamic reformers such as Tariq Ramadan—another controversial figure, deeply distrusted by Ayaan Hirsi Ali, the French left, and the American right, but an inspiration to many young European Muslims. Ramadan insists that Islam, properly interpreted, need not conflict with a democratic Europe. Where the Eurabianists imply that "more Muslim Europeans means more terrorists," Ramadan suggests that the more Muslim Europeans there are, the less likely they are to become terrorists. Muslim Europeans, that is, in the sense of people who believe—unlike Mohammed Bouyeri, Theo van Gogh, and, I suspect, Ayaan Hirsi Ali—that you can be both a good Muslim and a good European.[9]
Ultimately, this is a challenge as much for European societies as for European governments. Much of the discrimination in France, for example, is the result of decisions by individual employers, who are going against the grain of public policy and the law of the land. It's the personal attitudes and behavior of hundreds of millions of non-Muslim Europeans, in countless small, everyday interactions, that will determine whether their Muslim fellow citizens begin to feel at home in Europe or not. Together, of course, with the personal choices of millions of individual Muslims, and the example given by their spiritual and political leaders.
Is it likely that Europeans will rise to this challenge? I fear not. Is it still possible? Yes. But it's already five minutes to midnight—and we are drinking in the last chance saloon.
—September 6, 2006 |
