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  PR3/ 2002      VOLUME LXIX   NUMBER 3    
  
   
      
  Bruce Bawer

Tolerating Intolerance: The Challenge of Fundamentalist Islam in Western
Europe

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. 

It's hard not to see such hands-off attitudes by Westerners as a product of
leftist groupthink-of the tendency, that is, to view people as members of
groups rather than as individuals, and consequently to place the values of
the group above the rights of the individual. If native Europeans and
fundamentalist Muslims are to coexist in the West, the Muslims must temper
their fundamentalism-period. The alternative is for Europeans to sacrifice
the freedom, tolerance, and respect for individual mind and conscience on
which Western civilization is founded. That cannot be allowed to happen-not
just for Europe's sake, but for America's as well.

Situations vary, of course, from one Western European country to another. In
Spain, according to a December 4 article in the New York Times, the "Islamic
population has exploded" during the last ten years, during which the Muslim
community of 500,000 "has become a busy logistical rear guard, apparently
humming with Islamic terrorists." 

In France, which has the West's largest Muslim population (five million),
there is a man named Soheib Bencheikh who serves as the grand mufti of
Marseille and whom the International Herald Tribune calls "the clean-shaven
face of progressive Islam in Europe." In a November 30 profile in that
newspaper, speaking with an unequivocal clarity that one might wish more
Muslim leaders in the West had exhibited after September 11, Bencheikh
assailed the rigidity and backwardness of Islamic fundamentalism and
insisted on the vital importance of reforming Islam-a project that, he said,
would involve "a desacralization of the whole of Islam's texts,
commentaries, and the theological work around the texts." The purpose: to
shape an Islam that preaches tolerance, respects diversity, supports the
separation of church and state, and embraces integration wholeheartedly and
without hesitation.

Bencheikh would seem to be precisely the kind of leader that European Islam
so desperately needs. Yet the French government, instead of throwing its
support behind him and other reformists, is, he charged, "choosing the most
reactionary, the most politicized, and the most fanatic" of Islamic leaders
for participation in that country's new Muslim Council. Why? Because they
are viewed as more representative. Indeed, as the Herald Tribune's John
Vinocur noted, "In Europe, where sixteen Islamist organizations with
suspected terrorist ties were banned in Britain in the past year, and where
Germany has identified twelve extremist Muslim Arab groups within its
borders with 3,100 members, Mr. Bencheikh's views have an uncertain
following." Yet as Bencheikh argued, the French government, by confirming
and reinforcing the power of extremists, is in effect "legitimiz[ing] the
forces we decry in the Muslim world" at a time when the only hope for
genuine integration in Europe lies in a rapid and radical reformation of the
Muslim faith.

Then there's the case of Denmark. In Norway, when people dare to discuss the
issue of Muslim integration, they sometimes speak ominously of danske
tilstander: "Danish conditions." What they are referring to is a state of
affairs in which there exists not only de facto segregation between native
and Muslim communities but also a routine and open expression of mutual
hostility and distrust. Such a situation has existed for some time now in
Denmark, where recent years have seen, for example, the movement of children
out of integrated public schools and into private "white" and Muslim
schools. After September 11, however, the tensions between native Danes and
the Muslim community became more heated than ever. In Denmark, as elsewhere,
Muslims took to the streets to celebrate the terrorist attacks. A few days
later, a thousand Muslims gathered in the Danish town of Nørrebro for a
protest against democracy; one speaker called for "holy war" against Danish
society. In the run-up to a November parliamentary election, politicians
from a range of parties spoke out bluntly on the topic of Islam: one
referred to Muslims' "infiltration" of western countries; another called
Islam "not a proper religion" but "a terror organization"; a third offered
the staggeringly undemocratic suggestion that, in order to promote
integration of Muslims into Danish society, members of the immigrant
community be prohibited from marrying people from their ancestral countries.
After a new study showed that the persistence of current trends would make
Denmark (now about 3 percent Muslim) a majority Muslim nation within sixty
years, the small, reactionary Progress Party proposed ejecting "all
Mohammedans" from the country. 

Immigration was the number-one issue in the campaign. And the election
proved historic. It marked the fall from power of the Social Democrats, who
since 1920 had been Denmark's largest political party, and it gave Denmark a
new prime minister, Anders Fogh Rasmussen, whose campaign posters had
featured the slogan "Time for a Change" over a picture of a
"second-generation immigrant" who had been convicted of violence. In late
November, Rasmussen promised a new policy under which immigration would be
reduced and resources focused instead on a vastly improved integration
program.

A post-election article in Aftenposten, on November 24, vividly summed up
the current state of affairs in Denmark. "Our integration has not gone
well," admitted a teacher. "I had a class in which nineteen of thirty-three
children couldn't say anything in Danish, even though they were all born in
Denmark. . . . It's a catastrophe for Denmark, what's happening." A young
Copenhagen woman who had been a gung-ho supporter of "multiculturalism" said
that she now felt uncomfortable in her own country: "When someone like me
thinks this way, it doesn't bode well for the society." 

In Norway, anyone who dares to voice legitimate concerns about the immigrant
community's prejudices and self-segregation risks being branded a racist by
the political and media establishment; but in Denmark, it appears, those
legitimate concerns have in many cases degenerated into genuine racism. In
Denmark, alas, as elsewhere in northern Europe, many natives seem hamstrung
by an inability to disentangle ideology from race-and to distinguish their
own frankly racist discomforts ("It is simply a little strange to live in
Denmark surrounded by so many people from other countries," one woman told
Aftenposten) from their entirely justifiable unease over the prejudices and
the resistance to integration that accompany fundamentalist Muslim ideology.
This is, of course, dangerous: honest critical thinking of the sort
proffered by the likes of Shabana Rehman and Hege Storhaug is vitally
important if integration is to be made to work in northern Europe. If the
only permitted way of talking about the topic is to reiterate insipid
clichés in support of "the multicultural society," Europe is doomed. 

In English we have a word for fear of foreigners: xenophobia. It is a rare
word, seldom seen in print, almost never actually spoken, and probably
unfamiliar to most English speakers. Most of the languages of northern
Europe have words that mean the same thing. These words are frequently used
in conversation and are familiar to virtually every native speaker. In
Norwegian, the word in question is fremmedfrykt. And while this word is
often used unfairly to label anyone who criticizes any aspect of the
immigrant communities, there is in fact a real element of fremmedfrykt among
northern Europeans. The notion that a foreigner-especially a dark-skinned
foreigner-can become a Norwegian, a Dane, or a Dutchman, quite simply taxes
the imaginations of many people in these countries. However liberal they may
be, their pre-existing mental categories don't allow for it. For all the
racial and ethnic hatreds that fill the pages of American history,
Americans, even bigoted Americans, tend to be better at this than northern
Europeans are; we are accustomed to the idea that a person from anywhere can
become an American. This is, to be sure, not a virtue on our part, but
simply an idea we are used to. For many northern Europeans, it is not: it
just doesn't come naturally. More than half a century after the fall of Nazi
Germany, the notion of ethnic purity still lives, unarticulated, often even
unconscious, in the minds of people who think of themselves as good Social
Democrats. For almost all northern Europeans, national identity continues to
be wrapped up in, and equated with, ethnic background.

For this reason, large-scale immigration-of the right kind-could be a very
positive thing for northern Europe. Certainly there are some immigrants from
Muslim countries, people who have nothing of the fundamentalist about them,
who have proven to be excellent entrepreneurs and model individualists in a
part of the world where individualism has been traditionally discouraged.
(Why? Because it's viewed as a threat to social democracy.) In the Norwegian
class I took last year at the state-run Rosenhof School, I made friends with
students from Muslim countries who were easygoing and open-minded. Yet they
were the secularized (or, perhaps, semi-secularized) exceptions among the
immigrants from their part of the world; that was why they were in a class
made up of people from seventeen different countries in Europe and Asia
(plus me, the sole American), all of us with educated backgrounds and at
least a smattering of English, rather than in one of the many sexually
segregated, Muslim-only classes down the hall. In those classrooms, women
sat swathed in fabric, with male relatives at their sides, providing the
family escort without which they were prohibited from leaving the house. Our
class was lively, irreverent, fun; as we learned Norwegian, we also learned
about Norwegian folk ways, and gained insights into our own and one
another's native languages and cultures. Our discussions brought into focus
previously unexamined attitudes and assumptions that our native cultures had
bred into us; and as we recognized in all this the common foibles and
follies of the human species, we laughed-laughed in easy self-mockery, and
laughed, too, in celebration of the ability and opportunity we had been
given to grow beyond the limits of our own native cultures. 

>From the other classes we never heard the sound of laughter. 

"If you're not with us, you're against us," said President Bush soberly in
the wake of September 11. Some European Muslims made it clear they were with
us; some made it clear they were not. Faisal Bodi, the same writer who
complained in the Guardian in 1999 about women's shelters, returned to the
pages of that newspaper on October 17, reporting with approval that since
September 11 his imam had offered up Friday prayers "imploring God to
annihilate Islam's enemies, to 'rock the ground underneath their feet.'"
Here in Norway, a child counselor talked on national TV about a grade-school
class he had visited in order to discuss the atrocities. All the children
were upset, he said, except for one little Muslim boy who was sincerely
puzzled by his classmates' reactions-at his home, the boy explained,
everybody was celebrating. Aftenposten reported on a Palestinian who stood
with his young son outside the U.S. Embassy in Oslo and cheered the
attacks-shouting "This is a great day!"-until the police led him off. I
wasn't shocked to read that this Palestinian (even though claiming
membership in Hizballah) was not taken into custody, just removed from the
Embassy area. Nor did the Norwegian authorities, I'm sure, pay a visit to
the celebrating family of that puzzled schoolboy. And has the British
immigration service, one wonders, examined Faisal Bodi's visa status? Or his
imam's? One rather doubts it. 

Yet since September 11, the winds seem to have begun to shift-in some
places, anyway. In the Netherlands, it wasn't just the horrors of the
terrorist attacks on the U.S. that caused the blinders to fall from many
people's eyes. In early 2001, the imam of Rotterdam had made antigay remarks
whose viciousness stunned the Dutch. (Most Dutchmen had fooled themselves
into thinking their country was past such ugliness.) On the day the World
Trade Center fell, the Dutch populace learned that Moroccan immigrants in
the town of Ede were rejoicing in the streets. That Friday, a TV report on
Nederland 1 commemorating the victims in the U.S. was followed immediately
by a Koran reading, supplied by the Dutch Muslim Broadcasting System,
stating that "unbelievers were fuel for the fire." Finally, in a post-attack
survey of Moroccan immigrants in the Netherlands, 21 percent openly admitted
their support for an anti-American holy war. (A similar Sunday Times poll,
reported in early November, revealed that 11 percent of British Muslims
considered the attack on the World Trade Center justified.)

None of this surprised me. What did make me sit up and take notice was a
poll by De Volkskrant showing that more than 60 percent of Dutch citizens
believed that Muslim immigrants who approved of anti-American terrorism
should be ejected from the Netherlands. In an editorial, the newspaper's
editors spelled the message out bluntly: "The Netherlands doesn't accept
anti-Western fundamentalistic attitudes from Muslims. In the eyes of most
Dutch people, integration means adapting to a humanistic tradition, to the
separation between church and state, and distancing oneself from the norms
and values of one's motherland."

It was, at long last, a stunning-and welcome-affirmation of the Dutch
people's basic commitment to democratic values and to true integration. And
it signaled that the Dutch, perhaps the most liberal people on the planet,
have finally faced a crucially important fact: that there is nothing at all
liberal about allowing one's reluctance to criticize another person's
religion to trump one's dedication to individual liberty, human dignity, and
equal rights. Tolerance for intolerance is not tolerance at all.

As the International Herald Tribune noted, the De Volkskrant poll marked "an
end to the avoidance of talking openly about elements of conflict in Dutch
life that have accompanied the presence of Muslim immigrants. . . . The
Dutch are treading these days in an area where most of Europe does not want
to go." Indeed, here in Norway there were, in the weeks after September 11,
no dramatic signs of turnaround to compare with the De Volkskrant poll. Yet
there were stirrings. A November 20 Dagbladet article quoted a college
president as saying that "powerful people in the immigrant community are the
most important obstacle to integration"; if Norway wished "to avoid the same
conditions as in Denmark," he cautioned, "it doesn't help to be politically
correct and to overlook the weak points." The article caused a stir. That
evening, on the current affairs program "Tabloid," a longtime teacher at the
Rosenhof school described the contempt for democracy and the active
resistance to integration that he had observed for years among his Muslim
students. (Seething with anger, the Muslim community spokesman sitting
across the discussion table charged the teacher with racism.) The next day,
Norwegian newspapers reported on Egil Straume, a radio evangelist and local
Christian People's Party leader who, citing Muslim demands for "their own
meeting houses, schools, and laws," predicted that "in ten to fifteen years
we'll have civil war-like conditions between Muslims and Christians in
Norway." 

Yet these remained isolated voices. The consensus among Norwegian officials
and intellectuals was plainly in agreement with the diagnosis by the head of
Norway's Anti-Racism Center, who (despite Straume's insistence that his
concern was with "Islamic ideology," not race) called his remarks "mentally
deranged." Even the national leadership of Straume's own party distanced
itself from his comments. Indeed, a few days later it was reported that the
Christian People's Party was in the process of reaching out to Muslim
voters, who, a Party official noted proudly, shared many of the Party's core
values in regard to "family and morals." Muslims, he said, were streaming to
the Party in impressive numbers, even though, as non-Christians, they were
barred from holding Party positions. 

Then in January came a news story that shook up all of Scandinavia. In
Uppsala, Sweden, Fadime Sahindal, a young woman whose estrangement from her
Muslim family and refusal to submit to forced marriage had made her a
well-known media presence-and whose ethnically Swedish boyfriend had died
under mysterious circumstances in 1998-was murdered by her father. Upon his
arrest, he readily admitted to the crime and called his daughter a whore.
The murder was hardly unique; several such "honor slayings" take place every
year in Scandinavia. For Norwegians, the story's most striking aspect was
the number of Norwegian Muslims who, when asked by the media for their
comments, did not condemn the murder outright. More than one interviewee was
of the opinion that the father had done what he had to do. "I can't say it
was right and I can't say it was wrong," said an Oslo merchant. When several
public figures-including a former prime minister and Oslo's police
chief-turned up on the Norwegian TV program "Holmgang" to discuss the
murder, it felt as if the worm was perhaps finally turning in Norway.
Rarely, if ever, before in a Norwegian public forum had the problems of
Muslim integration been discussed so frankly. The slippery rhetoric served
up on the program by the Muslim community spokesman was, for once, strongly
rejected-and the person who took the lead was (yet again) a brave young
woman of Muslim background, who repeatedly interrupted the spokesman's
boilerplate to demand that he stop lying and tell the truth. It was stirring
to watch.

Since then, the intensification of the conflict in the Mideast has muddied
the waters to some extent-not only in Norway but throughout much of Western
Europe, where the intellectual and media establishment have long proffered a
black-and-white image of Palestinians as victims and Israelis as aggressors.
Yet at the same time Mideast tensions have, if anything, heightened Western
Europeans' consciousness of Islam. In February 2002 (the same month in which
a British Labour MP demanded official action against a London imam and other
Muslim leaders who were inciting the murder of non-believers), it was
reported that anti-Jewish violence by French Muslims was skyrocketing. In
April, Danish Prime Minister Rasmussen condemned a Muslim group,
Hizb-ut-Tahrir, for calling for the murder of Danish Jews; later that month,
a front-page headline on the Norwegian tabloid VG called attention to
Hizb-ut-Tahrir's plans to "turn Norway into an Islamic state." (Only two
days later came the news that yet another immigrant had perished in an
apparent "honor slaying"-this time just outside the police station in
Kristiansand.) 

The disinclination of social-democratic leaders to properly address such
matters has doubtless contributed to the recent growth of conservative
parties in many European countries. In the Netherlands, where gay bashings
by Moroccan and Turkish youths have been on the rise, and where the
government cracked down in February on the teaching of anti-Western hate in
state-supported Muslim schools (one of which was raising money by selling
calendars featuring a photo of the New York skyline ablaze), a Rotterdam
politician named Pim Fortuyn gained widespread support by speaking frankly
about the threat that fundamentalist Islam poses to Western liberties. It
was a threat of which he, as an openly gay man, was acutely aware. ("In
Rotterdam," he told the New York Times in March, "we have third generation
Moroccans who still don't speak Dutch, oppress women and won't live by our
values.") Fortuyn's brutal assassination on May 6, 2002, deprived European
politics of a brave and articulate voice for change.

Of course, not all politicians who dare to raise the issues of immigration,
Islam, and integration are necessarily admirable. As Anne Applebaum noted in
Slate in April, the lesson of the unsavory Jean-Marie Le Pen's electoral
success "is that if French politicians make it unacceptable to discuss such
things in the mainstream, then the discussion will take place on the
far-right fringes." Indeed, it is dismaying that while many leaders on the
European Left continue to do their best to avoid criticizing fundamentalist
Islam-which is, after all, among the most reactionary forces on the
planet-they persist in attaching the label "racist" or "right-wing
extremist" to any politician, such as Fortuyn, who makes bold to raise it as
an issue. The longer the Left keeps trying to stifle discussion in this
manner, the higher the chances of a rise to power of genuine racists and
right-wing extremists. 

The good news is that ordinary Western Europeans are beginning to recognize
all this. They are also coming to realize some crucial truths.
Fundamentalist Islam is not a race or an ethnicity; it is an ideology. Its
critics are not racists, any more than critics of Nazi or Stalinist ideology
are racists. And as an ideology, furthermore, Islamic fundamentalism is
something that people can be drawn away from. Some of those who arrive in
Europe as fundamentalist Muslims do indeed change their stripes, shedding
narrow dogma and dangerous prejudices and learning to value tolerance and
practice pluralism. It does not seem excessive to suggest that Western
European immigration authorities (who have a superfluity of potential
immigrants to choose from, and who are already in the habit of weeding out
candidates on economic and other grounds) should begin to concentrate on
screening for adaptability, accepting only those who seem likely to make an
effort to fit in-and admitting them only tentatively, on the condition that
they indeed adapt to democratic ways both outwardly and inwardly.

This adaptation should be encouraged in every way possible. Muslim
immigrants should not only be taught the language of their adopted country;
they should be comprehensively educated in the ways of democracy. They must
learn-no small order-to think for themselves, to read critically, to
question. Most important, they must learn to question those things they have
been taught to regard as most sacred. And they must be encouraged to see
themselves as free individuals in a free land rather than as members of a
straitjacketing subculture whose religion obliges them to take their
marching orders from autocratic community leaders.

Finally, these immigrants must be thought of-and must be encouraged to think
of themselves-as full and equal members of the societies in which they live.
European natives must appreciate what an accomplishment it is for people to
become functioning members of societies radically different from the ones in
which they were born. Those who do make the adjustment successfully deserve
the utmost respect. To persist in calling them immigrants after they have
been living and working in a country for years (and, even more outrageously,
to use the same word to describe their European-born children and
grandchildren) is not only offensive and insulting but staggeringly
counterproductive. 

As for those who, after a period in the West, make it obvious that they are
unwilling or unable to adapt, they must be sent home and replaced by
deserving individuals who can adapt. This may appear extreme, but there is
no reasonable alternative. For at stake in all this, ultimately, are the
basic freedoms of all Westerners-not only women and homosexuals, but
everyone, including Muslims and former Muslims who wish to live in a place
where they can be themselves. At stake, indeed, is Western civilization.

   
 
22 July 2002

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