Look out, Europe, they say

Jun 22nd 2006
From *The Economist* print edition
Why so many Muslims find it easier to be American than to feel European

HAVING narrowly escaped with his life from the theocrats of his native Iran,
Afshin Ellian likes the relaxed, cerebral atmosphere of Leiden, the Dutch
town where he now teaches law. But this 40-year-old professor is
disillusioned by a Europe which he says has become too soft-minded in its
dealings with Islam. It is a sign of the times, he thinks, that the country
where he settled 17 years ago is about to say goodbye to Ayaan Hirsi Ali, a
Somali-born Dutch politician who has sharply criticised the Muslim tradition
in which she was raised. Having got into trouble because she once fibbed to
the Dutch immigration authorities, Miss Hirsi Ali is moving to America.

Some of Mr Ellian's criticisms of Europe are philosophical: it is too
cynical and mercantilist a place to wage a war of ideas in defence of the
Enlightenment. Some are personal: "Five years ago, my Afghan sister-in-law
emigrated to the United States, where she now works, pays taxes and takes
part in public life. If she had turned up in Europe, she would still be
undergoing treatment from social workers for her trauma—and she still
wouldn't have got a job or won acceptance as a citizen."
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Among Europeans of Middle Eastern heritage, Mr Ellian's views are rather
unusual. But they would draw applause from many Europe-watchers in the
United States, in whose eyes the mishandling of Islam has become the latest
and gravest of Europe's self-inflicted wounds.

During the cold war, America used to berate its European friends for
underestimating the Soviet threat and failing to spend enough money on their
own defence. A little later, Europe was rightly scolded for not doing enough
to stop the bloodshed in its own Balkan backyard. These days, the handling
of Islam is near the top of the long list of subjects on which the American
consensus differs sharply, and increasingly, from the European one.
A different view

Two recent events have crystallised American views. Late last year, when
Muslims in many of France's slum-suburbs erupted in almost uncontrollable
violence, this was seen as proof of Europe's failure either to give the
newcomers a decent economic life or to confront extremism successfully.
Then, earlier this year, Danish cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad caused
worldwide riots. This was a sign both of official Europe's weakness in
defence of free speech—but also, for some Americans, of a godless
continent's failure to understand the depth of other people's faith.

In running their economies, observes Charles Kupchan, one of Washington's
veteran Europe-watchers, the Europeans know what is needed but lack the
firmness to do the right thing. When it comes to Islam, they just don't know
what to do.

It does not cheer America that, in several parts of Europe, some Muslims
have found a political voice in alliance with the anti-establishment left.
Britain's "Stop the War" movement, which organised huge rallies against the
war on Saddam Hussein's regime, is a curious partnership between supporters
of the international Muslim Brotherhood and largely non-believing
socialists. Tariq Ramadan, a Swiss-based scholar who has also taught at
Oxford University, has won a large following with his mixture of loyalty to
Islam's holy texts and opposition to global capitalism.

In some transatlantic squabbles, the American message has been delivered
more in sorrow than in anger. We wish you Europeans would do the right thing
(about labour markets, say, or farm subsidies) both for your own sake and
for the sake of the global economy—but in the end it will be your loss if
you don't. But when it comes to the handling of radical Islam, the argument
is getting more rancorous. That is partly because Americans see a threat to
their own security from a Europe whose citizens can travel easily to the
United States. The September 2001 attacks, remember, were planned in
Hamburg.

Europe has become a "field of *jihad*", and it may be the part of the world
where America faces the greatest threat from Islamic extremism. So says
Daniel Benjamin, a former White House adviser who is now a terrorism-watcher
at the Centre for Strategic and International Studies, a think-tank. Mr
Benjamin makes a demographic projection of a kind more often heard on
American lips than European ones. The Muslim population of the European
Union's existing 25 members may on present trends double from about 15m now
to 30m by 2025. And that leaves out EU-applicant Turkey, with an almost
entirely Muslim population of around 70m.

To be sure, it is by no means clear just how many Muslims there are in
Europe. In France, whose secular authorities never ask a religious question
on a census form, the number of people of Muslim heritage is generally given
as 5m, or 8% of the population. But that is only an educated guess. Some
studies, extrapolating from the difference in birth rates, say the figure
might rise to 20% of the population by 2020.

Well, maybe. In a forthcoming book, two scholars at America's Brookings
Institution, Jonathan Laurence and Justin Vaisse, say this estimate is much
too high. It underestimates the relative fecundity of non-Muslim Frenchwomen
(compared with, say, their Italian sisters) and the fact that Muslims seem
to have fewer babies the longer they have been in France.

In fact, there is something weirdly paradoxical about the Muslim scene in
every major European country. The secular French state has given mosques and
clerics a privileged role as representatives of Islam; yet France's Muslims
are as lax in attending their mosques as Catholics are about going to church
(though Muslims are better at private prayer and observing religious fasts).

In Germany, the great majority of the country's Muslims have their origin in
Turkey. German Turks tell pollsters that they are happy with their host
country, and with the principle of separation of church and state; but they
also seem to be growing more fervent in their attachment to Islam. In one
survey of German Turks, 83% said they were "rather" or "strictly" religious,
and the number of those who think women should cover their head is rising.

Britain's authorities, both national and local, have devoted much attention
to making the country's nearly 2m Muslims feel more at home. But Muslims
remain at the bottom of the economic pile. The main reason is that, compared
with British Hindus and Sikhs, or even French Muslim women, very few of
Britain's Muslim women—mostly from Pakistan or Bangladesh—go out to work.
Yet some Muslim sub-groups, such as the Ismailis who came from southern Asia
via East Africa, have soared ahead. Islam itself is no barrier to economic
advancement.

Amid all the confusion, there is one clear trend among European Muslims.
Islam is increasingly important as a symbol of identity. About a third of
French schoolchildren of Muslim origin see their faith rather than a
passport or skin colour as the main thing that defines them. Young British
Muslims are inclined to see Islam (rather than the United Kingdom, or the
city where they live) as their true home.

It does not help that all Europeans, whatever their origin, nowadays find
themselves "identity-shopping" as the European Union competes with the older
nation-states for their loyalty. No wonder many young European Muslims find
that the *umma*—worldwide Islam—tugs hardest at their heart-strings.
The argument gets blunter

In the short run, at least, there seems little chance of Europeans and
Americans finding a common language over Islam. As many non-Muslim Europeans
see things, it is American foreign policy—in Iraq, above all—that has
radicalised their Muslim compatriots. If European Muslims are anti-Western,
they say, it is largely because of the Bush administration's misdeeds.

In its gentler moments, the administration is sensitive to European
touchiness. Americans must be "careful and modest" in telling other parts of
the world how to solve questions of identity and religion, says Daniel
Fried, the State Department's top man for European affairs.

But, in his careful, modest way, Mr Fried makes some firm points about
Europe's difficulties in absorbing Muslim newcomers. Europeans, he thinks,
are still too inclined to see these Muslims as "unwanted foreigners". In
facing a challenge like Muslim immigration, "exclusionary nationalism will
not help." At the same time, Mr Fried fears, some European governments are
not very adept at distinguishing between peaceful piety and the more violent
kind. He insists that the United States has a "deep and legitimate interest"
in the battle of ideas between Islam's moderates and extremists in all parts
of the world—and that it will do its best to support the moderate ones in
Europe.

Yet, for Europe's angriest Muslims, their host countries' gravest sin lies
precisely in their alignment with America—both as partners in the global
capitalist system and as supporters, in varying degrees, of American foreign
policy. So the suggestion that America may have something to teach Europe
about how to make Muslims feel more comfortable (and therefore less extreme)
looks at first sight rather strange.

It is, in fact, by no means absurd. Whatever the defects in Muslim eyes of
American foreign policy, the United States has a substantial Muslim
population which on the whole seems pretty comfortable there, and has
produced some of the world's best Islamic thinkers. That spectacular Middle
East-looking mosque at the top of this article is in fact in Dearborn,
Michigan.

For the same reason as in France—the fact that the state does not like
asking questions about religion—the United States has a hard time estimating
the size of its Muslim population: the guesses range between 3m and 7m. But,
whatever the precise number, America's Muslims neither see themselves, nor
are seen by other Americans, as being radically at odds with American
society. When Americans scold Europe for its "exclusionary nationalism", it
is partly because they feel that their country has more successfully
embraced a variety of religions, including Islam.

Some American Muslims would quibble with that claim: polls show a rising
percentage of Americans with negative views about Islam, and Muslim
organisations report a rising number of incidents of harassment or
discrimination. But, broadly speaking, freedom to practise and preach Islam
is protected by the American system.

If America is better at absorbing its Muslims, this may to some degree be a
matter of luck. The majority of Muslim Americans are either upwardly mobile
migrants from southern Asia or Iran, or black American converts who lack any
personal links to Islam's heartland. Many European cities, on the other
hand, contain an exceptionally volatile Muslim under-class which is poor,
alienated and intertwined (by family ties) with the hungriest and angriest
parts of the Muslim world.

But it is not just luck. The difference between America and Europe in
dealing with Islam reaches down to some basic questions of principle, such
as the limits of free speech and free behaviour. America's political culture
places huge importance on the right to religious difference, including the
right to displays of faith which others might consider eccentric. In the
words of Reza Aslan, a popular Iranian-American writer on Islam, "Americans
are used to exuberant displays of religiosity." So the daily prostrations of
a devout Muslim are less shocking to an American than to a lukewarm European
Christian. American society is open to religious arguments—and to new
approaches to old theological questions—in a way that Europe is not.

In general, Americans are more optimistic—or less gloomy—about Islam than
Europeans. A poll published this week by the Pew Research Centre says that
Americans who see Muslim-Western relations as "generally bad" outnumber
those who take the opposite view by 55% to 32%. Not exactly cheery. But in
Germany the pessimists are ahead by 70% to 23%, in France by 66% to 33%, and
in Britain by 61% to 28%.

Some things are off-limits even in America. In Britain, for example, members
of the radical (but non-violent) Hizb ut-Tahrir movement have appeared on
television to express their rejection of the principles of liberal democracy
and secular justice. That is unlikely to happen in America. Nor would it be
possible, in any American context, to argue for the superiority of
*sharia*—Islamic
law—over laws passed by elected law-makers.

But the right to say almost anything on most other subjects is deeply
entrenched in America. This means that, whatever weapons the parties in
America's religious arguments try to use, they do not usually include
attempts to deny the other side's right to speak.

The result is that there is more space for hard religious argument. No law
restrains that quite large body of American thought which is critical not
just of extreme readings of Islam but of Islam itself—arguing that the
warrior ethos of the faith's earlier centuries was one of its essential
features, not just a regrettable excess. But the American system also
guarantees the rights of those who argue for the opposite view: that Islam
is basically a peaceful, universalist faith which restricts rather than
enjoins the use of violence.

This does not mean that America has a monopoly of wisdom in distinguishing
peaceful Muslim citizens from the other sort. During the 1990s, a
Washington-based group called the American Muslim Council and its leader,
Abdurahman Alamoudi, were hailed by the American government as valuable
people to talk to. In 2004, Mr Alamoudi was given a 23-year jail term on
terrorism-related charges.

But one merit of the American system is that, even when hard questions arise
about the trade-off betweeen freedom of speech and security, there is a
robust legal culture which enables people to fight back if their rights are
infringed. Last year some American Muslims who had been detained in New York
state on returning from a conference in Canada promptly filed a lawsuit
against the federal authorities—and they were helped to do so by the
American Civil Liberties Union.

The idea that freedom is the cornerstone of politics is one reason why
people like Mr Ellian, that Iranian who fled to Leiden, look hopefully
towards America. His argument goes as follows. Islam's sacred texts can be
read either in a spirit of militant intolerance or in a spirit of
altruism—and the latter can prevail only in conditions of hard, open-ended
debate in which nobody holds back for fear of giving offence. America's
free-speech culture may have a better chance of fostering such a debate than
European political correctness.
It's starting to change

There is no shortage of robust debate among European Muslims, but it is more
about politics—especially left-wing politics—than about theology. In
Belgium, Muslims now have about a quarter of the seats in the regional
government of Brussels. In the municipal politics of Britain and the
Netherlands, some radical Muslims quite often find themselves doing
political business with other anti-establishment groups on the secular left,
to the dismay of older immigrants.

During a recent contest in east London, the candidate for the new Respect
party—a young Muslim lawyer—was chided by his co-religionists for sharing a
platform with homosexuals. But Abdurahman Jafar held his ground: "We want
equality for Muslims and we would seem insincere if we didn't stand together
with other minorities who face discrimination."

The rhetoric that emerges from this sort of politics in a variety of
European countries is not always attractive to American ears, since one of
the few common denominators between angry Muslims and secular leftists is
hostility to America. But, given a choice between pious self-segregation and
plunging into public affairs, many European Muslims are choosing the latter.

In places like Amsterdam, coalition-building between Muslims and others is
producing some positive results. Ahmed Aboutaleb, a Moroccan-born city
councillor in Amsterdam, is proud of the fact that he was handsomely
re-elected this year—on a moderate centre-left ticket—by a combination of
native Dutch votes as well as those of Muslim immigrants.

He says that the relatively benign inter-ethnic climate in Amsterdam
reflects the town hall's efforts to make all races and religions feel part
of a "united camp". As a result, he claims, the risk of some new incident
setting off a general upsurge of tit-for-tat violence between Christians and
Muslims (as happened when the film-maker Theo van Gogh was murdered by a
Muslim extremist in 2004) has been greatly reduced, at any rate in Amsterdam
(though he admits the risk is still rather higher in other Dutch cities).

Of course, this does not mean that there is no longer any cause to feel
concern about Europe's ability to absorb its assorted Muslim peoples. The
latest study of the 900,000 Dutch Muslims, by Amsterdam University, suggests
that the feelings of "indignation and humiliation" experienced by Muslims
are worsening, not fading away. Such feelings are especially strong among
second-generation Muslims, who believe they have a solid claim to a
comfortable place in Dutch society but still reckon they are being rejected.

The good news is that not everybody who harbours these feelings is
retreating into the margins of extremism and violence. A process of
political assimilation is, hesitantly but visibly, taking place. This will
change the politics of Europe. It may affect Europe's relations with the
outside world. But, in the process, Muslims will also change—and perhaps
settle into their new homelands as comfortably as most American Muslims have
done.

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