Muslims in Europe How restive are Europe's Muslims? Oct 18th 2001 | PARIS, BERLIN, MADRID AND LONDON As the American and British bombing of Afghanistan continues, Europe's Muslims are increasingly nervous TAKE a quick overview: in America, the FBI is interrogating a Frenchman of Algerian origin who once attended a mosque in London. In France, the special judge in charge of terrorism inquiries is questioning suspected members of an extremist cell apparently set up by another Franco-Algerian. And in Britain, Belgium, Germany, the Netherlands, Spain and Italy still more suspects have been caught in co-ordinated police raids. What all, regardless of nationality or country of arrest, have in common is the ability, by race or religion, to fit unnoticed into Europe's many Muslim communities. No wonder, therefore, that since the terrorist attacks of September 11th, Europe's Muslim minorities have become more visible—and more worried. Fortunately, there have so far been few incidents of violence against Muslims. Indeed, Europe's leaders (bar Italy's Silvio Berlusconi, with his notion of Christian superiority) can congratulate themselves that their soothing words seem to have worked. As Germany's chancellor, Gerhard Schröder, put it, “This is not a clash of civilisations but a war for civilisation.” Muslims themselves have reacted in a fairly united way to the attacks and the war that has followed. Their leaders were quick to condemn the carnage in New York but since the American strikes against targets in Afghanistan began they have become more sceptical and uneasy. British Muslims, some of whom have relations in Pakistan and Afghanistan, are especially worried. Many Muslims across Europe fear that America's retaliation might prove counter-productive. In France, Soheib Bencheikh, the grand mufti of Marseilles, says pointedly: “I'm afraid that bin Laden's image is being magnified. There's a risk he may be idealised as a leader for the many young Muslims who live in social and economic exclusion. The risk is that this madman might become a hero, a martyr.” Europe's Muslims share feelings of exclusion, though their political grievances are not uniform However, since no European country has a uniform Muslim minority, the political grievances these minorities feel are not uniform either. Dislike of American policy towards Israel and Iraq is widespread. But in Germany, the Muslim minority are overwhelmingly Turks, who have little loyalty to the Palestinians; after all, Turkey, once the Arab world's imperial master, is a member of NATO and has long co-operated with Israel. And the Shia Muslims of Lebanese or Iranian origin have no particular interest in the Sunni Muslims of the Maghreb, with their Algerian civil war or the Moroccan annexation of the Western Sahara, both subjects close to the hearts of the majority of French Muslims who are of North African origin. But what most of Western Europe's 12.5m-odd Muslims do share is a feeling of exclusion and of being done down. They are much more likely than their non-Muslim (and mainly white) peers to be jobless and ill-educated, their young men more likely to be harassed by the police on suspicion of drug-dealing or petty crime. As they lose touch with the lands of their parents yet feel shunned by their countries of adoption or birth, it is natural that young Muslims should turn to Islam as a badge of identity; Europe's determined secularism only sharpens the tendency. Certainly, Islamic extremism is very rare: in Britain, for example, out of some 1,500 mosques, only two are known to be run by extremists. But many young Muslims have a sense of alienation, which could, if things go wrong, tip them towards violence. Indeed, in many countries, co-existence (even, in some places, self-segregation) looks a more realistic bet than assimilation and integration. Germany, for example, has some 3.2m Muslims in its population of 82m, and until recently made singularly little effort to integrate them. It was not until last year, for instance, that German law gave an automatic right to citizenship to children born in Germany to foreign parents. Among Britain's 2m-odd Muslims (perhaps half of them under 18, in a population of nearly 60m), there are some recently-settled refugees from Afghanistan, Iran, Iraq, Somalia and elsewhere. But two of the largest and most established Muslim communities, the Pakistanis and Bangladeshis, have eschewed the tendency of most immigrant groups to assimilate, becoming more rather than less segregated over time. In France, with a population of around 60m too, the traditional pretence is that the 4m-5m Muslim residents, most of them North African immigrants or their offspring, will over time become like the white Français de souche, Frenchmen of “true stock”, as some on the right put it. After all, since French culture is so obviously superior to any other, it seems self-evident that all who can will adopt it. Meanwhile, Spain, with around 500,000 Muslims legally resident (and perhaps another 200,000 illegally so) in a population of 40m, is only now realising that its Muslim workers will not necessarily make some money and then go back to the Maghreb, but are increasingly in Spain to stay. Muslims are themselves diverse These differences of approach and attitude stem from each country's different history. Some 2.5m of Germany's Muslims are Turks, originally invited as Gastarbeiter (guest workers) to help power the nation's post-war economic miracle. They were meant to be temporary but by 1973, when Germany closed its borders to new foreign workers, 1m poorly-educated Turks had chosen to stay in their German ghettos and brought spouses and other family members to join them. Today, 61% of Germany's Turks were born in Germany or have lived there for more than 20 years. Like Britain's Muslims, they are disproportionately young: almost half of Germany's Turks are under the age of 30. France, because its colonial dominance of the North African Maghreb began in the 19th century, has a much longer history of Muslim immigration. Yet there, too, the major waves of immigration came to provide cheap labour, especially in the factories but also in the fields, during the economic boom that followed the second world war. Britain's experience was similar. Many Pakistanis and Bangladeshis came to England after the second world war to work in the northern textile mills, and have suffered particularly from those industries' collapse. Compared to Anglo-Indians, the Pakistanis and Bangladeshis suffer higher unemployment and lower achievement in school. The consequent alienation among many Muslims helped lead last summer, in the English north, to the worst race riots in Britain for decades. Spain's experience of Islam is much longer and more complex. Colouring everything is the fact that the Arabs—“the Moors”—invaded Spain in 711 and were dominant or prominent there until, in 1492, King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella expelled them. This legacy still shapes Spanish attitudes today. In a survey carried out last year by the government's own think-tank, half the respondents described their own society as “quite or very racist”; most Spaniards prefer to stress their European identity and to play down their Moorish past. Such cultural chauvinism is not always innocuous. It led last year to two days and nights of rioting in the small Andalusian town of El Ejido, where some 15,000 North African immigrants, most of them men and only a third of them legally there, live in squalor while working on the area's vegetable farms. After a Spanish woman was murdered by a mentally-disturbed immigrant, enraged Spaniards looted and burned down the immigrants' shacks, shops and mosques, while the local authorities reacted with apparently deliberate slowness. Could such riots have happened in France or Germany? These days, it seems unlikely. For one thing, the equivalents of Spain's male-dominated shanty towns of immigrants coming to work the fields no longer exist. The Moroccans and Algerians who once came to pick the grapes in France's southern vineyards are now settling, in their public-housing estates, into retirement. The immigrant quarters of cities in France, Germany and Britain are so long established that they are an accepted part of the landscape. But familiarity breeds only a certain amount of acceptance. The immigrant parts of Europe's cities, whether the horrendous tower blocks of La Courneuve, outside Paris, or the terraced streets of Oldham, in Manchester, are separate and foreign places. In Britain, the Pakistani and Bangladeshi communities are becoming more segregated, partly because unemployment has trapped people, partly because of the widespread practice of bringing in brides from overseas. Mosaic more than melting-pot, then? Muslim representation in European countries' parliaments is still very low: there are only two Muslim MPs in Britain's lower house, one in Germany's (plus an ethnic Turk who eschews Islam), none in France's. The Dutch may do best, with seven in their 150-strong lower house (though similar tensions are growing in the Netherlands as elsewhere). It is probably true, across the continent, that black citizens and those of Indian (mainly Hindu) descent are more integrated into public life. Although most countries in the EU virtually closed their borders to non-European immigration as long ago as the early 1970s, ethnic minorities have grown in size thanks both to natural increase and to the arrival of spouses and other family members from abroad. That has helped spur Europe's far right and has made it politically respectable for governments of all parties to tighten rules on immigration and asylum. Meanwhile, racist incidents, from graffiti-scrawling to murder, have gone up. In Germany, for example, there was a 40% increase in reported racist crimes last year. Moreover, pollsters say that some 14% of the EU's people admit to being “intolerant” of minorities; another 25% say they are “ambivalent”. In retrospect, therefore, it is hardly surprising that a minority (albeit very small) of Europe's Muslim young should turn to terrorism or should fight in Bosnia or Chechnya or Afghanistan. In Britain, some community leaders have reported an enthusiasm among a few young men to proffer their services in Afghanistan, as others are known to have done previously on behalf of violent Islamic groups in Yemen and elsewhere. Nor is it surprising, given the freedom of movement within the EU, that their networks should span Europe's frontiers, from Germany to Belgium and from England to France and even to Scandinavia. The question is to what extent they swim in a sea of sympathisers. The mufti of Marseilles argues that in those parts of the Muslim world—in Algeria, Egypt and Afghanistan—where people “have tasted this criminal fundamentalism, they have been completely disgusted by it...Today, this kind of Islamism is in decline.” But he adds more bleakly: “I just hope that this American retaliation won't be an opportunity for its renaissance.” SOURCE:THE ECONOMIST OF 18/10/01. With the very best of good wishes, Musa Amadu Pembo Glasgow, Scotland UK. [log in to unmask] May Allah,Subhana Wa Ta'Ala,guide us all to His Sirat Al-Mustaqim (Righteous Path).May He protect us from the evils of this life and the hereafter.May Allah,Subhana Wa Ta'Ala,grant us entrance to paradise .. Ameen