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PDF FormatAlmost one hundred years later, Zionism transferred the abstract latter-day yearnings for Jewish sovereignty to the concrete arena of politics. However, even in the realm of the concrete, the autonomy that Zionism demanded for the Jews was confined within narrow borders. Even in the few instances when Zionism entertained the possibility of territorial autonomy outside the land of Israel, it set its sights on relatively remote regions with clear territorial boundaries and, most importantly, far from Europe. There were, perhaps, some grounds for the European fear that the Zionist Jew living in the Europeans’ midst held allegiance both to his present country and to his historic homeland, but they had no reason to believe that he had any intention of claiming autonomy over any part of the continent.
The establishment of the State of Israel left this reality unchanged. The French Jew may occasionally identify himself with both Israel and France, and this double identity may well cause him political and moral problems; but in this he is no different from members of many other minority groups who retain their links to their native land, real or imagined.
Islam, however, demands a different kind of autonomy. The imagined Islamic nation does not at present reside in any one place, but it imagines itself everywhere. It aspires to an autonomy that embraces the entire world. In the realm of the imaginary, London is no different from Mecca or Paris from Medina. All of these are Allah’s domain and, therefore, also the Islamic nation’s domain.
This is the background against which the world-encompassing political claims of some current Muslim-Arab clerics are developing. Al-Qaradawi calls on Muslims in the West to act on behalf of their brothers suffering in Palestine, Kosovo, Chechnya, and elsewhere.22 The European Council for Fatwa and Research, established in London on March 29, 1997, and led by al-Qaradawi, stated that the condition for Muslim participation in the political process of any Western country was to serve those Muslim interests which could not be served by any other means.23 A similar tenet was expressed by Fadlallah.24 The political duty of a Muslim living in Europe is not limited, therefore, to a defined territory or a specific society; it is anchored in his status as a member of the universal Islamic nation and in his recognition that this alone guides and defines his actions on a global scale.
This perception of the imagined Muslim nation as a global phenomenon is supported by recent technological developments, especially the new transnational media of satellite television and the Internet. These media allow Muslims across the globe to participate simultaneously in the imagining of their nation even though they live in different countries, or even on different continents. For some Muslim scholars this is no coincidence; they believe that the appearance of the Internet and satellite television is part of the divine plan, and the task that Allah has assigned to these media is to serve the word of Islam and expose it to all mankind.25
On this basis, Muslim clerics and commentators are setting up Internet sites and television channels with a twofold purpose: To allow the entirety of the world’s Muslims, including those in the West, to imagine themselves as a collective which is daily building one nation, and to put a sophisticated means of indoctrination at the disposal of Islam. When al-Qaradawi broadcasts his weekly religious program on Al-Jazeera, it is viewed by Muslims worldwide at the same moment; and when the Internet portal IslamOnline.net, operating under his supervision, publishes its global news reports focusing on the Islamic aspect of events—whether the subject is politics, culture, or sports—they are read by Muslims all over the world simultaneously; and when al-Qaradawi’s European Council for Fatwa and Research publishes its fatwas in books or on the Internet, they touch those who are in the process of imagining a transnational Muslim identity.26
Therefore, the Westerner who feels that Islam is a threat to his identity—whether as a believing Christian, a liberal democrat, or the citizen of a territorial nation—is not simply engaging in paranoid speculation. Contemporary Muslim-Arab thinking has most certainly set itself the task of converting Europe to Islam—and it is doing so explicitly, openly, and without hesitation or ambiguity. The Westerner is correct when he perceives this form of Islamic thinking as a threat to his own autonomy and his right to self-determination within defined territorial borders. The imagined Islamic nation is nurturing aspirations toward a global hegemony, an aspiration it promotes using the mass media—and its followers, wherever they are, are required to work on behalf of these aspirations. This is the crucial difference between the Jewish and the Muslim imagined nations: It is the fluidity and flexibility of Jewish identity that makes it possible for the anti-Semite to project his darkest fears onto the Jews and to attribute to them the desire for world domination. The enduring popularity of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion and innumerable other theories regarding a Jewish “conspiracy” stem from this source. But Islam’s ambition to spread its rule over the entire world is not a fantasy of paranoid or prejudiced Europeans, but an accurate perception of what leading Muslim-Arab thinkers themselves openly preach.
IV
There is no escaping the obvious conclusion: From a purely ideological point of view, European fear of Islam is not mistaken. The Muslim believer living on the continent is potentially exposed to an ideology that imposes upon him a religious and political duty to proselytize Christians and impose the rule of the Islamic nation everywhere possible, including Europe itself.27
But life is more complicated than the abstract theories of clerics. In the real world, most (though not all) Muslim immigrants in Europe are not rallying to the cause of the Islamic nation, or are rejecting it outright. One of the major reasons for this difference between theory and practice is the weak religious sentiments of many immigrants. Although they claim their affiliation with Islam as the foundation of their identity, this declaration is often empty of content; they seldom go to mosque, they do not observe the commandments and prohibitions of Islamic law (such as abstaining from alcohol), and pay no heed to “the good of the Islamic nation” when making political judgments. Their relationship to Islam is purely spiritual—bordering on folklore—and has no public expression. In Germany, for example, according to the four largest Muslim organizations in the country, only an estimated five hundred thousand out of 3.4 million Muslims attend Friday prayers in mosques and prayer rooms. Such attendance is the minimum criterion for an active Islamic identity.28
Another prominent obstacle is the ethnic link that many Muslim immigrants feel toward other frameworks of identity—foremost among them the territorial nation state into which they were born, their mother tongue, and the religious school they attend. In all the largest countries in Europe, the Muslim immigrant population is fragmented into majority and minority groups based around national affiliation. Although Islamic religious and cultural institutions are open to all, immigrants and residents from Turkey will prefer to pray in a mosque with a Turkish orientation, whereas Moroccan immigrants will attend mosques with a Moroccan orientation, and so on. These frameworks are further fragmented into subcultures in which diverse variations on Muslim theory and practice abound; these phenomena—whether they reflect a maximalist attitude regarding the vision of a Nation of Islam or not—actively express the imagined Nation of Islam’s lack of unity and the inability of those who adhere to it to free themselves from other, less expansive forms of identity.
One must also note the limited access immigrants have to the media which disseminates the concept of an imagined Nation of Islam. In theory, satellite television and the Internet make it possible for the spokesmen of that nation to overcome all territorial and ethnic obstacles to the spread of their creed. But in reality, this is often not the case; second-generation immigrants who know no Arabic whatsoever or have only a partial command of the spoken language have difficulty understanding the writings and sermons of the Muslim-Arab intellectuals who preach in the rarified and difficult literary Arabic of religious texts. There are obstacles of a more technical nature as well: In Germany, for example, the law requires every landlord to approve the installation of satellite dishes by tenants if these tenants hold foreign passports. Second-generation Muslim immigrants with German passports frequently have their applications refused, among other reasons because the landlord is afraid that a building festooned with satellite dishes will look like “immigrants’ quarters,” thus lowering its market value.
