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PDF FormatThe most serious impediment, however, to complete identification with the Nation of Islam as a cohesive religious-political identity is that many immigrants are fully cognizant of the fact that it is a dangerous idea. This understanding has produced its own concept of Muslim identity—one that seeks to curtail, if not deny outright, the political and missionary aspects of Muslim-European identity. The religious importance of the literature may not be on a par with that of the great religious authorities of the Muslim-Arab world, but it has far-reaching public repercussions.29
Even among those immigrants who, staunch in their faith and active in their communities, can envision a global Islamic nation, there are many who consciously decide to reconcile their faith and their desire to integrate into the non-Muslim societies in which they live. During field research I conducted among German Muslims, many of those questioned testified to their attempts to integrate the two worlds, often well aware of the fact that this integration forces them to live out an internal contradiction. Far from wanting to “Islamize” their neighbors, they are seeking recognition and respect from a society that frequently considers them backward and primitive. Hassan, a thirty-one-year-old computer student, emigrated in 2003 from Morocco to Darmstadt. During his studies, he fell in love with a half-Russian German Catholic and married her. When I asked him about the role he assigns to himself as a Muslim in German society, he answered that he has no such role. “Nowadays, there’s the Internet, television; we don’t need people to preach about Islam like they did five hundred years ago,” he said. “Islam is not a secret. It’s open to anyone who wants to know about it.” Omar, fifty-three, separated and a father of three, immigrated to Germany from Egypt in 1985. He is an admirer of Sheikh al-Qaradawi’s approach to sharia and quotes the sheikh’s vision of a Europe that will gradually become Islamic because of the willing consent of its population. “It was Allah’s promise to the prophet that Islam would spread,” he says. But he rejects the ruling that requires him to vote in German elections according to Muslim interests. “I respect al-Qaradawi’s opinion in theory, but there is a reality. There is no such thing as voting in the interests of the Muslim nation. I live here, my children live here, I want to vote in the interests of the society in which I live.” Masrour, a twenty-seven-year-old software engineer whose family emigrated from Pakistan to Germany in 1985, is a member of the Ahmadiyya sect (considered heretical by mainstream Islam). Among his other activities, he has developed an Internet site in German that tries to explain why the wearing of a headscarf is compulsory in Islam and why this does not prejudice the rights of women. During our meeting, he declared: “I can certainly say that my duty as a Muslim living in Germany is to get those who are not Muslims to see Islam as the true religion. There is nothing illegitimate about that. When a guest is invited to your house, it is legitimate for him to argue with you that Fanta is tastier than Coke, or if it’s good or bad to smoke. If the visitor convinces you—what’s wrong with that?” But when I asked if he was aware of the difference between an argument about one aspect of a way of life, like the relative quality of soft drinks, and undermining that way of life itself, he replied: “Yes. And that is why it is called a vision. I am aware that my vision is possible only insofar as it is impossible.”
V
The road to the realization of Islamic prophecy is long and strewn with great obstacles. But this cannot obscure a simple truth: In order for this nation to turn the majority and minority groups in Europe onto a sure collision course, it is not necessary for the majority of Muslim immigrants—or even a particularly large part of them—to imagine themselves part of it and act as its emissaries. It is enough for a small but determined and ever more powerful minority to gain ground.
The European Muslim on his way to the mosque is different from the European Jew on his way to the synagogue. He represents a potential member of an imagined community that envisages the West as Muslim and Islam as the new world order. To fear such an eventuality is not pure xenophobia; it is firmly grounded in reality.
The challenge that Muslim thinking poses to European society is not simple, especially because the memory of anti-Semitism reverberates in the collective European consciousness. Europe knows just how short the distance is from alarmist newspaper articles about a foreign minority infiltrating the nation to a murderous outburst against that minority; from abuse hurled at people in the street because their beliefs and external appearance are different to an actual pogrom. Indiscriminate, blind, arrogant, and chauvinistic hostility toward Islam and Muslims is a phenomenon that Europe must denounce and correct, if it wishes to prove that it really has learned anything from its past.
But there is another warning that history has given Europe: Dangerous ideas should not be ignored because only a very few are loyal to them. Today, Europe is once again witness to the growing power of an ideology that despises territorial borders, undermines the liberal political system, and rejects Western concepts of human rights. There is indeed cause for alarm. As restricted and minimal as its influence may be, the imagined Nation of Islam is not just an idea; instruments of immense power have been pressed into its service. If Europe closes its eyes, if it chooses to label all critical analysis of Islam and its adherents as a xenophobic equivalent to anti-Semitism, that imagined nation, left without resistance or opposition, may very well succeed in undermining the foundations of the order in which it functions.
Uriya Shavit is a historian of the Middle East researching Islam in Europe for the Minerva Foundation, a subsidiary of the Max Planck Society. His book The Wars of Democracy: The West and the Arabs from the Fall of Communism to the War in Iraq will be published this year by the Moshe Dayan Center for Middle Eastern and African Studies. His last article in Azure was “The Road to Democracy in the Arab World” (Azure 26, Autumn 2006).
Notes
The author wishes to thank Ursula Apitzsch, Felicia Herrschaft, and David Shavit for their help with this essay.
1. For documentation and analysis of manifestations of discrimination, hostility, and even violence against Muslims and Muslim institutions in recent years in Europe, including Germany, against the background of their Muslim identity, see European Monitoring Center on Racism and Xenophobia, Muslims in the European Union: Discrimination and Islamophobia, 2006, www.libertysecurity.org/IMG/pdf_Manifestations_EN.pdf.
2. The research was based on interviews with eighteen Muslims from different communities in the federal state of Hessen between December 2006 and July 2007, and on observations of sermons and seminars in community centers and mosques. The interviewees were assured that their full names would not be revealed, apart from those who held official posts.
3. See, for example, the conference of the Holland-based united (a European network against nationalism, racism, and fascism and in support of migrants and refugees), which was held in May 2005 in Rieti, Italy, under the banner “Dissolving Barriers: Intercultural Dialogue in Europe.” One of the discussions held during the conference was on “Islamophobia and Anti-Semitism: Building a Dialogue,” and among other things discussed was the similarity between the Jewish and Muslim communities in Europe, between the victims of Islamophobia and those of anti-Semitism, and the responsibility of the media for hostility to Muslims and Jews alike. See www.unitedagainstracism.org/pages/repriet.htm#99.
4. For the text of the declaration, see www.coe.int/t/dcr/summit/20050517_decl_varsovie_en.asp.
5. Maleiha Malik, “Muslims Are Now Getting the Same Treatment Jews Had a Century Ago,” The Guardian, February 2, 2007.
6. On March 15, 2004, French President Jacques Chirac signed a law prohibiting the wearing of items of clothing or symbols clearly expressing religious affiliation in public schools. The law was vaguely worded but specifically intended to prohibit the wearing of headscarves in class following the polemic that had gripped France since 1989. For a discussion of the law and the controversy surrounding it, see John Richard Bowen, Why the French Don’t Like Headscarves: Islam, the State, and Public Space (Princeton: Princeton, 2007). Throughout 2006, there was a searching public debate in Britain on the subject of headscarves and veils. The debate became heated following the declarations of Jack Straw, a senior Labor member of parliament, who said that he did not approve of women coming to meetings with him with their faces covered by a veil. For a review of the subject in the popular press, see, for example, Jon Gaunt, “Why These ‘Leaders’ Are a Pain in the Burkas,” The Sun, October 17, 2006; Ulrika Jonsson, “Veil Row May Stifle Debate,” News of the World, October 8, 2006. The subject was also the center of debate in Sweden, where the minister of integration and gender equality, Nyamko Sabuni, proposed a ban on girls under the age of fifteen wearing headscarves in school. Arguing for the ban, she said, “If they want to be here, they must make an effort to fit in with the society in which they are living.” Sarah Lyall, “From a Minority in Sweden: Fit In,” International Herald Tribune, January 13, 2007. The wearing of headscarves, especially in class, is also a controversial subject in Germany, and it is not permitted in some federal states that have responsibility for education. The negative reaction to Islamic dress also finds its way into the press and literature, including children’s literature, where the covering of the head is presented as an expression of Muslim backwardness and insularity. The German book Headscarf, for example, tells the story of a young girl of Turkish extraction who enjoyed a liberal education when she lived with her grandmother in Turkey but was required to wear a headscarf and obey the oppressive Muslim way of life when she moved to Germany to live with her father, her stepmother, and her fanatical brothers. See Patricia Mennen, Headscarf (Germany: Ravensburger Buchverlag, 2006) [German].
7. “Dutch Government Backs Burqa Ban,” BBC, November 17, 2006, http:news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/europe/6159046.stm.
8. According to the racist hierarchy of the Nazi ideology, the “Gypsy problem” was not comparable with the “Jewish problem,” because the threat posed by the Gypsies to the German people was less. Moreover, the Nazis differentiated between different “Gypsy types.” On this topic see, Michael Zimmermann, “Jews, Gypsies, and Soviet Prisoners of War: Comparing Nazi Persecutions,” in Roni Stauber and Raphael Vago, eds., The Roma: A Minority in Europe (Budapest: Central European University, 2007), pp. 44-45.
9. A.B. Yehoshua, “An Attempt to Identify and Understand the Roots of Anti-Semitism,” Alpayim 28 (2005), pp. 11-30 [Hebrew].
10. Yehoshua, “An Attempt,” p. 24.
11. Yehoshua, “An Attempt,” p. 24.
12. Yehoshua, “An Attempt,” p. 27.
13. The concept of an “imagined nation” on which Yehoshua relies is identified with the book Imagined Communities by Benedict Anderson, originally published in 1983. The term has been given exaggerated meanings, some of which distort its original intention. It should be stressed that Anderson used the expression to indicate not a false entity that does not exist, but a real community whose establishment is connected with the ability of its members to imagine themselves as belonging to one nation through common texts and images. The Jews imagined themselves in the modern age as belonging to one nation, even though they were scattered to all four corners of the globe. Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 1993).
14. See Abu al-Ala al-Maududi, Islam and Jahiliyah (Beirut: Mua’sasat al-risala, 1975), pp. 17, 35-46 [Arabic]; Sayyid Qutb, Milestones (Damascus: Dar al-’Ilm, n.d.), pp. 3-6, 9-10, 21-22, 30-31 [Arabic]. The latter book was first published in 1964.
15. Among the most important of these was the Muslim World League (Rabitat al-‘Alam al-Islami), established in Saudi Arabia in 1962 as an umbrella organization for religious activities—that is, religious dissemination—throughout the world; and the Organization of the Islamic Conference, established in Rabat, Morocco in 1969 after a deranged Jew tried to set fire to the Al Aksa mosque. The organization set itself the task of promoting cooperation between Islamic countries, fifty-five of which joined it.
16. Yusuf al-Qaradawi, “Duties of Muslims Living in the West,” Islamonline.net, May 27, 2007.
17. Muhammad Hussein Fadlallah, Challenges of the Immigrant Between Rootedness and Modernity (Beirut: Dar al-Malak, 2000), p. 82 [Arabic].
18. Fadlallah, The Challenges of the Immigrant, p. 106.
19. Muhammad al-Ghazali, The Future of Islam Outside Its Lands: How Shall We Think of It? (Amman: Orient Public Relations, Publishing, and Translation, 1984), p. 154 [Arabic].
20. Hamdi Hassan, “The Role of Information Activities in Supporting the Image of Islam and Muslims in Europe,” in The Muslims in Europe, a collection of lectures delivered at a conference held in Vienna on May 12-14, 2000, under the auspices of the president of the Austrian Republic (Cairo: Dar al-Bayan, 2002, first edition), p. 312 [Arabic].
21. Muhammad al-Hanni, “The Role of Islamic Cultural Institutions in Europe in Strengthening the Muslim Individual,” in The Identity of Muslims and Their Culture in Europe, a collection of lectures delivered at a conference held in Chateau Chinon in France on May 7-9, 1993 (Rabat: Manshurat al-Munathama al-Islamiya Lil-Tarbiya wal-’Ulum wal-Thakafa, 1995), p. 135 [Arabic].
22. Al-Qaradawi, “Duties of Muslims.”
23. Decisions and Religious Edicts of the European Council for Fatwa and Research (Cairo: Dar al-Tawzi’ah wal-Nashr al-Islamiya, 2002), p. 95 [Arabic].
24. Fadlallah, Challenges of the Immigrant, p. 334.
25. See, for example, Ja’afar Sheikh Idris, “Da’awa… and Advanced Communication Technologies,” in Al Bayan 146 (February 2000), www.jaafaridris.com/Arabic/aarticles/dawa.htm.
26. The portal Islamonline.net operates from Egypt and is managed in Qatar. Around one hundred people work for it, and it defines its goal as “the creation of a unique and global Islamic website.” The portal is a combination of news reports from an Islamic angle and religious instruction and fatwas in all areas of life. It claims to have a million visitors a day. The most popular of the Muslim portals according to the rating company Alexa.com is the strict Wahhabi Islamway.com, which offers a choice of sermons as well as guidance for new Muslims and instructions on how to bring non-Muslims into Islam. At any given moment, the portal, operating out of Saudi Arabia, displays the number of visitors to it from every country on earth as evidence of its global network and the unity of all Muslims. The satellite television network Iqra, which broadcasts round-the-clock programs of sermons, ethics, and Koran readings, is the best-liked of the satellite networks that devote themselves to religious broadcasts. The network was set up in 1998 by the Saudi media tycoon Salah Kamal as part of the ART Arab television network and in response to accusations that Arab satellite television dealt more with entertainment than with education in religious values. After being perceived initially as too dry and scientific, it began to include more popular sermons in its broadcasts and gained a loyal audience.
27. This may provide a partial explanation for the attraction to classic anti-Semitic claims among those Muslim clerics and preachers most faithful to the global perception of the Islamic nation. What makes concepts like “world Judaism” and books like The Protocols of the Elders of Zion so central to the contemporary world of Islam? Unquestionably, hatred of Israel has something to do with it, but no less than that, in Muslim discussion of “world Judaism” there is a certain amount of enchantment. The Jewish political-religious nation is perceived as a nation endeavoring to act globally, and is portrayed in Muslim eyes as a model to be imitated. Al-Qaradawi, for example, remarks in his fatwa on the Muslim duty to work for the Islamic nation in Europe, “Nowadays, we see the Jews, from the four corners of the world, championing and backing Israel, and we call on all Muslims in all parts of the world, saying that it is high time to champion the cause of their Muslim Ummah." See al-Qaradawi, “Duties of Muslims.”
28. For the data, see Peter Carstens, “Islam in Deutschland,” Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitug, May 2, 2007 [German].
29. For example, Tariq Ramadan, an Islamic scholar who is one of the most distinguished spokesmen for European Islam (and enjoys special status, among other reasons, because of his family connections—his grandfather was Hassan al-Bana, the founder of the Muslim Brotherhood), proposed that the duty of da’awa imposed on every Muslim immigrant should be a passive one, expressed by the proper manner in which he behaves towards others. See Tariq Ramadan, “Europeanization of Islam or Islamization of Europe?” in Shireen T. Hunter, ed., Islam, Europe’s Second Religion (Westport, Conn: Praeger, 2002), p. 213. Similar ideas are put forward by Amr Khaled, the Egyptian television preacher currently living in Birmingham, England, and one of the most popular personalities in the Muslim world. He calls upon Muslim immigrants to take an active part in the life of the local community, to help others irrespective of their religious affiliations, and to be useful to the Nation of Islam by improving its image in Europe rather than attempting the conversion of Christians. The speech he gave in Germany on “Integration in Islam,” originally in Arabic, was translated into English and German, and was extremely well received by Muslim immigrants in Germany. For the German version, see: Amr Khaled, Integration of Islam: On the Roles of Muslims in Europe (Nueremberg: Andalusia Verlag, 2005) [German].
