The Future of “European Isalm”

The recent incident in the city of Toulouse, southern France, raised repeated questions about the impact of the presence of Islam and Muslims not only on France but also on the entire old continent. This identification of the image of the True religion with its heavenly signs and sublime values with the image of Muslims of different ethnic and national origins, local cultures, family backgrounds, social classes and education level is mixing things up which will continue, either out of ignorance of the difference between religion and its followers, or deliberately made to link every Muslim extremist group to Islam’s overall picture. The young man who fired at a French school for Jewish students and was cornered and shot dead by the police was of Algerian origin, but born in Toulouse, was the latest to raise such questions, but will not be the last, despite the French President’s comment on the incident that it should not be linked to Islam.

How has the image of Islam as a tolerant and peaceful religion become a threateningly fearful one associated with its followers who are the least in number but the most in terms of extremism? What is the future of Islam and Muslims in Europe after centuries of contact, decades of immigration and years of attempts to enter into a dialogue between the two parties?

The creation of the European Union five decades ago coincided with a dramatic rise in the number of Muslim immigrants of different ethnic backgrounds mostly from former European colonies in Asia, especially India and Pakistan or Africa’s Arab north and Islamic west beyond he Sahara.

The reality of Islam in Europe

Ahmad Alshimy, the translator of Islam in Europe, citing a number of Arab and Western thinkers, says the number of Muslims in France is over 5m now (only half a million in 1952). They came from former French colonies suffering from inferiority complex and live only physically in France but are emotionally tied to their countries of origin, which made them fail to assimilate into French society. The number of Muslims in Germany is over 3m now, mostly of Turkish origin, whose concerns and demands are neglected by he German government. In Britain, there are over a million Muslims, some of whom live a hard life and many suffer from explicit or implicit persecution. Moreover, many suffer from unemployment and neglect by the local authorities and the central government. A little more than half a million Muslims live in Italy, most of whom are still trying to acquire Italian citizenship, but their requests have been turned down by successive Italian governments which do not recognize them, in contrast to less distinguished groups, such as the Lutherans who have easily become citizens, though most of them are foreigners holding just residence permits.

In the Benelux about 750,000 Muslims live, most of whom are struggling to acquire full citizenship. About half a million Muslims live in the Scandinavian countries Sweden, Norway and Denmark and are sill suffering from isolation, lack of resources and neglect by the authorities of their plans to build schools and mosques. In Austria there are a little less than half a million Muslims, most of whom struggling to achieve equality with Austrian nationals and recognition of their mosques and religious rites.

Europeans make a serious mistake when they misunderstand Muslims living in Europe and think that individual cultural or sectarian acts performed here and there are the rule, the DNA of all Muslims and that European Muslims are violent and terrorist by nature. As a matter of fact, this thinking is against common sense and contradicts tolerant human nature and disposition.

A distressing scene

The distressing scene of the first generation of Muslim immigrants to Europe may be different from the current scene of he children of he second or even the third generation, who are Europeans, in a European environment whose relationships with the European institutions and society have developed and they have thus become Muslim Germans, English or French rather than Muslims living in Germany, England or France. This is not an easy, but a complex situation because they are engaged in business relationships with the host society and have therefore to adapt to it and change their self-concept and their attitudes to and interaction with others in the context of a multicultural society.

However, the main problem facing European Muslims is that the European parties do not like the idea of multiculturalism because it does not support their attempt to integrate Muslims into European society and require them to show loyalty to European secularism and accept them as full citizens and give up their cultural demands which clash with the simplest principles of liberalism.

They even think that the anti-West Muslim state attracts European Muslims and uses them as a lobby to blackmail the European governments or force the Europeans to adopt certain political positions, which has increased tension between the West and the Muslim world and increased host societies’ doubts of Muslims’ intentions. The European dread the rising number of Muslims in their countries and the falling number of Europeans in the future, lest by the end of the 21st century Muslims should be the majority; Europeans the minority.

The Toulouse incident and similar previous incidents add insult to injury, particularly as it reminds of the domination of religion on the act which has a negative impact on European societies. We know historically how Europeans during the Renaissance struggled to free themselves from the authority of he church and the influence of the clergy, and the successive revolts in Europe against the tyranny of the clergy and their custody of people, which arouses Europeans’ feelings and the desire of united Europe to reaffirm its secularism and become an exclusive European club, as some European politicians call for.

To that end, Europe should face the most critical problem since World war II: the presence of Muslims on its territory, some of whom have become nationals and carry European passports, others still struggling to achieve this.

The victim of fixed dies

The image of Islam as one connected with Muslims’ acts is part of a package of fixed ideas used by Muslims and non-Muslims to generate tension between Islam and Europe.

This reminds us, e.g., of attempts to undermine the Ottoman Empire and attacks by European secular reformers in the 19th century, which was the main source of tension between Islam and others in the world at large. Likewise, we remember another not less important source in Europe’s colonial history as deeply rooted in collective memory, combined with a selective attempt to politicize this colonial past by powerful Muslim leaders or at least use it as a key point of comparison between that colonial era and current American and European policies involving Islam and Muslims heavily or slightly.

Memory also recalls the Crusades, the fall of Constantinople in 1453 and its aftermath and the siege of Vienna in 1683. Remote and settled in minds as they seem, these incidents are images of Europe stirring the imagination of many Muslims and non-Muslims in Europe and even elsewhere.

In the book Islam in Europe: Diversity, Identity and Influence, one of its co-authors, Dr Tariq Metri, a former Lebanese minister, argues that national identities in the modern times, which are deeply rooted in cultural constraints and awareness of a common destiny, helped combine Muslims and Christians and developed an earlier relationship which surmounted traditional constraints and differed from the relationship based on religious affiliation, without necessarily clashing with religion. These relationships, which prefer cooperation to dialogue, have involved many intellectuals and become common among many sectors of modern society, and they still exist in other countries which have put national unity in danger or abandoned modern national structures.

“Before the advent of Islam, Christianity had given names to the followers of other beliefs: Jews, pagans, heretics, and when a confrontation between the Christians and Muslims took place each side faced the other using the same such names and did not use the words “Muslims” or “Islam” and instead used ethnic terms, such as “Arabs” or Biblical terms, such as the “Ismaelites of Hagar”. To the Christians, Muslim invaders were whips sent by god to punish Christians for their sins,” Metri wrote.

But the 9th-century Syrian Christian historian Dionzis Telmher fairly says, “Muslims were able to save Christians from imperial Roman persecution, which was a significant gain”. Early in 1661 the Armenian Sybus wrote, “God has granted the land covenanted to Abraham to the Arabs as well as victory against atheist Byzantines.”

Also in the 7th century we know at least one of the ideas of Sybus Anastasius, a monk of St Catherine’s Monastery in Sinai, describing Arab invasions as “punishment inflicted by God on Hercules who promoted Unitarianism.”

These fixed ideas about Islam in the European mentality became more widespread as Islam became stronger, coinciding with the weakness of the Byzantine Empire, and Muslims’ rapid and early victories were ready proof that God sided with them. This feeling of the presence of a heavenly message was one of the key factors of the success of successive invasions later. Muslims did not fight Christians or force them to abandon their religion, but gave them freedom of worship and protection under custody. Protection covenants reflected this in varying degrees of Christian submission: “We and they have equal rights and obligations”. It was political loyalty with a form of submission manifested in the payment of a tax they called “tribute”.

The contexts of integration

In this context one of the terms that has appeared in recent years is “European Islam”.

Dr Bassam Tibi was perhaps one of the first writers who used this term in an entirely different meaning in his contribution to the round-table discussions held in Paris in 1992 and 1993 under the title “The Types of Islam in Europe: Integration or Social Obligation?” He calls for integrating Islam into European society, stressing that this is a bilateral process.

As Muslims represent the third largest religious community in Europe, European Islam, Tibi says, should adapt to Europe’s social and cultural developments within three contexts: religious tolerance in the broader European sense; multiplicity which means that Muslims abandon the ideological concept which gives them superiority over others; secularism and separation of religion and state.

The paper presented by Gorgen Nelson, Centre for the Studies of Islam and Christian and Islamic Relationships, like Metri’s, adopts a contemporary context as he discusses the spread of the idea of the possible presence of a special nature (Europen Islam). Nelson discussed the various applications of European Islam, indicating two trends within Muslim communities in Europe. In some contexts the term” European Islam” is used reflecting forms of expression and thinking in Europe which allow Muslims to share in the building of their places of residence.

In other contexts the term “European Islam” shows that it has acquired an ideological content from outside the Muslim communities (or a least the marginalized ones). Some regard this as an attempt to control Muslims’ ability to express themselves. As a matter of fact, Muslim identity in Europe needs to be understood as an ongoing process rather than a still structure. Muslim identity assumes new dimensions all the time, or it forms over time, rather than being a fixed idea. Joselin Sizari, National Research Centre, Paris, and visiting professor at Anthropology Department, Harvard University, argues that the search for a Muslim identity in the West is in fact influenced by local and international news and stories along with a whole series of images and stereotypes which make Islam look backward and strange religiously, culturally and politically, which refers us to the story we started this Talk with

People’s affiliation with Islam seems mostly to be an ingredient of ethnic communities. This applies to Turkish immigrants in Turkey, Indian and Pakistani immigrants in England and, to a certain degree, Moroccans in France. Islam seems to be a vital ingredient of the ethnic identity within European societies, especially for the first generation of immigrants.

In the meantime, new Islamic transethnic forms have appeared in recent decades. In Britain, e.g., there is a new generation of Muslim leadership who adopt positions totally cut off from ethnic or, sometimes, isolationist Islam.

A special case of European Islam occurred in Bosnian contexts, as, according to Zavier Bugaril, Turkish and Ottoman Research and Studies Unit, National Research Centre, Paris, Bosnians devised a new religious model through cementing the ties with Muslim communities in Europe, clearing up doubts and streamlining their practices, a role which developed after the war.

Bugaril says this new model of Islam might have not appeared in Bosnian valleys but in larger European cities, where there are clusters of Muslim immigrants from all backgrounds, including Balkan immigrants.

To conclude, we do not live isolated from the world around us, nor can we, even if we want to. We wish to live in a world where equality, the rule of law and democracy prevail, so we have to promote the modern image of Islam and make it the frame of reference for all Muslims not only in the West but at home as well. The future of Islam in Europe is conditional on its future at home, and attempts to contain Muslims’ crises with others begin with openness with self, so that individual, fanatic or extremist practices may not tarnish the ideal image of a world religion based on respect for human values.