Veiled Intolerance

By Richard Wolin
The Nation, April 9, 2007
 

Edited by Andy Ross
 

Today there are an estimated 15 million to 17 million Muslims living in Europe. Anyone who wishes to address the theme of Europe and Islam immediately runs up against a definitional conundrum. For in Europe, the monolithic religion known as Islam is functionally nonexistent. The national origins of the European Muslim population vary dramatically from country to country.

There are also prodigious generational differences among Europe's Muslims. As a rule, Islamism's greatest appeal is among second- or third-generation immigrants: maladapted youth whom the integration process has failed and who feel torn between two worlds — their parents' country of origin, which many have never seen, and their adoptive European homeland.

These facts strongly suggest that converts to Islamic fundamentalism are made and not born. In most cases, Islamism is a conscious choice embraced by frustrated second-generation immigrants who feel they are growing up in an ethnic and cultural no man's land. Thus the rise of Islamism in Europe has very little to do with the intrinsic nature of Islam as a religion and everything to do with the failures of integration and Muslim immigrants' sense of de-territorialization.

Official government policy toward Muslim immigrants has also differed vastly from nation to nation. Britain (1 million to 2 million Muslim immigrants out of a total population of 60 million) and Holland (1 million Muslim immigrants out of a total population of 16 million) have for the most part embraced a flexible, multicultural approach. Dutch patience with multiculturalism seems to have reached a tipping point. A similar disillusionment with multiculturalism suffused Britain after the July 2005 London Underground attacks.

France followed a rigorously assimilationist approach — a color-blind, one-size-fits-all, "immigrants into Frenchmen" model of citizenship. According to the best available estimates, there are 5 million to 6 million Muslims in France out of a total population of 60 million. French republican ideology is so studiously tone-deaf to considerations of difference that the law forbids the statistical tracking of immigrants according to their ethnic or religious backgrounds.

Three years ago, eyebrows were raised when France passed a law banning the Islamic headscarf from public schools. The issue first arose during the late 1980s, following a series of terrorist attacks in Paris and the fallout over the Salman Rushdie affair (Rushdie's Japanese translator was killed, his Italian translator was stabbed and his Norwegian publisher was brutally assaulted).

One of the signal achievements of French republicanism was the 1905 law establishing laïcité: delineating firm lines of separation between church and state but also ensuring that public education would remain in the hands of state officials. From an orthodox republican standpoint, laicization's triumph was the result of a bitter and protracted Hundred Years' War against ecclesiastical backwardness. Republicanism's defenders were not about to cede to Muslim immigrants hard-won gains that had been made over the course of a century-long struggle against Catholicism. The thought that success might come at the cost of further alienating several million Muslims crossed their minds only after the fact — if at all.
 

AR  (2007) Altogether a very troubling political issue. How can anyone discuss the theology of the Abrahamic God in abstraction from it?