“A firm NO to Islam!” This is how some editorialists have described the spectacular success of the Pim Fortuyn List in Holland’s general election this month.
Fortuyn, who was assassinated by a militant ecologist days before the poll, had billed his party as “ a bulwark of modern civilization against Islamic dark ages.”
General election results in advanced democracies, however, are too complicated to be understood in terms of simple populist slogans. The Dutch voter seemed determined to ditch the left-wing parties just as his counterparts had done in many other European Union countries, including most recently France. Thus the claim that 20 percent of the Dutch electorate voted against Islam is certainly exaggerated.
Nevertheless, there is no doubt that the tide of Islamophobia is rising throughout Europe, at times with tragic consequences. Earlier this month a Flemish nationalist in Belgium set a Moroccan home on fire. A man and his wife were burned to death while their three sons were seriously injured.
The number of attacks on Muslims and their businesses and religious buildings has risen dramatically since the Sept. 11 terrorist operations against New York and Washington.
Provisional figures worked out trough the information available show that during the past six months the 15 nations of the European Union experienced over 800 anti-Muslim incidents ranging from murder to sending letter bombs to Muslim preachers.
More than 90 such aggressions, claiming over 1000 injured, were recorded in Holland alone. The Sultan Ahmad Mosque, the country’s most famous Muslim center, was burned to the ground while 70 other mosques were seriously damaged.
Similar attacks have taken place in Britain, France, Belgium, Germany, Spain and Italy.
A recent poll shows that Arabs top the hate list of the French with 23 percent, followed by Jews who get 10 percent.
The massive presence of Muslims in Europe is certainly a problem that cannot be ignored. There are no firm statistics but most experts put the number of Muslims in the EU at between 15 and 20 million. To these must be added a further 30 million Muslims in the non-EU countries of the continent, especially the Russian Federation. In other words Muslims now account for almost 10 percent of the population in the European continent.
This is a new and dramatic experience for both sides. Just after World War II the total of non-Christian religious minorities in Europe, excluding Russia, was less than one percent. Even then Jews accounted for much of that figure. The massive Muslim presence in Europe, therefore, is a new, and very rapid, phenomenon in historic terms.
Living under non-Muslim rule is no new experience for Muslims. Just after World War I all but a few Muslim lands, including Turkey and Iran and pockets of territory in the Arabian Peninsula, lived under Western rule. Almost 85 percent of all Muslims were subjects of this or that European empire. The difference was that Muslims still lived in their own homelands where they formed massive majorities of the population. The only place where Muslims lived as minorities among non-Muslims was the Indian Subcontinent under British rule. Muslims living in the subcontinent did not feel out of place, because a majority of them belonged to native Indian ethnic communities that had converted to Islam. And living among the Hindus and Buddhists was regarded more palatable than living among the Christians. This is because Hinduism and Buddhism unlike Christianity are not organized religions and have no proselytizing ambitions.
The issue of large numbers of Muslims living in non-Muslim countries, paying tax to often secular states, and obeying laws many of which directly contravene Islamic jurisprudence is a subject that needs to be pondered and debated at both theological and political levels.
This is no easy task. Islam does not have the organizational structures of Christianity and whatever ruling is made by a group of theologians or political officials would not be binding on anyone.
What are the roots of the current upsurge in Islamophobia?
One problem is that because Islam does not make a clear distinction between political and religious actions, a number of political groups have established themselves as faith organizations. Thus, topics that should be debated in the political arena are pushed into the theological domain and used as a means of portraying Islam as “reactionary” or “violent.” One example came in a leaflet distributed during the Dutch election in which a number of signatories came close to approving suicide bombings. The best known of the signatories were Necmettin Erbakan, Mahfoud Nahnah, Rashed al-Ghannouchi, Hassan Nasrallah and Abdallah Jaballah, all of whom are leaders of political parties or groups, some legal some not, in their native countries. But the Dutch Islamophobes presented them as “leaders of Islam” as if they constituted a college of cardinals with authority to rule on matters of faith.
A similar trick is used by sections of the Western media that promote a dozen or so radical political activists as the leaders of Islam.
Yet another problem is that some practices and social habits that have ethnic and/or tribal origins are highlighted as a means of producing a negative image of Islam.
Female genital mutilation, for example, is an African tribal custom totally unknown to 90 percent of Muslims. And yet mostly feminist groups routinely cite it, as a sign of Islam’s “barbarity”. When a Muslim cuts the throat of a sheep in a busy street in Marseilles, for example this is presented, mostly by animal rights activists, as another illustration of Islam’s “savage nature”. The fact that such scenes are rare inside the Muslim world itself is ignored. Polygamy is another issue. This is presented by Islamophobes as a key feature of Islamic life, though a doctorate thesis prepared for the Provence University in France shows that polygamy concerns no more than one percent of marriages in the Muslim world.
We live in a world in which image is often more important than reality. Thus some European newspapers do not hesitate to put the picture of masked Muslim women on the front page as a means of frightening women voters. They ignore the hundreds of thousands of European Muslim women active in all walks of life — from medicine to spacer science. Often, when reporting a crime, the fact that the accused in the case is of Muslim origin is highlighted. But when it comes to hero worship, as in the case of the football-star Zineddin Zidane, we are told that he is “a child of Marseilles.”
Sometimes Muslims themselves play the game of their enemies by pretending as if successful Muslims in Europe were not Europeans. Toqiah Sifi, the French politician appointed a junior minister in the new Cabinet in Paris, has been hailed as a Muslim and Arab hero by part of the Arab media. The fact is that Ms. Sifi was born in France and has never even visited Algeria.
