Earlier this month, a 31-year-old Moroccan-born immigrant to Belgium quit her job at a prepared foods factory in the small town of Ledegem. Her decision was the result of several months of intimidation, beginning in November when her employer, Rik Remmery, received an anonymous letter. It claimed to be his “death warrant’’ unless he fired his “fundamentalist’’ Muslim employee — or made sure that she removed her head scarf.
During my two most recent research trips to Europe, I saw how a story like this could capture people’s imaginations. It represents one of the most radical cases of what Germany’s newspaper the Sueddeutsche Zeitung has called anti-Islamic “hysteria,’’ which makes many Europeans see “every head scarf as a political emblem, every Muslim (as) an extremist, every mosque (as) a seething hotbed of hatred.’’ And it shows what I have come to see as a dangerous failure in Europe to distinguish between threats from an extremist fringe and symbols of Muslims’ rich cultural heritage. Unless Europeans learn to make that distinction, I am afraid their societies risk being torn apart. Such a possibility was reflected in a study of 11 European Union states released last week by the International Helsinki Federation for Human Rights, which warned that some Muslims feel as if they are viewed as “an enemy within.’’
Islamophobia is a new phenomenon in modern Europe. In the early 1970s when I lived in Britain, Muslim women in France used to tell me how their neighbors admired their “stylish turbans.’’ Turkish women in Berlin and Cologne would flaunt their head scarves, which their own country’s ultra-secularist government had banned from many public places. Some Arab women arriving at Paris’ Orly Airport would take off the veils they were obliged to wear in their homelands. They did so of their free will, not because of Europeans’ negative reactions to their cultural peculiarities.
In fact, 30 years ago Muslims were rarely recognized in Europe as a religious group at all. Islam has been put on Europe’s social map by Halal butchers’ shops (which sell ritually slaughtered meat), Arabic and Urdu store signs, women in head scarves, men in Arab robes, mosques and Islamic schools. In 20 years, between 30 and 40 percent of the populations of about a dozen European cities will be Muslim. These changes have prompted fears among Europeans that their continent is becoming “a colony of Islam,’’ as Italian journalist Oriana Fallaci put it.
Such fears have been stoked by a few dramatic acts of violence by Muslim extremists, such as last November’s brutal murder of Dutch filmmaker Theo van Gogh.
Security services have since been monitoring thousands of mosques across Western Europe, especially in the Netherlands, France and Germany.
Imams — or prayer leaders — have been fired under government pressure for making “extremist’’ comments.
Meanwhile, in Denmark, France, Germany and the Netherlands, programs have been launched to assimilate Muslims into national mainstreams. The assimilation of ethnic or racial groups has historically meant their merger through marriage, friendships and socialization. Most Europeans, however, can’t imagine having those kinds of relationships with minorities of non-European origin. Some European intellectuals are predicting that European-born Muslims will “assimilate over time.’’ They see extremism and estrangement as symptoms of Muslim religiosity. These prognoses show an almost willful ignorance of Muslim history and contemporary culture.
Islam didn’t go through a church-state power struggle, an Inquisition or a Thirty Years’ War, all of which make some Europeans disdain anything associated with religion. Secular Muslims cherish key Islamic symbols as part of their cultural traditions, and they are very upset by the vilification of these symbols.
Ties to their transnational Islamic community, the Ummah, are also cushioning Muslims against assimilation. This solidarity is helping them remake their ethnic communities throughout Europe. And once embedded in these communities they show little urge to assimilate into native Christian societies. Ethnic Muslim communities, not Islam, pose the real challenge to European societies.
The best way to preserve democratic order in Europe, thereby lessening the chance of cross-cultural clash, is to stop trying to expect Muslims to give up their cultural traditions and instead adopt a multicultural policy.
The best that can be hoped from Europe’s assimilation campaign is its early demise. Because, as Naima Amzil and Rik Remmery would both attest, a head scarf should not be seen as anything more sinister than a simple symbol of cultural affinity.
— Mustafa Malik, a Washington journalist, was born in India and lived and worked in Bangladesh and Pakistan before immigrating to the United States in 1974.
