The far-right National Front in France has, predictably, called for a referendum, but one that would extend beyond the simple issue of minarets to include immigration and the impact of religious and ethnic minorities on French society. In Holland, Geert Wilders, the platinum-haired leader of the Party for Freedom, has seen his popularity soar on the strength of an unequivocal stand against Islam. Never mind minarets. He wants to ban the Quran.
The British National Party, a far-right organization that is only now moving toward allowing non-white members (because Britain’s Human Rights Commission threatened legal action), today focuses its vitriol almost exclusively against Muslims. “To go anywhere near inciting racial hatred is grotesquely unfair because no one can change how they are born,” BNP chairman Nick Griffin has said. “On the other hand, to criticize a religion in much stronger terms—even if it does cross the line imposed by law—I think is entirely justifiable, because everybody has the choice to change a religion if it’s bad.”
Griffin describes Islam as “a wicked, vicious faith” and “a cancer eating away at our freedoms and our democracy and rights for our women.” This June, the BNP won two seats in the European Parliament. The party is poised to accept its first non-white member, Rajinder Singh, a septuagenarian Sikh who hates Muslims. “He is perhaps the kind of immigrant you want, if you are going to have them,” a BNP spokesman says.
At issue is a question of national identity—what it means to be Dutch, or French, or German, or Italian. “The big problem in Europe is that the way we create identities is unlike how it is done in classic immigration nations like the United States, Canada, and Australia,” says Jan Techau, director of the Europe program at the German Council on Foreign Relations. “We have not developed any kind of mechanism that allows people from all over the place to enter our societies, play by a certain set of rules, and become one of us.”
Indeed, many of the Muslims in continental European countries are the descendants of migrants who arrived a generation or two ago as “guest workers.” They were never meant to stay, and therefore little effort was made to integrate them. But they did stay. And they had children who are now considered foreigners despite their native birth. Often without citizenship, they have little stake in the political process, and withdraw into isolated Muslim enclaves that are common in dozens of European cities.
It would be wrong, however, to blame this segregation solely on the host societies. Integration is not always sought by European Muslims, either. Many mosques and Muslim organizations in Britain, for example, have ties to South Asian Islamist groups that discourage friendly interaction with non-believers. In some European Muslim communities, brides are imported from poor and backward villages in North Africa. They arrive too late to attend school and have little opportunity to learn the language, get a job, or become part of the larger society.
“It takes two to tango,” says Joffe. “The indigenous have to be more generous about accepting ‘the Other’ and his unfamiliar ways. The newcomers have to adapt to local mores: don’t drop out of school, learn a trade, become a bit like us, try exogamy, don’t build mosques that are higher than the church steeple next door, don’t live in ‘parallel universes,’ as a classic shibboleth has it. This is going to be a long bargaining process—painful for both sides, but absolutely necessary.”
For several years, Usama Hasan, a part-time imam at the al-Tawhid mosque in east London and a professor of artificial intelligence at Middlesex University, has been trying to encourage the growth of a “Western, British Islam” that is both modern and moderate, and rejects the cultural and political baggage of South Asia and the Middle East. Last year, he helped launch the Quilliam Foundation, which dubs itself the “world’s first counter-extremism think tank,” and whose founders are ex-Islamists who now reject the ideology they once followed. “It’s worrying, this kind of development,” Hasan said of the Swiss referendum in an interview with Maclean’s. “It underlines the need for more dialogue, more interaction, more balanced and sane voices to speak up. That’s the only way forward after this.”
Tariq Ramadan, a Swiss author and academic, blamed the minaret ban partly on his compatriots’ fear of Islam. “While European countries are going through a real and deep identity crisis, the new visibility of Muslims is problematic—and it’s scary,” he wrote in the wake of the vote. But Ramadan also blamed his fellow Swiss Muslims for their passive role in the debate, for not engaging with their countrymen. “I have been repeating for years to Muslim people that they have to be positively visible, active and proactive within their respective Western societies,” he said.
Integration won’t be easy. And there are many European Muslims and non-Muslims who don’t appear to want it. But it’s difficult to imagine a stable and harmonious continent unless this occurs. Those who want to ban minarets might not want to acknowledge it, but Islam is now a European religion.
