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In a few days time a cluster of far-right groups under the name the Stop the
Islamisation of Europe alliance will hold rallies in London, Copenhagen and
Marseilles to demand an end to what they call "the overt and covert expansion
of Islam in Europe".
Return of the Muslim
10/28/2007 - Opinion Political - Article Ref: TG0710-3399
Number of comments: 2
Opinion Summary: Agree:1 Disagree:1 Neutral:0
By: Soumaya Ghannoushi
Guardian* -
In a few days time a cluster of far-right groups under the name the
Stop the Islamisation of Europe alliance will hold rallies in London,
Copenhagen and Marseilles to demand an end to what they call "the overt and
covert expansion of Islam in Europe". Although the events are likely to attract
no more than a handful of protesters, their message resonates widely. On
Saturday the rightwing People's party, notorious for its virulent hostility to
ethnic minorities and Muslims, emerged as the victor in the Swiss elections,
taking 29% of the vote, the best electoral performance by a party in the
country's elections since 1919.
The far right is on the ascendancy in many parts of Europe. Beyond its
explicit party political expressions, this assumes a more worrying form. What
had been traditionally confined to the margins of dominant political discourse
is progressively penetrating its mainstream, with parties of the centre
absorbing much of the far right's populist rhetoric. This underlies the
complaint by Jean-Marie le Pen, leader of the racist National Front, that
Nicolas Sarkozy had "stolen his clothes". Across the Channel, the Tory
candidate for the London mayoralty, Boris Johnson, believes that "to any
non-Muslim reader of the Koran, Islamophobia - fear of Islam - seems a natural
reaction".
We are witnessing a reversion to the type of cultural essentialism that
dominated political and academic discourse until the mid-1900s. Its central
theme, the purity and superiority of European culture, was dealt a powerful
blow by the tradition of post-colonial studies and radical critique of
Orientalism. The trend brought together progressive, leftist voices from Europe
and the US with others from the south amid the dismantling of modern-day
empires and the rise of developing world liberation movements.
The same discourse is reconstructing its terms today by substituting the
classical east-west bipolarity at its core with one of "Islam" and "west". The
west's rationality, tolerance, individualism and freedom are now contrasted
with Islam's superstition, fanaticism, fatalism and repressiveness. In the
history books, this trend has manifested itself in the resurrection of the myth
of the benevolent empire, championed by figures such as Niall Ferguson and
Andrew Roberts.
September 11, the emergence of violent radical Islamic groups, and the war on
terror have created fertile ground for the revival of this tradition. Its
spirit permeates much of the language current in the political sphere and many
sectors of the media. What had once been cause for disrepute now goes
unquestioned and barely remarked upon. The vocabulary is various, from
immigration, integration and citizenship to terrorism, radicalism, Islamism and
an endless chain of -isms. But the referent is consistent: Islam and Muslims.
It is a game of insinuations, of codes, in which meaning is readily conveyable
without need for explicitness or directness.
Beyond all the noise about Europe's "Muslim problem" lurks a growing unease
about the changing texture of European society. Gone are the days of pure
white, Christian Europe. Now Europe is multi-ethnic, multireligious and
multicultural, a fact which many find hard to swallow. Muslims are part of this
evolving reality, but the idea that the continent is being Islamised is a
figment of the right's imagination.
In a European population of some 540 million, Muslims number between 20
million and 25 million, or about 4%. The majority are underprivileged, and
socially, economically and politically marginalised. Whatever the scaremongers
say, Muslim armies are not at Europe's gate preparing to conquer.
Obsession with the question of Britishness in the UK and with les valeurs de
la RÂŽpublique in France reflects a state of anxiety about identity. The
collapse of empire, globalisation and flow of immigrants from the old colonies
brought new peoples into Europe's bosom. The Muslim other - the Saracen or
Turk, in opposition to whom Europe defined its imaginary geographic and
cultural borders - is now located within its frontiers, a sort of internal
outsider. From the periphery of the empire in distant overseas colonies in
Lahore or Algiers, it has moved to the periphery of capitals and industrial
cities in London or Paris. The borders of identity and culture are overlapping,
making it impossible to draw rigid boundaries between east and west, Europe and
Islam, white and black.
At the heart of Europe's "Muslim problem" is an impotence and perhaps
unwillingness to extend the norm of tolerance to newcomers from the Muslim
world. Tolerance is not an abstract concept but the child of a specific
historical context. In Europe it was the product of the religious wars, which
ended in France, for instance, with the Edict of Nantes in 1598. Following the
horrors of the Holocaust, the norm was widened to include Jews. And with the
civil rights movement in the US, this was further extended to black people and
other ethnic minorities - legally and theoretically, though not in practice.
There is still resistance to the norm's broadening to encompass Muslims,
something evident in the controversy over the building of mosques in northern
Europe, as well as in the "veil problem" in France, Germany and other
countries.
Some quasi-liberals continuously ask how we can be tolerant with people who
preach intolerance - by whom they mean, of course, Muslims. A better question
could be: to what extent are those who profess tolerance really tolerant?
Soumaya Ghannoushi is director of research at IslamExpo
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