Of Burqas and Rosaries

The EU’s Islamic Identity Crisis
President Obama’s address to the Muslim world in Cairo last June called for a new beginning between the United States and Islam, one based on tolerance, dignity, and mutual respect for religious differences. Just two weeks later, French President Nicolas Sarkozy stood before parliament to justify France’s infamous ban on burqas. “It will not be welcome on French soil. We cannot accept, in our country, women imprisoned behind a mesh, cut off from society, deprived of all identity. That is not the French republic’s idea of women’s dignity.”
There is a fundamental divide in the West over the definition of religious tolerance. Anti-Muslim sentiments and legal restrictions in Europe are often attributed to the Old Continent’s general aversion to public displays of religion.
But secularism alone cannot fully explain the French burqa ban or the Swiss minaret ban. These high-profile controversies reflect a continent that has been shaken by recent demographic changes, one in the throes of a collective identity crisis. And multiculturalism in Europe is in peril as a consequence.
Immigration and Integration
When Europe opened its borders with the creation and expansion of the European Union, Europeans found themselves asking one question: “What does it mean to be one of us?” Since 2004, the European Union has extended membership to twelve new countries and is currently considering Croatia, Macedonia, and Turkey. With the number of member states nearly doubling in the last four years, the European Union has seen a large spike in non-Western immigration. The European Commission estimates that as of 2006, there are about 18.5 million non-E.U. immigrants living in the E.U. zone.
New immigration has inflamed old questions of cultural identity and evoked memories of early European encounters with Islam. From the Muslim conquest of Andalusia in 756 C.E., through the Crusades and the Ottoman capture of the Balkans in the late 14th century, Islam and Christianity have had a long and violent history on the continent. Karl Kaiser, professor of public policy at the Harvard Kennedy School, pointed to Europe’s long history of conflict with Islam as an important context for contemporary tensions. “Don’t forget European history. Europe almost became a Muslim continent. Only two great battles prevented it,” Kaiser explained to the HPR. “Somewhere in the collective consciousness there is this background of the enormous battle between Christianity and Islam in the Crusades.”
This history manifests itself in the fact that Muslims are singled out in the European consciousness as alien. Forecasts indicate that Europe’s Muslim population will more than double by 2015. Still, Muslims make up just a small proportion of European immigrants.
Jocelyne Cesari, an associate at Harvard’s Center for Middle Eastern Studies, told the HPR, “The larger problem is this [false] idea that most immigrants … have Muslim backgrounds.” Non-Muslim Europeans also tend to overestimate the cultural uniformity of Muslim immigrants, both reflecting and perpetuating the fear that the influx of Muslims might be threatening to Europe’s identity.
Isselmou Ould-Deilahy, a French Muslim Ph.D, told the HPR that “the French have problems accepting new citizens. You now have third-generation Muslims in places like France that are still designated as immigrants. How can someone who is born as a third generation French not be accepted as a French citizen?”
Faith and Fear
Fear of Islamic terrorism has also fueled anti-Muslim sentiment in Europe. “9/11 was of course a game changer,” Kaiser said. Incidents such as the 2004 Madrid train bombings, the murder of filmmaker Theo Van Gogh, and the London bombings in 2005 reinforced the link between terror and Islam. Todd Gaziano, a senior fellow at the Heritage Foundation, told the HPR that “many Western nations are at war with Islamic terrorism … so [religion] is not an unreasonable factor to take into account when determining immigration policies.”
Terrorist attacks have thus helped politicians to justify exclusionary legislation. Ould-Deilahy explained, “Anti-Muslim feelings are kept alive by political movements and the press.” He continued, “Some political parties use fear as their capital. The way for them to get ballots and votes is to create fear.” Fear no doubt played a large role in Switzerland’s November 2009 referendum, in which nearly 60 percent of voters supported a constitutional amendment banning the construction of minarets. Although the amendment will likely be overturned by the European Court of Human Rights, its approval “showed a degree of intolerance which is very detrimental to international relations,” according to Kaiser.
The anti-minaret campaign demonstrated a clear intent to identify Islam as subversive and dangerous. One campaign poster created by the Swiss People’s Party depicted several minarets coming out of the Swiss flag in a way that made the minarets appear to be missiles.
Redefining Europe
What does all this mean for the future of Europe? Aziz Al-Azmeh, professor of Islam at Central European University and the author of Islams and Modernities, told the HPR, “The earlier models of multiculturalism are not working very well. There is an emerging wall of separation between two certain kinds of people: Europeans, and on the other hand more recent immigrants from a variety of Muslim countries.” What Al-Azmeh describes as a wall of separation, Kaiser less provocatively calls “parallel societies.”
In order to bring these societies together into a workable whole, Europeans will have to minimize their fear of the foreign, particularly through improved education about Islam. “The way to address [the insecurity] is not to fuel the Islamic concerns but to demystify them,” said Cesari.
Although many governments have tried to educate Muslims about Western traditions, Cesari argued, “if you want to make room for another component, you have to educate both sides.” This may require not just lessons on Islam and its beliefs, but also restructuring history textbooks to include lessons on the importance of cultural diversity.
“Europe is not, as Americans believe, one thing,” Kaiser said. But Europeans themselves have started, in many ways, to act like it is. In their attempt to become one union, they have forgotten or neglected the fact that Europe is a patchwork of nations and peoples with different beliefs, histories, and problems.
Multiculturalism is imperiled in Europe, then, in large part because Europeans seem to have forgotten the fact of their own diversity. The debate is not between secularists and fans of public religion. It’s between different conceptions of European identity: one that includes Muslims, and one that does not. But the question of whether Muslims can be Europeans has already been settled on the ground, and settled affirmatively. Now the question is whether they will be treated like Europeans.
Ioana Calcev ’12 is a Contributing Writer.