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Sol Sanders Archive
Monday, April 7, 2008

How will the tolerant West assimilate Mulim migrants?

Almost ignored in the mainstream media – even in Europe where it is being fought on a multitude of fronts almost daily – is the argument over how the everyday practices of believing Muslims is to be integrated into modern life. The contested issues come down to such mundane concerns as whether a woman may wear a headscarf when she attends a university [Turkey] or whether religion [including Islam] is to be taught in public schools [Switzerland], or whether oral and kneeling prayer is to be permitted in the waiting area of an airline [U.S.].

Basic to the arguments is a horrendously difficult dilemma: rights of an individual versus those of the society in which he lives to assure comity and avoid conflict. That includes the right to express oneself freely, even if that opinion is obnoxious, antagonistic, or unacceptable to others in the society, and offends his most basic beliefs.

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Free speech – limited only by shouting “fire” in a crowded theater to cause panic as Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes defined it – is fundamental to a democratic society. It is perhaps far more important, but in any case essential, to the electoral process which has taken on so much weight in discussions on the development of political freedom in the last few decades. The argument cuts to the heart of the idea of a free society. The French philosopher, who lived in a time of despotism, said it most forcefully: “I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.”

It is no wonder then that hardly a week goes by that somewhere in the U.S. an argument does not break out about the conflicts between these two conflicting demands of a civilized society. Elsewhere in the world, in Western Europe and Japan, that is also the case. And even in those countries which do not have freedom of expression, the cudgels are taken up over and over again to try to achieve it. But the discussion is always fluid because there are no absolutes to these quandaries. That, surely, is in the nature of liberty, a civilized society, democracy, which must be a continuing debate and implementation of a legal system that somehow finds a balance.

There is also the problem of cultural differences which make any individual act more or less relevant to the larger issues.

When I was a child growing up in a mountain village in North Carolina, one of the peculiarities which set our local Episcopal Church apart from the other three Protestant churches on Church St. was the requirement that women who attended should wear something on their head, even were it only [as it often was] a piece of lace. That head covering, whatever its origins in ancient Britain, was an act of piety, one incidentally observed by Jewish men in other circumstance.

Then why is the headscarf such an abomination to so many in Turkey and the Western European countries? [France has a prohibition against it in its universities; the EU human rights commission has ruled such laws are within bounds of a free society.] In Turkey, it is a symbol for opposition to much of the top-down authoritarian effort since World War I to modernize the social basis as well as political and economic structure of society. But to the proponents of the ban, it is also a political commitment. It is a symbol of the fight against “veiled women”, with all the horrendous suppression and even murder for social transgressions of the female in traditional Arab and Moslem societies. The argument gets grotesque even in these sometimes the most bizarre of times when Norway’s capital city, Oslo, hosts a fashion show in honor of International Women’s Day featuring garments in new and attractive colors and materials – but still covering the whole body and face except the eyes -- as a substitute for the black shroud that covers orthodox Muslim women in some of the most modern as well as the most retrograde Muslim societies!

The practices which Islam – whether in the interminable argument over whether they originate in the Muslim scriptures or are the accretion from the societies in which the religion has spread – has held dear for centuries simply cannot be the basis of a modern society. [That debate, incidentally, has just reached climatic proportions when a Dutch filmmaker released on the internet, after being denied access to the TV networks because of its offense to Muslims, a film quoting from the Koran endorsing violence against nonbelievers in Islam.]

The absurd and bitter fruit of the oppression of adhering to Muslim religious practices interpreted in some 7th century manner is being proved almost daily in the theocratic state of Iran. There supposed religious orthodoxy is being used to justify a corrupt and repressive regime, one that unfortunately seeks to spread its contagion to the rest of the region and the world through subversion and violence.

“An encrusted tradition has its own ways, a thicket of consolations and alibis shelter it from the world. Beyond economic repair [really a precondition of it], a modernist impulse will have to assert itself if rescue is to materialize. ‘We can’t look for the future in the caves of the past, and we can’t make the future with ready-hewn stones,’ an Egyptian thinker, Mahmoud Amin al-Alim, has written in a recent [1997] book on Arab thought between ‘authenticity’ and ‘globalization.’ The romance with the Islamic past is illusion, a detour: that romance had filled the void when a national, tradition faltered, when new classes, half-educated and bewildered, sought to simplify the world around them.” That is how Fouad Ajami, the noted American Middle East scholar of Arab descent, has described the problem.

What has been joined now, however, in a new and dangerous way for the Western democracies, is that the old forms practiced to a greater or lesser extent in the Muslim lands of their origins are being imported by the continuing massive inflow of immigrants from North Africa and South Asia to Europe, and to some extent to North America. Given the continuing falling birthrates among native populations, especially in the Western European and Japanese societies, that immigration appears to be inevitable.

For Western democracies for whom toleration of dissent is an essential part of their civilizations as well as their political structures, the question becomes how much are they required to bend their practices, perhaps even their laws, to accommodate the need for the new arrivals to practice their religion. And how much are the new arrivals required to modify their religious practices to conform to the requirements of the modern society in which they have chosen to live.

What obscures the real issues, among other things, is the tendency of some well-meaning opinion makers to compensate for what they see as past injustices by according special privileged positions to the newcomers’ demands. There are no fonts for holy water in the public restrooms for believing Catholics. Why then should the taxpayer be required to provide special foot washing facilities for believing Muslims who require it before their five times a day prayers? But then is the traditional Christian church bell to justify the annoyance for many of the call of the muezzin on a public address system from Muslim mosques calling on the Islamic faithful to prayer?

An even more difficult question is whether the requirements of assimilation of increasingly large numbers of those reared in majority Muslim countries in the West can go forward without modernization in the Muslim lands themselves. Already speculation has increased among the experts on terrorism that the use of European Moslems – whether born into their religion as are many in the Balkans and increasingly the immigrants’ offspring in countries with large Muslim populations such as the U.K., Germany, France, and the Netherlands, or new converts among the native born – by the terrorists may become the greatest problem in fighting the international jihadist networks. Obviously, at a time of increased vigilance against foreign terrorists, those natives of the country who join the terrorist cause present the greatest threat. They know their way through the society and can blend in for nefarious purposes. And, already, the migration of even native-born Western Muslims from their homes to terrorist training camps in sanctuaries such as those on the Pakistan-Afghanistan border has become a problem. Welcome to the world of globalization as it affects terrorism!

If, as it seems self evident, suppressing Islamofascist terrorism in the West is to be effective, it must seek to eliminate the sanctuaries where new recruits are being trained. With the shading off from religious orthodoxy to fanaticism to terrorism that takes place in Muslim societies, it then seems logical that a clearer definition of Islam by those within it who profess their opposition to violence must parallel the police and military efforts by the West and by Arab and Moslem regimes who oppose it.

That redefinition would require a revolution in thinking of much of the Islamic world as well as realignment of legal concepts and codes. India, a self proclaimed secular society which recognizes no established religion, has not after some 60 years of independence been able to integrate its Muslim Family Law Code with its basic civil law as promised by its constitution. And many observers argue it plays a role in the continuing backwardness and illiteracy of much of its huge Muslim population.

Globalization, that is the increasing penetration of old cultural as well as economic walls, is going to a handmaiden to such a rethinking – although with the activities of the Islamicist terrorists the world has again had proved the neutrality of technology in the battle against evil. And the history of such religious conflicts in Europe suggests the process could be long and difficult.


Sol W. Sanders, (solsanders@cox.net), is an Asian specialist with more than 25 years in the region, and a former correspondent for Business Week, U.S. News & World Report and United Press International. He writes weekly for World Tribune.com and East-Asia-Intel.com.

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