Author:
Publication: NewsMax.com
Date: July 10, 2003
URL: http://www.newsmax.com/archives/articles/2003/7/10/160934.shtml
In Manchester, England, a radical
Muslim who does not even speak English has been elected to the city council,
where he needs an interpreter.
Consider: According to the German
media, secret Shari'a courts appear to be meting out "justice" in Italy.
In that country's north a man known to Muslims as a sex fiend recently
showed up with a hand missing. It had obviously been amputated as punishment.
Italian doctors report treating Muslim women who had evidently been lashed.
Consider: In France about 70,000
young women, chiefly Muslim, are being subjected to forced marriages every
year, according to the country's High Council for Integration. Every year,
too, 35,000 girls are either circumcised or under threat of circumcision,
HCI related.
These vignettes highlight a dilemma
troubling Islam experts on both sides of the Atlantic: Are European governments
still masters in their own house? And to what extent will the growth of
their Islamic communities have serious repercussions on foreign and domestic
affairs?
As terrorism expert Michael Radu
of the Philadelphia-based Foreign Policy Research Institute points out,
there are between 12 million and 16 million Muslims living in the European
Union's 15 member states, "more than in most Arab countries."
Given these figures, Radu wondered
in a recent FPRI lecture if EU governments were becoming hostages to these
minorities. Many of their members are, after all, voters, an important
point to be considered by politicians of all stripes, especially in France.
Radu suggested that this is an important
factor in the deteriorating relations between the U.S. and its traditional
European allies. "Will the Gulf be a permanent bone of contention between
them?" he asked.
Strange Bedfellows Indeed
And what about the conflict surrounding
Israel and the Palestinians, with whom Islamism and the radical left share
a common cause? Most French intellectuals still have a pro-Palestinian
bias, he reminded his audience; they are driven by an "anti-Western, anti-
capitalist and romantic Third-Worldism," Radu charged in an interview.
But that's not all. "In certain
countries Muslim communities have reached a critical mass, which pushes
otherwise lucid politicians to see where their electoral weight lies. In
France this is obviously the case. It could be the same elsewhere. In Germany,
the number of voters of Turkish origin made the difference that allowed
[Chancellor Gerhard] Schroeder to remain in power."
It is not that the French government
is indifferent to this peril. For 20 years, left-wing and right-wing administrations
labored to form an umbrella group for the nation's leading Muslim organizations.
They hoped to create an interlocutor analogous to the Catholic Church or
the Protestant Federation, and an institute for training of imams who would
preach, in French, the Koran and not politics.
Earlier this year they thought they
had succeeded. Elections were held in Muslim congregations for the 50 seats
on the national council. The result was a shock. The group around Dalil
Boubakeur, the moderate rector of the Grand Mosque of Paris, who was supposed
to be the council's first leader, won merely two seats. But the most radical
organization came in second, with 14 seats.
Worse Than French?
France has 5 million to 6 million
Muslims, whose young generation seems particularly troublesome, according
to Radu. It is split right down the middle. Half of these young Muslims
are almost indistinguishable from their non-Muslim contemporaries.
"But the other half pose a real
problem," said Radu. "They reject the French identity. They reject their
immigrant parents' national identity. They see them selves not as Frenchmen
but as Muslims."
And these young people, about 1
million, are "very vulnerable to recruitment by radicals."
Similarly, a substantial segment
of young Muslims in the United Kingdom does not identify with Britain but
only with Islam. Thus, Radu said, "it is not surprising that of all Western
nations [it] has the largest number of detainees in Guantanamo," where
the U.S. holds al-Qaeda and Taliban suspects, including nine British subjects.
In Germany, most of whose 3.5 million
Muslims are of Turkish origin, the most unsettling reality is not their
radicalism, but the radicalism of those who speak for then.
"The Central Islamic Council of
Germany is dominated by Islamists," said Ursula Spuler-Stegemann, who teaches
Islamic studies at Marburg University.
She touched on one of the West's
key problems in dealing with Islam, a problem Radu also acknowledged: a
goofy inclination of Western secular authorities and clerics "to talk to
the wrong Muslims," as Radu phrased it. "They seek out the least moderate
elements in Islamic society."
Bush's Blunder
This is not an exclusively European
phenomenon. In preparing for the war on Iraq, Bush administration officials
inexplicably sidelined Mohammed Mohammed Ali, a remarkable Shiite scholar
and leader in the Iraqi National Congress, who advocated a secular nation
providing a safe haven for his brand of Islam and all other faiths of his
country.
Spuler-Stegemann told this correspondent
how this annoying "softy mentality" in dealing with Muslims gets in the
way of her own efforts to help German educational authorities tackle these
issues well.
P.C. Pastors
To hear Spuler-Stegemann, "softy
pastors," meaning politically correct clerics, seem to be particularly
irksome. And here lies perhaps the greatest peril in the Western world's
current Islamist challenge: If the old insight is true that the most efficacious
antidote to a bad idea can only be a good idea, then Europe's and, to some
extent, America's churches are not living up to expectations.
As for Europe, Radu insists it has
entered a "post-religious era," which is not quite correct. Post-post-religious
is probably a better description. Spuler-Stegemann and others, this writer
included, find an enormous spiritual quest among Europe's young. But this
thirst for God is not sufficiently quenched by clerics stuck in 19th-century
theological rationalism and inclined to embrace fads.
A Solution
It seems that the answer to the
"Islamist problem" is a dialogue between a new and reform-minded breed
of Muslim scholars, who are present but often ignored, and the equally
new breed of faithful Christian theologians that is emerging on both sides
of the Atlantic.
Look around. There are new sprouts
of faith everywhere on the Old Continent: evangelical Anglicans in England,
spiritually hungry Catholics and Protestants in France, blossoming new
faith communities in almost every major European city, including in Germany,
which spawned theological rationalism two centuries ago.
That's where the future of a healthy
dialogue with Islam lies - not in the cheap sellout of the faith that made
Europe what it is, but in its rebirth.
Analysis by Uwe Siemon-Netto, UPI
religion editor.
