Author: Fouad Ajami
Publication: The Wall Street Journal
Date: March 22, 2004;
In the legend of Moorish Spain,
the last Muslim king of Granada, Boabdil, surrendered the keys to his city
on January 2, 1492, and on one of its hills, paused for a final glance
at his lost dominion. The place would henceforth be known as El Ultimo
Suspiro del Moro -- "the Moor's Last Sigh." Boabdil's mother is said to
have taunted him, and to have told him to "weep like a woman for the land
he could not defend as a man." An Arab poet of our own era gave voice to
a historical lament when he wrote that as he walked the streets of Granada,
he searched his pockets for the keys to its houses. Al Andalus -- Andalusia
-- would become a deep wound, a reminder of dominions gained by Islam and
then squandered. No wonder Muslim chroniclers added "May Allah return it
to Islam," as they told and retold Granada's fate.
The Balkans aside, modern Islam
would develop as a religion of Afro-Asia. True, the Ottomans would contest
the Eastern Mediterranean. But their challenge was turned back. Turkey
succumbed to a European pretension but would never be European. Europe's
victory over Islam appeared definitive. Even those Muslims in the Balkans
touched by Ottoman culture became a marked community, left behind by the
Ottoman retreat from Europe like "seaweed on dry land."
* * *
Yet Boabdil's revenge came. It stole
upon Europe. Demography -- the aging of Europe on the one hand and, on
the other, a vast bloat of people in the Middle East and North Africa --
did Boabdil's job for him. Spurred by economic growth in the '60s, which
created the need for foreign laborers, a Muslim migration to Europe began.
Today, 15 million Muslims make their home in the European Union.
The earliest migrants were eager
to hunker down in this new and (at first) alien world. They took Europe
on its own terms, and lived with the initial myth of migration that their
sojourn would be temporary. But for the overwhelming majority, Algiers
and Casablanca and Beirut and Anatolia became irretrievable places. In
time, there would be slaughter and upheaval in Lebanon and Iran, sectarian
warfare in Syria, and a long era of sorrow and bloodshed in Algeria, just
across the sea from Marseilles. Economic destitution would cut a swath
of misery through the lands whence they came. Birth rates worked their
way like a wrecking ball: It became impossible to transmit culture and
civility and the old familiar world to the young. Migration became the
only safety valve.
In the '80s, terrible civil wars
were fought in Arab and Islamic countries -- with privilege on one side,
militant wrath on the other. The despots and the military caste in Algeria
and Tunisia and Syria and Egypt won that struggle. Their defeated opponents
took to the road: From Hamburg and London and Copenhagen, the battle was
now joined. If accounts were to be settled with rulers back home, the work
of subversion would be done from Europe. Muslim Brotherhoods sprouted all
over the Continent. There were welfare subsidies in the new surroundings,
money, constitutional protections and rules of asylum to fight the old
struggle.
"The whole Arab world was dangerous
for me. I went to London." The words are those of an Egyptian Islamist,
Yasser Sirri. In London, Sirri runs an Islamic "observation center" and
agitates against the despotism of Hosni Mubarak. But Sirri, a man of 40,
is wanted back home. Three sentences have been rendered against him in
absentia: One condemns him to 25 years of hard labor for smuggling armed
terrorists into Egypt; the second to 15 years for aiding Islamic dissidents;
and the third to death for plotting to assassinate a prime minister. Sirri
had fled Egypt to Yemen. But trouble trailed him there, so he moved to
the Sudan, but it was no better. He turned up in London -- there, he would
have liberties, and the protections of a liberal culture. There would be
no extradition for him, no return to the summary justice of Cairo.
Sirri was not working in a vacuum.
The geography of Islam -- and of the Islamic imagination -- has shifted
in recent years. The faith has become portable. Muslims who fled their
countries brought Islam with them. Men came into bilad al kufr (the lands
of unbelief), but a new breed of Islamists radicalized the faith there,
in the midst of the kafir (unbeliever).
The new lands were owed scant loyalty,
if any, and political-religious radicals savored the space afforded them
by Western civil society. But they resented the logic of assimilation.
They denied their sisters and daughters the right to mix with "strangers."
You would have thought that the pluralism and tumult of this open European
world would spawn a version of the faith to match it. But precisely the
opposite happened. In bilad al kufr, the faith became sharpened for battle.
We know that life in Hamburg -- and the kind of Islam that Hamburg made
possible -- was decisive in the evolution of Mohammed Atta, who led the
"death pilots" of Sept. 11. It was in Hamburg where he conceived a hatred
of modernity and of women and of the "McEgypt" that the Mubarak regime
had brought into being. And it was in Hamburg, too, that a young "party
boy" from a secular family in Lebanon underwent the transformation that
would take him from an elite Catholic prep school in Beirut to the controls
of a plane on Sept. 11, and its tragic end near the fields of Shanksville,
Penn. In its economic deterioration, the Arab world is without cities where
young Muslims of different lands can meet. A function that Beirut once
provided for an older elite had been undone. European cities now provide
that kind of opportunity.
Satellite TV has been crucial in
the making of this new radicalism. Preachers take to the air, and reach
Muslims wherever they are. From the safety of Western cities, they counsel
belligerence and inveigh against assimilation. They forbid shaking hands
with women examiners at universities. They warn against offering greetings
to "infidels" on their religious holidays, or serving in the armies and
police of the new lands. "A Muslim has no nationality except his belief,"
wrote an intellectual godfather of radical Islamism, the Egyptian Sayyid
Qutb, who was executed by Nasser in 1966. While on a visit to Saudi Arabia
in 2002, I listened to a caller from Stockholm as he bared his concerns
to an immensely popular preacher. He made Qutb's point: We may carry their
nationalities, he said, but we belong to our own religion.
Radical Islamism's adherents are
unapologetic. What is laicite (secularism) to the Muslims in France and
their militant leaders? It is but the code of a debauched society that
wishes to impose on Islam's children -- its young women in particular --
the ways of an infidel culture. What loyalty, at any rate, is owed France?
The wrath of France's Muslim youth in the banlieues (suburbs) is seen as
revenge on France for its colonial wars. France colonized Algeria in the
1830s; Algerians, along with Tunisians and Moroccans, return the favor
in our own time.
France grants its troubled Muslim
suburbs everything and nothing. It leaves them to their own devices, and
grants them an unstated power over its foreign policy decisions on Islamic
and Middle Eastern matters; but it makes no room for them in the mainstream
of its life. Trouble has come even to placid Belgium. In Antwerp, Dyab
Abu Jahjah, a young Lebanese, only 32, has stepped forth to "empower" the
Muslims of that country. Assimilation, he says, is but "cultural rape."
He came to Belgium in 1991, and he owns up to inventing a story about persecution
back home; it was a "low political trick," he says, and in the nature of
things. The constitution of Belgium recognizes Dutch, French, and German
as official languages. Abu Jahjah insists that Arabic be added, too.
Europe's leaders know Europe's dilemmas.
In ways both intended and subliminal, the escape into anti-Americanism
is an attempt at false bonding with the peoples of Islam. Give the Arabs
-- and the Muslim communities implanted in Europe -- anti-Americanism,
give them an identification with the Palestinians, and you shall be spared
their wrath. Beat the drums of opposition to America's war in Iraq, and
the furies of this radical Islamism will pass you by. This is seen as a
way around the troubles. But there is no exit that way. It is true that
Spain supported the American campaign in Iraq, but that aside, Spain's
identification with Arab aims has a long history. Of all the larger countries
of the EU, Spain has been most sympathetic to Palestinian claims. It was
only in 1986 that Spain recognized Israel and established diplomatic ties.
With the sole exception of Greece, Spain has shown the deepest reserve
toward Israel. Yet this history offered no shelter from the bombers of
March 11.
* * *
Whatever political architecture
Europe seeks, it will have to be built in proximity to the Other World,
just across the Straits of Gibraltar and in the grip of terminal crisis.
There is no prospect that the rulers of Arab lands will offer their people
a decent social contract, or the opportunities for freedom. It is a sad
fact that the Arab peoples no longer make claims on their rulers. Instead
the "drifters," such as the embittered terrorists who blew into Madrid,
now seek satisfaction almost solely in foreign lands.
You can't agitate against Mubarak
in Cairo, but you can do it from the safety of Finsbury Park in London.
The ferocity of the debate in the Arab world about France's decision to
limit Islamic headgear in public schools is a measure of this displaced
rage. Spain may attribute the cruelty visited on it to its association
with America's expedition into Iraq. But the truth is darker. Jacques Chirac
may believe that he has spared France Spain's terror by sitting out the
Iraq war. But he is deluded. The Islamists do not make fine distinctions
in the bilad al kufr.
Europe is host to a war between
order and its enemies, fuelled by demography: 40% of the Arab world is
under 14. Demographers tell us that the fertility replacement rate is 2.1
children per woman. Europe is frightfully below this level; in Germany
it is 1.3, Italy 1.2, Spain 1.1, France 1.7 (this higher rate is a factor
of its Muslim population). Fertility rates in the Islamic world are altogether
different: they are 3.2 in Algeria, 3.4 in Egypt and Morocco, 5.2 in Iraq
and 6.1 in Saudi Arabia. This is Europe's neighborhood, and its contemporary
fate. You can tell the neighbors across the Straits, (and within the gates
of Europe) that you share their dread of Pax Americana. But nemesis is
near.
Five centuries ago, the Castilians
took Granada from Boabdil. They were a hardy breed of sheep-herders driven
by a Malthusian logic, outgrowing their grazing lands, pushing southward
-- and into the New World from Seville -- to answer Castile's needs. Today
there is great turmoil in Islamic lands, and a Malthusian crisis. Were
it only true that those in harm's way in Europe are solely the friends
of the Americans. The New World is a demon of this Islamism, it is true.
But that old border between Europe and Islam has furies all its own.
Mr. Ajami, a professor at Johns
Hopkins, is the author of "The Dream Palace of the Arabs" (Vintage, 1999).
