Europe's Muslims

The unpopularity of diversity

  I have long believed that people are better off and more secure in themselves if they can embrace diversity. Why only eat apples when you can have your mango and eat it too? However, I’m also aware that this isn’t an easy ask. Becoming comfortable with pluralism necessitates certain trade-offs.

You may acquire deeper empathy and enjoy a more textured understanding of existence, but this can feel ridiculously rhetorical for those who lose privileges and certainties in the bargain. Calibrating yourself to multiplicity is confusing, and as Socrates illustrated a long time ago, people find it irritating and uncomfortable to be confused. There are few global truths, but the fact that diversity is unpopular may be one of these.

 In Japan, even as an ageing demographic has revealed a detrimental labour shortage, there has long been a consensus that robots are preferable to immigrants because the latter are too “different.” In China, a state-led project to Han-ify thought and culture has reduced minorities to exotic species with colourful dances. In both India and Indonesia, countries that had some success in creating a unified tapestry out of their glorious plurality, an erosion of this ethos is underway.

And what of Europe? For this week’s newsletter I’m posting an edited extract from my book, Punjabi Parmesan (published as New Old World in the U.S.) that examined Europe’s “Muslim “problem.”

Currently, Muslims comprise roughly five percent of the EU’s total population, although in some cities like Brussels, Amsterdam and Marseilles, they account for up to a quarter of residents.

Many trace their arrival on the continent to the post-World War II period, when several Western European governments turned to former colonies, and other developing countries, to recruit the manpower for their then booming economies. Often, the source countries for this labour were Islamic: Pakistan in the case of Britain, Morocco/Algeria/Tunisia in France, Turkey in Germany and Indonesia/Suriname/Morocco/Turkey in the case of the Netherlands. It was widely held by governments that ‘guest workers’ would sweat away in the continent’s iron foundries, railroads, post offices, and textile factories for a few years and then meekly return home. This did not come to pass.

…

As it became clear that immigrants were not going “home” and that a new Europe with a new kind of citizen was being created, resentments against Muslims bubbled over. This was the outcome of what political philosopher Seyla Benhabib has called the “disaggregation of citizenship” whereby the political rights of citizenship are separated from national belonging. If a nation is defined as a community where people are linked by shared languages, historical memories and common ancestry, then Europe’s new immigrants were not part of the “nations” of which they found themselves becoming citizens.

 The new Muslim presence provoked amongst some Europeans feelings of alienation within their own countries. There were those who were embittered by having to share citizenship rights with people they perceived as irredeemably different. Not only were Muslims ‘foreign’, but they were perceived as welfare-spongers living off the taxpayer’s money of ‘real’ Europeans. Their apparent refusal to integrate into ‘European’ culture was offered as proof of the catastrophic consequences of having opened the Pandora’s box of immigration.

Much antipathy stemmed from Muslim demands that European countries change some of their laws and customs to accommodate their religion.  Over the years Muslim groups had lobbied for and often succeeded in asking for provisions for halal meat in schools, prayer rooms in office buildings, exemption for girls from swimming classes and so on. The idea that Muslims are all about insisting that Europe accommodate itself to them while steadfastly refusing to accommodate themselves to Europe, meant that it had become quite respectable to voice concerns over the Muslim ‘problem.’ ……

The Eurabia thesis, in a nutshell, predicts the takeover of a “weak” Europe that is plagued by wrongheaded notions of colonial guilt and misplaced liberalism, by a resurgent and ‘masculine’ Islam. Immigration in this interpretation is a Trojan horse via which Muslims infiltrate Europe in order to prepare for an eventual conquest of the continent……

There is in fact data to prove such demographic scaremongering wrong(and lots of it is presented in my book)…. but I could see why some in Europe might buy a version of the argument. In some European cities the possibility of a Muslim-majority population was not so ludicrous. One- third of newborns in Brussels, for example, are of Muslim origin, although currently Muslims make up only 25 percent of the city population. A third of all children in Paris are born to foreign (though not necessarily Muslim) mothers.

Islam is a very sensory presence in these cities. It’s possible to walk through extensive neighbourhoods where the scent emanating from boulangeries is the sticky-sweet ittar of baklava rather than the flour-dusted aroma of freshly baked baguettes; the posters on the windows of travel agents advertise discounts to Morocco and Tunisia rather than Venice or the Costa Del Sol; and the snatches of chatter from TV sets permanently hooked up to satellite TV is guttural and unfamiliar.

I read a story in the Belgian press, based on a university professor, Felice Dassetto’s 2011 book, The Iris and the Crescent. It claimed that Islam mobilized more people in Brussels than the church, labour movement or political parties. It was apparently only second the football in this ability to mobilize followers. These categories puzzled me: football, Islam, the labour movement, political parties. They hardly seemed equivalent or exclusive. Couldn’t you be a Muslim trade unionist with a passion for football? Trying to classify humans on the basis of an isolated, singular identity rather than investigating the messy mesh of identities that constituted the lived reality of most people didn’t seem helpful. And yet it was the constant lot of immigrants from Islamic countries to be itemized as Muslims, regardless of whether they were fanatics, devout, nominally observant, or merely culturally affiliated to the religion.

I met with Professor Dassetto who was careful to stress his distance from Eurabia mongers. Of Brussels’ 300,000 “Muslims” he said only half were believers in the sense of attending mosques. However, he thought it important for Europe to avoid “sticking its head in the sand.” In our post-colonial cities he said, “religion was now a visible presence in public space.” Given that “Catholicism” had become invisible over time, this reinsertion of religion into secular Europe was “traumatic.”

 But Europe is not as secular as it likes to claim. Religion is not so much absent from the public sphere as much as blended into the cultural background and so rendered somewhat indiscernible. Virtually all the public holidays in Belgium are Christian ones. Not only Christmas and Easter but also a battery of others including Ascension Day (when the resurrected Jesus is taken up to heaven), Whit Monday (the day of feasting following Pentecost – when the Holy Spirit descended on Jesus’ disciples) and Assumption Day (when the Virgin Mary made it to heaven). Around half of all schools in Belgium are still denominated as “Catholic” as were a large number of hospitals.

 Nonetheless, the kind of overt religiosity that had been a palpable part of the texture of European life only a few decades ago, had indeed been extirpated.  Consequently the traditional Belgian mentalities described by Luc Sante in my dog-eared copy of Factory of Facts fitted immigrants from Morocco’s Rif valley or Turkey’s Anatolian interior far better than contemporary ‘natives.’ If transported to modern-day Europe, Sante’s grandmother would probably have a lot more in common with the waddling, headscarved matrons of Brussels’ immigrant neighbourhoods than her grandson and his contemporaries.

“My grandmother was ‘country’ in the gravest sense,” Sante writes, “absorbing all the moral certitude of life governed by God in the guise of the weather. The city must always have seemed remote and savage to her.” In fact, much of the clash in the attitudes and values of some Muslim immigrants with the dominant culture of their host nations is not because of the religion of Islam per se, as much as because of the dislocation caused by the encounter of a traditional, rural sensibility with the social and economic individualism of modern, urban cultures.

Similar conflicts are in evidence not only in the Hindu or Sikh immigrant encounter with Europe but even within countries like India. As rural to urban migration accelerates in India, honour killings and other firms of violence against women have been on the rise over the last decade. The country has modernized rapidly following its fastest economic growth since independence, but a simultaneous patriarchal backlash has resulted against the choices made by young people of a rural background emboldened by education and growing economic opportunities in urban centres.[1]

***

……Public transport (in many European cities) was a ghetto-free, multicultural space where the natives were not distinguishable from the foreigners by the colour of their skin, or their clothes, or their names, as much as by their expertise in negotiating the city and its codes. You could tell the locals by the assurance with which they rang the stop bell at the appropriate bus stop; by their brisk acceptance of the weather; by their knowledge of the quickest route home.

….These were cities that had experienced the cruelty and moral debilitation of ruinous wars. And yet they had not only survived, but flourished, and allowed newcomers to try and flourish along with them. The results have been variable. As is evident from the deep anxiety created by the presence of immigrants, Muslim and other, multiculturalism remains a fraught progression rather than a happy accomplishment.

But these cities have also proved wrong the inevitability of a clash of civilizations: the idea that different kinds of people simply cannot live together. Those who claim that immigrants with their non-European, overly religious mores unacceptably disrupt some ideal of pre-immigrant homogenous public life fail to appreciate that public life usually is, and has been, inherently plural. Not only does it have to take account of class, gender, age-related and regional divergences, it inevitably includes several forms of reasoning, encompassing the secular, the religious and the cultural. It has always been possible for citizens to communicate across different moral and political languages. The new ‘languages’ and ways of reasoning introduced by Europe’s immigrants are problematic not only because they introduce the religious into some hermetic secular space, but due to their unfamiliarity…

My Bruxellois friends talk about how their children’s conception of what it means to be from Brussels is already wholly different from the one they had grown up with tgemselves. How could it be otherwise, given that more than 30 percent of the city’s population is of foreign origin? Youngsters from every kind of cultural background mix in school, check each other out on the bus, and hang out on sunny days in the city’s public parks and squares.

On any evening the streets that knit together Matonge, a largely African neighbourhood that claims to be home to 100 nationalities, are like the proverbial global village. Rotund Africans and lean Swedish stagiaires from the European Commission rub shoulders with harried Vietnamese waiters and garrulous Congolese vegetable sellers. The shocking pink of a Roma’s skirt cuts a flash of colour. There are many headdresses adorning bobbing heads, from scarves to patterned turbans. A few dozen meters away, a massive bronze statue of the infamous Belgian colonizer Leopold II, mounted atop a horse, gazes sourly over the scene, like some Berber grandmother from the Rif, tut-tutting at what a strange pass the world has come to.

------

I really liked the last sentence of that extract :-)

But, what are your thoughts on the value/dangers of diversity? How do you feel about the resurgence of tribalisms around the world? Is it inevitable?  Do share in the comments section. Sorry, if this post has been a bit heavy, but its essential for any “global soul” to grapple with this issue.

As always, please share on social media and with your friends. Ciao till next week. Oh and the book can be ordered here:

https://www.amazon.in/Punjabi-Parmesan-Dispatches-Europe-Crisis/dp/0143423568/ref=sr_1_1?dchild=1&keywords=punjabi+parmesan&qid=1617087969&sr=8-1 (In India)

and here:

https://www.amazon.com/New-Old-World-Journalist-Discovers/dp/125007231X (rest of the world)