Johann Hari

[This is a review of several books:

‘While Europe Slept’ by Bruce Bawer
‘The West’s Last Chance’ by Tony Blankley,
The Force of Reason’ by Oriana Fallaci
Eurabia – the Euro-Arab Axis’ by Bat Ye’or
‘Breaking the Silence’ by Fadela Amara with Sylvia Zappi, translated by Helen Harden Chenut
‘The Caged Virgin: An Emancipation Proclamation for Women and Islam’ by Ayaan Hirsi Ali]

Every few months, flecks of blood splash out from European Islam and stain the global news agenda. The world has watched jihadist assassinations on the streets of Amsterdam, civilian-slaughter in Madrid and on the London Underground, France’s bonfire of the car-and-vanities, and Denmark’s uprising against cartoons of the Prophet Mohammed. For ordinary Europeans who pride ourselves on our multiculturalism and tolerance, the continent seems stranger and sadder. The windows of my apartment in London stare out towards the scene of a recent suicide-murder, and when they are open on a summer morning, the low wailing of a muezzin can be heard clearing the air. On the streets and in the mosques outside, jihadi young men distributing ‘death to democracy’ leaflets clash with young Muslim feminists calling for an open, liberal Islam. Kaffiyas and headscarves clash with make-up and wonderbras in a bewildering Islamic cacophony.

At last, a slew of books has appeared to try to fit these changed streets, scattered battles and stray bombs into a broader intellectual context. They fall, broadly, into two schools. The first presents Europe’s fight as a Huntingtonian ‘Clash of Civilisations’, a war between democratic Europe and the 15 million indigestible Muslims it has, they believe, foolishly imported from undemocratic countries. Some even predict – as former Reagan staffer Tony Blankley puts it – that “as hyper-tolerant, or even self-loathing, Europeans are confronted by intelligent, hyper-aggressive Muslims, a Darwinian life-or-death struggle will result in the death of European culture.”

The second school believes this conservative analysis is a betrayal of democratic Muslims immigrants, a rebuke to the millions who have become great Europeans and cannot be casually counted as in the camp of jihad. They believe this is a civil war within[ital] the Muslim world, between Islamic fundamentalists and the Muslim moderates who despise them. The most optimistic of us even believe that hosting this fight is an extraordinary opportunity for Europe, because – if we manage it right – we can decisively tip Islam away from jihadism and trigger the long-awaited, long-delayed Islamic Enlightenment.

Most of the events that have ravaged and savaged Europe lately can be understood, at least superficially, through either prism. Look at the near-beheading of Theo Van Gough, the film-maker and controversialist, by crazed fundamentalist Mohammed Bouyeri as he begged – in classic Dutch fashion – “Don’t so it! Surely we can talk about this!” Was Van Gough murdered because he was an “infidel” who had dared defame Islam? Or was he killed because he had sided with moderate Muslims by making a film about the epidemic of domestic violence against immigrant women?

The American writer Bruce Bawer’s book ‘While Europe Slept’ is an interesting entry-point to this debate, since he veers – almost at random – between the two schools of thought as he tries to understand Europe’s new and febrile situation. He arrived in Europe just as jihadi smoke was beginning to hang over our streets: “I first travelled to the Netherlands in 1997 and thought I’d found the closest thing to heaven on earth. What sentient being, I wondered, wouldn’t want to live there?” He had, he believed, finally escaped the Protestant fundamentalism of his homeland, and ambled into a secular society where he could marry his gay partner and walk hand-in-hand down the canal lanes. But “Europe, I eventually saw, was falling prey to an even more alarming fundamentalism”.

It began to hit him – literally – when he and his boyfriend were beaten up by a Muslim hate-mob one sunny afternoon. Islamic fundamentalists were, he discovered, attacking Amsterdam’s gay men with such frequency that this pro-gay Shangri-La was unravelling: gay men could no longer hold hands or kiss in public. When he studied what some mullahs were preaching in the Muslim ghettoes scattered across Europe, Bawer found something worse than the Falwellian fanaticism he had fled. “Falwell was an unsavoury creep, but he didn’t issue fatwas,” he writes. “James Dobson’s parenting advice was appalling, but it didn’t tell people to murder their daughters. American liberals had been fighting the religious right for decades. Western Europeans had yet to acknowledge they had a religious right… Pat Robertson just wanted to deny me gay marriage; the imams wanted to drop a wall on me.”

Bawer had belly-flopped into the continent’s paradox: Europe’s warm and capacious tolerance was being extended to some of the most fanatically intolerant people on earth. The continent had inhaled immigrants from our former colonies to skivvy and scrub for us, and the most hassle-free approach seemed to be multiculturalism: let them do their own thing. But in practice, it evolved into something even worse: immigrants were encouraged to retain their original culture – no matter how reactionary – as a matter of state policy. By the time Bawer touched down in Amsterdam, this has thrown up perverse alliances across the continent, with European liberals fostering and feeding some of the anti-liberal, misogynist and homophobic parts of immigrant communities. Britain-based feminist Germaine Greer defended the widespread butchery of young Muslim girls’ genitals – the removal of the labia and clitoris to destroy the possibility of sexual pleasure – as a legitimate cultural practice. Eva Kjer Hansern, the Denmark’s minister for gender equality, responded to a fundamentalist imam who said women were asking to be raped if they showed too much flesh by calling for an “open debate”. As Bawer demands - about what? Is it okay to rape a woman if her dress is below the knee, but not above?

These criticisms, offered in a fizzing firecracker polemic, fit into an intriguing pattern, whereby some of the most vociferous critics of the swelling jihadism in Europe – from Pim Fortuyn to Peter Tatchell – have been gay men, unusually well-attuned to the rise of fanatical faith for obvious reasons. But as his book progresses, Bawer’s polemic shifts from being a carefully reasoned work in the civil-war school into a sloppy, shrill work in the clash-of-civilisations school. He begins to doubt that there are any moderate Muslims at all, except a few shimmering exceptions, saying, “if that silent majority existed at all, it had to be one of the most silent majorities ever.” He begins to present Europe’s Muslims as a homogenous sharia-seeking hoarde slowly trying to conquer the continent. With spine-chilling incidental music, he reveals the fact that most popular name for baby boys in Amsterdam is no long Jan but Mohammed.

Indeed, he shunts aside the examples of heroic moderate Muslims he had listed and proceeds to present the growth of the Muslim population – moderate or jihadist, who cares? – as a problem in itself. He writes – as so much of the American literature on this subject does – of a demographic time-bomb sitting underneath Europe: “Today, in Western Europe, the Muslim share of the population is somewhere between 2 and 10 percent. In France, it’s 12 percent. In Switzerland, it’s an astonishing 20 percent. A glance at the relative rates of reproduction suggests this percentage will rise precipitously over the coming generation. Among native Western Europeans, the fertility ranges from 1.2 to 1.8 percent – well blow the “replacement rate” of 2.1. This means the native populations will decline considerably over the next generation… and the number of Muslims will increase dramatically, partly through controlled immigration and partly through reproduction (the fertility rate of Muslims is considerably higher).”

But it is only by making some pretty wild extrapolations that Bawer can sustain his idea Europe will have a Muslim majority – and perhaps sharia law, beheadings and all – fairly soon. But even Tony Blankley – the former Reagan staffer whose flimsy book ‘The West’s Last Chance’ is built on the same premise – admits that “the phrase ‘if current trends continue’ is one of the most misleading guides to the future.” Remember Paul Ehrich’s ubiquitous ‘The Population Bomb’, which predicted that rising populations and dwindling food supplies would guarantee five millions Americans have withered and starved by 1985? “For almost every Western European country, their populations do not even begin to decline until at least 2025,” Blankley confesses. “In fact, for the next few decades, they continue to go up, even without any new immigration… The numbers only begin to move decidedly down about fifty years from now.”

But an entire shelf-full of literature has been built on the plainly hyperbolic premises that demographic trends will remain exactly the same for the next fifty years, and that all European Muslims will by then be jihadists clamouring for sharia. Sitting here at the apex of the Clash of Civilisations thesis is the scholar Bat Ye’or, a Jew ethnically cleansed from Egypt in 1956 and condemned to life as a European exile. She not only believes that Europe will very soon be conquered by a Muslim majority and turned into ‘Eurabia’, a continent where Christians and Jews are reduced to ‘dhimmis’ – second class citizens forced to walk in the gutter. She believes this is the result of a deliberate “war of political and cultural subversion, undertaken by [Europe’s] own politicians, media and intellectuals.”

In her latest book, ‘Eurabia – the Euro-Arab Axis’, Ye’or argues that since 1962 France has been plotting “the creation of a common culture encompassing the North and South shores of the Mediterranean” and the “secret schadenfreude fulfilment of an interrupted Holocaust.” These European politicians clandestinely “see Islam as liberation from unbelief, superior as a religion and a civilisation to Christianity and to all other infidel creeds.” These are such fantastical claims – suggesting a conscious conspiracy unprecedented in human history – that one imagines Ye’or must have uncovered some pretty astonishing evidence to have her research endorsed by so many senior figures on the American right. So… where is it?

She says this massive plot is being driven by an obscure group of minor politicians called the Euro-Arab Dialogue (EAD), whose “occult machinery” (yes, she really does say ‘occult’) is everywhere, “engineer[ing] Europe’s irreversible transformation through hidden channels.” But the only ‘proof’ Ye’or offers are a few slices of boilerplate rhetoric issued at inter-governmental conferences about the contribution Islam has made to European culture and the desire for co-operation in the future. But remarkably similar statements have come from George Bush. Ye’or can only maintain her argument by repeatedly resorting to rhetorical inflation. So because “Eurabian notables – whether Chirac, Solana, Prodi, de Villepin, Mary Robinson or others – have continuously stressed the centrality of the Palestinian cause for world peace,” she says they believe “Israel’s very existence… is a threat to peace” – a clear distortion. So because some European politicians have offered rote-praise for how Muslims and Christians lived together in medieval Andalusia, she says they have “the firm belief that Andalusia provides an exemplary model for the construction of Eurabia in the twenty-first century.” [P147] So because millions of Europeans marched against the invasion of Iraq, she says there were “mass demonstrations in European streets in favour of Saddam Hussein,” part of the “coordinated Euro-Arab policy.”

But Ye’or’s insistence that there is only one Islam – a jihad-and-sharia-seeking mania – is more than just a historical error: it is actually a weapon in the jihadists’ hands. A good example can be found when Ye’or lambasts a Muslim biomedical engineering student at Harvard University who gave a speech redefining jihad as “the determination to do right, to do justice even against your own interest.” She savages this as “wishful thinking,” a sugar-coating for the savage reality of Islam. She is saying to a moderate Muslim – exactly the people who must be encouraged– your understanding of your faith is wrong. Only Osama Bin Laden’s is correct – and his will inevitably prevail.

To understand how wrong this is, we must turn to the dissident strains of Islam that are sprouting across Europe. Fadela Amara’s raw, vivid book ‘Breaking the Silence’ is the story of how an ordinary Muslim girl from the banlieues – the concrete blocks of Muslim poverty that ring France’s cities – started a movement to reform Islam. One of ten children born to her Algerian immigrant parents, she grew up chafing at the constraints of Islamic fundamentalism. She could not see why she was forced to do housework while her brothers lazed, or reduced to begging her father for weeks for the smallest of freedoms like the right to see a movie. But she always knew she was living in a free, democratic society where she challenge these stifling norms. She writes, “My own France – a view shared by a great number of people from immigrant families – is the France of the Enlightenment, the France of the republic, the France of Marianne, of the supporters of Alfred Dreyfuss, of the Paris Commune, of the Resistance. In short, the France of liberty, equality and fraternity.”

As she grew, she realised it was not enough to challenge jihadists in her own home. In 2002 an 18 year-old girl from the banlieues called Sohan Benziane was burned to death by fundamentalists for being ‘loose’ and refusing to bow her head to their misogynist norms, and Fadela knew she had to act – in the name of Islam. With her friends, she launched a group called ‘Ni Putains, Ni Soumises’ (Neither Whores Nor Doormats). They began to carefully articulate a feminist Islam compatible with Enlightenment values. Within five months, they had 30,000 people marching in the streets of Paris, demanding change.

Their “feminist Islam” is the fiercest enemy of what Amara dubs “basement Islam” – a fanaticism of the shadows and backrooms that “offered young men a theoretical framework and tools with which to oppress young women.” She believed “its influence is much more important than is recognized. From the moment imams settled into the projects, some of the young men began to apply radical codes of behaviour to young women, in particular by forcing them back into their homes.” Fadela and the tens of thousands of Muslim women who support her loathe the fundamentalists’ vision of “fascist-like society that has nothing to do with democracy” – and unlike many ‘Clash of Civilisations’ blowhards, she fights against it on the ground, every day. Some of their fights are small everyday acts of defiance: “Make-up has become war paint, a sign of resistance.” But many are larger: they reject the headscarf as “nothing more than a means of oppression emanating from a patriarchal society.”

Here is an authentic Islamic Enlightenment occurring on the streets of Europe. Here is the development of a strain of Islam fiercely committed to democratic values. Yet those who suggest the birth of every new European Muslim is a problem – another tick from the time-bomb – treat Amara as akin to Osama. This mindset is (at best) a distraction from the real fight: across the continent, groups of Muslim women are rebelling in the same way against the literalist, quasi-fascist interpretation of the Koran popularised by the Mullahs. Tired of being its first victims, they are creating their own liberal lived Islams as an alternative – and if this rebellion is completed, European jihadism will be left literally unable to reproduce itself. Ayaan Hirsi Ali – the brave Somalian refugee to the Netherlands who has become a dissident against jihadism – astutely argues, “If the West wants to help modernize Islam, it should invest in women because they educate the children.”

So how do we guarantee there are a dozen Fadelas in every mosque? A string of creative solutions spring from the literature. Some are fairly painless – for example, across Europe, Muslim women who become too fond of democratic values are often ‘disciplined’ by their families by the importing of a stern spouse from the traditional homeland. As Bawer puts it, “The disease of integration is prevented by injecting into the European branch of the family a powerful booster shot of “traditional values”.” To prevent this attack on moderate Muslims, Denmark has banned any citizen from importing a spouse until he or she is 24 years old. “The assumption behind the rule,” Bawer writes, “is that by the time a young person reaches 24, he or she is more capable of resisting parental pressure – and more likely to have met and fallen in love with someone in Denmark.”

Liberal Muslims are also hobbled across Europe by the fact that the continent’s mosques are almost all funded by foreign fundamentalist powers - mostly Saudi Arabia, Libya and Pakistan. A third of French imams cannot speak any French at all, and barely a third are fluent in the language. Ye’or – before she launches on yet more exaggeration – is right to ask why are we importing proselytisers for Wahhabbism and literalism. The French government has tired to develop imam training programmes to supply home-grown preachers, and the Dutch government now requires all imams to undergo an assimilation programme. Why aren’t all European states following them?

Some solutions will come from the conventional anti-racist approach of the past thirty years, outlawing discrimination. In July 2004, the BBC conducted an experiment: they sent out nearly identical job applications to over fifty British employers. The applicants with Anglo-Saxon names were twice as likely to be asked to interview as those with Muslim names. Similar results have been found in France. By far the most frequent demand about European Muslims is for an employment law banning discrimination on religious grounds – hardly a separatist jihadi agenda. There is often a similar exclusion from politics, because huge chunks of Europe’s Muslims are disenfranchised – literally. Around half of Denmark’s Muslim population cannot vote because they are “long-term non-national residents” – second-class citizens. In Italy, less than 10 percent of Muslims are eligible, and in Germany only 500,000 of the 3.2 million resident Muslims can vote. If Muslims cannot engage in the economy or politics, they will be far more likely to go underground (or Underground).

But the trickier solutions will require Europeans to unpick a central plank of our conventional anti-racist approach: multiculturalism. The Ni Poutains, Ni Soumises manifesto calls for “no more justifications of our oppression in the name of the right to difference and of respect for those who force us to bow our heads.” Multiculturalism has worked on the assumption that there is one ‘pure’ Islam, represented by elderly Mullahs. Now Islam is splitting into liberal and literalist wings, this approach actually places European states closer to the reactionaries that the feminists and liberals. We will have to ensure there are no more state-funded Muslim-only schools and youth clubs, no more privileged status for reactionary clerics. “It must,” Bawer notes, “become impossible for children growing up in Western Europe to be raised to see their religious affiliation as the be-all and end-all of their identity.”

To successfully host an Islamic civil war – one where the liberals win – Europeans need to junk both the conservative pining for an Apocalyptic clash and the liberal fixation on multiculturalism. The potential prize is extraordinary. In the thirteenth century, Muslims stopped using the principle of ijtihad – the application of reason and reinterpretation to pull their religious texts into a modern context – when reading the Koran. This led in a clear black line to the literalism and psychosis of Bin Ladenism. If the gates of ijtihad open once again, it will be in Europe. It is a long, slow process, but it has already begun. Amidst the sound of suicide-murders and screaming on European streets, it is possible to hear the slow creaking of those gates – and the low rumble of the Islamic Enlightenment.

[This review was written before Fallacci died and Hirsi Ali was forced to leave the Netherlands]