“Moslims uit!”: American Islam vs. European Islam

An Arab district in Brussels. Photograph by Flickr user Aldask (CC-usage).

It comes up in conversation all the time with colleagues at neweurasia: what do I think about the situation of Islam in the West?  I think Central Asians are really curious to know about it because they’re probably looking for insight not only into the West’s relationship to them and the larger Islamic world, but also for insight into themselves.  After all, Muslims living in the West are exposed to lifestyles and a quality of life little experienced in the umma.

Why me?  Well, for one, I’m studying Islamic history and philosophy here in the West, which, unfortunately, is still a rare thing for a Westerner to do.  For another, I’ve previously written about the concept of an “American” or “Americanized” Islam, which I wrote after a very long personal struggle with the religion.

Nowadays I’m no longer so hot for the idea of an “American Islam” as a theoretical project, i.e., reforming Islam to better match American culture or somehow fusing American philosophical principles with Islam.  However, as a way of describing the ways in which Islam is expressed and practiced in the United States as opposed to elsewhere, talking about an “American Islam” still makes sense — perhaps all the more so if we compare it “European Islam”.

What the heck do I mean?

Muslims trying to understand the situation of their religious kinsman in the West need to realize that there are two humongous divisions that cuts it right in half.  The first is, obviously, geographical: water.  The second is culture.  And in both cases, the divisions really come down to language — English.

It is perhaps wiser to speak of “Anglophonic Islam” since the situation for Muslims in Canada, Australia, the United Kingdom, and the United States is actually very uniform.  (I should note, however, that British Muslims have very sharp class, ethnic, and generational divisions within their community).  Once we step across the Atlantic or the English Channel, we find ourselves in a very different world.  The political traditions of the Continent are very different from those which prevail in the British Isles, North America, and Australasia.

I should also note that I’m not including Turkey or the Balkans, which obviously have historical Muslim populations, in my definition of “Europe”, nor am I including most of the former Communist bloc.  I’m speaking very specifically of the Continent’s Romanic zone (France, Italy, Romania, Spain) and Germanic Zone (Austria, the Benelux, Germany, Scandinavia, and Switzerland).

Ethnic make-up

American Muslims are both immigrant and native.  Like Britain, we have an historical immigrant population, albeit small, that dates back to the 19th Century, but unlike Britain, we also have an historical native population of converts from among the former slaves (or re-converts, as they tend to envision themselves).  Moreover, since the 1970s we have been drawing immigrants from every corner of the Muslim world — the umma, in all its manifoldness, is best represented not only in Mecca but also the streets of American cities.   All told, this means that American Muslims have an incredible array of intellectual, cultural, and human resources to draw upon.

Europe’s Muslims, however, are entirely immigrant — the last natives were chased out of Spain in the 15th Century.  They also tend to be homogeneous, drawn largely from only two sources, namely, Morocco and Turkey.  Of course, there is a healthy contingent of Muslims from African, Balkan, Central Asian,  Middle Eastern, and Southeast Asian countries, but they are smaller.  Moreover, they tend to be more effective at integration, or at least keeping themselves out of the spotlight.

Education

American Muslims tend to have skills and education before they moved to America. Yes, America is, quite literally, brain-draining the umma.  And, although it is not uniform — Black American Muslims are still struggling academically and economically in many quarters — it is a consistent enough of a phenomenon to the point where it is being passed onto the first and second generations of Muslim children born and raised in the United States.

European Muslims, however, were originally imported as unskilled labor.  It’s a strange, even laughable, fact that the Europeans really believed the Moroccans and Turks would simply go home after their contracts ended.  Today, after three generations of continual immigration and ghettoization, European Muslims have the highest secondary school drop-out rates, and with it, the highest petty and violent crime rates.  They are also consistently the single largest group on the welfare rolls.

Integration

This element of ghettoization is critically important: with the notable exception of Black American Muslims, American Muslims are integrated — heck, we have a President of Islamic descent!   And where they aren’t, such as in Black communities, they nevertheless tend to have an ameliorative effect by uplifting otherwise self-destructing neighborhoods.  Indeed, Black American Muslims score higher in secondary school exams than their Christian or otherwise non-religious peers.

Europe’s Muslims, on the other hand, isolate themselves and are isolated by the surrounding cultures.  Speaking candidly, I take the Europeans to task for this: after all these centuries they still look upon themselves as “civilization” and the rest of the world, including America, as barbarous.  At the same time, they are very nervous about difference to the point where they have an almost pathological disinterest in other cultures.

Tim Pauwels, a Flemish journalist with Belgian State Television, put it to me bluntly:

For three generations we just didn’t care about the Moroccans and left them to rot in our cities.

“They have no respect”

As a result, there’s a massive conflict between cultures going on here.  Europeans fail to realize that the Muslims they encounter are impoverished strangers in a strange land; Muslims, in turn, resent that the Europeans they encounter would rather pretend that they don’t exist.

Putting aside all the big theory, here’s an example of what I mean: a Dutch friend of mine, who would like to have the Moroccans deported from the European Union, complained about an incident involving his girlfriend.  They were walking through a Moroccan neighborhood in the Hague during which she was whistled at, heckled, and called a whore.   “They hate women!” he said.  “They have no respect.”

There’s no country called “Assholestan”

I informed him that, to the contrary, the Moroccans do actually have a lot of respect for women.  Any stroll through a city park will be revelatory.  You can find Moroccan couples of all ages and religious inclination cuddling, laughing, and joking.  Some of my nicest memories of the Hague’s main park is of Moroccan guys taking their girls for bike rides through the forest.

What did my friend miss?  Well, for one, he failed to realize that the Moroccan punks cat-calling his girlfriend were precisely that — punks.  Alas, there isn’t out there in the world some country called “Asshole-stan” where all the citizens are punks; all nations have young hooligans.  For another, there is actually a legitimate cultural difference at operation.  Whether we Westerners agree or disagree with it, the fact remains that in the Moroccan’s home culture an unveiled woman in jeans or a short skirt in the company of someone who isn’t her husband or male relative is, in fact, a prostitute.

This is not to say that the punks’ behavior is defensible.  For one thing, after living in Europe for three generations one would think that by now the Moroccans overall would have some sense, however vague, of the difference between their culture and that of the Europeans, and would try to be more circumspect; indeed, the Turks for the most part seem to have learned this.  For another, the red light districts are packed with Moroccan men, so there’s a bit of hypocrisy going on here.

So, what’s the future of Islam in the West?  Simply put, the American model, while not perfect (just ask American Muslims how they felt during the paranoid Bush years), works.  The European model doesn’t.  I think at the heart of this is the concept of the nation-state, which, for Americans, is built around an idea — liberty — but for Europeans is built around a linguistic ethnic group.  In other words, America integrates Muslims better than Europe because it is ideologically prepared and desirous to do so.

Beyond the nation-state

The European nation-state is creating the conditions for a “clash of civilizations”.  The only answer, then, is to abandon it.  What does it mean to be Dutch, French, German?  Whatever it means, it certainly no longer means what it did two hundred, one hundred, or even fifty years ago.  If they are to avoid very real ethnic conflict from erupting within their cities, the Europeans need to re-define European-ness.

Of course, in many ways, the Europeans are attempting to do precisely that — the European Union is the grand experiment in re-definition.  So there is real hope that conflict can be avoided.  And, indeed, we are seeing hints of integration all around: mosques in Rotterdam, Zurich, and Paris, and Muslims getting elected to government.   Time will tell.

That’s my two cents on this subject.  On the one hand, keep in mind that I’m talking in terms of gross generalities here.  On the other hand, my views will probably continue to evolve while I’m here in Europe, so stay tuned!

Manifold colors, underlying unities

Even if all the trees were pens and the ocean ink, backed up by seven more oceans, the words of God would not be exhausted. — Qur’an 31:27

Another late Sunday evening, but a good one.  Indeed, a weekend of good late evenings, ripe with meaningful conversation and encounter.  And the days, too, have been lush, but with work — for job, for school, for life.  And while others lament the coming winter, I am finally, quietly, defiant, like the blazing colors of the autumnal trees.  November has always been my favorite month, and not simply because it is my birthmonth.  The manifold colors reveal underyling unities, and with them, new focus.

The hidden river

“It is in the watches of the night that impressions are strongest and words most eloquent; in the day-time you are hard pressed with the affairs of this world.” – Quran, sura 73

It’s a full moon over Leuven tonight.  The small city is quiet, gently illuminated.  Between the Question and the Debate, between the why do i exist? and the contest of faith and reason, there is another space.  And underneath the quivering ego’s thirst for justification flows a river, subterranean and brisk — the one true drink.

A wrong turn in Israel

Here is a story for you.  I’m not entirely sure if it’s the best one to tell you, but it’s the  first one that comes to mind whenever I think of Halloween or Israel.

It was October 31, 2004 — Halloween — and I found myself in Lud, Israel.  Lud is a terrible, desperate place. I’ve sometimes heard Palestinians from the Gaza Strip refer to it as “hell.” There are sections of the city where the houses are constructed of stapled aluminum siding and dried mud. The more civilized sections are fortresses. Most of the residents live in giant concrete blocks. The city elite (cops, politicians, and drug dealers) live in walled mansions. Lud’s dealers pioneered “ATM drugs”: the junkie walks up to a tiny slit in the wall of his or her dealer’s mansion, deposits some shekels, and out pops their heroin.

I had just returned from the north, visiting Nazareth, Akka, and Haifa, and other places.  I saw the minarets of Qalqiyah and Tulkarem peeking out over the top edge of the notorious Separation Wall and tendrils of black smoke from burning tires licking the blue sky.  I visited a small village called Kufr Manda, a poor farming community of Palestinians that had lost two of their sons in protests and whose hearts I would later break.  And I drank coffee with Bedouins — it had been brewed for three days and had the sharp texture of fine red wine.

On the return journey by train I was aiming for Ramle, near Lud, but overshot and ended up in Beer Sheva, deep in the south.  Israel’s a small country; such things can happen.  Several hours later, deep into the night and even deeper in the Negev desert, I sat with two security guards in the railway terminal of Beer Sheva. One guard was a newly immigrated Russian; the other, a second-generation Sepharadi. They had just finished their mandatory military service. They both served in Gaza, protecting the Israeli settlements there.

“I once saw a terrorist with a rocket,” the Russian said. “I shot him.”

“I ran over an Arab with my tank,” the Sepharadi said. “I don’t know if he was a terrorist.”

They both grinned with a savage joy. The Russian was twenty-four; the Sepharadi, twenty-one.

Do not fear the chiaroscuro

Moses said to his servant, ‘I will journey on until I reach the land where the two seas meet, though I may march for ages’

- Qur’an 18:60

We are all in the chiaroscuro, questing between the dark and the light, not so that we can embrace the one or the other, but to find our true selves, whatever or whoever that may be, at the vertical horizon between the two.

The stars our destination: cyberdissent and the future of Turkmenistan

Exploring the question of why the normally totalitarian government of Turkmenistan has suddenly and aggressively striven to increase internet access among its population, this article is ultimately a reflection upon the impact of technology upon human society.  As a piece of what can only be described as “journalistic philosophy”, I’m particularly pleased with how it turned out; indeed, its core ideas are why I am a committed cyberjournalist.

Note: a shortened version of this editorial was published under the title, “A Pandora’s Box“, in the “Our Take” section of Transitions Online (TOL).  The expanded version, republished below, originally appeared on neweurasia under the current title (click on the image above to read it).

It’s a philosophical riddle as old as when humanity first learned to harness the power of fire: Will technology bring freedom or slavery?  Lately, observers of Turkmenistan find themselves asking this very question about the Internet.

Turkmenistan has one of the world’s lowest rates of Internet penetration: According to Internetworldstats.com, a website that measures global Internet access, a meager 1.4 percent of Turkmenistan’s population is wired, putting the country in 216th place out of 226.

However, two years ago, Gurbanguly Berdymukhammedov, recently ascended to the Turkmen presidency, vowed to expand the Internet in his nation. Speaking at Columbia University in September 2007, he remarked, “Let me tell you frankly that the atmosphere today in Turkmenistan is just incredible. Our children feel such a strong and intense yearning for knowledge that we just can’t fail and let them down.”

At the time, neweurasia’s pseudonymous blogger Conquistador noted that the speech was accompanied by a presentation showing young students typing on new laptops. In light of the paranoia that marked the previous regime of Saparmurat Niyazov – during which Internet access was sequestered to a tiny elite – the images were a bold statement.

“Will any of this emerge?” Conquistador asked. “That remains to be seen.” Yet, remarkably, it seems that the Berdymukhammedov regime is actually intent on keeping its word.

In September Turkmenistan hosted an IT-themed exhibition called Turkmentel 2009 and a scientific conference. Berdymukhammedov personally addressed the audience, saying, “We are doing our best so that every citizen of Turkmenistan has access to the Internet and modern communication technologies.”

Subsequently, the government declared its intention to launch Turkmenistan’s first ever communications satellite.

Schwartz’s law

For those of you unfamiliar with Murphy’s law, this is a fundamental premise to the cosmos-is-absurd perspective on life: whatever can go wrong shall go wrong.

Well, I have my own version: if there is an impossibly difficult way of doing something, Christopher Schwartz will find it.

Guessing the spiritual future

Spirituality has always been subject to trends.  Influenced by everything from geography to technology, the metaphysical inclinations of society can serve as evidence of the unseen processes and forces shaping the direction of human civilization.

Previously, it was possible to discuss and debate the spirituality of the human species in terms of its various societies.  However, we are now entering a new phase of civilization marked by the rise of a global society.

It is true that this global society is, to a great extent, simply a patchwork of individual nations and communities.  However, the same can be said for human consciousness: the mind is made up of all its many individual neurons — and yet it is also somehow, almost ethereally more.

In likewise manner, at some point during the next few centuries a true global society will emerge from its constituent cultures.  So, the question I put to you now is: what do you think will be the initial spirituality of the global society?

Leave a comment below or click here to take a poll.

The Religions of the Future?

A new religious movement (NRM) is a term used to refer to a religious faith or an ethical, spiritual, or philosophical movement of recent origin that is not part of an established denomination, church, or religious body.

Christianity and Islam were NRMs once upon a time.  My question to you, dear reader, is which of today’s NRMs do you think is the religion of the future.  Click here if you want to know what the heck I’m talking about and to take a poll.  }:-)

Will work for food, promises made but unkept

From the Associated Press:

Photo by Matt Rourke.

Recent La Salle University graduate Sean Christman of Westmont N.J., attempts to hand out resumes to passing motorists in Philadelphia, Wednesday, July 22, 2009. The number of newly laid-off workers seeking jobless benefits rose last week, though the government said its report again was distorted by the timing of auto plant shutdowns.

Why is it that whenever my alma mater, La Salle University, appears in the news, it’s for something dreadful?  Basketball rape scandals, rapacious tuition rates, and now unemployment.

Nevertheless, it’s a powerful statement Christman’s making: whither America’s promise that with education would come opportunity, career, and normality?  Was our generation just fed a line long enough so that Wall Street could cut and run?

I commend Christman for his good sense of publicity to highlight not only his personal plight and that of Philadelphia, but that of so many people around the world in today’s “brave new economy”.