November 17, 2005

Empty religion
In France it's what adherents don't have that ties them together | by Joel Belz


So much for the illusion. Just when modern Europe thought itself to have been successfully secularized, along comes a crew of scruffy Muslims to spoil the picture. ("Scruffy" was one of the nicer words used by French leaders last week to describe the rioters.) Both the French people and their overweeningly self-confident government are discovering that religion remains a crucial part of modern life after all.




Historic Christianity, of course, had already become all but irrelevant to many, at least in the big cities and centers of European culture. Most cathedrals have long since been reduced to drafty museums of past superstitions. Serious religious commitments by Christians have been measured recently in single-digit proportions of the population.




But no observers of the European scene last week could deny the strong religious component of what was driving one of the scarier uprisings in the recent history of the continent. Religion wasn't the whole issue, to be sure; class and culture and economics played important roles. Yet the strong Islamic theme was too dominant to be ignored.





But who could explain it accurately? If most politicians and most media people are ignorant of the fine nuances in their own religious traditions, how much more so with reference to Islam? If the differences in explaining evangelical Christianity range from Pat Robertson to Jimmy Carter, isn't it reasonable to expect that differences in explaining Islam are just as broad-and just as ambiguous and confusing?




At first, both European and American media soft-pedaled the religious aspects of the costly unrest. So The Washington Post headlined with discreet political correctness: "Rage of French Youth Is a Fight for Recognition." But, as Canadian columnist Mark Steyn pointed out (Canadians might be a little scared themselves), it wasn't "Pierre and Jacques and Marcel and Alphonse" who were causing the trouble. It was Mohammed and his friends-who admittedly may have been poor and unemployed members of drug gangs-but who first and foremost found their identity in their relationship to Islam.




So in a front-page story last week, John Carryrou finally wrote bluntly in The Wall Street Journal: "The past year is proving to be a watershed in modern Europe's encounter with Islam. As a number of events have shown-including last year's assassination of Dutch filmmaker Theo van Gogh by a Muslim radical and the home-grown terrorists who bombed the London tube this summer-Europe has failed to deal with the Muslims within its borders."




In his article, Mr. Carryrou shows how even purported efforts by so-called moderate Muslim groups to restrain violence by young devotees of Islam have tended-inadvertently or otherwise-to highlight and perhaps even encourage ever more violent behavior. Concerning the Tabligh group, he says that while it publicly preaches a peaceful brand of Islam, French intelligence officials claim that up to 80 percent of Islamic extremists in France were once members of Tabligh. French officials call it the "antechamber of fundamentalism."




Indeed, the record shows that the very efforts of groups like Tabligh to work with young people have tended often to heighten their sense of identification with Islam rather than to meld them into the broader society of which they are a part. When unemployment, resulting from a variety of influences, ranges as high as 40 percent among some immigrant groups, such patterns quickly prompt the jobless folk to see their plight as a deliberate effort by society to victimize them because they are Islamic. The fact that Tabligh works out of a mosque all but guarantees that the young people it reaches out to learn instinctively to see the struggle as a religious one.




So it's not so much any specific content that they've been taught. It's not a particularly charismatic brand of teachers who have gripped them with a vision. Nor is it that the Quran has proven so convincing. Instead, it's a grim and empty life experience they've inherited that prompts them to claim a religious adherence whose meaning has primarily to do with what they don't have in life. And now, both oddly and frighteningly, that's how the secularists of Europe see them as well.
Copyright © 2005 WORLD Magazine November 19, 2005, Vol. 20, No. 45

http://www.worldmag.com/displayArticle.cfm?ID=11278
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France and the Muslim myth
The French riots have been a godsend for those who oppose integration and progress
Jason Burke
Sunday November 13, 2005
The Observer

Analysts and commentators often seek to find evidence to support their well-established ideas in any given event. So while critics of the 'French social model' have gleefully seen evidence of its failure in the recent violence in France, its supporters have seen evidence of the damage done by right-wing policies in the country. But little compares with the extraordinary way in which the disturbances of the last two weeks have been hijacked by those who appear set on either finding, or creating, a 'clash of civilisations' between Islam and the West.
Take one particularly egregious example. Melanie Phillips, writing in the Daily Mail, described the riots in France as 'a French intifada, an uprising by French Muslims against the state'. I covered the intifada in Israel and Palestine and, beyond the fact that thrown stones look much the same wherever they are, saw little that resembled the Gaza Strip in the autumn of 2000 in Clichy-sous-Bois in the autumn of 2005. In the course of her article, Phillips spoke of how 'night after night, France [had] been under attack by its Muslim minority', how the country was being 'torched from Normandy to the Mediterranean', how it had 'sniffed the danger that had arisen in its midst' and quoted a little-known writer called Bat Ye'Or who is a favourite of the more unsavoury right-wing American websites and believes that the European Union is a conspiracy dedicated to creating one Muslim-dominated political entity that will comprise most of the Middle East and Europe.
Phillips also conflated Arabs (a race), and Muslims (a global religion of 1.3 billion, some devout, some not). This is dangerous nonsense, but needs to be studied.
First, the facts. According to the French intelligence services, the areas where radical Islamic ideologies have spread furthest in France have actually proved the calmest over recent weeks. Second, characterising the rioters as 'Muslim' at all is ludicrous. Most were as Westernised as you would expect third-generation immigrants to be and far more interested in soft drugs and rap than getting up for dawn prayers.
Indeed, a high proportion was of sub-Saharan African descent and not Muslim at all. Others were white and so, following Phillips's description of the darker skinned rioters as 'Arab Muslims', should presumably be referred to as 'Caucasian Christians'.
Also, it is clear that the rioters were not seeking to destroy the French state but were demanding a greater stake in it. Otherwise, there would have been many more direct confrontations with the security forces. The point the rioters made again and again was that they felt rejected by 'the Republic', not that they wanted to tear it down. With all other channels of communication blocked, they sent, literally, smoke signals instead.
To dismiss claims that the violence was Muslim in origin, rooted in simple racism or in cultural representations of 'the Turk' or the satanic, scimitar-wielding Saracen, would be wrong. Instead, it should be seen as part of a strand of conservative thought that, though varied, has many common traits and which deserves far more attention than it has so far received. Phillips says that to confront the menace of Islam, we need to 'reassert British identity and British values', though she does not define what they might be. This rhetoric, married to trenchant if somewhat unspecific statements about threats, is typical. In France, a significant proportion of the population is falling back on an inchoate but powerful amalgam of zealous republicanism, Gallic exceptionalism, fear of a supposed flood of migrants and last-ditch resistance to an 'Anglo-Saxon conspiracy' apparently intent on imposing bad food, worse films and long working hours.
In the USA, religious fundamentalists who strive for a return to the 1950s and a society where everyone - women, blacks, whites, children - knew their place now wield unprecedented influence.
In Russia, there is a virulent and widespread racism and a yearning for the good old days of the gulag. In India, a popular demagogic concoction of Hindu-Indian nationalism is still strong, exacerbating sectarian divisions. And then there is Islamic radicalism. The modern contemporary Muslim militant discourse is rooted in a rejection of change, a twisted vision of history, a belief that modern 'Western' societies are decadent and a hoped-for return to what is certain and true. These strands all depend on a nostalgia for an imagined ideal society, an emphasis on racial or religious difference, a powerful sense of injustice, a sense that weakness threatens moral corruption and a sense of imminent invasion. They unite into a sort of negative version of the largely left-wing, anti-capitalist, anti-globalisation movement that is rarely noticed.
This discourse is potentially dangerous. The conservatives, be they French republican diehards, extremist mullahs or newspaper columnists, are likely to find in the age of the budget airline, the internet, satellite television, communities of second- or third-generation immigrants that number in their tens of millions, not to mention massive and growing pressure from migrants beyond European borders, huge flows of capital and even greater movements of cultural exchange that it is impossible to try to turn back the clock. Pulling up the drawbridge will not work. History is flowing in the wrong direction.
This means their actions are likely to get more desperate, their logic more twisted, their conspiracy theories more barmy and their rhetoric more rabid. The paradox is that the faster globalisation moves, the more radical and possibly more numerous they'll become. The real clash of civilisations is not between East and West but between those who believe they stand to gain from the steady coming together of communities, nations and religions that globalisation, if not simply used as an excuse for rampant free market capitalism, can bring and those who see this continued integration as a menace to everything they hold dear.
The rearguard is doomed to perish eventually, wrapped in the flag and out of ammunition, but it will go down fighting.
http://observer.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,6903,1641413,00.html