Category: Morgue

Bernard Lewis and the decline of Muslim civilization

Middle East Policy
June 2002

While the United States has yet to bring the masterminds of the September 11, 2001, suicide attacks to justice, its attorney general has issued an indictment against their faith. “Islam is a religion,” said John Ashcroft, “in which God requires you to send your son to die for him. Christianity is a faith in which God sends his son to die for you.” (1) Ashcroft attacked Islam rather crudely, but he echoed the judgment of many Westerners about what is “wrong” with Islam and the Muslim world.

Christianity separates the church from the state, the argument goes, but Islam does not. Instead, it teaches Muslims to apply scripture to the real world. The Quran has references about Christian and Jewish hostility, and Osama bin Laden used them to recruit Al Qaeda members from Islamic schools. Nineteen of them attacked the United States with hijacked planes, killing 3,000 people. Can you believe that people are killing and dying in the name of God and religion?

Prodded by these analysts, the Bush administration tried to get Pakistan to purge the curricula of its Islamic schools. And Saudi school curricula have come under U.S. media attacks. The New York Times, for example, noted a caveat in a Saudi school textbook that says, “Muslims [should] be loyal to each other and to consider the infidels their enemy.” The newspaper argued that instructions of this kind were poisoning young Saudi minds with hatred for the West. And because “up to one third of every child’s schooling is on religious topics,” the Saudi school system was producing potential recruits for “Osama bin Laden or other extremists.” (2)

The argument that Islam has caused the many ills of Muslim societies was popularized by such Enlightenment thinkers as Montesquieu, Volney and Voltaire as much as by Christian polemicists through the ages. It has been elevated into truism by colonial-era Orientalists and many contemporary Western scholars, journalists and politicians. Few have argued the thesis more powerfully than Bernard Lewis, professor emeritus at Princeton.

His latest book, What Went Wrong?, explains how Islam’s “mighty civilization has fallen so low,” as do several of his previous works, especially The Middle East and Islam and the West. His more than a dozen books and many articles are a treasure for students of Muslim history. His encyclopedic knowledge of Islamic history, power of reasoning and elegant writing have made him the doyen of Islamic historians in the West.

Two other things about his works need mention. One is his intellectual probity. He tells it as he sees it. Second, he sees Islam with a pair of Western eyes. While his integrity as a scholar and writer is notable, his vantage point is Western, with its strengths and limitations for a historian of Islam. I will argue this point below.

Sprinkled with titillating historical anecdotes, What Went Wrong? recounts how Islam became “the greatest military power” as well as “the foremost economic power” on earth. Europe used to be poor and backward, and only after becoming “a pupil and in a sense dependent on the Islamic world” did it begin to build the modern civilization. He quotes a sixteenth-century Austrian ambassador to the Ottoman Turkish capital of Istanbul as lamenting that Christendom was languishing in “public poverty, private luxury, impaired strength, broken spirit.” Had the Ottomans not been fighting with the Persians, observes the envoy, Christendom could have succumbed to Muslim might.

But then began, notes Lewis, the decline of the Ottoman Turkish empire and rise of Europe in military, economic and scientific fields. Beginning in the late seventeenth century, the Europeans defeated the Turks in battle after battle and eventually threw them out of Europe (except Istanbul) by the end of World War I. Meanwhile, economic power and technological progress enabled European nations to conquer and colonize most of the Muslim world.

Lewis reminds us that Muslims have not recovered from their degradation now that European colonialists are gone, while Europe’s former east Asian and Pacific colonies are making impressive progress. The Muslims lag behind most of the rest of the world by “all standards that matter in the modern world–economic development and job creation, literacy and educational and scientific achievement, political freedom and respect for human rights.”

All this is true. But while Lewis’s analysis of the plight of the Muslim world is illuminating, his interpretation of its causes leaves much to be desired. What Went Wrong? tells us more about what has happened to the Muslim civilization than why it happened. And when he attempts to delve into the whys, he mostly relies on the traditional Orientalist analysis, which is often true but trite and incomplete. Lewis points to Muslims’ reluctance to acknowledge their failings and their proclivity to blame their adversity on scapegoats. In the mid-thirteenth century the Abbasid empire was crushed by the Mongols, who remained Muslims’ “favorite villains” for a long time. During Ottoman times, the Arabs were content to blame their backwardness on their Ottoman rulers. During the colonial era, all that went wrong in Muslim societies was attributed to European colonialism, and now Europeans’ “role as villains [has been] taken over by the United States.”

Islamists, he adds, are the most obscurantist of the lot. They blame “alien notions and practices” for all the ills of Muslim societies. Their stock argument: Muslims have “lost their former greatness” because they have strayed from the path of God.

I can vouch for the last point. I was a young journalist with the Pakistan Observer newspaper during the 1967 Six-day War between the Arabs and Israelis. In a subsequent interview with the Pakistani Islamist leader Abul Ala Maududi, I asked how it was possible for a small Jewish state to defeat three Muslim countries including Egypt, the strongest Arab military power. Maududi asked if I had read the comments of Egyptian leader Gamal Abdel Nasser boasting about being a descendant of the pharaohs. I said I had. “What happened to the pharaoh who fought the noble Musa [Moses], may Allah’s blessings be on him’?” asked the founder of Pakistan’s Jamaat-i-Islami party. “The pharaoh was defeated,” Maududi answered his own question. “So why are you surprised, my brother, that a descendant of the pharaohs has been defeated by the descendants of Musa, may Allah’s blessings be on him?” If Nasser were a good Muslim, he added, and had waged a “jihad in the name of Allah” instead of being a “socialist bragger who went to war in the name the pharaohs,” he would have prevailed. Similar arguments can still be heard from some Islamists, especially those of the older generations.

Muslims are not, however, the only people who look for scapegoats for their failings or adversities. Don’t many Americans dismiss Arab protests against their government’s hegemonic policies as a reflection of the jealousy of the poor and the weak’? Don’t Israelis routinely scorn European criticism of their repression of Palestinians as “antisemitism?”

Lewis points out that Muslims are held back by the autocracies and dictatorships that rule most of the Muslim world. In addition, he argues that because Islam does not separate religion from the state, Muslim societies are not secularizing, and that secularity has been a “principal cause of Western progress.” Then there is the Islamic tenet that prescribes women’s subordination to men, “depriving the Islamic world of the talents and energies of half its people.” Lewis argues these points cogently, supporting them with a wealth of data and anecdotes. But most of these arguments have been heard from other Western scholars, columnists and politicians through the ages. These critics, Lewis included, seem to forget that many Western nations prospered and some built mighty empires under autocratic rule. And Max Weber notwithstanding, many Western societies did not begin to secularize until after they were well on their way to economic development. “[T]he first great upsurges of capitalism,” as S.N. Eisenstadt points out, “occurred in pre-Reformation Catholic Europe–in Italy, Belgium, Germany.” (3)

Lewis stops short of telling Muslims what they should do, but says they have two options. One, they can follow the Islamists and set up a state based on a “real or imagined past.” The other is “secular democracy, best embodied in the Turkish Republic founded by Kemal Ataturk.”

The Islamist movement does not, of course, have a political model that would work in the modern world. We have seen that Iranian Islamists had to mold their revolution to fit the Western institutions of a written constitution, presidency, parliament, banks, news media and so on. Contrary to Lewis’s view, however, the political Islamists of the post-1980s generation seem quite open to the finest Western values such as democracy and scientific education. I think for all its shortcomings, the Islamist movement could, like the Great Awakening of eighteenth-century America, turn out eventually to be a catalyst for the regeneration of the Islamic civilization. Unlike other Islamic movements or schools of thought, the Islamists are inspired by the mission to regenerate their societies, and their goals and outlook are evolving through exposure to modernity as well as to other cultures.

The other option Lewis mentions–secularization–has long been prescribed for Muslim societies by many Western intellectuals and Muslim modernists. Since the Ataturk revolution in Turkey in the 1920s, they have been waiting anxiously to see if other Muslim societies are following in Ataturk’s footsteps. In The Emergence of Modern Turkey, Lewis explains that revolution in depth and detail and has expressed admiration for it in many of his writings. He does so again in What Went Wrong?

As an Ottoman military officer at the turn of the twentieth century, Ataturk read Thomas Carlyle and perhaps other Enlightenment writers and convened to their view that Islam was the cause of the Turks’ economic decline and military defeats at the hands of secular European powers. After liberating Turkey from allied occupation in 1922, the father of the new nation-state replaced the Turks’ Islamic law (Sharia) with the Swiss civil code and Italian penal code, Arabic script with the Roman alphabet and the Ottoman Islamic cap (fez) with the European brimmed hat. He shut down Islamic schools, outlawed religious orders (tariqat), forbade women’s veils in government offices and banned prayer calls from minarets. He taught Turkish elites to dance European style, listen to European music and flaunt courtship in public as do the Europeans. Through these and other breathtaking measures he sought to “unite Turkey with Europe in reality and materially.” (4)

Ataturk became a hero in the West, as would Mikhail Gorbachev after the Soviet perestroika six decades later. After all, their programs acknowledged the superiority of Western political ideology over its rival creed of the time. But neither Ataturk’s revolution nor Gorbachev’s counter-revolution has delivered the promised utopia. (Unlike Ataturk, though, Gorbachev did not force an alien culture on an unwilling people but simply knocked down a decrepit political and economic structure.)

The Turkish Republic, heir to the once mighty Ottoman empire, remains poor, unhappy and is frowned on in the West, as does Russia, heir to the once mighty Soviet empire. Instead of being part of Europe “in reality and materially,” Turkey is estranged from it “in reality and materially.” The Turks have been consistently rebuffed in their plea for membership in the European Union, as have the Russians in theirs for equal membership in the G-8. And the Turks have, additionally, become estranged from the Muslim world, which views their secular elites as turncoats.

Muslims are finding out, as are Russians, that a society’s political institutions grow better in its own soil, albeit with nourishment from the best borrowed additives they can absorb. Muslim societies need the nurturing of freedom and democracy, left out of the Ataturk model, but these can have meaning for them only in the context of social justice, kinship and community, which are the glue that holds Muslim societies together. And if Muslims secularize, they will do so more through cross-cultural interaction than through legal strictures or purges in the curricula of religious schools. Ataturk tried both unsuccessfully. It should be noted that secularism eluded the Holy Roman Empire, Calvin’s Genera and Puritan New England despite Jesus’s precept about keeping Caesar’s business separate from God’s.

Social and political change are like pregnancy; every woman has to go through it on her own, suffer its pain and savor its joys. Physicians, nurses and therapists are useful during the process, but they had better not try to precipitate the childbirth. The world can wait a little longer to see if Muslim societies can overcome their intellectual, economic and cultural deficiencies. As a religion, Islam today is the world’s largest (considering Protestantism and Catholicism separate faiths) and perhaps its most dynamic. As a civilization, it flourished, aged, declined and is struggling to revive. It has just come out of the era of colonial suppression and is struggling to ditch the stifling stranglehold of autocracies, often supported by Western governments (oops! scapegoating the West!). Civilizational change does not occur in election cycles.

Islam has an inner vitality that many other religions do not. Those who suggest that Islam is the cause of the decline of the Muslim civilization forget that it was the cause of the birth and growth of that civilization. The excitement of a new faith and the mission to share it with the rest of mankind is what sent poor and backward Arab, Turkic and Berber nomads into conquering lands and building mighty and prosperous empires. In spite of their illiteracy, prejudices, subordination of women and other disabilities (which need, of course, to be rectified), they triumphed over the contemporary world’s most advanced societies, such as the Byzantines and Persians.

Missions that catch the imagination, rather than cultural sophistication, have spurred the growth of civilizations. The primary mission that set Europeans off on global conquests was not really the desire to dominate other peoples or plunder their resources, although they did both. It was their passion to conquer nature and its secrets, aroused by the Renaissance and the Enlightenment, which plunged them into scientific and technological pursuits and sent them scouting around the world.

Ernest Gellner was not far from the truth when he said the English “acquired their empire in a state of absence of mind and … lost the empire with a similar lack of attention.” (5) Civilizations have life cycles. Some have died (Egyptian, Aztec). Some have rebounded after a decline (Japanese, Chinese). Some are struggling to rejuvenate after exhaustion (Indian, Islamic). The Western civilization, whose ascendancy was signaled by the rout of the Ottomans at the gates of Vienna in 1683, is still growing, though it appears to be slowing down. Its European node has apparently begun to fatigue.

A word about nodes of civilizations. Some civilizations have had more than one political and cultural center, each following its own life cycle. Islam had five major nodes: the Abbasid (750-1258) in southwest Asia; the Moorish (711-1492) in Spain and Sicily; the Ottoman (1281-1918) spanning Europe, Asia and Africa; the Safavid (1501 -1736) in Iran; and the Mughal (1526-1858) in the Indian subcontinent. These political and cultural realms rose and peaked at different times. In all of them except Spain, Islam endures as a faith although Muslim political and economic life lacks vitality. The Moorish “civilization” (as it is often called) has disappeared, however.

Determining the number of nodes in Western civilization requires a decision about its origins. Some of my philosopher friends say it began with the School of Athens or Hellenistic civilization. Well, Hellenism is long dead, and Socrates or Aristotle is rarely discussed outside college classrooms. Samuel Huntington, among others, traces the beginnings of the Western civilization to the “eighth and ninth centuries,” when Western Christianity began to take a distinct civilizational shape. (6) Some scholars tend to disagree. They say the Enlightenment has so dramatically changed the West’s culture and outlook that today’s liberal North Atlantic democracies cannot be considered an extension of the old Christian Europe. If there are church-going Christians in the contemporary West, they argue, so were there lots of agnostics and atheists in the Holy Roman Empire. It is the dominant culture and Weltanschauung that define the character and identity of a civilization. They point out that the character, not just of Western societies, but of Western Christianity has also changed beyond recognition since the French and American revolutions.

The argument reminds me of John Ashcroft. He prays in the office and declares at Bob Jones University: “We don’t have a king; we only have Jesus.” But he does not understand, as we have noted, why people die for what they believe (sometimes wrongly) to be God’s cause. There is a world of difference between his Weltanschauung and that of the Christians who died in droves for their faith before Christianity became the state religion in Europe under Constantine, and those who joined the Crusades, the expedition of Joan of Arc or the battles of the Thirty Years War.

In any case, I would settle for Huntington’s birth certificate for Western civilization, recognizing Charlemagne, rather than Constantine or Socrates, as its progenitor. In this setting, Western civilization appears to have two nodes: West European (including Australia and New Zealand) and American (including Canada).

The two wings are evolving at different rhythms. Western Europe has settled into an economic and cultural plateau with low rates of economic growth, shrinking population and military dependence on America. American society, it seems, is at a crossroads. Some of its key elements–the economy, science and technology and manpower-demonstrate its stamina. Other indices seem to betray its maturity or fatigue. The latter include the shrinkage of the core (European American) population group, corrosion of social and family values, political and business corruption, and loss of martial spirit, as reflected in, among other things, the fear of casualties and dependence on proxy fighters in warfare.

Lewis wrote in a 1997 article that Western civilization, like others before it, is going to yield to some other “dominant civilization.” (7) Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., is now worried that American society is ill danger of unraveling from cultural pluralism. (8) Huntington warns that universalization of Western values could precipitate a civilizational clash and “lead to defeat of the West.” (9) And the title of Pat Buchanan’s latest book–The Death of the West.’ How Dying Populations and Immigrant Invasions Imperil our Country and Civilization–encapsulates his concern and that of a whole host of other conservative intellectuals. (10)

One historian of civilizations has a timetable for the demise of Western civilization. Carroll Quigley predicts that it “will surely pass out of existence … perhaps before A.D. 2500.” (11) It is useful to recall George Orwell’s prediction about society degenerating into authoritarianism in 1984. Well, we in America made it through 1984 with an elected president and Congress and a free press (whatever their intrinsic worth) and need to take these apocalyptic forecasts with a grain of salt. But suppose Quigley’s foreboding came true, and in 2501 a historian set about finding out “what went wrong” with the West. He would probably browse through the works of Schlesinger, Huntington and Buchanan and conclude that Americans and Europeans brought it all on themselves. If only they had made more babies, done their own work themselves instead of relying on immigrants, and had not tangled with the “axis of evil” and other wicked foreign regimes, they would have done just fine.

We know, however, that the creeping “malaise” (President Carter might have spoken a bit too soon) of Western societies is the inevitable outcome of their maturation. People are having fewer children to maintain a good living standard, which entails dependence on the work of immigrants, who are fostering pluralism. And the expansion of Western economies is making the West more and more dependent on foreign resources and markets and resort to hegemonism and conflicts.

Our historian of 2501 would be right to point to population shrinkage, pluralism and foreign wars as the main causes of the West’s demise, as is Lewis when he cites Islamism, dictatorships and subordination of women, and so forth, as the causes of the travails of the Islamic civilization. So would be the physician who reports that his 92-year-old patient died of anemia and a bad cold. The main thing that is “wrong” with the Islamic civilization is its age. Its major “nodes” lasted an average of six centuries, longer than the Hellenistic or Roman civilizations and double the age of the modern West (counting from the Ottoman debacle at Vienna).

Striking, indeed, is the decline of the Islamic civilization. But so is Muslim youths’ struggle for its renewal. Some great societies, as we noted, could not overcome degeneracy; others have bounced back. Can the Muslims Make It? Just a suggestion for the title of Professor Lewis’s next book.

(1) Dan Eggen, “Ashcroft invokes religion in U.S. war on terrorism,” The Washington Post, February 20, 2002.

(2) Neil MacFarquhar, “Anti-Western and extremist views pervade Saudi schools,” The New York Times, October 19, 2001.

(3) S.N. Eisenstadt, “The Protestant ethic thesis in an analytical and comparative framework” The Protestant Ethic and Modernization: A Comparative View, S.N. Eisenstadt, ed. (New York: Basic Books, 1968), p. 4.

(4) Feroz Ahmad, The Making of Modern Turkey. (New York: Routledge, 1991), p. 82.

(5) Ernest Gellner, Nations and Nationalism (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press), 1983, pp. 42-43.

(6) Samuel P. Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations and the Making of the Worm Order (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1996), p. 50.

(7) Bernard Lewis, “The West and the Middle East,” Foreign Affairs, January/February 1997, p. 130.

(8) Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., The Disuniting of America: Reflections on a Multicultural Society (New York: W.W. Norton, 1992), pp. 66-67, 123.

(9) The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order, p. 311.

(10) Patrick Buchanan, The Death of the West: How Dying Populations and Immigrant Invasions Imperil Our Country and Civilization (New York: Thomas Dunne Books, 2002), pp. 3, 10.

(11) Carroll Quigley, The Evolution of Civilizations: An Introduction to Historical Analysis (Indianapolis: Liberty Press, 1979), pp. 127, 164-66.

Mustafa Malik Journalism fellow, German Marshall Fund of the United States

Courting tyranny to fight terrorism

San Francisco Chronicle
October 5, 2001

DURING WORLD WAR II, Winston Churchill told a group of Indian leaders about the Nazi threat to Britain’s “freedom and independence” and asked them to help recruit Indian soldiers for the war. The Indians said they would be glad to help. But could the prime minister just give them his “word of honor” that at some point the Indians themselves would be enjoying the freedom that they would fight to preserve in Britain? Many Indians never forgot the insult they felt from Churchill’s reply. British citizens had not elected him, said the arch-imperialist, “to preside over the downfall of the British Empire.”

The insensitivity to the nomenclature about Muslims currently being bandied about Washington conjures up the same response today as the European colonialists’ attitudes toward their subjects did in World War II.

The way it is taking shape, the anti-terrorist campaign the Bush administration has launched has the potential to degenerate into a clash between Islam and the West.

It could happen despite the Bush administration’s impressive success in rallying Muslim governments around the world behind the project. The reason: The whole enterprise betrays brazen insensitivity about Muslims.

It started with the name. When President Bush called the campaign a “crusade”, some Muslims believed he meant it. Others thought it was a Freudian slip. Then came the narcissistic exercise to give it a formal name. Its outcome is hardly any less offensive for Muslims, or any more reassuring about their fate in the enterprise.

Muslims had objected to calling it “Operation Infinite Justice” because their Scripture says only God’s justice can be infinite. Pentagon pundits wracked their brains for a week only to come up with “Operation Enduring Freedom.”

Most of the Arab and Muslim countries are ruled by autocrats against whom Muslims are fighting for their rights and freedom. Those autocrats routinely call rights activists “terrorists”, and they all have joined Bush’s anti- terrorism bandwagon.

The day the Pentagon announced the operation would be named “Freedom”, President Bush praised the repressive Saudi monarchy for its “strong statement” supporting it. When Saudi youths watched the news on TV about their king being recruited for a project about “freedom”, they fumed: “Whose freedom? “Billing it as a pursuit of “freedom” is also an irony for Western Muslims whose freedom is becoming its casualty. Vandalism, assaults, slurs and blazing stares have forced many of them to minimize their outdoor activities. More than 450 have been arrested for interrogation in the United States. New laws are being crafted to give the FBI sweeping powers to crack down on suspects, and they will be Muslims. In Europe, too, scores of Muslims are being detained, interrogated and thrown behind bars on “terrorism-related” grounds, among them a 23-year-old man in Clermont-Ferrand, France. He felt he was being harassed during at a security check and yelled “Long live bin Laden” to vent his anger. He received a six-month jail sentence for those four words. Many of those who would be targeted as “terrorists” outside the West are Islam’s minutemen and Nathan Hales. They have been fighting for freedom and autonomy against local tyranny. They are now pitted against a far greater adversary: the U.S.-led “Operation Enduring Freedom.”

Russian President Vladimir Putin is helping the anti-Taliban forces in Afghanistan and being paid with Chechen Muslim aspirations for freedom. The Bush administration, which had sharply criticized Russia for human rights abuses in Chechnya, has now demanded that Chechen leader Aslan Maskhadov settle with Putin for whatever he can get. Bush has learned that there are “al Qaeda terrorists” in Chechnya who need to be “brought to justice.”

No wonder the Chinese, who denounce the Uighurs struggling for autonomy as “Islamic terrorists”, have joined the anti-terrorism coalition enthusiastically. So have the Indians, who have been trying to crush the Kashmiri Muslim independence struggle.

The only thing that Arab autocracies have to show for their participation in the coalition is U.S. pressure behind the new Palestinian-Israeli peace talks. During the Persian Gulf War, too, the Americans had promised a Palestinian-Israeli peace initiative. Since then, Palestine has seen more Jewish settlements and more Muslim graves.

Many Muslims, who denounced the United States for supporting their oppressors, will now probably see it as joining those oppressors. And President Bush could have his “crusade,” unless he can keep his anti-terrorism campaign from being used as a tool for state terrorism against freedom-loving Muslims.

US Pushes Pakistan Toward Danger Zone

Boston Globe
September 19, 2001

MY DAUGHTER, ALIA, WAS SHAKEN WHEN SHE CAME HOME FROM SCHOOL THE OTHER DAY. A MAN HAD ASKED HER FRIEND, AN 11TH-GRADER, ABOUT HIS PARENTS’ NATIONALITY. THE BOY SAID, “PAKISTANI,” AND THE MAN SPAT ON HIM. A friend in Frederick, Md., inquired if I was OK. She had been discussing last week’s terrorist attacks with a friend who said, “We should find every Muslim in the country and kill him.”

As war on Afghanistan looms, Pakistanis in the United States are as worried about the fate of Pakistan as they are about their own safety. And Muslims in general are concerned about the future of the Muslim world.

Pakistan has already paid a price because of pro-American military generals. In 1958, a Pakistani general, after a trip to Washington, overthrew our first government under a democratic constitution. My mentor, Nurul Amin, led a democratic movement of nine political parties for a decade. We implored the United States, through its embassy, to help us restore democracy, which alone could have saved the old Pakistan.

We never received a response.

Another pro-American Pakistani military dictator was arranging Henry Kissinger’s secret trip to China in July 1971 during the very week politicians from the country’s eastern province were asking Indians for military aid for its secession. They realized that independence of what would become Bangladesh was their only way out of Pakistani army repression.

And look whom the United States has now pressured into joining its war against Afghanistan – Pakistan’s latest military ruler, who has been under domestic pressure to restore democracy. General Pervez Musharraf has promised elections, which he can forget now.

At stake in Pakistan, however, is more than elections. Most Pakistanis are devout Muslims with deep sympathies for the people of Afghanistan. The Musharraf regime’s collaboration in the US war against the Afghans could trigger an Islamist-led upheaval of unprecedented proportions, whose outcome nobody can predict. In effect the United States is pushing the Pakistanis down the slope it had sent the Iranians tumbling, only to regret later.

In the 1953 the Iranians elected a government under secular Prime Minister Mohammed Mosaddeq. Soon the Eisenhower administration gave Mosaddeq “the choice” between joining an anticommunist alliance (Southeast Asia Treaty Organization) and incurring American displeasure.

The prime minister hesitated, and then-US Brigadier General H. Norman Schwartzkopf and CIA Director Allen Dulles engineered a coup in Iran, replacing the affable, Sorbonne-educated democrat with the ruthless autocrat Muhammad Riza Shah. A Bangladeshi saying has it that you need a thorn to take out a thorn. It was left to the Islamist leader Ayatollah Khomeini to end the shah’s reign of terror. The Khomeini revolution became an American nightmare.

Should Pakistan come under Islamist rule because of its collaboration in this war, other Muslim countries could be swept by the same tide as they become destabilized by the war.

Paul Wolfowitz, the deputy secretary of defense, has vowed to “end the states who sponsor terrorism.”

All who live in southern Iraq, now under the no-fly zone, are Shiite Muslims. If Iraq is on Wolfowitz’s list, we could end up with an Iraqi Shiite theocracy next to the Shiite theocracy of Iran. The Islamist wave would also stalk other Muslim countries that may be affected by the war.

War cannot “smoke out” terrorists. It will invigorate them, while Muslims are hounded and social life disrupted in the United States.

The ghastly terrorists and their sponsors who visited this tragedy on the United States must, of course, be brought to justice. Tackling terrorism in the future is a different problem requiring different remedies, the foremost of which is resolving the Palestinian-Israeli dispute.

Historically, the United States has coddled dictatorships in Pakistan and extolled democracy in neighboring India, and occasionally played one against the other. The two countries, feuding over Kashmir and other issues, will remain important to US strategic interests. The United States can best serve those interests by engaging in peace making between them, instead of causing instability in the nuclear-armed subcontinent.

Islam in Europe: quest for a paradigm

Middle East Policy Council
Summer 2001

My guide at the Alhambra, the fabulous Moorish palace in Granada, Spain, drew my attention to its lush gardens livened by a gentle breeze. Did I know why the gardens were square-shaped? asked Mohamed Yusef Garcia, a native Spaniard who had converted to Islam. I said I did not. Historically, he said, four has been Islam’s “lucky number.” Islam says God has sent down four holy books. There are four principal angels and four “rightly guided” caliphs. The Prophet Muhammad’s fourth military campaign won him the Kaaba, the holiest Islamic shrine in Mecca…. My friend went on and on.

Another example, I thought to myself, of how people mythologize religion. Yet I remembered Yusef Garcia a month later during a luncheon in Bonn, Germany, with Hasan Ozdogan, president of the Islamic Council for Germany, an umbrella organization for 38 Muslim groups. A native of Turkey, Ozdogan reminded me that four centuries ago, in 1683, the forebears of today’s Germans and Austrians had thrown back an Ottoman Muslim advance toward Western Europe. “We just had to take the plane to get in,” he added with a grin. (1)

Western Europe today has a Muslim population of 10 to 12 million. Most of these Muslims or their parents or spouses were brought in from Africa and Asia as workers in the 1950s and 1960s to meet the labor shortages of the booming postwar West European economies. Today France has 4 million Muslims, Germany 3 million and Britain 1.5 million; Italy, Belgium and the Netherlands have about a half-million each. In other West European countries the figures hover in the six-digit range. (2)

The emergence of burgeoning Muslim communities in Western Europe marks not only the fourth century of the Ottomans’ westward thrust to which Ozdogan alluded. It also represents the fourth Muslim tide into Europe. In this article I will examine the outlook for this new Muslim presence in the European heartland. Is this fourth wave going to be, to use Yusef Garcia’s term, a lucky one for Islam? In a democratic Europe, an anti-Muslim pogrom seems quite unlikely even though prolonged economic crisis could change the situation. (3) Unless that happens, the question that will decide the fate of Islam in Western Europe is whether Muslims will preserve a separate religious or cultural niche or assimilate into native communities. To explore this question, it will be useful to look into the nature of the challenges Islam has been facing in Europe.

The first Islamic phase in Europe consisted in seven centuries of Moorish civilization in Spain, which was blotted out by Catholic Spaniards after they captured Granada in 1492. In the thirteenth century, Tatar Muslims set up a principality in Russia and part of Eastern Europe, known by the pejorative label, Khanate of the Golden Horde. The Russians gobbled up the Tatar domain in the fifteenth century, but the Tatars retain their Muslim identity. The Ottoman Turks of Anatolia brought the third Muslim tide into Europe in the fourteenth century. Istanbul is the only European territory that Turkey, the successor state to the Ottoman Empire, still holds.

On all three previous occasions, the Christian faith was Muslims’ main credal adversary. Nationalism had yet to be born as an inspirational force behind political and military contests. The defense and dissemination of Christianity was Europeans’ rallying cry against Muslims. In fact, the final and decisive phase of Spanish wars against the Moors, the reconquista, began after Pope Clement V had issued a decree saying the presence of Muslims on Christian soil was “an insult to the Creator.” (4)

By the time the Ottomans and Tatars emerged on the European scene, Turks and Mongol Tatars were portrayed as new threats to Christianity. John Calvin, for example, warned Christian Europe that Muhammad, “apostate as he was, has alienated the Turks from Christ” and was making them “worship the devil in the name of God? Prayers were offered in churches to spare Christian Europe from Muslim “hordes.”

A clue to the outlook for the West European Islamic niche could be found at the continent’s other end, inhabited by 8.2 million Muslims. (6) They are the descendants of converts from Ottoman times or belong to Turkish stock and are spread over northern Cyprus, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Kosovo, Albania, Macedonia and Bulgaria. From the vantage point of their co-religionists to the west (and in the Muslim world), the problem facing them is not their identity or culture. Balkan and East European Muslims proudly profess their Muslim identity. And few Muslim groups elsewhere have paid such a heavy price for their Muslim culture in blood and tears as have the Turkish Cypriots, Bosnians, Kosovar Albanians and now Macedonian Albanians.

Yet the content of their faith has markedly declined over the centuries. Balkan and East European Muslims are among the most secular in the world. Some Europeans have an esoteric term for it: “Bosnianization.” It is used for Muslims who would die for their Islamic identity but won’t bother to practice the faith. Some West European Muslims worry whether their posterity may become “Bosnianized.”

Secularization means “a decline of religion both in society and in the minds of individuals.” (7) Until recently, most leading sociologists generally agreed with Max Weber and Talcott Parsons that secularization was triggered in the West by economic and social modernization, which, in turn, has been a gift of the Protestant work ethic. Protestant “workaholism,” according to this argument, was generated by the Reformation concept of man’s individual responsibility to God.

Some of the later social anthropologists, including Peter Berger, Robert Bellah and David Martin, (8) have modified and embellished the Weberian theory. The most interesting of their theses traces the secularization process to the inception of the monotheistic tradition. It says during the times when man lived under a primitive religious order, his life from dawn to dusk was part of the cosmic order; he had no conception of his individual self, no sense of alienation.

Bellah says:

Primitive religions are on the whole oriented to a single cosmos; they know nothing of a wholly different world relative to which the actual world is utterly devoid of value. They are concerned with the maintenance of personal, social, and cosmic harmony and with attaining specific goods — rain, harvest, children, health — as men have always been. But the overriding goal of salvation that dominates world-rejecting religions is    almost absent in primitive religion, and life after death tends to be a shadowy semiexistence in some vaguely designated place in the single world?

Man’s separation from the sacred space, according to this theory, began with Abraham. The patriarch of monotheism differentiated the sacred world above from a mundane one below. Moses accelerated the process when he made the covenant with God, placing the “chosen” Israelites above the rest of the human race.

Weber argues that man’s “individualization” culminated with Martin Luther. Luther tore man away even from the society with which Moses and the Catholics had left him, making him directly accountable to God. From Luther, Enlightenment thinker Rene Descartes was only a short step away, waiting to snap man’s ties to God, leaving him in the solitary pursuit of happiness through the acquisition of goods here on earth.

Bellah and others acknowledge that Muhammad, nearly a millennium before Luther, had preached the individual’s direct responsibility to God, but they suggest that the Islamic message of individualism got trapped in the tribal Arab social structure. Tradition kept the Muslim tied as ever to his tribal community. The Islamic concept of individual freedom, Bellah argues, “was too modern to succeed. The necessary social infrastructure did not yet exist to sustain it.” (10) In others words, Islam was meant to be the Christian reformation. The bedouins just did not get it.

The thought crossed my mind during my 1998 and 1999 research trips to south-East Europe. On Cyprus I saw that Turkish Cypriots were significantly more secular than Greek Cypriots (who chose their archbishop as their first president). In Athens a so-called “Greek Turk,” a graduate student in chemistry, said Muslims everywhere are suffering because of their “backward, religious outlook.” In Istanbul members of the Turkish intelligentsia offer you drinks at 11 a.m. and mock their “Islamic brothers” in the Arab world to flaunt their secularity. Bosnians and Albanians are known as models of secular Muslims. The post-communist rediscovery of their Islamic identity has not, notes a French specialist on the Balkans, triggered “a true religious revival.” (11)

It appears that in Western Europe, too, Bosnianization of Muslims is well underway. To be sure, many mosques in Western Europe are teeming with worshipers. But about 90 percent of those congregations are immigrant Muslims who grew up in the Middle Eastern, North African or South Asian Islamic religious and cultural environments. (12) The European-born second- and third-generation Muslims, who make up 50 percent of the West European Muslim population, (13) are a sparse sight in mosques, often forming the tail ends of the last rows of the congregations.

In Germany, according to a survey by Aziz Gardezi, only 4 percent of the European-born Muslims pray “regularly” or “tartly regularly.” (14) In Marseilles, France, Algerian intellectual Toumi Azzedine said, “Not more than 6 to 8 percent” of the beurs, French-born children of North African Muslim immigrants, pray “regularly” or “fairly regularly.” (15) In Amsterdam, a Pakistani studying Dutch immigration policy said, “About 30 percent of Muslim children go to the mosque on weekends with their fathers, but once they are 15 or 16 most of them stop [going to the mosque].” (16)

I picked prayer to measure secularity because “secularization,” as a social scientist notes, “is indicated by a decline in church attendance.” (17) Indeed, prayer is the most representative symbol of Muslim piety. Secondly, it is a common yardstick to compare the levels of secularity between Muslims and Christians, as both faith groups consider praying an essential religious requirement. And from a comparison of prayer statistics between West European Christians and European-born Muslims, one can conclude their levels of secularity are about the same. The percentage of West European Christians considered “core members” of a church is 23 percent in Northern Ireland, 13 percent in Britain, 12 percent in Germany, 9 percent each in Belgium and Portugal and 5 percent each in France and Norway. (18) “Algerians in France,” observes a researcher, “are no more Muslim than the French are Catholic.” (19) He could say the same thing about second and third generation Muslims all over Western Europe.

Many West European intellectuals — Muslim and non-Muslim — say the increasing secularization of Muslims proves the Weberian theory of secularization through modernization. They included Muslim intellectuals Mohammed Arkoun, Tahar Be Jelloun and Gardezi, and native European scholars on Islam Remi Leveau, Oliver Roy and Lucette Valensi. Eventually, said Valensi, director of the Paris think-tank Institut d’Etudes de l’Islam et des Societes du Monde Musulman (IISMM), Muslims will assimilate like the other immigrants who have poured into France since the end of the nineteenth century. (20) Gardezi, a journalist at Deutschewelle radio in Cologne, argued that the assimilation will take place in two stages. Muslims will “first secularize, and then assimilate.” (21)

Their prognosis and prediction do not, however, explain the current wave of religious revival in some of the modernizing and modern societies including the United States, Israel, India and parts of the Muslim world. Neither do they shed light on the secularity of the Hellenistic and Sinic civilizations, or of Europe before Charlemagne. Modernity did not touch any of those societies. And none of them knew of Martin Luther or dabbled in monotheism.

Secularization apparently has many mothers, and one of them is exposure to other cultures and cross-cultural interaction. It has promoted secularity in premodern (Hellenistic) as well as modern (German) societies. A groundbreaking survey conducted in Detroit by Gerhard Lenski showed that people who migrate from rural ethno-religious settings into urban centers mostly lose their religious sensitivity. This transformation, explained Lenski, occurs through the segmentation of their lives between the secular sphere of factory and civic institutions and the “religious” sphere of the church and family.

At his workplace and in the mall the immigrant is thrown into the midst of people from different cultural backgrounds and constrained first to tolerate, and then respect, the religious customs of others. Eventually the religious sphere of his life is “compartmentalized,” and he becomes used to “a common code of moral norms … shared by all the various faiths represented in the community,” which is what secularization means. (22)

Berger and other sociologists have come to similar conclusions. When people from different cultural backgrounds come in contact with one another, says Berger, their “different lifestyles, values and beliefs begin to mingle,” and they realize that “maybe these other people have a point or two.” (23) The exposure has a rapid and dramatic effect when it occurs in a modern environment. Normandy is perhaps the most conservative Catholic region in all France. Gabriel LeBras, the pioneer French sociologist of religion, studied the secularization of rural migrants from Normandy to Paris. The seduction of secularity begins, he says, on the platform of the Gare du Nord, the Paris train station where the arriving migrants have the first glimpse of the “eternal city.” (24)

Muslim immigrants and their offspring are not escaping the seduction of cultural pluralism in modern Western Europe. Mohammed Ahnif, a Moroccan immigrant in Amsterdam, said, sadly, that he and his wife worked hard to teach their four children prayers, Islamic etiquette, reading the Quran and the life of the Prophet. But then “they go to school and the street and mix with other [non-Muslim] children, and come home and watch TV.” Two of Ahnif’s three sons, who are in the upper teens, “pray only when I’m home,” Only his 15-year-old daughter is punctual about prayers and other Islamic rites. He is not sure if his sons will pray at all when they leave home. He blames their “indifference” to religion on their living “in the midst of Christians, atheists, homosexuals and the TV.” (25)

A hard core of Muslim youth throughout Western Europe is devoted to Islam. They practice the faith punctually; propagate it among secular Muslims and, occasionally, non-Muslims; conduct Islamic seminars and workshops; and campaign for Islamic causes. Some of them were born in Europe of parents who are lackadaisical about Islamic practices. But their number is small.

In Berlin I attended a meeting of the local branch of the Islamic Youth of Germany, which is engaged in the dissemination of Islam in that country. I asked all 14 participants in the meeting whether they thought the outlook for Islam’s resisting the secularizing influence of Europe was “excellent,” “good” or “dim.” Eleven of them answered “dim.” (26)

The secularizing trend notwithstanding, it appears Muslims are strongly resisting the second step in the Gardezi recipe for their assimilation: the assimilation itself. Most of the secularizing or secular West European Muslims I met showed little inclination toward melting into native cultures. They mostly socialize among Muslims. Only about 3 percent of Muslim youth marry non-Muslims in Britain. The percentage appears somewhat higher in France and Germany, but not by much. (27)

Young West European Muslims talk about integration, by which they mean abiding by the laws of the native countries and having good relations with everybody but preserving and fostering their Muslim cultural life. Many native Europeans spurn such argumentation. For them integration means becoming part of native cultures except perhaps keeping Muslim names, praying and having doner kebab or humus for meals. But the Turks in Berlin, Algerians in Paris, or Pakistanis in Bradford, England, are no more willing to assimilate with their secular Christian neighbors than are Bosnian, Kosovar or Macedonian Muslims with theirs.

“Muslims,” said Muhammad Anwar, professor of ethnic and racial studies at the University of Warwick in England, “will remain a distinct layer in the social makeup of Europe.” He discounted the argument that education and prosperity would promote Muslim assimilation into West European societies. “Education and economic well-being,” he argued, “give you greater confidence in yourself and your cultural identity.” (28)

The main reason Muslims have so far resisted assimilation is a unique feature of Muslim life: the bond of the umma, the Islamic community. It came into a spectacular, though somewhat misleading, display during protests over The Satanic Verses, which denigrates Muhammad’s family; the ban on headscarves in French schools; and ethnic cleansing in Bosnia and Kosovo. Muslims — mostly young and secular — from different ethnic, national and age groups participated in those protests in England and France.

No other religious group except the Jews has demonstrated such multiethnic, multiracial and multinational ties. The Jews are a small community in today’s Western Europe, and hence Muslims remain the only faith group tied across ethnic and linguistic boundaries by a communal bond. The Jewish bond stems partly from their tribal origin, partly from their history of persecution and partly from their mission to support Israel.

The umma solidarity has a different source, and it has been nurtured by a different set of circumstances. Issues such as the publication of The Satanic Verses and a ban on Muslim headscarves made a dramatic show of Muslim communal spirit (as do Israel’s troubles among Jews in the West), but they are misleading because they fail to spotlight the real nature and source of umma solidarity. The places to look for that solidarity are the coffee shops near the Omar Mosque in Paris, the weekly Quranic exegesis and refreshment gathering of the Muslim Youth of Germany, the fundraising campaign for an Islamic school in Granada and the lively interaction on the myriad Islamic sites on the Internet.

It also reveals itself in the everyday incidents in the life of West European Muslims. On the afternoon of September 30, 2000, outside the Amersfoort train station in the Netherlands, I met four young men, three born in the Netherlands and one in Morocco. Of the three Netherlanders, one was born of Surinamese parents, one of Turkish parents and the third of a Turkish father and Dutch mother. They had been just acquaintances for a year until two weeks previously, when “a bad incident” made them good friends. The Moroccan had been denied access to a discotheque on the alleged ground it had been “full.” When he saw some native Dutch were allowed in later, he telephoned the other three, and the next day all four went to the disco, demanded an explanation of the previous night’s incident, got an apology from the management and were allowed to enjoy an evening there free of charge.

None of them prayed except on Eids and some Fridays. They spoke Dutch among themselves, and spoke different languages and ate different kinds of foods at home. What prompted the Moroccan to ask the others’ support on the disco incident, and the others to give it? “We are Muslims,” replied the son of the Turkish-Dutch parents. After an uncomfortable pause, the Moroccan added, apologetically, that they should not, after all, be going to the disco “too often,” but will settle down and become “better Muslims” later in life.

Everywhere in Western Europe Muslims belonging to different racial or ethnic stocks, speaking different native languages, dressing differently and eating different foods are joining hands to build mosques and Islamic schools; praying together; celebrating Eids together; attending one another’s weddings, picnics and fast-breaking (iftar) parties during the holy month of Ramadan; gathering for Quranic readings; and organizing Chechnya relief campaigns.

The Mevlana Mosque in Berlin’s Kreuzberg district has a coffee shop astride the gate. After the late-afternoon (asr) prayer, one can see Turkish, Bosnian, Pakistani and native German Muslims sitting around the table, sipping Turkish coffee and sharing jokes, despite difficulty in communicating in German. An Islamic library on one side of the mosque, too, would contain an ethnic rainbow of Muslims browsing through books. Then at the other end of the mosque, a Turkish teacher would be seen frantically trying to accomplish the seemingly impossible: Teaching the articles of faith, prayers, etc., to small children speaking three different mother tongues.

There are almost as many Hindus or Catholics in the world as Muslims. But one does not see Hindus from India, Nepal, South Africa and the Caribbean socializing and struggling for common causes in Pads or Frankfurt. And Catholics from Poland, Italy, Spain and Mexico may be living in the same apartment complex in East London for a year and not know one another’s names.

The Muslim umma spirit originates in numerous Quranic references. The Creator expects the Muslim to be an integral part of his community and society. His responsibilities as an individual involve his duties to his family, kin, orphan, the needy, the wayfarer (29). He is enjoined by God over and over to strive for justice in society and told that he has been created as a member of a nation or tribe, (30) so he appreciates human fellowship. And he is designated by God as His “vice-regent on Earth.” (31)

Although Muslims over the centuries have jettisoned many Quranic caveats, the umma tradition endures. It does so because, apart from the stipulations in the scripture, history has played a seminal role in fostering communal solidarity. In Muhammad’s time the young Muslim community, drawn from different tribes and regions, was in constant danger of annihilation by its enemies. The key to its survival lay in sticking together. “Faith,” as Bernard Lewis aptly observes, “replaced blood as the social bond.” (32)

Over the centuries, Muslim caliphs, sultans and emperors created multiracial armies to build multinational empires, which were administered by multiethnic bureaucracies. Later, as European colonialism engulfed Muslim domains, peoples in far-flung lands united in spirit, if not physically, to fight common enemies under the Islamic banner. Above all, throughout the past millennium and a half, the core Islamic tenets, values and rituals remain unchanged, binding the believers from Morocco to Indonesia and from Canada to Yemen with a common spiritual thread. Often a simple Islamic greeting — Assalaamu alaikum (peace be upon you) — builds trust and starts camaraderie among strangers that none of the modern communication techniques can.

During a research trip to Iraq in December 1991, I found myself in the company of one of Saddam Hussein’s monitors every time I went out to interview people. Often I would be attached to a monitor along with one or two Western reporters. Some of those reporters had spent years in the Arab world and spoke fluent Arabic, which I didn’t. The problem was that few Iraqis would open up to them.

But if I approached the Iraqis scrambling up my English with Arabic, they would break into broad smiles, greet me with ahalan wa sahlan (welcome to you) and kaifa haluk (how are you?), offer me coffee and then answer my questions. Sometimes they would ask me to go back for a meal, signaling that they would want to talk with me when I was not being stalked by a monitor. Alexandra Avakion, then with Newsweek magazine, asked me one day to tell her the “secret code” I was using to get the Iraqis to talk. I said it was assalaamu alaikum.

The Muslims who have migrated to Western Europe brought along the umma tradition with them and are passing it on to their children. It is now a salient part of European Muslim culture. Assalam alaikum sets up instant bonding among immigrants from diverse countries and cultures and native converts to Islam. Yet the Muslim umma tradition, too, marks a deep cultural divide in Western Europe. It stamps Turks, Punjabis, Moroccans and Berbers with the Islamic diacritical mark, making them victims of violence and job discrimination in Western Europe, especially in France and Germany.

In France, neighborhood residents as well as public officials oppose mosque building although the law allows it. The last time Muslims could obtain local government permission for a full-fledged mosque was in the early 1990s, when the mosque of Lyons was built after the Saudi government directly lobbied the French government for it. In many schools, Muslim girls are barred from wearing headscarves while Christian children are allowed to wear the cross and Jewish boys the skullcap.

Germany allows Christian and Jewish religious instruction in schools, but not Islamic courses. In parts of Western Europe complaints are rife of Muslim women being denied jobs because of their headscarves, Muslims being served last in stores, denied the membership of a local club, jeered at in the street, asked to “go back to Turkey.” The news media have a proclivity to link Muslims’ troubles with the law to “Islamic fundamentalism.”

Because Muslims themselves tend to view the world through the lenses of their faith, they often attribute these incidents to “Islamophobia,” paranoia about Islam. “The Crusader mentality is the main problem” facing West European Muslims, said Mehmet Sabri Erbakan, president of the Cologne-based National View (Milli Gorus) organization. (33) He said the fear of Islam once evoked in Europe by Ottoman and Moorish conquests has been reborn with the growth of Muslim communities in many parts of Europe. Rashid Benaissa, of UNESCO publications in Paris, agreed and added that French liberalism is a “hoax,” that the French government subsidizes Catholic and Jewish schools while denying the same privilege to Muslim schools. (34) (The problem, said a French government official, is that Catholic and Jewish schools receiving government subsidy agree to accept students from other faith groups, but Muslims resist this legal requirement.)

In reality the Islamic faith is not a main concern of Muslims’ detractors in Western Europe. Secularity has stretched deep roots in West European societies, which so far have proved impervious to the winds of religious revival that are sweeping parts of Asia, Africa and the Americas. It appears that the old Weberian secularization theory still holds on the continent of its birth.

Muslims, as other non-European minorities, are victims of a unique element of European culture: racism. Racist xenophobia has revived there with a vengeance since the end of the Cold War. A Europe-wide study conducted in 1998 found that 48 percent of the French described themselves as “racist” or “fairly racist.” Fifty-five percent did so in Belgium, and more than 30 percent in Germany, Britain, the Netherlands and Italy. (35)

Resurgent racism seems to have been Western Europe’s answer to the failure of its older moral and social paradigms. After the failure of Christianity, Nazism, Fascism, socialism and communism and the decline of nationalism (under the pressure of European Union integration), race is the only cultural root many of them feel they have left. Many non-European societies that have suffered the setbacks of nationalist experiments or economic models have turned to religion. But Enlightenment liberalism has wiped religion out of Western Europe more thoroughly than almost anywhere else.

As the largest of Western Europe’s immigrant cultural groups, Muslims bear the brunt of racist campaigns, which target them as an amalgam of non-European races molded by Islam into a cultural category. The racist-cultural, rather than religious, nature of those campaigns is reflected by the fact that they do not spare other non-white minorities.

In Brandenburg, Germany, a black Christian worker was the first victim of violence following the fall of the Berlin Wall. Throughout eastern Germany, Vietnamese, Jews and Mozambicans — but not the Muslim Turks — are the main targets of the neo-Nazi and skinhead extremists.

The situation became so bad in the early 1990s, recalled Czarina Wilpert, a sociologist at the Technical University in Berlin, that a group of Japanese industrialists who had come to explore investment opportunities in eastern Germany were chased away by skinheads who thought they were Vietnamese! (36)

Yet, in many parts of Europe, Muslims are prime targets of the xenophobes because of their long history of antagonism with Europe and especially European racism. The Muslims were, so to speak, “present at the creation” of European racism and are among its oldest and most irreconcilable adversaries.

As an ideology implying the superiority of one race over another, racism was born of European colonialism and slavery introduced into the New World by European settlers. These colonialists and slaveholding plantation owners in the Americas came to believe that their mastery over other races proved their intellectual superiority over them. Intellectual excellence, it was argued, enabled them to advance in the sciences and technologies, build armies, conquer colonies, and organize industries and eventually dominate other races. Intellectuals and polemicists summoned Charles Darwin’s theory of natural selection to claim the white race’s genetic superiority over the rest of mankind. Social sciences have since debunked the theory of white racial superiority, but many white Europeans, including intellectuals, continue to believe in it.

Muslims have contested European colonialism and claims of superiority in more places and more vigorously than any other religious and racial categories. It began in the mid-seventh century when Arab Muslims conquered Syria, Egypt and North Africa from Christian Byzantium. But the contest reached its widest dimension during colonial times, when the entire Muslim world except Turkey, Afghanistan, Iran and Arabia came under European colonial rule.

Since the unraveling of communism, an enemy of both Islam and Europe, these two old adversaries are once again faced with one another. Muslim immigrants and their offspring rake up the old fears in European minds that Islam, in Samuel Huntington’s words, “has put the survival of the West in doubt, and it has done that at least twice,” under the Ottomans and Moors. (37)

The perception of the threat is mutual, as one is reminded daily by the parallel lifestyles reflecting the contradictory worldviews of Muslims and native Europeans. In cities and towns with sizable Muslim populations, Muslims live in separate neighborhoods with halal meat shops, mosques, Quran schools, Islamic bookstores and so forth. Their social outlook and priorities of life are starkly different from those of native Europeans.

The typical European is a devoted member of his community, the nation. But his relationships are essentially deliberate, flowing from a rational paradigm. The Muslim’s relationships with his religious and cultural groups, flowing from the paradigm of the umma, are essentially organic. The European lives with his nuclear family and visits with, or has visits from, his relatives once or twice a year. The Muslim lives in the same neighborhood or town with his extended family and goes away on vacation once or twice a year.

Both the Frenchman and the Muslim supported the NATO war against the Serbs in Kosovo, the Frenchman because the Serbs were killing other Europeans, the Muslim because they were killing other Muslims. Both support the creation of a Palestinian state, the Frenchman because he believes the Palestinians have the right of national self-determination, the Muslim because he believes Palestinian Muslims need to be freed from Jewish repression. Both resent American hegemony, the Frenchman because of the perceived American dominance over Europe, the Muslim because of the perceived American dominance over the Muslim world.

The awareness of this cultural cleavage has been intensified by the realization on both sides that there is no easy escape from it. In the colonial era, the French in Algeria lived their separate lives away from the natives, as did the British in India. But in the backs of their minds they knew that if things got rough they could always go home, and they did. Europe today is home to both Europeans and Muslims. Offers of financial incentives by France and Germany have failed to induce immigrants to return to their native countries. Foreign-born Muslims are a passing generation, anyway. The 50 percent of European Muslims born in Western Europe assert their European identity.

Increasingly, the native intelligentsia and public-policy planners are betraying the awareness that ignoring Muslims and their cultural demands would further complicate rather than alleviate social problems. In Britain, the Netherlands and Scandinavian countries, pluralist (or multicultural) political institutions have been put in place, allowing Muslims and native populations to live their parallel cultural lives. In the rest of Western Europe, too, native intelligentsia and the public appear slowly to be opening up to Muslim and other non-European minorities.

Globalization and integration are gradually relaxing French-German resistance to the concept of autonomy for minority cultures. Attributes of national sovereignty, a hallmark of the liberal state, have been transferred to the EU. The supranational union now has jurisdiction over currency, monetary policy, security measures, border control, human rights, immigration and asylum policies, and so forth, which were once vested solely in the sovereign West European states. As a result, cultural groups are dealing directly with transnational agencies over the heads of their national governments. The legitimacy of cultural interests is more and more recognized by these agencies, forcing national governments to do so. And national governments are feeling increasing pressures from the EU to concede the cultural rights of Muslims and other minorities.

In the fall of 2000, the French Interior Ministry buttonholed eight Muslim community leaders to help devise a plan to enable Muslims to ritually sacrifice animals during their annual festival of sacrifice (Eid al-Adha). Farouk Laazouzi, imam of an elegant Saudi-built mosque in the French town of Evry, was “surprised” when he received the invitation to work on the plan. The government had persistently denied permission for the sacrifice, citing health concerns even though it is a religious obligation for Muslims. The Tunisian-born imam had since learned that the European Commission had put pressure on the French government to accommodate the practice. The Muslim group was asked to develop procedures that would satisfy the government’s health regulations and Muslim religious ritual. (38)

About the same time, German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder appointed a commission to recommend an “integrative immigration policy” by summer 2001. Germany is officially known as a “non-immigration country”: children born in Germany of non-German immigrants and educated in German public schools do not have the right to citizenship, but ethnic Germans from anywhere have the automatic right of return to German citizenship even though some of them do not speak a word of German. Turks, Balkan Muslims and other immigrants have been pressing the German government and Bundestag to ease restrictions on their acquiring German citizenship. Some of the restrictions have already been eased. In January the Bundestag passed a law granting citizenship to children of German-born “foreigners,” who have lived in Germany for eight years or more.

Brend Knopf, the spokesman for the German Labor Ministry, said the Schroeder government was trying to expose “the myth that we’re not an immigration country,” but it would take some time to do so. Germany has always received foreigners, he said, and the German population is ethnically mixed. “In Berlin alone we have 160 religions,” he said, showing me around the thick-walled, steel-and-stone building that Hitler had built to house his Ministry of Propaganda. “If you visit Bremen or Hamburg, they will say, `Here’s our mosque; come take a look. There’s our synagogue.’ Things are changing.” (39) Knopf’s pitch about racial coexistence made from what is still jokingly called “Goebbels’ office” marked a change indeed!

The same day, however, a German court sentenced a neo-Nazi to 18 months in jail for participating in an attack on a group of Vietnamese in the town of Lassan. Four of his 14 accomplices already had received sentences for that crime. (40) Despite persistent efforts to erase it, racism remains ingrained in German society. However, Germany’s continuing labor shortage, as well as its integration with the EU, is slowly sensitizing Germans, especially the educated youth, to the need for coexistence with others.

An interesting aspect of the continual violence committed against Muslims and other foreigners in Germany is the almost total absence of college-educated youth in it. None of the nearly 50 German university students I interviewed indicated his or her sympathy for the perpetrators of violence. Several of those students said, in almost identical terms, that Germany would not be able to do without foreigners and was heading toward a “pluralist society.” Rainer Meunz, an authority on immigration trends at Berlin’s Humboldt University, said “pluralism is inevitable” in Germany and Europe. “With 1.2 children [per woman], we can’t do without foreigners,” he added. “We’ll look more and more brown. We’ll look eventually like California.” (41)

Some of the conservative West European intellectuals and statesmen find pluralism an attractive option for a different reason. Among them is Britain’s Lord Hylton, who wrote to me in 1998 to say he opposed Turkey’s membership in the EU, because, among other reasons, Muslim Turks would have difficulty integrating into West European societies “based on Christian values.” (42) Last November he said he is “very much in favor” of cultural pluralism, which is “working well” in Britain. (43) One of his colleagues in the British House of Lords, who did not want to be identified, said Hylton and conservative Christians like him ardently support pluralism because “they would never accept Muslims and other colored people in their white English society.”

Muslims in Western Europe generally are excited by the thought of pluralism. Most embrace the concept for the same reason some conservative Christians support it: It would allow Muslims to build Islamic institutions and preserve the Islamic lifestyle, which would be denied under an assimilationist social model. Like Christian conservatives, they hope pluralism will prevent the contamination of their culture.

The problem is that pluralism promotes, instead of preventing, cultural contamination. When people from different faiths or cultural groups come together under a common project — be it working on a welfare program, participating in a housing committee or campaigning for a parliamentary candidate — they focus not only on the project but on one another’s work, manners, attitude and so forth. They begin to look at their own customs, values and beliefs through those others’ eyes and realize everything they believe may not sound plausible.

As this process continues, an individual’s beliefs and values become relativized. Pluralism exacts a price from its practitioner, which rises with the increase in the level of his cultural tolerance. That price is his belief system and, in a deeper sense, his worth.

“[T]he totally tolerant individual,” to return to Berger, “is ipso facto an individual who holds nothing to be true, and in the final analysis perhaps an individual who is nothing.” (44) People do not feel comfortable about relativizing their beliefs and values. “[T]he human mind,” says Berger, “abhors uncertainty, especially when it comes to the really important concerns of life. When relativism has reached a certain intensity, absolutism becomes very attractive again.” (45)

Before long they grope for their old cultural paradigm or a new version of it, or embrace a new one. Hence pluralist eras, which have occurred during the decline of civilizations, have been short-lived and followed by robust new ones offering certainty of beliefs and standards, and little tolerance for dissent.

The Roman civilization overwhelmed pluralist Hellenism; Christianity and Islam supplanted the flagging, pluralist Roman empire; liberal Europe vanquished the Ottoman Islamic caliphate, which had glided into its milliyet pluralist system during its decades of decline.

Pluralism did not flourish in the Europe of what Ernest Gellner calls “enlightenment secular fundamentalism” (46) any better than in Christian Europe. Does the current phase of pluralism in Britain, the Netherlands and Scandinavia and the emerging one in the rest of the continent signal the exhaustion of liberalism’s moral and cultural paradigm? If it does, what new or old paradigm of moral certainty and cultural security awaits Western Europe?

Carol Quigley, a historian of civilization, appears to know the schedule. The entire liberal Western civilization, she says, “will surely pass out of existence … perhaps before A.D. 2500.” (47) In other words, West Europeans only have a half-millennium left to enjoy the stock market, Beethoven and tennis games. But she does not tell us about the nature of the “truth” they should be waiting for.

Michel Gurfinkiel, editor in chief of Valeurs Actuelles, France’s leading conservative weekly newsmagazine, seems to have an idea of the shape it could take on his turf. He cites the dismal attendance (less than 5 percent) in Catholic churches, the decline in the nation-state, an upsurge of violence, theft and racism, a drop in native birthrate (1.3 percent per white woman) and other indices showing the French are fast losing their cultural values and norms.

The Muslim population of France, he points out, is growing more than three times that of the Christian (between 4.4 and 5.8 children per Muslim woman). 50,000 non-Muslims already have converted to Islam in France, and the conversions continue. And he recalls that Christianity began in Europe as a small, alien sect. “Why should the average Frenchman of Catholic origin,” he asks, “not forsake a dying religion for an expanding, living religion that is anyway described as Christianity’s younger sister?” (48)

Modern Europe was born of the Greek intellectual tradition, which was overwhelmed by the Christian era, which in turn has nearly been wiped out by Enlightenment liberalism. As liberalism shows signs of exhaustion, will Europeans try Islam as their fourth and “lucky” creed? Other European intellectuals dismiss these thoughts as unwarranted spasms of defeatism, among them, David Landes. In his breathtaking survey of global economic currents, he says liberalism remains man’s ultimate destiny, with rationality — not religion — his guide. The reason European Muslims are worked up by their religious culture is the same one that has sparked religious revivals elsewhere in the world: the search for moral security due to economic frustration. The answer, he says, is not to panic or retreat into religious contemplation, but to speed the production and marketing of goods in order to maintain a “positive” view of life. Western “technological precedence” and optimism will enable Europe and North America to overcome the current challenge of “Europhobia.” (49) If so, Muslims, on their fourth incarnation in Europe, would finally get God’s message for reformation that Robert Bellah says they missed the first time around.

(1) Peter L. Berger, A Far Glory: The Quest for Faith in an Age of Credulity (New York: The Free Press, 1992), p. 72.

(2) Jorgen S. Nielsen, Fluid Identities: Muslims and Western Europe’s Nation States, “amended version” of paper presented at the International Center of Ethnicity, Migration and Citizenship, New School University, New York, January 2000, p. 1.

(3) Berger, A Far Glow, p. 72.

(4) John McManners, ed., Oxford Illustrated History of Christianity (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990), p. 186.

(5) Yvonne Yazbeck Haddad and Wadi Z. Haddad, eds., Christian-Muslim Encounters (Gainesville, FL: University Press of Florida, 1995), pp. 131-35.

(6) Xavier Bougarel, “The Balkan Islam,” ISIM Newsletter, Leiden University, Leiden, Netherlands, No. 6, 2000, p. 32.

(7) Berger, “Desecularization of the World: A Global Overview,” in Peter L. Berger, ed., The Desecularization of the World (Grand Rapids, MI.: William B. Eerdsman Publishing, 1999).p. 2.

(8) Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (New York: reprinted Routledge, 1992); Roland Robertson, et al., Talcott Parsons: Theories of Modernity (London: Sage Publications, 1991); Robert N. Bellah, Beyond Belief Essays on Religion in a Post-Traditionalist World (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1991); David Martin, A General Theory of Secularization (New York: Basil Blackwell, 1978).

(9) Bellah, Beyond Belief, p. 23.

(10) Ibid, p. 151.

(11) Interview with Selcuk Eren, Athens, Greece, September 23, 1998.

(12) Interview with Ahmed Reza Khan, Ph.D. student in “Islam in Europe,” University of Pads, Paris, September 19, 2000.

(13) Nielsen, Fluid Identities, p. 9.

(14) Interview with Aziz Gardezi, Cologne, Germany, September 29, 2000.

(15) Interview with Toumi Azzedine, Marseilles, France, September 8, 2000.

(16) Interview with Inayet Kazim, researcher in immigration tends, Amsterdam, September 30, 2000.

(17) Peter Ester and Loek Halman, eds., The Individualizing Society: Value Change in Europe and North America (Tiburg, Netherlands: Tiburg University Press, 1993), p. 9.

(18) Sheena Ashford and Noel Timms, What Europe Thinks: A Study of Western European Values (Aldershot, England: Dartmouth Publishing Company Limited, 1992), p. 46.

(19) Rachid Tlemcani, “The French Have Themselves to Blame,” Middle East Quarterly, March 1997, p. 36.

(20) Interview with Lucette Valensi, IISMM, Paris, October 31, 2000.

(21) Interview with Gardezi.

(22) Gerald Lenski, The Religious Factor (Garden City, N.Y.: Anchor Books, 1963), pp. 9-11.

(23) Berger, A Far Glory, pp. 38-39.

(24) Ibid, p. 27.

(25) Interview with Mohammed Ahnif, Amsterdam, September 30, 2000.

(26) Interviews with members of the Muslim Youth of Germany, Berlin, October 16, 2000.

(27) Interview with Muhammad Anwar, Center for Research in Ethnic Relations, University of Warwick, Warwick, England, November 15, 2000.

(28) Ibid.

(29) Quran, II: p. 177.

(30) Ibid, XLIX: p. 13.

(31) Ibid, II: p. 31.

(32) Bernard Lewis, Arabs in History (New York: Harper & Row, 1966), p. 43.

(33) Interview with Mehmet Sabri Erbakan, Islamic Milli Gorus office, Cologne, October 6, 2000.

(34) Interview with Rashid Benaissa, UNESCO, Paris, September 18, 2000.

(35) Frank Viviano, “Europe Suddenly Doesn’t Even Recognize Itself,” San Francisco Chronicle, March 5, 1999.

(36) Interview with Czarina Wilpert, Technical University, Berlin, October 18, 2000.

(37) Samuel P. Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1996), p. 210.

(38) Interview with Farouk Laazouzi, Islamic Cultural Center, Evry, France, September 17, 2000.

(39) Interview with Brend Knopf, Ministry of Labor, Berlin, October 20, 2000.

(40) Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, October 21, 2000.

(41) Interview with Rainer Meunz, Department of Sociology, Humboldt University, Berlin, October 17, 2000.

(42) Letter from Lord Hylton, April 25, 1998.

(43) Telephone conversation with Lord Hylton, London, November 8, 2000.

(44) Berger, A Far Glory, p. 71.

(45) Ibid, p. 45.

(46) Ibid, p. 76.

(47) Carol Quigley, The Evolution of Civilizations: An Introduction to Historical Analysis (Indianapolis: Liberty Press, 1979), pp. 127, 164-66.

(48) Michel Gurfinkiel, “Islam in France: `Is the French Way of Life in Danger?'” Middle East Quarterly, March 1997, pp. 19-27.

(49) David S. Landes, The Wealth and Poverty of Nations (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1998), pp. 514-24.

Hope For Serb, Albanian Harmony Is A Pipe Dream

St. Louis Post Dispatch
September 2, 1999

ETHNIC STRIFE

GERMAN peacekeepers stopped a car in southeastern Kosovo one day recently, “Your identification papers, please!” one of them said, stepping toward the car.

Three passengers pulled out pistols and started shooting at the Germans. Luckily, only one bullet hit a soldier whose flak jacket spared him any injury.

NATO peacekeepers were shot at in other places by ethnic Albanians who resent the alliance’s efforts to protect minority Serbs. Keeping Kosovo ethnically mixed is a key NATO mission. British Prime Minister Tony Blair repeated this mission during his recent visit to Pristina, as had President Bill Clinton.

It looks as if they are fighting a lost battle. More than 160,000 of the 200,000 Kosovar Serbs have fled Kosovo, and the exodus continues. Even those Serbs who are staying behind are hardly part of a pluralist society.

“The towns that were predominantly Serb are now all Serb,” said Brig. Gen. John Craddock, the outgoing commander of U.S. peacekeepers in southeast Kosovo. “The towns that were predominantly Albanian are now all Albanian.”

Clinton and Blair apparently are too used to their variety of “civic” nations in which people’s ethnic identity is secondary to their citizenship. The ball game is different where people are loyal primarily to their ethnic or religious groups and call them “nations.” Ethnic nations often cleanse themselves of minorities.

I was born into a Muslim family in India’s Assam state when Muslims there were demanding a partition of India to create their “national” homeland, Pakistan. My father followed Mahatma Gandhi, a Hindu, in opposing the partition. When Pakistan was created anyway, our Hindu neighbors in the new Indian republic grabbled some of our property and made a landfill out of the Muslim graveyard where my grandparents were buried. Some of my father’s Hindu friends started avoiding him.

We resettled on our ancestral farm in Polashpur, East Pakistan, where Hindus and Muslims had lived peacefully for centuries. But anti-Hindu riots broke out there and most Hindus around Polashpur and Pakistan fled to India.

YEARS later ethnic Bengalis in East Pakistan started the Bangladesh “nationalist” movement and seceded from West Pakistan. Bangladesh has since cleansed itself of its Urdu-speaking ethnic minority.

The neighbors of Kosovo, as I saw last year, have gone through the same cleansing process in the wake of nationalist movements. Greeks who had lived in Turkey through seven centuries of Ottoman imperial rule were expelled en masse. Many of them have resettled in deserted Muslim homes in Greece, which drove away most of its Muslims.

Pyla, a village in the buffer zone between north and south Cyprus, is an especially instructive example. North Cyprus has gotten rid of its Greek Cypriot minority after the south chased away its Turkish Cypriots. The United Nations wanted to set an example of ethnic pluralism, and persuaded Pyla’s 400 or so Turkish Cypriots to stay with their 800 Greek Cypriots neighbors.

The two communities live as neighbors all right; but unlike in earlier times, they shop in separate grocery stores, eat in separate restaurants, and belong to separate social clubs. And when a Greek and a Turkish Cypriot run into one another, they don’t say hello, which they used to do until the “age of ethnic nationalism” triggered inter-ethnic riots in Cyprus in the mid-1960s.

Even if NATO could keep those Kosovar Serbs from fleeing, Kosovo would at best have become a big Pyla. More likely, it would have turned into a communal inferno. For the same reason, the alliance should rethink its plans to keep Kosovo part of Serbia. Let the Kosovars, through their elected representatives, decide their political future. Just about every other ethnic nation in the Balkans has done so. Any constitutional plan th at doesn’t have the support of the Kosovars could turn Kosovo into a quagmire for NATO.

With Ocalan Convicted, Turkey Faces Big Challenge

Philadelphia Inquirer
July 8, 1999

Turkey’s “trial of the century” ended June 29 with a death sentence for Kurdish guerrilla leader Abdullah Ocalan, convicted of treason and murder.

Turkish Prime Minister Bulent Ecevit hopes the verdict “will be auspicious” for the Turks and Kurds. Nearly 37,000 have died in the 15-year conflict between the Turkish military and Ocalan’s Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK), which initially demanded an independent Kurdish state but later indicated it would settle for cultural rights in a “democratic” Turkey.

Ocalan’s sentence must to go through an appeals process and is subject to ratification by the Turkish parliament. Whatever his fate, Turkey appears to be heading for a new form of Kurdish challenge even harder to tackle than Ocalan’s ragtag guerrilla movement.

That challenge, strangely enough, is democracy.

Mizgin Sen, spokeswoman for the PKK’s political wing in Europe, among other Kurdish leaders, is urging Kurds to wage a “peaceful struggle” for their demands in the democratic tradition. Some of Ocalan’s lieutenants, including his brother, Osman, disagree with this stance and advocate the continuation of the “armed struggle.”

But if the Kurdish movement meanders into the democratic track, that would be Ocalan’s most important legacy to the Kurds. Throughout his trial, he reiterated his plea for a “democratic solution” to the Kurdish question. It was dismissed by many Turks as a weak man’s entreaty to save his life. But he has called for a “peaceful, democratic” approach to the Kurdish issue since 1993, and reiterated that call many times before his arrest.

I helped publish the last media interview Ocalan gave before Turkish commandos captured him in Kenya. There, he repeated this theme over and over, using variations of the words democratic 16 times and peaceful six.

Last summer and fall, underground Kurdish activists in Istanbul explained to me that the former Marxist Ocalan was following the footprints of Palestinian leader Yasir Arafat and South African leader Nelson Mandela, who found peaceful democratic struggle more effective than violence. In the Anatolian city of Konya, another Kurdish activist, a high school teacher, argued that “the ballot box may become our Trojan horse.”

Many Turks agree. Ocalan’s “hypocritical gibberish” about democracy, said an official at the Turkish Foreign Ministry in Ankara, is intended to “destroy the Kemalist republic.” The republic is founded on a state ideology called “Kemalism,” coined from the name of the republic’s founder, Mustafa Kemal, later known as Ataturk. Ataturk wanted to mold Turkey’s multi-ethnic, Islamic society into a single-culture secular nation. Islamic laws were replaced by the Swiss civil code, religious schools were shut down, Islamic dress code and cultural symbols were banned from many public places, and all minorities were ordered “Turkified.”

The Kurds are a fifth of the Turkish population of 64 million. Half of them live in the country’s southeast. But the laws ban Kurdish-language publications and exclude Kurdish from school curriculums. Forming any organizations based on Kurdish ethnic identity is a criminal offense.

Ocalan’s prognosis that democracy could prove to be the Kurds’ ultimate weapon appeared to have been reflected in the April 18 elections. The Kurdish People’s Democracy Party swept local elections throughout the southeast, winning almost all mayoral seats. So far the military, under emergency laws, has held the Kurds at bay. It has banned one Kurdish political party after another, besides overthrowing governments, making constitutions, participating in government policy-making – usually citing the Kurdish or Islamist threat to the Kemalist state.

Pressures for democratic reforms are mounting from outside and inside Turkey. Turkey is eager to join the European Union, which has cited the abuses of Kurdish human rights and military intervention in Turkish politics as main reasons for its rejection of Ankara’s membership. Soon after Ocalan was handed the death sentence, EU foreign affairs commissioner Hans van der Borek and a German Foreign Ministry spokesman reiterated that position.

Inside Turkey, the clamor for ethnic and religious rights is rising with the expansion of the middle class, which includes many Kurds. Thus, the Kurdish challenge to the Kemalist state has outgrown Ocalan. In the coming months, Turkey will have to make a tough choice. Or it can move toward acceptance of the Kurds’ cultural and political autonomy, allowing a “reformation” of Kemalism. It can let its state ideology continue to hold democracy hostage and deepen Turkey’s isolation from the West.

Did the Kurds Win Anything in Kosovo?

San Francisco Chronicle
July 6, 1999

TURKEY’S “trial of the century” ended last Tuesday with a death sentence for Abdullah Ocalan, who was charged with treason. He had been fighting for the cultural rights and political autonomy of 12 million Turkish Kurds, and was captured in Kenya by Turkish commandos on a U.S. intelligence tip.

Nearly 37,000 people have died in the 15-year conflict between the Turkish military and Ocalan’s Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) guerrillas. The military has destroyed 3,000 Kurdish villages it suspected of being PKK hideouts, and uprooted about 3 million Kurds, three times the number of Kosovar Albanians expelled by the Serbs. The Turkish Kurds have lived in their homelands in Turkey’s southeast for more than 1,000 years, and have been resisting extermination of their culture.

Ocalan’s sentence is subject to ratification by the Turkish parliament, which is filled with anti-PKK Turkish nationalists.

But on Wednesday, Turkish Justice Minister Hikmet Sami Turk made an intriguing announcement: Because Ocalan has regretted his “crimes,” he could benefit from a plan to show leniency to repentant terrorists.

At his trial, Ocalan did apologize for the murders committed by his guerrillas. He also pleaded for his life, embarrassing many of his followers. But he stressed the need for “reconciliation” between Kurds and Turks in a democratic environment.

The justice minister’s statement sounds intriguing because, from the Turkish government’s view, Ocalan’s call for a “peaceful, democratic” reconciliation since 1993 was only to irritate Ankara. He was “making noises . . . for Western consumption,” a Turkish diplomat in Washington said.

Last fall, however, underground Kurdish activists told me that Ocalan was following in the footsteps of Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat and South African leader Nelson Mandela; those who had found peaceful struggle more effective than violence. And a Kurdish schoolteacher explained that the Kurds “can get with ballots what we probably can’t get with bullets. The ballot box may become our Trojan horse.”

Turkey’s Kurdish tragedy stems from its state ideology, called “Kemalism” after its founder, Mustafa Kemal Ataturk. Ataturk wanted to mold his multiethnic, Islamic society into a homogeneous secular nation. He replaced Islamic laws and schools with secular versions. He banned Kurdish- language publications and excluded Kurdish from school curricula. Public assertion of Kurdish identity became a crime.

The military is the self-appointed guardian of Kemalism. It has staged three coups, had opposition parties banned, kept the southeast under emergency rule and brutalized people — all in the name of preserving the state’s unitary, secular character. Many Turks (and all Kurds) are wary of the military. The Turkish economy is growing fast, expanding a politically conscious middle class. Part of this class are the Kurds who have begun to assert their ethnic identity. In Istanbul, they trash the PKK before foreigners in the daytime, but gather at night to pore over PKK bulletins and gripe about Turkish “colonialism.”

Abuses of Kurdish human rights have nearly ostracized Turkey from Europe, Turkey’s largest trading partner. The European Union has said it would not consider Turkey’s application for membership until it stopped repressing the Kurds. With Ocalan’s death sentence, EU statesmen have also warned Turkey against executing him.

The Turkish state ideology not only justifies ethnic repression, but is holding democracy hostage and deepening Turkey’s isolation from the West. The alternative is to move toward conceding the Kurds’ cultural rights and perhaps political autonomy so that the 65 million Turkish citizens can also enjoy full democracy. Kosovo seems to have made the latter option more compelling than ever. After all, the dust has yet to settle from the war in which Turkey joined its NATO allies to stop the persecution of an ethnic group one-sixth the size of its Kurdish population. Perhaps the Turkish justice minister’s statement had a word for the Kurds from the Kosovar Albanians?

It’s the Kurds’ turn for world recognition

The Christian Science Monitor
December 9, 1998

Last week Washington hosted an international fund-raiser for former guerrilla leader Yasser Arafat, which netted more than $3 billion for his would-be Palestinian state. A few days earlier the Clinton administration repeated its demand that Kurdish guerrilla leader Abdullah Ocalan, now under house arrest in Italy, be put on trial on terrorism charges.

Mr. Ocalan, the chief of the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK), has been fighting for 14 years for the political and cultural autonomy of 12 million Turkish Kurds, and he shares strikingly similar antecedents with Mr. Arafat. Both men tried unsuccessfully to realize the rights of their people through violence, and are now seeking them through peaceful means. Both had bases in Lebanon. Both were expelled by host countries under outside military pressure.

In 1982 when an Israeli invading force had Arafat and his Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) guerrillas thrown out of Lebanon, some Israeli officials hoped that would be “the final solution” to the PLO problem. Recently a Turkish military threat forced Syria to expel Ocalan and his guerrillas, and Turkish officials said Oct. 5 that the action was “aimed at finishing off PKK.”

Italian Prime Minister Massimo D’Alema has promised to put Ocalan on trial. The PKK committed many acts of terror, including the slaying of civilians it suspected of collaborating with the Turkish military. So did Arafat’s PLO. Unlike Arafat, and “onetime terrorists” Menachem Begin and Yizhak Shamir, Ocalan has been caught in a “wrong place” before achieving his mission. So instead of being received by heads of state or the Nobel Peace Prize panel, he could become the guest of a jail warden for a while. If found guilty, he should. We can’t afford a world without the rule of law.

Whatever Ocalan’s fate, his odyssey is likely to help put the Kurdish question on the global political agenda, where it belongs. The Kurds are the world’s largest nation without a state of their own. Their historic homeland was split among five countries by victors of World War I. The Turkish state is bent on blotting out their identity. It has banned the Kurdish language, press, publications, and associations. Among the countless Kurds persecuted for asserting their ethnic identity are seven Kurdish members of the Turkish parliament serving prison time for taking their parliamentary oaths in Kurdish.

Turkish forces have destroyed nearly 3,000 Kurdish villages and deported tens of thousands of Kurds out of their mountain habitat into towns to force their assimilation with the Turks. The Turkish government estimates that 29,000 people have died in the 14-year conflict with the PKK. Many more perished in the uprisings of previous decades.

Kurdish activism aside, the temper of the times has flashed the Kurdish cause on the political screen of the West, which pretty much sets international political priorities. Freedom and group rights are the hallmarks of this so-called “postmodern” era. And now that the Palestinian, Northern Irish, and Basque movements have receded into peace processes, the question of Kurdish cultural and political rights is the most pressing ethno-nationalist issue. The PKK, once set on an independent Kurdish state, now only seeks an autonomous Kurdish territory within the Turkish state.

Most Europeans are troubled by the Kurds’ travails. Austria, Belgium, Italy, the Netherlands, and Russia have hosted sessions of the Kurdish “Parliament in Exile” ignoring Ankara’s angry protests. European governments and Western human rights groups have frequently criticized Ankara for its abuses of Kurdish human rights. Last December the European Union cited this as one reason it rejected Turkey’s membership application. On Nov. 27, the governments of Italy and Germany proposed to involve the European Union in the quest for a negotiated solution to Turkey’s Kurdish problem. Ocalan quickly embraced the idea.

Turkey persistently scorns the international effort, and human rights minister Hikmet Sami Turk reiterated Nov. 28 that negotiation on Kurdish cultural rights is “totally unacceptable” because it might tempt Kurds to demand “independence.”

In Turkey, governments work at the sufferance of the military. And generals are the main stumbling block to a resolution of the Kurdish question because it is one of two “internal security” issues (the other is Islamism) they cite to justify their pervasive role in political decisionmaking.

The United States is the one country whose counsel the Turkish military would not ignore. Turkey is the third-largest recipient of US aid, mostly military. About 80 percent of Turkish military hardware comes from the US. Relationships between senior US and Turkish military officers are often close, a legacy of a half-century of camaraderie in cold and hot wars.

Yet Washington shows little concern about the Turkish-Kurdish imbroglio. Administration officials’ occasional remarks on the subject show they consider it just a problem created by a group of murderous terrorists, as the PLO was viewed in the US in the 1970s and 1980s.

The Americans have been striving to resolve the Israeli-Palestinian dispute mainly because of their concern about US strategic interests, which includes the stability of Israel, a close ally. The Kurdish struggle threatens the stability of Turkey, which serves vital US strategic interests in that region. Ankara was a key US ally in the Gulf War, and it facilitates the monitoring of the northern-Iraq no-fly zone. A secular Muslim country, it is considered a buffer against anti-US Islamist forces in southwest Asia, and could be a US partner in expanding business ties to the oil rich Caspian states.

If the Clinton administration is looking for a legacy, it should take up this much-needed peace process.

A ‘law of return’ for Christians?

The Baltimore Sun
June 10, 1997

WASHINGTON — Most scholars have dismissed Samuel Huntington’s warning that the Western Judeo-Christian civilization is entering upon a phase of confrontation with the Chinese and Islamic civilizations. The Congressional Human Rights Caucus appears, however, to have taken it seriously and introduced a bill that could get the “clash of civilizations” started.

H.R. 1685, co-sponsored by Reps. Frank Wolf, R-Va., and Tom Lantos, D-Calif., would punish “Communist . . . [and] Islamic countries and regions” in which Christians are being persecuted. It also would overhaul the immigration laws to bring over Christians from “persecuted communities” the way Jews were brought in from behind the Iron Curtain.

The Wolf-Lantos bill targets countries in which the government persecutes Christians, called Category I persecution. It also takes aim at those where “the government fails to undertake serious and sustained efforts to eliminate” it, which it terms Category 2 persecution. Sanctions for both categories include stopping U.S. aid, using the U.N. Security Council and forums of “industrial democracies” to tighten a global economic squeeze, and other unspecified measures.

Christians from both types of countries would be allowed to migrate to America. A Sudanese Christian, for example, would get an immigrant visa if the United States labels Khartoum a persecutor of Christians. An Egyptian Copt would qualify if the Hosni Mubarak government is seen to have failed to “eliminate” Christian persecution. He doesn’t have to have been persecuted himself to get the visa as long as his “community” is judged to have been.

The “Freedom From Religious Persecution” bill is the outcome of several meetings among lawmakers, researchers and Jewish and Christian activists. Some intellectuals of Cold War vintage support it ardently. At one recent workshop organized by a Washington-based Jewish organization, Christian activists were briefed on legislative and diplomatic strategies and tools that were effective in defending the rights of diaspora Jews and facilitating their immigration into the United States and Israel.

A haven for refugees

The Congressional Human Right Caucus is holding a series of briefings on the subject. In a May 20 letter inviting their colleagues to one of them, Mr. Lantos and Rep. John Edward Porter, R-Ill., recalled that “the Jewish community has steadfastly taken responsibilities for fellow victims of discrimination,” and called for “a coordinated response to Christian persecution abroad.” Nina Shea of Freedom House complained that the United States was “founded as a haven for religious refugees,” but “our government seems to have forgotten our origins as a nation.”

Yet H.R. 1685 seems designed more as a tool for “civilizational,” rather than religious, missions. Its concerns about Christians are confined to Communist and Muslim countries (except Burma, whose repressive policies have drawn U.S. attention). In some of those countries, the bill also alludes to the repression of other faith groups: Bahais in Iran, Tibetan Buddhists and animists and “moderate Muslims” in southern Sudan. But it doesn’t bother about their fate elsewhere.

A confrontational penchant is apparent from the kind of Christian activism the caucus is encouraging. Kevin Turner of the Voice of the Martyrs, an American evangelical group, went into Sudan defying a Sudanese government travel ban and U.N. objections. He survived a government air raid, distributed Bibles, had a film on Jesus shown 28 times in various villages and administered vaccines. John Eibner, president of the Geneva-based Christian Solidarity International, made similar missions to Sudan, Egypt and other countries. Caucus members, hearing their accounts, applauded.

Representative Lantos’ aide, Andrew Hale-Byrne, told me later that the caucus is determined to get rid of Sudan’s Islamist government, which is committing “genocide” against Christians. “It has got to go,” he repeated. Other offending countries mentioned in the bill include China, Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, Indonesia, Pakistan, Azerbaijan, Iran, Egypt and Saudi Arabia.

The insurgency in southern Sudan is as ethnic and racial as it is religious, and Khartoum’s response has been brutal. Christians and many other minorities are indeed suffering repression and discrimination in many other Muslim and Communist autocracies. Yet these daring Christian missions, the political campaign surrounding them and the proposed law recall the colonial era, when Western missionaries would dash off to bastions of other faiths to preach the Gospel. Xenophobic natives would kill them, and soon colonial armies would spring to action to defend Christianity and incidentally occupy those countries.

Nobody is of course talking about colonization today, but there is little chance that sanctions or military action will help Christians in Sudan or Vietnam anymore than they have helped the Bahais in Iran or the Shiites in Iraq. Nor can Christian activists reconcile the two goals they say they want to accomplish: spreading Christianity in Communist and Muslim countries and bringing Christians to America.

The proposed immigration policy might somewhat reinforce America’s Judeo-Christian cultural ethos, but that would compromise the First Amendment, which forbids the identification of the United States with any religious tradition. On the other hand, bringing large numbers of Christians “home” to America probably will seal the fate of Christianity in the Third World. Islamists around the world will celebrate it.

Throughout the Third World, Christian and other minorities are suffering repression that is essentially political and social. Islam is no more responsible for pockets of slavery in southern Sudan than Christianity was for slavery in America.

Political Islam thrives in an atmosphere of confusion and fear. The recent Iranian election shows — as did recent elections in Jordan, Pakistan and Bangladesh — that political Islam recedes in societies where Muslims have a chance to confront it and where democracy has a chance to take roots. Communism has been banished from its fatherland and will be undone, too, in its remaining holdouts as business and trade heighten people’s demands for civic and political freedoms.

America can help democratic reforms in Communist, Muslim and other autocracies by engaging them in industry, trade and commerce, by using its colossal diplomatic weight and by disengaging from these activities when necessary. Democratic values are the only real antidote to the woes of Christians and other minorities in the Third World.

Turkey Remains Strong U.S. Ally, Why Not For EU

Chicago Tribune
May 15, 1997

Despite its Islamists-led government, Turkey is again one of America’s favorite allies, and Washington has stepped up efforts to help latch it more closely to Western economic and security systems. Americans are warning European governments not to belie the continent’s secular credentials by barring Turkey from the European Union. The EU has so far refused to act on Turkey’s decade-old membership application.

Strobe Talbott has brought it out into the open. The American deputy secretary of state publicly ridiculed the EU’s argument that having Muslim Turkey as its member would trigger a culture clash. References to Turkish culture, he said at a U.S.-EU conference in Washington, are “euphemisms for religion.” Must the “European-ness” of a village, he asked, be judged by “whether its landmarks are church spires of minarets”?

America’s No. 2 diplomat also dismissed the suggestion that Turkey’s human-rights violations (in combating Kurdish insurgency) disqualify it for the EU membership. He reminded Europeans that “many current EU members have overcome far greater traumas in this century–and that’s putting it mildly.” Talbott probably was alluding to the past Greek and Portuguese dictatorships, anti-Jewish pogroms and the holocaust. One American diplomat grumbled later that West European statesmen opposing Turkey’s admission into the EU are being shamed by Turkish generals who are fighting their own government to preserve the secular character of their state. U.S. officials use the words “crucial” and “critical” to underscore Turkey’s importance to American interests in that region. And the administration has established contacts with Islamists in the Turkish government.

This pro-Turkish stance is the latest among a half-dozen twists that America’s Turkish policy has undergone in eight years. The unraveling of the Soviet Union led U.S. policy-makers to drop Ankara from their strategic equations. Turkey had been NATO’s front-line member against the Soviet power. It regained importance to Americans during Desert Storm as a key partner in the anti-Iraq coalition. Then early in the first Clinton administration, human-rights concerns considerably strained U.S. ties to Turkey. They were all but repaired again by Turkey’s strong support for American efforts to end the Bosnian crisis.

The American peace broker for Bosnia, Richard Holbrooke, assured the Turks publicly that the human-rights debate would not harm U.S.-Turkish relations. Perhaps unforeseen by him, the Islamist Refah party soon came to power at the head of a coalition government in Ankara. And despite the State Department’s half-hearted assurance that “secularism” is “not a condition” of good U.S.-Turkish relations, Washington remained leery about Turkey’s Islamist Prime Minister Necmettin Erbakan.

That trepidation has eased now. Erbakan has agreed, though grudgingly, to retain Turkey’s ties to Europe, the United States and Israel, and committed himself to working within the secular Turkish constitution. But American interest in Turkey has actually been heightened by a string of other events affecting U.S. strategic interests.

China’s economic and military resurgence is causing unease in Washington. Beijing appears to aspire for the status of a second superpower.

And the Russian announcement of a new military doctrine stipulating the first use of nuclear weapons in a desperate conflict was a reminder that the honeymoon with the Russians is over. Even though President Boris Yelstin has swallowed the NATO expansion plans, the Russian parliament could hold off on ratifying the second strategic arms reduction treaty requiring Moscow to dismantle thousands of nuclear warheads. And Yeltsin recently joined Chinese President Jiang Zemin in a statement criticizing the U.S. domination of world affairs and calling for a “multipolar world.” A multipolar, bi-polar world may not be around the corner, but the United States needs allies in the periphery of the world’s second- and third-largest military powers that are resentful of its superpower status. Turkey is its only ally in the periphery of both.

Turkish politics, however, remain extremely fluid and Islamic revivalism is far from over. The best way to promote stability and secularism in Turkey, its secular politicians and diplomats have been telling the West, is to integrate it with Western Europe politically and economically.

Talbott’s impassioned plea to the EU indicates that Washington is listening. Recently, a Turkish diplomat in Washington acknowledged that “the United States, happily, is showing a greater appreciation” of his country “during the last two, three months.” He was quick to point out, though, that “the helicopters and frigates issue” remained unresolved.

U.S.-Turkish relations have never been smooth. Under pressures from the Greek lobby, Congress has held up the delivery of 10 Super Cobra helicopters and three guided-missile frigates to Turkey. Besides, influential groups are sounding the alarm bell about the Islamists in the Turkish government. Yet Turkey is likely to remain strategically important to Americans as long as they have stakes in its neighborhood.