Islam in Europe: A Strained Relationship

"The more Europe’s Muslims establish themselves as a permanent part of the national scene, the more they frighten some who believe that their national identity could be altered forever."

The above statement is from Steve Erlanger's December 27, 2009 New York Times article, "French Mosque’s Symbolism Varies With Beholder." He is actually paraphrasing Vincent Geisser, "a scholar of Islam and immigration at the French National Center for Scientific Research."

This is a view I have read many times, and seems to be a foundational concern among Europeans about Muslims.

The cause for Erlanger's article is the plan for a new mosque in Marseille, France. An old man at a cafe, when asked how he felt about the new mosque, admitted, "There are a lot of them already, and this will bring more of them, and there will be trouble."

But there has already been trouble. Remember the riots in the banlieues (suburbs) of Paris in late 2005? Jacques Chirac was president at the time and he declared a state of emergency. For three months North African youth burned thousands of cars and burned buildings also, in protest of perceived social discrimination. Almost 3,000 youths were arrested.

The previous year France banned the hijab (a scarf around the head) in public schools, and the legislature has been considering banning (for what seems like the past year) any full covering of Muslim women, such as the burqa (where only the face and hands are visible) or the niqab (in which only the eyes are visible).

The population of France is 65 million, and it has the highest percentage of Muslims in Western Europe, at about 9 to 10 percent. (In the United States Muslims are between less than 1 to 2 percent of our population.)

The French have long been protective of their secular culture (the Academy Francais, for the past 400 years has charged itself with keeping the language pure and authentic). The rise of Islam within their borders, given the difference of values between the two societies (you can't get much further apart than secular and Islamic), has alarmed many.

France is not alone in its throes with Islam. Erlanger's article hits all the major contemporary conflicts between Europeans and Muslims: the recent banning of minarets in Switzerland, the Madrid train bombings in 2004, the killing of Dutch film director Theo van Gogh, the London bombings of 2005, and the violent protests that erupted over the Danish cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad, also in 2005.

I grew up thinking of Europe as the exemplar of permissiveness and liberal. It has been interesting to see the European reaction to the immigration of Muslims among them. America, for now, remains to be the country that allows the most immigrants inside its borders, and does not ban the hijab or the burqa. We don't allow the Muslims' call to prayer over loudspeakers five times a day though. If we allowed that, we would have to let everyone advertise over loudspeakers, and what a racket that would be.