On John R. Bowen's article: "Nothing to Fear"

Last night I read John Bowen's essay, "Nothing to Fear: Misreading Islamic immigration to Europe," in Boston Review, vol. 35 no. 1, the Jan/Feb 2010 issue; pages 27-29. (Unfortunately, the essay is not available online.)

If I were to submit this blog post to Boston Review as a refutation to Bowen's essay, I might titled it "Cause for Concern."

In Bowen's essay, he argues that European and American political analysts are wrong about Islam and Muslims. He defines the points of the American argument as this: "Islamic shock, value conflict, and unending struggle." He warns, "We need to take this argument seriously and understand what is wrong with it. And...it is wrong on every detail that matters."

I don't have a problem with Bowen's definition of the argument, but I do disagree with the way he discounts European and American concerns, which I consider legitimate.

He addresses the first point - Islamic shock to the various European ways of life - by reminding us that European countries perpetrated against one another, "centuries of religious wars, revolutions and counter-revolutions, attacks on Belgian and Italian immigrants to France, and, of course, the events of the early 1940s, in which good French and Dutch people joined good Germans in denouncing and arresting Jews and transporting them to death camps."

None of us - Europeans or Americans - have forgotten these things. I'm not sure what Bowen means to accomplish my mentioning these events - because they do not mean that the culture brought by Muslims to their respective countries cannot "shock" them.

Bowen is well aware of recent steps taken by European countries against Islamic cultural practices: such as France's banning of scarves in public schools in 2004 (and the ongoing effort to ban the burqa and niqab altogether), and Switzerland's banning of building more minarets in November 2009 - not to mention the European Union's perpetual resistance to admitting Turkey into their integrated economic and political group (Turkey formally applied for membership in 1987). Reasons for not admitting Turkey into the E.U. are lack of: "equality between men and women, protection of minorities and freedom of religion"--this is specific E.U. criteria for membership. (As a "by the way," secular Turks themselves fear their religious compatriots since a Sunni Muslim was elected prime minister in 2003.)

Many European countries value their secular culture, and certainly at the top of such a list of countries would be France, with their national motto of "Liberté, égalité, fraternité." How can Bowen, or anyone else, not understand the alarm that many French citizens feel when they see signs of religious devotion (e.g., mosques, hijabs, and burqas) creeping into their society? Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying that concern and fear legitimizes discrimination or hazing or anything like that. I'm sorry to say that it seems that anyone who is not pro-Muslim Bowen calls "anti-Muslim." I think this is unfair of him. He is trying to shame or stigmatize those (like myself) who are just trying to see the situation clearly.

Bowen says the second point, the "conflict over values, is similarly shaky." He then moves through this list: Islamic intolerance of gays, forced marriages, and the oppression of women.

It surprises me that Bowen tries to cover this point by accusing those who make this argument of "block thinking," in which "the diversity of perspectives within a social group is collapsed into a single caricature." He explains further: "Today, in Europe and elsewhere, there is widespread assumption that all Muslims think one way and all non-Muslims another."

Bowen himself simplifies this circumstance in order to make it seem plausible.

He tries to equate mainstream Muslims with mainstream Americans, citing polls that show "Muslims are more likely...to be opposed to abortion, homosexuality, and suicide," while "A 2009 Pew study reported that...American Protestants and American Muslims disapprove of homosexuality in equal measure--60 percent. The gap is not between Islam and the West, but between more religious and less religious people."

The problem here is that American Muslims are probably more tolerant than all other Muslims, and that in many Muslim countries the penalty for being gay is death. Such is the degree of Islamic intolerance.

But what about the other points that Bowen brings up, forced marriages and the oppression of women? He doesn't address these, but moves on to the final point.

I suppose he is at a loss in how to address these? I would add to the list of conflicting values, freedom of religion and protection of minorities--yes, the very points that Germany says is preventing Turkey's admission to the E.U.

How are these differences in values to be reconciled? In Islamic countries these are not "values," they are Sharia law, and the fear is that if Muslims ever achieved a majority presence--in one of Europe's smaller countries, like the Netherlands--they would pass Sharia legislation. No more weed and prostitution in Amsterdam.

It frustrates me that Bowen tries to convice us that, really, there is no difference between Muslim values and Western values. It's true that not all Muslims are the same, but the truth is that Muslims--as a block--are shifted much more to the right than Westerners are. Their spectrum is narrower than ours. And whereas our spectrum might have 16 colors, theirs might have just 2 to 4.


I will address Bowen's final point tomorrow.