A R C H I V E S
Madinat al-Muslimeen Islamic Message Board
| Times Article |
|---|
| Danyala |
| 12/24/02 at 14:23:05 |
| [slm] The Many Faces Of Islam > > European Muslims are speaking out, reassessing their faith and their feelings about assimilation in liberal, secular societies. As a > result, Islam in Europe is a religion in transition. A progress report > > In Glasgow, a Turkish Kurd refugee is seeking compensation from the Home Office, claiming a decision to force him to stay in the > city - where he and his family have been the victims of racist attacks - breaches his human rights. In Paris, a young Algerian woman > is suing her employer for unlawful dismissal after she was fired for refusing to adjust her headscarf. Europe is home to some 12.5 > million Muslims who suffer high unemployment - and, since Sept. 11 - growing mistrust from non-Muslims. One sign of the tension came > when the French government tried to create a representative council for French Islam. French Muslim organizations were set to choose > their representatives last June, but Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy canceled the elections. The reason: the vote would have given > the majority to the Union of French Islamic Organizations (UOIF), a federation representing the majority of France's 1,500 mosques. > The UOIF is allied with the Muslim Brotherhood - the most powerful opposition force in Egyptian politics - which supports the right > of Muslim women to wear headscarves in public schools, something France won't allow. Europe has a long way to go before Islam is > just another faith. But a young generation of Muslims is speaking out - against racism, Islamophobia and Islam's own rigidities. > Here are four of this generation's most compelling voices. > > > > THE ACTIVIST > Dyab Abou Jahjah, > 31, Belgium > The Belgian government picked a fight with the wrong man. Lebanese-born political activist Dyab Abou Jahjah is charismatic, > good-looking, articulate and brash - and he may have a point. Prime Minister Guy Verhofstadt accused Abou Jahjah and his Arab > European League of inciting the street riots in Antwerp that followed the murder last month of 27-year-old Moroccan schoolteacher > Mohammed Achrak by a 66-year-old mentally ill Belgian man. But Abou Jahjah turned Verhofstadt's allegations into a trial of Belgian > attitudes toward the country's 400,000 Muslims. Are Muslims second-class citizens? What will the government do to fight rising > racial tension? And why do many second-generation Muslim Belgians still not feel at home? > > The situation is especially dire in Antwerp, where unemployment in many immigrant communities hovers around 30%. Under the slogan > "Our People First," the far-right Vlaams Blok (Flemish Bloc) garnered one-third of the vote in the last municipal elections in > October 2000. Abou Jahjah gives Belgium's Muslims a radical voice to counter the Blok. He showed up at the scene of Achrak's murder > barely 30 minutes after the crime; what happened next is in dispute. Abou Jahjah claims he tried to calm angry Muslims, who rioted > for two nights. The police arrested him, saying he was responsible for the fighting, but an Antwerp court ruled last week that there > was insufficient evidence to hold him. > > Two days after his release, Abou Jahjah relaxes in the downtown Antwerp apartment of his lieutenant, 26-year-old Ahmed Azzuz. In > jeans, navy blue sweater and socks, he looks like a graduate student taking a study break. He says he dreams of a pan-European > coalition of Arab Muslims with the power to force European governments to reckon with Islamic communities. "We have three basic > demands," he says. "Bilingual education for Arab-speaking kids, hiring quotas that protect Muslims, and the right to keep our > cultural customs. For example, there should be laws that prevent discrimination against women who wear the veil." > > Abou Jahjah founded the Arab European League two years ago; it now claims close to 1,000 members across Europe. He is not > anti-American; in fact, he admires anti-discrimination laws in the U.S. "America's race laws are more advanced than here," he says. > "I have relatives in Detroit and they are Arab-Americans but they feel American. I don't feel European. Europe needs to make its > concept of citizenship inclusive to all cultures and religions. I'm a practicing Muslim but I'm not a freak. I'm not a > fundamentalist." > > According to immigration records, Abou Jahjah arrived in Belgium from Lebanon in 1991 as an asylum seeker. On his application form, > he claimed that he had belonged to Hizballah and was fleeing after a dispute with militia leaders. "That was a lie," he says now. "I > was a 19-year-old boy and I had to make up a story so I could get asylum. I emigrated because I wanted a better life." During the > 1990s, he studied international politics at university in Louvain-la-Neuve and settled in Antwerp, doing odd jobs for immigrant > organizations and trade unions. He's currently unemployed, but says he's working on a doctoral thesis. > > Among some parts of Belgian society, he's one of the country's most hated men. "He should be thrown in jail for good," says Philippe > Schaffer, a mechanic who runs a garage around the corner from where Achrak was killed. Civil-rights activist or self-interested > agitator? Abou Jahjah may be a little bit of both. But Belgians shouldn't expect him to quiet down anytime soon - he's running for > Parliament in June. - By JOHN MILLER/Antwerp > > > THE THINKER > Shaker Assem, > 38, Germany > The six policemen who woke shaker Assem and his family early on the morning of Nov. 12 were polite and respectful. "Maybe they > knocked a little too loudly on the door, but otherwise they were very professional," he says. The surprise visit to Assem's Duisberg > flat was one of a score of searches carried out across Germany that morning, as police raided homes and offices belonging to members > of Hizb ut-Tahrir (Islamic Liberation Party), a 50-year-old pan-Islamic political organization that seeks to establish a modern > version of the caliphate that ruled parts of the Arab world from Muhammad's death until 1924, when Turkey's Kemal Atatürk officially > laid it to rest. > > The police visited Assem, Hizb ut-Tahrir's "representative member" in Germany, as part of their investigation of the group. They > took away documents and computer discs, but Assem was not arrested. German authorities are worried that the group's anticapitalist > and anti-American rhetoric could incite terrorism, though no one has accused Hizb ut-Tahrir of violence. "We've been watching them > for years," says a German intelligence official. "What concerns us is that they've got a lot of support among extremists at > universities, although they also appear to be nonviolent." > > Assem admits that Hizb ut-Tahrir's goals are incompatible with European political institutions, but insists the organization has no > intention of making trouble. "People who say there is a conflict between Shari'a and Christianity don't understand Shari'a," he > says. "But people who say there is a conflict between Shari'a and Western democracy are right." > > The problem in Assem's view is that "all men are not created equal, and democracy eventually lets the fortunate over-run the less > fortunate." So Hizb ut-Tahrir members don't vote or run for office in secular elections, but have no plans for revolution. "This is > a different system here, and our members respect that," he says. "The idea of a caliphate is only now beginning to take hold in the > Arab world. Europe won't come around until our example is there to follow." > > The caliphate would operate under Shari'a law, the system of ethical and legal conduct derived from the Koran and the teachings of > the Prophet. Assem says the economic principles of Shari'a would ensure a fairer distribution of wealth. Shari'a prohibits interest > payments on loans, for example (see next article), which Hizb ut-Tahrir claims prevents exploitation, while the ban on free-flowing > currency would protect countries like Indonesia from the destabilizing effects of globalization. "Shari'a presents a logical > framework for sustainable development," says Assem. "It's not utopian like socialism, and it isn't all about exploitation and profit > like capitalism. It's all-encompassing. The more you learn, the more sense it makes." > > In the social realm, Assem grants that Shari'a is more restrictive than Western norms and lifestyles. "Women are to be admired, not > used for cigarette advertisements," he says. But he blames later traditions not derived from Shari'a for the extreme subjugation of > women in the Islamic world - and his wife, Sana, agrees. > > Though the U.S. bears the brunt of the criticism in the party magazine, explizit , Assem argues that Hizb ut-Tahrir doesn't blame > the Americans for everything that goes wrong in the Islamic world. "Our message is that America has an exploitative value system," > Assem explains, "but we should blame ourselves for losing our way and leaving ourselves vulnerable to this kind of exploitation." As > for terrorism, he thinks Sept. 11 "gave the secular governments of the Islamic world carte blanche to crack down on Islamists. It > also gave Bush a pretext to grab Afghanistan and its access to the Caspian Sea." > > Assem was drawn to Hizb ut-Tahrir 16 years ago, as a 22-year-old lost soul in Vienna. "I'd grown up in Egypt, where my father was > from, and then moved to Austria, where my mother is from," he says. "I didn't really fit in with a lot of the Austrians I met, but I > couldn't feel comfortable with those guys you see at European mosques either - the ones with the long beards and robes but nothing > going on upstairs." > > After a brief flirtation with Scientology, he re-embraced Islam just as someone told him about Hizb ut-Tahrir. The Hizb ut-Tahrir > members "were educated and self-sufficient and open to the world around them," Assem recalls. "It wasn't all about beards and robes > and prayer, but about logic." > > For him, the economics of Shari'a is its biggest selling point, but adds that you can't buy into the economic theory without > accepting the caliphate as well. "Islam can fill the vacuum left by the collapse of socialism," he says. "But we also recognize that > the caliphate can only be implemented if people want it." Assem believes Europeans will join the caliphate, but only once they see > its advantages. And he admits that day is a long way off. - By STEVE ZWICK/Duisberg > > > THE CRITIC > Ayaan Hirsi Ali, > 33, the Netherlands > Islam is "an extremely backward religion," according to an important new voice on the Dutch political scene. These words clearly > echo those of slain right-wing leader Pim Fortuyn, who also used the word backward in reference to Islam. But the speaker today is > Ayaan Hirsi Ali, a Somali refugee and former Muslim who's a sure bet to become an M.P. for the liberal VVD party in January's > elections. "Millions of Muslim women all over the world are oppressed in the name of Islam," she says from VVD party headquarters in > the Hague, as her bodyguards wait outside. The bodyguards are needed because Hirsi Ali has been threatened by Islamic > fundamentalists ever since she first openly criticized Islam on a local TV station in March. After death threats in October, she > went into hiding in the U.S., returning two weeks ago. > It wasn't the first time Hirsi Ali fled persecution. The daughter of a leading Somali opposition leader, she was born just a few > weeks after the coup by Mohammed Siad Barre in 1969 and was forced into exile with her family when she was 10. She was brought up as > a traditional Muslim girl in Kenya, although her father was progressive enough to insist that his daughter receive an education. At > 22, confronted with an arranged marriage to a distant cousin in Canada ("I was repelled by his comment that I would bear him six > sons," she says), she decided to escape to the Netherlands. > > Right from the start she felt pressure to conform from the Somali community in the Netherlands. But she resisted. "I wanted to be > part of Dutch society, to be financially independent, take off my headscarf and drink alcohol," she says. In the spring of this year > she finally admitted to herself that she was no longer a Muslim, and she started speaking out. But she quickly found herself caught > in a cultural divide. "As a liberal society, the Dutch are against the oppression of the individual," she says. "But when it comes > to ethnic minorities, multiculturalism dictates that we have to respect practices in other cultures that oppress the individual." > Last week her book, De Zoontjesfabriek (The Son Factory), which presents her views on women, Islam and integration, was published. > > Hirsi Ali's adoption of the VVD marks a very public defection from the Labor Party, for whom she worked as a political scientist. > Her departure was prompted by the "politically correct" taboos that dominate progressive left-wing circles when it comes to tackling > the oppression of Muslim women. But her critics see Hirsi Ali as a political opportunist who's using her newfound fame to ease her > way into politics. Hirsi Ali denies it. "I was not looking for a cause, but all of a sudden I am in the middle of one," she says. "I > was asked to take part in a TV discussion to mark international women's day and was shocked that the Moroccan woman on the show > would not accept that Islam oppresses women. I couldn't believe it. After all, Roman Catholics criticize the Pope. Why can't Muslims > be critical about their faith? > > "It's possible for a woman to be emancipated and be a Muslim if she sticks to Islam as a spiritual belief," she continues. "But I > reject the Koran when it says girls must stay home and that it is right to beat women if they disobey their husbands. We have been > led to believe that we have to preserve cultural practices that clash with Western norms." To change that, Hirsi Ali would scrap the > subsidies given to Muslim organizations in the Netherlands, ban Islamic schools and include empowerment classes in the compulsory > integration courses that all immigrants must follow. > > "Living in the Netherlands has made it possible for me to realize that men and women are equal," Hirsi Ali says, "and given me the > opportunity to take advantage of higher education. But it also made me ask why more Muslim women here are not doing the same." - By > ABI DARUVALLA/The Hague > > > THE CONVERT > Anne Sofie Roald, > 48, Sweden > Most angry young students join marches or sign petitions. Anne Sofie Roald took the veil. When she discovered Islam at the > University of Oslo in the early '80s, the faith seemed to offer all that she sought - fellowship, moral grounding, even ideological > compatibility. "I was thinking about how the First World was exploiting the Third World," she says. As she read the works of such > anti-Western thinkers as Sayyid Qutb, "I saw my ideas," though she now admits the writings are "apologetic literature" for a brand > of Islam more radical than her own. She ventured into Oslo's Muslim community, and the believers, most of them Pakistani, embraced > her. "I asked questions, they gave answers," she says. "They even gave me keys to their flats. It was strange. Norwegians are more > distant." > > Now an associate professor of migration and ethnic relations at Sweden's Malmö University, Roald has seen attitudes toward her faith > shift from indifference to begrudging tolerance mixed with mostly quiet disdain. "Scandinavians want to be inclusive, but it's > difficult," she says, especially after Sept. 11. Thanks in part to Osama bin Laden, Roald and other Muslims unfairly bear what she > calls "guilt by association." > > She often feels the judgment of others the instant they see her headscarf. "When I became a Muslim, I didn't know you were supposed > to wear the hijab. Most Muslims in Norway didn't," Roald recalls. "I thought people just wore it when it was windy." After a friend > prodded her to study the subject more closely, she concluded that she ought to veil. This external sign of faith seemed harder for > her nominally Lutheran family to accept than her new beliefs. Even today, "my mother feels I am singling myself out," she says. > "She's embarrassed." > > But Roald is not. As a convert, she says, she is so self-conscious about other issues, such as doubts about her objectivity as a > researcher on religion, that she doesn't worry about people's views on sartorial matters. Though she deems Norway and Sweden "maybe > the best places for Muslims to live" in the West, the mood has changed. Islam has become more politicized. As Palestinian militant > groups, for example, have added religious overtones to battle cries that were once mostly secular and nationalistic, "people have > started holding all Muslims responsible for what those fighters did - and what Sudan did and what bin Laden did," Roald says. Some > Muslims have reacted by retreating into the safety of "the idea of us vs. them." > > At the office, where she's studying the role of religious minorities in the modern nation-state, she feels as if she has to "work > four times as hard to show my credibility because people are only perceived as objective if they think like the majority." Since > Sept. 11, she has also seen more public criticism of Islam. Following a talk Roald gave recently at Gothenburg University, she > recalls an audience member saying: "'Islam is the root of all the evil in the world.' He wasn't rational, but nobody in the audience > responded. They just sat there." > > How do you make sure that people don't just sit there any more? She points to the media - "The more they are critical, the more the > people will be too" - and to government. She believes programs like language lessons should be bolstered to help "people to feel a > part of society." But Muslims have to do their bit too. Roald broke off ties with non-Muslim friends after her conversion. "I regret > it," she says. "The only way for Muslims to succeed in this society is to be part of it" - her Palestinian-born husband is a local > councilor in Malmö. > > Hopes also rest on the next generation. Roald's three teenage children mix comfortably with both Muslims and non-Muslims. "They have > the religious way of Islam and the Norwegian view of society, which means I give them space and freedom." It surprises some > non-Muslims that these home truths transcend sectarian lines, she says. "None of us want our children to be druggies. Most don't > want our girls sleeping with boys when they are 15." We just have to lift our own veils - of stereotype and preconception - to see. > - By JEFF CHU [wlm] :-* |
Madinat al-Muslimeen Islamic Message Board |