Downturn Draws a Veil Over Islam

Europe’s economic crisis has subordinated its other epochal problem — shaping a future life with Muslim immigrants and Islam — into a place where there’s a temptation to pretend it’s vanished.

There are no headlines around Europe these days like the front-page one in New York last weekend, reporting that minorities are hardest hit by real estate foreclosures in the city.

Here, instead, it’s low-level, reflexively standard stuff: a story or two, depending on a newspaper’s basic political take, pointing to encroachments on traditional national habit by Muslim immigrants, or suggesting the state may be over-responding (giving in, according to what you read) to demands for what’s often cast as their separate but equal status parallel to the mainstream.

One story last week was about a Muslim cook who said wearing plastic gloves and using tongs was not enough to protect him from the possibility of being splattered while preparing pork sausages for breakfast. Feeling discriminated against, he sued. Another reported Christians’ concern about the appointment of a Muslim, described as a “controversial” producer who commissioned documentaries with a pro-Islam bias, as chief of religious broadcasting at the BBC.

There are two facts below the surface here.

The first says that Europe is not paying much attention and certainly not talking about how its Great Recession is affecting the stability of the communities of vulnerable, largely unskilled Muslim immigrants who make up an increasing proportion of Europe’s cities.

Among Europe’s existential concerns, immigration does not come under the common policy control of the European Union. That frequently leaves individual countries hiding from neighbors’ problems concerning issues they can’t resolve themselves.

And it underpins a flight from solidarity, effective action, and often, Europe’s shared reality. Not ideal.

The second fact is that on the level of daily experience, an increasing number of white Europeans believe Muslim immigrants want integration with an asterisk — the asterisk providing an all-access pass to the welfare state, but with a mark-the-box list of opt-outs or variances from many of its obligations.

The predicament now is that as economic realities harshen, implying more stress and tension for (and emanating from) its newcomers, Europe seems no better prepared or certain about what needs to be done.

An American has walked into the middle of this thicket. Christopher Caldwell has written a dense and important book about whether Europe’s identity (itself an uncertain issue) can absorb or survive a fast growing Muslim population, in part deeply engaged in Islam. It is called “Reflections on the Revolution in Europe” and is published in London by Allen Lane and by Doubleday in New York.

Its most cutting insights, rather than on Muslim immigrants’ capacity or motivations to assimilate — I’d say they turn on Europe’s will to establish more demanding standards for their integration — deal with the Europeans themselves.

Mr. Caldwell, who is an editor at The Weekly Standard in Washington and writes a weekend column for The London Financial Times, says Europe’s “writers, academics and politicians act as if it is only some quirk or accident or epiphenomenon (and never immigration itself) that has left their country with intractable problems.”

All European countries, he writes, pursue the same strategy: “elevating Muslim pressure groups to pseudo-governmental status and declaring that doing so will produce an Islam that reflects the values of Europe than vice versa.”

But because Europe was unsure of what those values are, and accepted a “neutrality of cultures,” Mr. Caldwell finds “declaring immigration a success and an enrichment became the only acceptable opinion to hold.”

As a result, he concludes, “Europe finds itself in a contest with Islam for the allegiance of its newcomers. For now, Islam is the stronger party in that contest.”

Not exactly what every European wants to hear. In response to Mr. Caldwell’s observations, Mark Mazower, a British academic living in America, wrote the following in a review in The Financial Times: “This sinister fantasy has less to do with reality than neo-conservative anxieties about the decline of the West.”

Funny how the Dutch Labor Party, not known for its penetration by neo-con agents, published a position paper last December calling for the end of the failed model of Dutch “tolerance.”

Considering the long Dutch experience with multicultural laissez-faire involving Muslim immigration, it said some extraordinary things. Notably, that government and politicians had too often ignored the feelings of “loss and estrangement” in Dutch society in the face of newcomers who disregarded its language, laws and customs.

Lilianne Ploumen, the party chairwoman, insisted that attempts to stifle Dutch criticism of religions (read Islam) and cultures had to stop; double nationalities had to disappear; punishment for troublemakers had to be of such severity that it could no longer serve as a badge of honor for them.

“The street is mine, too,” she said.

The party’s new line seemed like a path-finding change of course inside Europe’s left. Almost.

Up for approval at a party congress in March, the double-nationality ban disappeared. The text didn’t say, as Ms. Ploumen had, “Let go of where you come from.” It no longer contained a call to newcomers to abandon “self-designated victimization.” Nor did it refer to “bringing our (Dutch) values into confrontation with people who think otherwise.”

And the notion of “unconditional” engagement by immigrants in Dutch life was gone.

Analysts of the Labor Party called the declaration’s changes mainly “adjustments in tone.” Would the party, a member of the coalition government, work to make the position paper law?

Answer: that was not the intent. Rather, the goal was to better define the party’s views in relation to its rivals.

Europe, May 2009: In its worst economic downturn since World War II, there isn’t much visible or specific concern for the millions of Muslim immigrants who may be the least able to defend themselves.

And not much new resolve, either, in making it unmistakable for those immigrants that the quid pro quo in becoming accepted in a time of economic grief means their accommodation to European society, not the other way around.

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