An attack on the European Project
Katajun Amirpur 25 November 2010

Katajun Amirpur is Assistant Professor for Islamic Studies at the University of Zurich

It is no more than a year ago that in Switzerland the vote was passed on banning the construction of minarets. I would like to stress that I am concerned not so much with the Ban on building minarets itself but what this ban stands for, and what possible consequences it may have.

1. The Ban on Minarets is more than a violation of the right to freedom of religion. It is more than discrimination of a specific religious community. What’s much worse is that it puts basic liberties up for grabs, so to speak. The Ban on Minarets puts up basic liberties as a subject for debate – basic liberties of a minority at that, which thus cease to be basic liberties. That was and continues to be a so far unprecedented event which is of utmost importance to all of Europe and goes way beyond the question of minarets. Why? Because in theory, the same arguments brought forth to canvass the Ban on Minarets could be used to ban all kinds of Islamic visibility in the public sphere, the ‘burqa’ as much as the scarf, public prayer – even mosques. In addition, this debate does not only concern Muslims. When citizens are threatened to be stripped of basic liberties, this should be a call to attention for all those who are advocates of the European Project. We call back to mind that the European Project – which goes far beyond the idea of the European Economic Community – is determined by a specific canon of values. This specific canon of values one can adhere to regardless of one’s own culture, race, nationality, or religion. And that is the reason why many people with migratory background, people who have migrated to Europe, are such strong advocates of the European Project: one can become a European, while, on the other hand, one cannot become a German (or so it appears). This is exactly what many Muslims in Germany have experienced during the last months.

The European Project, then, it is; and it is not by chance that the right-wing populists and their formerly liberal turned neo-conservative avant-garde in the media without exception are either critics or outright opponents of the European unification process. What they want is apartheid instead of greater openness, is a focus on the closely delineated nation state instead of giving room to the rich variety of an unified Europe. Their neo-liberal economic concepts also go against the European founding fathers’ and mothers’ social legacy. What this boils down to is that not only those who care about Muslims should be preoccupied; those who care about the European project likewise should sit up and take notice.

2. On the other hand, our aim and intention cannot be to stigmatize debates on Muslim presence in Europe, on visualization and visibility of Muslim presence, to the extent that these debates cannot be held anymore in public. The only thing this leads to is that those problems that are taboo to talk about, let alone to solve, by the public are being taken up by others – and those others turn out to be the afore mentioned right-wing populist parties. Obviously problems that inevitably arise when a continent experiences the amount of immigration that Europe has over the last few decades must be addressed. They have to be addressed though as what they are: normal processes of adaptation in which diverse interests are negotiated, processes of getting used to each other, conflicts which are inevitable but nor irresolvable. Putting my focus on Germany as a concrete example, sins of omission have been piling up for decades – and this goes for both sides. Real or imagined conflicts were not addressed, no demands on the immigrants formulated, no willingness to integrate was cultivated in the major part of society, and now we are presented with the bill: today’s problems hit us right into the face. But – why should we be incapable of solving them?

3. In order for that to happen, however, it is of major importance to avoid projecting things on those who are to be integrated that cause them to take up a defensive stance and leads to all of their reactions being defiant and sullen. One can easily imagine what kind of reaction is provoked when the Bavarian Prime Minister Horst Seehofer says that Turks and Arabs cannot be integrated, when the German Chancellor says that the project of a multi-cultural German society has failed, or when the author of a book that has sold one and half a million copies up to date ‚discovers’ the ‚Muslim gene’ which ‘leads to Muslims being more stupid than others’. The book of Thilo Sarrazin, published on August 30th 2010, has already been called the ‘most important German non-fiction book of the last 50 years’. And one has to raise the question if this public discourse is not the reason why more than 60 percent of the Germans want to put limits on Muslims’ freedom of practicing their religion. No, this is not the way to lead a debate on integration.

Leading the debate in this way has had two additional consequences that are most interesting: 39.000 people left Germany last year to migrate to Turkey, versus 29.000 who immigrated. Naturally, those who leave are those who have the highest level of education. From a political economic point of view, that is the worst case scenario: first you educate people to the highest level and then you bring them to the point when they leave. That is called wasting human capital.

The second result of this kind of debate is that Muslims in Germany are being shaped into a collective that they never before have been. Over the last several years, I myself can feel in my own perceptions how the experience of being rejected because one is seen as part of a group leads to one finally feeling part of this group oneself. Muslims in Europe right now are undergoing a process which structurally is an experience all minorities have. The end result is a Muslimization of Muslims – and that is not what Europe really is all about.

Instead of constantly ranting about Muslims’ capability for integration, the demand should be for them to obey the law – and let that be the only demand. To obey the law ought to be the first and only civic duty. It is impossible to verify if someone has internalized the lately much cited Judeo-Christian values and traditions anyhow, and that goes for Muslims just as much as for natural born Germans. It would, at that, be useful indeed to not re-christen the German Constitution as ‚Judeo-Christian’, as the philosopher of law Ernst-Wolfgang Böckenförde points out, since that specifically would weaken the demand to obey the law.

The rationale behind this really is a bit too obvious: ‚Judeo-Christian’ here is used as a politically charged phrase with one prominent intention, namely that of excluding Muslims. Over the last few weeks, many Jewish intellectuals have voiced their opposition to this phrase, among them Almuth Sh. Bruckstein Coruh, Micha Brumlik, and Rafael Seligmann. The latter writes: ‚Disregarding all Heines, Liebermanns, Einsteins, Tucholskys, for about 1,700 years, nobody saw any point in focusing on Germany’s Jewish tradition.’ Now, suffering from his own fear of Muslims, the ‚helpless German Michel’ recalls his Jewish tradition and uses it as a weapon against Islam. This leads me to my final observation:

4. In political circles as well as in the German Feuilleton, the opinion has been expressed several times before and again recently that the public’s fear of Islam is to be taken seriously. That is very true, on one hand; on the other hand, it draws the focus away from the fact that those fears, in many cases, have been and are being nurtured on purpose. In the specific case of the Ban on Minarets, we recall the extensive campaign of those in favor of the ban in which fears were intentionally hyped up. Similar moves can be observed now in the ‚Ausschaffungsinitiative’ (Initiative for the deportation of criminal foreigners). Geneva’s National Counselor Antonio Hodgers says there have been ‚52 manipulations’ of the survey. In the chapter ‚How much Islam do you want?’, for example, the SVP claimed that most Muslim migrants come from countries without a democratic legal system. This is wrong since 90 percent of Switzerland’s Muslims migrated from Turkey and the Balkan states, which can be called democratic.

We can see how fears are being intentionally hyped up elsewhere, as well. Or what other explanation can be offered for the fact that fear of Islam is most prevalent where the Muslim population is actually lowest in numbers, i.e. in rural or in some well-to-do, upper middle class communities? And while we are talking about fears: It is quite telling that, after the Ban on the Minarets, hardly any one European leader of state addressed the fears of those who – in a European country – had just been declared second class citizens. What kind of integration summit shall, in the future, be offered to convince them that they are, indeed, part of the European communities?

Whoever wants to address that xenophobia in earnest should not close ranks with the right-wing populists in preemptive obeisance and make the foreign disappear by decree. Instead, those fears should be lessened by offering perspectives of problem solving, such as – among other examples – language training starting in kindergarten, women’s shelters, actions taken against ghettoization tendencies in cities, the training of Muslim Religious Education teachers, and first of all, massive investment in education in general, to name just a few. In Germany, at least, the problem of integration is first and foremost a problem of education.

This is the text of the paper the author presented at the conference  “After the Ban on Minarets: The Open Society and Islam” organized by ResetDoc and UFSP Asia and Europe and held at Zurich University on Wednesday November 17th  2010.

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