A world Without Islam pdfdrive com

Muslims in the West: Loyal Citizens or Fifth Column?
The dramatic force of the events of 9/11 focused attention on Muslim
communities in the West like nothing before. That the 9/11 plotters drew up
many of their attack plans in Germany and had spent a lot of time in the West
raised the already troubled profile of Muslims in Europe to unprecedented levels.
Were Muslims in the West now enemies inside the tent, fifth columnists lying in
wait for the signal to strike? Open expression by Europeans and Americans of
latent and visceral anti-Muslim sentiments now became more acceptable in the
smoldering fears of the new security-driven environment.
Then violence did indeed come to Europe itself. In March 2004, a series of
bombs ripped through several commuter trains in Madrid, killing 191 people and
wounding over 1800. The conspirators were ultimately traced to Muslims from
North Africa with inspiration from, but no clear links to, al-Qa’ida. In November
2004, Holland was shocked by the brutal knife murder in broad daylight of the
Dutch writer and film producer Theo van Gogh; his murderer was a Moroccan-
born Dutch citizen who had become radicalized through the Iraq war. Van Gogh,
an equal-opportunity bigot who had previously mocked Jews, was also
outspokenly anti-Islam and had made a short film in which passages from the
Qur’an were projected onto the body of a writhing naked woman as a protest
against “Islam’s discrimination against women.” The murder understandably
sent a chill through even liberal European circles about the presence of a
community of foreigners for some of whom religion mattered enough to commit
murder.
In July 2005, several British Muslims carried out suicide bombings in the
London Underground, killing 52 and wounding some 700 people. The bombers
were allegedly influenced by British involvement in the war in Iraq. Then in
June 2007, two Muslims, one a British-born doctor of Iraqi origin, drove a truck
with propane canisters into the entrance at the Glasgow airport. No one was
killed, but several were injured. The motivation again seemed linked to Iraq

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events.
In November 2007, riots broke out for days around Paris by African and Arab
immigrants angry at their problems in trying to assimilate into French culture
and economy; a lot of property was destroyed, although no terrorist tactics were
employed.
All of these events brought to front and center the presence of Muslims in
Europe, raising questions about their loyalties and their willingness and ability to
assimilate. Questions naturally arose: is there something “different” about Islam
that puts Muslim immigrants into a special category from other immigrants? Or
we might turn the question around: if they were not Muslim, would the problems
and issues be fundamentally different? The answer seems to be a qualified no.
Tariq Ramadan, a leading European Muslim, warns against what he calls the
“easy pitfall of ‘Islamizing’ problems,” that is, identifying problems of the
Muslim community as somehow linked to Islam. “We have social problems, we
have economic problems, and we have urban problems. They have nothing to do
with religion. They have to do with social policies…. But when we have
politicians who do not have social answers, they tend to essentialize the problem
claiming that these social ills stem from the fact that these people are Muslims or
Arabs.” In short, Europe would face, indeed does face, considerable problems
with immigrants from the developing world in this era of globalization, even if
there were no Islam.
Europe presents a very different “frontier” for Muslims compared to Russia,
India, or China. Muslims in Europe are not indigenous; they are modern
immigrants who individually and voluntarily left their homelands to migrate to
non-Muslim countries to work and raise families. While some saw employment
in Europe as a temporary move for financial reasons, increasingly their decision
has become permanent: they seek citizenship and accept their status as
minorities.
Life in contemporary multicultural Europe of course differs sharply from life
in most other parts of the world and raises new and complex identity issues. In
most cases Europe represents the first contact of Muslims with an essentially
post-ethnic and post-religious European society in which ethnicity and religion
had seemingly ceased to be important aspects of life, until massive immigration
began. And the European experience was quite new for Muslim immigrants, as
well—and to most of the rest of the developing world.
Unlike North America, Europe is not by nature an immigrant society; it had
consisted of old and well-established Western European nationalities and
cultures often set in conservative patterns of life. Europe was, of course, long
familiar with the Muslim “Other” as the historical enemy—but usually a distant

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enemy. Europe had repelled Arab forces from Muslim Spain at Poitiers in 732
CE—considered to have ended forever the prospect of a Muslim invasion and
any potential Islamization of Europe. Europeans met Muslims on the battlefields
of the Crusades. King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella in 1492 put a harsh end to
nearly seven centuries of a largely pluralistic, Muslim-Jewish-Christian
multicultural society in Spain by unleashing modern Europe’s first program of
ethnic cleansing of Muslims and Jews. Polish forces stopped the advance of
Ottoman armies at the 1683 siege of Vienna, the high-water mark of the Ottoman
move into Eastern Europe. Then Europe itself had gone on to invade and
dominate virtually every Muslim country in the world. Still later, Europe
struggled to put down anticolonial resistance of Muslim populations; Europe
dominated oil exploration and production in Muslim lands before nationalist
movements eventually took them over. The French effort to retain control of
Algeria was an intensely bloody affair and Algerians became objects of hate in
France. So European historical memory of its interactions with Islam were not
positive. But now, by the second half of the twentieth century, an entirely new
and unexpected relationship with Muslims began to emerge with the arrival of
large numbers of Muslims as immigrants.

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