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Muslim Engagement in the Non-Muslim Community
Numerous British commentators portray UK Muslims as standing outside the
British political order. For an early generation of immigrants, this was in fact
usually the case when, in their own experience, political involvement was a
dangerous process in their home country and may even have led to the necessity
of their fleeing their homeland for security in a foreign culture.
But Amin Nasser argues that first-generation Muslims in the UK are indeed
politically aware and are organizing community support for legislation and civil
liberties that affect them. This is especially true in the area of antiterrorism
legislation that brought hardships to the Muslim community through restriction
of free speech under the Blair government.
And in a surprising example of adaptation, perhaps 10 percent of the entire
Muslim student population in France now attends private Catholic schools. One
reason is the relative paucity of Muslim schools. But more important is that
Muslim parents believe that Catholic schools offer a more sympathetic view of
the role of religion in life and show greater understanding of Islam than state
secular schools. Muslim parents also like the stress on moral behavior. They
seem not especially concerned about the particular Catholic theological aspects
of instruction, and the Catholic schools have no ban on girls wearing
headscarves to class, unlike French state schools. Thus, on the religious level,
there is healthy coexistence in these schools that may provide a good basis for
the next generation to experience multireligious understanding.
While the administration of George W. Bush pursued ruinous policies in the
Muslim world that exacerbated and deepened the crisis, American society itself
has actually been much more successful in integrating Muslims into society than
the Europeans. First, as we have already noted, Muslim immigrants to North
America are largely professionals, better educated and more capable of making
the cultural transition than their working-class counterparts in Europe.
Additionally, North American societies are immigrant societies and therefore by
definition far more multicultural than Europe. With the exception of a minority
of American chauvinists who believe that the United States must remain
essentially a white, northern-European Protestant society, most Americans do not
really feel that the arrival of new immigrants is going to fundamentally change
the culture. European societies such as Scandinavia, Holland, or Belgium,
however, possess considerably smaller populations; there the arrival of
significant numbers of immigrants can actually begin to change the carefully
preserved nature of their traditional culture. These countries had never expected

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to be multicultural in any significant way, and the process has been something of
a shock.
One of the leading scholars in Europe on Islam, Tariq Ramadan, stresses that
integration is a two-way street. He believes Muslims must first address their
responsibilities, and only then their rights in their new societies. In his view,
Muslims who emigrate freely to Europe are under obligation not only to accept
but also to understand European culture, its languages, and its psychology
deriving from the European historical experience. Muslims cannot live outside
that experience or hold the culture at arm’s length—although that does not have
to mean full Muslim acceptance of all aspects of European lifestyles. Ramadan
notes among European Muslims the existence of “literalists and traditionalists
who do not want to be involved in the society. And of course we still have
people saying, ‘Anything European is against the Islamic tradition.’ But the
[Muslim] mainstream, made up of those who feel at home in Europe, is a big
part of the European reality.” And this reality is in a constant state of evolution
and integration as new generations of Muslims are born and grow up in
European societies.
Ramadan notes that Europe represents a culture of great personal freedom for
the individual to do as he or she wishes; no one compels Muslims to pursue the
lifestyles of others. If they believe that changes should come about in European
lifestyles, they must turn to the ballot box if they wish to introduce change. But
Europeans, too, must understand that integration does not compel Muslims to
live just like traditional Danes or Dutch. Europeans need to understand how the
nature of “integration” is also changing: Europe is not a static and frozen culture,
in which Muslim immigrants suddenly represent a jarring force. European
culture has been formed over two millennia by a great variety of cultures,
invaders, barbarians, wars, and external influences. Islam contributed heavily to
the development of medieval European culture and the transmission of Greek
philosophy. Thus, Europeans, too, must expect to change and find their
traditional culture evolve as it encounters globalizing forces.
Ramadan also deals with questions of identity, referring to the well-known
reality that we all have multiple identities. Therefore, it is not reasonable to ask
Muslims “Which identity comes first, Muslim or German?” Ramadan identifies
himself as “a Swiss, an academic, a male, a Muslim, of Palestinian origin,
European by culture,” and so on. Different identities emerge in accordance with
the situation.
These problems are familiar in America as well, where social challenges
often shade off into racism when they are simply attributed to “the Mexicans, or
the blacks” or, in earlier eras, to Italians, Hungarians, Irish, Roman Catholics,

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Jews, and Chinese, who in previous years were considered “unassimilable.”
There are indeed social issues involved in integrating Muslims into American
and European societies, and the problems are often of a different character in
each place and with each group. But these problems essentially resolve
themselves over time through the process of integration and acceptance. The
election of Barack Obama in America represents just one such American
watershed of assimilation, as was the election of the first American Roman
Catholic president, John F. Kennedy.

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