The Muslim Next Door: Can we live with him? Can he live with us? - Muslims in European countries

National Review, June 17, 2002 by Roger Scruton

There are now 15 million Muslims resident in Europe, and Muslim immigrants form close to 10 percent of the Dutch population. This last fact has led to the sudden collapse of the cozy social-democratic consensus in a country that has until recently been famous for its liberal approach to all questions of national identity. The extensive Muslim populations in France, mostly immigrants from North Africa, are one cause of the massive surge in popularity of Jean-Marie Le Pen. And even in Britain, where most Muslims are English-language speakers from the former British Empire, there is a growing sense that the clash of civilizations announced by Samuel Huntington is after all becoming a reality. Islamist cells in Germany, Muslim anti-Semitism in France, and the radical mullahs of the London mosques all contribute to this feeling, and of course the atrocities of September 11 have done nothing to dispel it. The question in every European mind is, Will Muslims assimilate?

This is not to say that the question is openly discussed. Massive political and social censorship, of the kind used to intimidate the followers, or would-be followers, of Le Pen, now prevails in Europe. Anyone who publicly raises the question of Muslim immigration risks being denounced as a racist, a xenophobe, or a religious bigot. And since the EU now proposes to make racism and xenophobia into a criminal offense, for which people can be extradited from anywhere in the Union to a court of the Investigator's choice, it may well be that all discussion of the matter will soon be officially closed. Still, people cannot be prevented from drawing their private conclusions, and from pondering the peculiar situation in which the residents of our cities now find themselves.

Consider the mad mullah of London's Finsbury Park mosque, Abu Hamza al- Masri, now wanted in Yemen on charges of conspiracy to murder. Hamza came to Britain seeking asylum, and in order to enjoy the security that British troops are currently risking their lives to defend. Taking advantage of a freedom of speech nowhere available in the Islamic world, Hamza has used his Friday sermons to incite young men to violence and holy war, naming Britain, among other places, as a legitimate target. The Yemeni government alleges, on very good grounds, that he has sent a group of British Muslims to Yemen in order to bomb the British embassy there and at the same time to kidnap and murder British tourists.

It goes without saying that the tolerance extended to Hamza would not be extended by Hamza himself, were he ever to realize his ambition of establishing an Islamic state in Britain. But should he be tolerated? The official view in most Western countries is that we are multicultural societies, and that cultures should be allowed complete freedom to develop in our territory, regardless of whether they conform to the traditional standards of behavior. As a result, the "multicultural" idea has become a form of apartheid, with each culture developing completely independently of the others. All criticism of minority cultures is censored out of public debate, and newcomers quickly conclude that it is possible to reside in a European state as an antagonist and still enjoy all the rights and privileges that are the reward of citizenship.

Toleration taken so far, however, undermines its own preconditions. For toleration is an Enlightenment ideal, and demands the Enlightenment conception of citizenship if it is to be a reality. The citizen, as defined by Locke, Rousseau, Montesquieu, and the Founding Fathers, is a free participant in the institutions that govern him. His primary obligation is to obey the law of a sovereign state, and to regard other citizens as equals before that law, regardless of their religious affiliation. We citizens enjoy a single political culture, with the nation-state as the object of our common loyalty, and a secular conception of law that makes religion a concern of family and society, but not of the state. The laws of Western states therefore make no religious demands, bind all citizens equally to a place and its history, and safeguard a political heritage in which the freedom of the individual is the highest aim of government.

People who see law, social identity, and loyalty as issuing from a religious or a tribal source cannot really form part of the Western political culture, and will not recognize either the obligation to the state or the love of country on which that obligation is founded. Many people are waking up to this fact, and beginning to recognize -- as Pim Fortuyn recognized -- that we citizens are not, and cannot be, members of a multicultural society, if that means a society with multiple and conflicting loyalties and rival systems of law.

The Western idea of citizenship implies that it is no more acceptable for Muslims to say that their religion absolves them from obedience to the territorial law than it is for any other group of citizens. Most Muslims accept this; but not all. A spokesman for al-Muhajiroun ("Emigres" or "Exiles," a group founded in Britain and with links to Osama bin Laden) recently warned that no British Muslim has any obligation to British law when it conflicts with the law of Allah, and that the British mujahedin in Afghanistan, waiting to fight there against what others would call "their country," must remain indifferent to any charge of treason.