Alienation of the Islamic Diaspora in Europe
By Fawaz Turki
Arab News, 8/10/05
The Daily Telegraph of London, a respected conservative paper,
published a survey on July 23 of British Muslim opinion and found that
though the vast majority of the respondents condemned the bombings in
the capital, a substantial minority are so alienated from their
objective world that they are prepared to justify terrorist acts.
According to the poll, 88 percent of Muslims, evidently moderate,
law-abiding citizens or residents of the United Kingdom, abhorred the
attacks and evinced no support for the perpetrators. However, 6
percent claimed that the bombings were justified. That’s clearly 6
percent too many, representing roughly 100,000 people who mean their
native or adopted country harm, individuals who, though not prepared
to carry out terrorist acts themselves, are ready to support those who
do.
The survey revealed other figures that are both reassuring and
disturbing. Before we consider what all this says about the Muslim
community in Britain, and perhaps by extension in the rest of Europe,
let’s step back a little and take stock.
Public pollsters, like statisticians, can be manipulative with their
figures. In other words, before we trust the results of a survey such
as this, where 526 Muslim adults across Britain were interviewed
online July 15 and again on July 22, we have to ask some relevant
questions here. Who conducted the poll? Who should have been
interviewed but was not? What was the sampling error for the results?
Did the pollsters avoid the pitfall of wording questions in such a way
as to suggest an answer by the respondents? Was a cross-section of the
entire community interviewed (randomly rather than selectively)? Were
other polls done on the subject, and if so, were the figures
different? And if they were different, then why?
All we get from the Telegraph is that its survey was conducted by a
group called YouGov. We have to accept the findings on faith, though
few of the direct questions or respondents’ answers were in quotes,
which is obviously troubling.
Yet, since we refuse to believe that a highly respected publication
would cook the books, because it has an ideological ax to grind or
deliberately promote a skewed view of the Muslim community, then we’ll
let its findings stand as credible ones indeed.
According to these findings, a large majority of Muslims believe that
the time has come when they must shoulder their share of the
responsibility for preventing and punishing those who commit terrorist
acts such as those in London, and as many as 70 percent said they took
it as their duty to go to the police if they saw something in the
community that made them feel suspicious.
A majority, 60 percent, believed that Western society may not be
perfect but Muslims should live with it and not seek to harm
it. Nevertheless, a third of British Muslims, 32 percent, are
dismissive, claiming that `Western society is decadent and immoral and
that Muslims should seek to bring it to an end,’ one of the few
answers in the survey, incidentally, presented in quotes.
Among those who hold this view, almost all go on to say that Muslims
should only seek to bring about social change by non-violent means,
but one percent, about 16,000 individuals, declared themselves ready,
willing and able, even eager, to embrace violence.
So does that mean that the Muslim Diaspora in Britain, and along with
it the rest of Europe, have a problem with integration?
Clearly, this Diaspora, numbering roughly 20 million, has effected a
demographic shift on the Continent, altering its social landscape. All
of which is not surprising.
Cultural flow and population transfers have always been an integral
part of human history, and copious research has been done, by
historians, sociologists and anthropologists, of diasporic societies,
of forced or voluntary migration of Greeks, Armenians, Africans,
Palestinians and Puerto Ricans.
We also read of the Chinese Diaspora (60 million in Southeast Asian
countries), the French Diaspora in Canada, and the Irish Diaspora in
the US, Australia and the UK. And most recently the Muslim Diaspora in
Europe, whose members hail from Pakistan, India, Bangladesh,
Indonesia, Somalia and a wide range of other Asian, North African and
Middle Eastern countries.
For Muslims in Europe, if we can generalize about them, it has been a
constant battle with alienation ‘ how to see the world around you in
terms that redefine your relationship with the Other, how to live in
and be not just from but of those societies that continue to refuse to
accept you, that thrust upon you a range of hybrid images.
The young in particular are socialized from an early age on the need
to deal with integration conflict and racist bias ‘ a heavy lot of
cargo for a youngster to have to carry on his back growing up.
You don’t have to have written a dissertation on the psychology of
alienation to discern these youngsters’ human response: If you’re a
young Turk, Pakistani, Yemeni or any other kind of Muslim born in a
European country that thrusts a sense of otherness on you, your
identification with Islam, as a pan-ethnic identity, becomes more
strongly felt than with your ancestral national heritage.
Then the defense mechanisms kick in. You feel pride in this otherness
than had been thrust upon you by the Other, and turn upside down those
racist labels, that define you, into labels of pride.
Consider how in Germany, the term `barbaren,’ used by some (note, I
say some) Germans to dismiss foreigners, is co-opted and embraced by
ethnic Turkish gangs to describe themselves, where the term here
connotes power, inclusiveness and acceptance. To call yourself
`barbaren’ is a means to challenge a culture that rejects you, denying
you its solidarity and connection to a reference group.
Diaspora, a word from classical Greek that means a `scattering or
sowing of seeds,’ is a sad term ‘ sad because it implies an uprooting
of a community, a struggle by its members to reassemble their inward
preoccupations in order to fit in their new locale.
The Muslim Diaspora in Europe, representing 56 nationalities speaking
over 100 languages, feels, it has to be admitted, an emotional
distance from the societies they inhabit, loss of a robust sense of
identity, and a crippling numbness at their core.
So the answer to the question, whether the Muslim Diaspora in Britain,
and along with it the rest of Europe, have a problem with integration,
is yes, it does. It definitely does.
But that is a problem for Britain and the rest of Western Europe to
deal with, not Islam.
The integration of millions of well-adjusted Muslims in places like
the US, Canada and Australia, countries with a tradition of welcoming
and assimilating immigrants, must surely tell you something here. In
America, we don’t use terms like barbaren, wog, bicot or the N-word ‘
not unless we want to go to jail.
An opinion poll, such as that in the Daily Telegraph two weeks ago,
may reveal the sentiments, `disturbing’ and `alarming,’ as the paper
called them, that a segment of the community harbors. What triggered
them in the first place is the real revelation.