Managing The Future Of European Muslims

Developing New Policies Is The Key

Jan 7th 2012
Courtesy Of "The Economist"

IN THE summer of 2005 Robert Leiken, an American political scientist, wrote a bluntly worded essay entitled “Europe’s Angry Muslims”. His piece appeared in Foreign Affairs on the eve of the London tube bombings—and convinced many of his fellow Americans that Europe had failed to integrate its burgeoning Muslim communities, and that this represented a new, and barely acknowledged, challenge to the West’s ongoing “war on terror”.

In turning the essay into a book, Mr Leiken has had time to travel and reflect, and to soften some of the hard edges of his original critique. But the result remains a trenchant indictment of European policies, the unintended consequences of which have been disastrous, he believes. His focus is on the three countries—Britain, France and Germany—which have the biggest Muslim populations in western Europe. For British readers in particular, his book makes for uncomfortable reading. At its core are the London bombings and the iconic and ultimately enigmatic figure of Mohammad Sidique Khan, who led the British-born suicide-bombers. Mr Leiken views the young schoolteacher from Leeds as the product of three peculiarly British factors that came together to create a perfect storm.

The “revolt of the second generation” has been more acute in Britain than elsewhere, he suggests, because of the deeply conservative and introverted character of its mainly Pakistani Muslim communities; because the British approach to multiculturalism has unwittingly fostered separation and isolation; and because, in the 1980s and 1990s, Britain opened the door to radical leaders from the Middle East—the “lords of Londonistan”, Mr Leiken dubs them—who seduced young British-born Muslims with their witch’s brew of jihadist ideology.

Mr Leiken believes that France, by cracking down hard on militant Islam, has largely kept the phenomenon at bay. It has, to be sure, failed to integrate a large Muslim community of North African origin. But this, he says, has little to do with Islam and Islamism, and everything to do with discrimination, harsh policing and a lack of worthwhile jobs. Mr Leiken regards Germany as lying somewhere in between; neither fully in the danger zone, like Britain, nor largely outside it, like France. Of its large population of Turkish origin, less than a third have managed to acquire German citizenship. And it is only through luck, he says, that the radical plots uncovered in 2006-07 failed to produce a German equivalent of the London bombings.

Mr Leiken is a largely reliable guide to the varieties of Islamic belief and politics that are now reproduced in Europe, even if he can be a little clumsy with Arab and Asian names. He writes with eloquence, bringing to life the grim realities of the French banlieues and of the back-to-back houses of immigrant families in Leeds, where his requests for information met an impenetrable wall of silence. He is no neo-conservative, but appears to endorse the “clash of civilisations” thesis of the late Samuel Huntington, which lends a dark undertone to his view of relations between Islam and the West. But, as parts of his book attest, that relationship is both more complex and more nuanced than either the jihadists or the Huntingtonians fully acknowledge.

This is where Jonathan Laurence, of Boston College, comes in. “The Emancipation of Europe’s Muslims”—a title that may provoke initial scepticism—looks at the largely unnoticed ways in which European governments have begun to integrate Muslims and Muslim organisations into public life. Mr Laurence describes a two-stage process. In the first (“outsourcing”), governments relied on the embassies of the sending countries (Turkey, Algeria, Morocco) to organise the building of mosques, training of imams and other requirements of Muslim religious life. But the embassies had no interest in encouraging the evolution of a British or French or German Islam, since their purpose was to maintain links with the country of origin. As the failures of integration became all too apparent in the 1990s, and above all after the terrorist attacks of 2001-05, the host countries switched to a different approach (“incorporation”). The embassies lost their monopoly status, as host governments widened the circle of Muslim interlocutors—even including, cautiously, Islamist groups that had long been at odds with both the host governments and the embassies.

Relying on extensive research and a wide range of interviews, Mr Laurence has written an original and thought-provoking study. He focuses on a crucial new mechanism of state-mosque relations: the Islam councils which governments have created, under different names, in France, Britain, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands and elsewhere. These councils remain, he stresses, a work in progress, but many have helped nurture a more pragmatic Muslim leadership that seems increasingly committed to a shared future in Europe rather than a clash of civilisations.