As in the sixteenth century, the depiction of Europe’s Muslims as “suspect communities” tends to interpret cultural and religious difference—whether real or simply imagined—as an expression of willful defiance of the majority. The covered female face has become a particular object of such suspicions, even if the meanings associated with it have changed. Where Spanish clerics once associated the
almalafa
with female sexuality and saw it as a threat to Catholic morality and virtue, the Muslim veil has been variously interpreted in recent years as a threat to European secularism, as a symbol of the oppression of women, or even as a terrorist threat, as the Dutch cabinet described the
burqa
in November 2006 during a discussion that resulted in a decision to ban it from public places throughout Holland.
Holland is not the only European country to have introduced legislation banning the
burqa
, the
niqab
, and the
hijab
. Whether such bans are presented as a defense of female equality or the promotion of integration, they tend to share a common perception of Islam as a primitive culture or religion that monolithically sanctions genital mutilation, the stoning of homosexuals, and the oppression of women, and demands violent jihad as a religious obligation. It is not necessary to eulogize Islam as a pristine “religion of peace” to recognize the underlying bigotry behind these narratives. All religions contain contradictory elements within their doctrines and traditions that can be used and misused, according to specific historical and cultural circumstances, and Islam is no exception. There are reactionary elements among Europe’s Muslim communities who denounce the “decadence” of the West, who talk of executing apostates and homosexuals, and who boast of the superiority of Islamic civilization. There is a small minority of radical extremists who have carried out or attempted to carry out mass killings of European civilians. But these groups constitute a minority within a minority, especially when compared with the hostile consensus that is beginning to take shape among media pundits, politicians, “terrorism experts,” and the ordinary population which increasingly depicts Europe’s Muslims as a dangerous and backward minority whose members will not or cannot adapt to European norms.
Such hostility tends to ignore the distinctions between religious and secular Muslims, among different strands of Islam and different cultural traditions of European Muslims, and among the terms
fundamentalist
,
terrorist
, and
Islamist
, prefering to cite the most extremist and reactionary preachers, such as Abu Hamza or Abu Qatada, as evidence of a generalized cultural backwardness. Other religious groups, including Christians, also harbor reactionary attitudes toward women and homosexuals, but such attitudes among Muslims tend to be singled out as evidence of a collective incompatibility with the superior values of a secular, enlightened, and tolerant Europe. One increasingly influential school of anti-Muslim thought has depicted Europe as a continent that is in the throes of cultural suicide and imminent transformation into a colony of Islam called Eurabia. The mostly conservative and right-wing writers in Europe and the United States who subscribe to this thesis often fuse science-fiction visions of a dystopian future with historical references to the Battle of Poitiers or the 1783 siege of Vienna in their presentation of Europe’s Muslim immigrants as the vanguard of a new Islamic conquest. To proponents of Eurabian scenarios, such as the Egyptian-born writer Bat Yeor and the radically anti-Muslim British media pundit Melanie Phillips, every new mosque, every Arab investment, and every Arab endowment to a European university is a confirmation of Europe’s spiritual sickness and subservience to Islam that has placed the continent’s institutions in a state of “dhimmitude.”
Other writers, such as the American Catholic intellectual George Weigel and the Canadian columnist Mark Steyn, depict a suicidal and masochistic Europe fatally afflicted by a crisis of civilizational morale. To the American anti-Islamic ideologue Daniel Pipes, Eurabia stems from Europe’s “alienation from the Judeo-Christian tradition, empty church pews and a fascination with Islam,” whereas “Muslims display a religious fervor that translates into jihadi sensibility, a supremacism toward non-Muslims and an expectation that Europe is waiting for conversion to Islam.”
12
Alarmists warning of this Eurabian future appear oblivious to the resemblance between their paranoid theories of a Muslim takeover and anti-Semitic tracts such as the
Protocols of the Elders of Zion
. Such views do not come from marginalized ideologues on the far-right political fringe, but from writers such as Pipes, Steyn, and Phillips, who regularly write for mainstream newspapers and publications. Where Spanish anti-Morisco writers once warned that Moriscos were outbreeding Christians, Eurabian narratives are prone to equally apocalyptic demographic predictions, in which rising Muslim birthrates and declining fertility rates among “secular” and “Christian” Europeans alike will transform Europe into what the late Italian journalist Oriana Fallaci called “a province of Islam, as Spain and Portugal were of the time of the Moors,” which “teems with mullahs, imams, mosques, burqas and chadors.”
13
Most purveyors of these nightmare scenarios tend to be more temperate than Fallaci, who suggests that Muslims who “breed too much” are doing so as a form of “conquest” and “reverse crusade.”
14
But even mainstream academics sometimes support such ideas: the Princeton historian Bernard Lewis told the German newspaper
Die Welt
in July 2004 that “Europe will have Muslim majorities in the population by the end of the twenty-first century at the latest”—a prospect that he predicted would transform Europe into “part of the Arab west—the Maghreb.”
15
Other commentators have similarly described a dire future, in which Europe is engulfed and finally overwhelmed by a Muslim population whose numbers are inexorably growing to the point where they are able to impose sharia law on all Europe. Some commentators attribute this demographic transformation to low birth rates among an aging European population. Others, like Fallaci, have claimed that European Muslims are deliberately increasing their numbers in order to take over Europe as a form of jihad—a lunatic notion that Jaime Bleda and Marcos de Guadalajara would have subscribed to.
There is abundant evidence to demonstrate that these demographic projections are unreliable at best and inflated or fantastic at worst. According to the respected U.S.-based Population Reference Bureau, Muslim fertility rates have
fallen
continuously, not only in Europe, but also in North Africa.
16
In an August 2007 article, the
Financial Times
disputed Eurabian predictions of a demographic decline and noted a “rebound in fertility” in northern Europe in recent years. Citing figures from the United Nations and the CIA
World Factbook
that show little difference between the birthrates of Algerian women in France and French women overall, the article concluded that “Islamicisation—let alone shar’ia law—is not a demographic prospect for Europe.”
17
Even though statistical evidence is far more readily available than it was in the sixteenth century, bigotry and fantasies of cultural decline can generate their own logic, leading to assumptions and beliefs that are uncritically accepted and acted upon. As in the sixteenth century, these demographic scenarios generally assume that all Muslims are part of a monolithic bloc whose members transmit their immutable cultural and religious values from one generation to the next. Once again, such assumptions are not restricted to the political margins, and respected establishment historians, such as Martin Gilbert and Niall Ferguson, have subscribed to the Eurabia thesis and the demographic nightmare that sustains it.
The fantasy world of Eurabia is one element in a rising tide of anti-Muslim sentiment throughout Europe that has taken various forms, from relentlessly negative and often blatantly dishonest media coverage of Muslims to physical attacks, campaigns against the construction of mosques, acts of vandalism against Islamic buildings, and grotesque episodes like the “pig parade” in Bologna, where local residents carried pigs’ heads and sausages to the site of a proposed mosque in an attempt to “contaminate” it.
European politicians generally avoid the language used by Giancarlo Gentilini, the deputy mayor of Treviso, who once described Muslims as “a cancer which must be eradicated before they start to spread.”
18
Respectable English political discourse tends to be more reserved than Winston Churchill’s grandson, who has warned that the “takeover” of British mosques by the Deobandi sect is creating a “viper’s nest in our midst.”
19
But many European politicians and media commentators share Churchill’s belief that “unlike most other categories of migrant, the Muslims are reluctant to assimilate and, all too often, wish to pursue their own agenda.” In September 2000, Cardinal Giacomo Biffi, the archbishop of Bologna, called for a limitation on Muslim immigration into Europe, on the grounds that “In the vast majority of cases, Muslims come here with the resolve to remain strangers to our brand of individual or social ‘humanity’ in everything that is most essential, most precious,”
20
Biffi’s arguments echoed those of European far-right parties, such as the Vlaams Belang party in Belgium, whose leader once told the
New York Times
, “We must stop the Islamic invasion. I think it’s, in fact, impossible to assimilate in our country if you are of Islamic belief.”
21
Similar accusations were once leveled at the Jews of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Europe. Such assumptions tend to ignore the existence of discrimination and prejudice emanating from within the “host” country itself, and attribute the absence of integration to a residual hostility or incompatibility on the part of hermetically sealed and introspective immigrant “guests.” In response to this perceived problem, a growing number of European governments have opted for an authoritarian model of assimilation, in which integration and “social cohesion” is demanded rather than negotiated, and enforced by stringent citizenship requirements, civic integration tests, and an increasingly McCarthyite culture that demands that European immigrants prove their “moderation” in order to justify their continued presence.
The Muslim presence has been a key factor in recent legislation, introduced in a number of European countries, which aims to weed out “incompatible” immigrants through citizenship and integration tests that supposedly measure their ability to interact with European notions of tolerance and secularism. In 2005 the interior ministry of the German state of Baden-Württemberg introduced a two-hour exam aimed primarily at Muslims applying for German citizenship, in which applicants are asked questions on their attitudes to homosexuality, freedom of expression, and arranged marriages. Similar tests have subsequently been introduced in other European countries. In March 2006, the Dutch government introduced a civic integration test in which prospective migrants wishing to become Dutch citizens are shown a DVD entitled
To the Netherlands
, which shows gays kissing on a beach and a topless woman emerging from the sea.
The Dutch test is not aimed specifically at Muslims but at relatives of migrants “from non-Western countries” wanting to join their families and at non-Dutch residents of Holland, but it was introduced after years in which the Muslim presence was routinely cited by mainstream politicians and right-wing populists, such as Pim Fortyn, as the predominant cultural threat to Dutch liberal tolerance. A similar pattern has unfolded in other parts of Europe. In another development that hearkens back to Hapsburg Spain, this assimilationist drive has been given a new urgency by security fears, in which Muslim cultural and religious difference is too easily conflated with political radicalization and terrorist violence. These perceptions are increasingly leading to a dangerous tendency to see assimilation—in the sense of obligatory conformity to the perceived values of the majority—as an essential corollary of national security.
In the sixteenth century, Spanish officials also regarded the residual Moorish characteristics of the Moriscos as evidence of hostility, political disloyalty, and sedition—an association that often made them even more determined to eliminate such differences by coercion. But if the history of the Moriscos has even one lesson to offer the present, it is that forced assimilation is not an effective means of allaying security fears, nor does such a process facilitate integration. From the moment Spain’s Catholic majority set out to impose its own culture and values on its former Muslims by coercion, it became trapped by its own suspicions and unrealistic expectations. Instead of promoting integration, coercion bred resentment, defiance, and alienation among the Moriscos themselves, which further confirmed them as a suspect and dangerous population in the eyes of Spain’s rulers.
Is Europe in danger of succumbing to the same process in its treatment of its Muslim minorities? These similarities need not be overstated. There is no Inquisition to police the cultural and religious behavior of Europe’s Muslims. Citizenship and integration tests do not equate with the Inquisitorial dungeon and the auto-da-fé. Nevertheless, Europe is moving increasingly further away from former British home secretary Roy Jenkins’s famous description of integration as “not a flattening process of assimilation but equal opportunity accompanied by cultural diversity in an atmosphere of mutual tolerance.”
22
Instead, a growing number of countries are subscribing to the either/or logic articulated by the former British prime minister Tony Blair in 2006, who insisted that tolerance was “what makes Britain” and that all citizens were expected to “conform to it or don’t come here.”
23
These parameters tend to take the superiority of these dominant values for granted, even as they assume that all British citizens automatically share the same commitment to them. In their strident insistence on a homogeneous identity to which this imagined majority belongs, such declarations demand conformity as a price of admittance to the national territory—demands that are easily focused on particular religious, cultural, or ethnic groups that are already perceived as alien and extraneous.