European Muslims and European identity

Citation

Sardar, Z. (1999), "European Muslims and European identity", European Business Review, Vol. 99 No. 3. https://doi.org/10.1108/ebr.1999.05499cab.007

European Muslims and European identity

European Muslims and European identity

Ziauddin SardarZiauddin Sardar is writer and cultural critic, editor of Futures, the monthly journal of policy, planning and futures studies

Europe came to self-consciousness in relationship to the Muslim world. Today, the Muslim world is testing the conscience of Europe. The greatest test is whether Europe can overcome a millennium of simplistic and constructed ignorance regarding Islam, and deal with the diversity of problems afflicting the Muslim world according to Europe's own best conception of itself.

Kosovo and Iraq are the two most obvious, and entirely different, even diametrically opposite, cases where Europe's ability to reason with the nature of Muslim existence is called into question. The Muslim world comprises one-fifth of humanity; around the globe Muslims are embroiled in a series of diverse social, economic, political and human problems that test the quality and practice of European conscience. And Muslims are now the largest single minority within Europe. The operation of European conscience is thus no remote foreign policy concern, it is a test of whether Europe will be able to live in peaceful, constructive plurality at home every bit as much as abroad.

The trouble is there is no starting afresh, no clean slate on which to forge a new relationship. History, for both Europe and the Muslim world is significant, and a significant impediment. Substantively, the idea of Europe is nearly contemporaneous with the inception of Muslim civilization in the seventh century. The idea of Europe as the physical location of Western Christendom, the heir to the western unity of the Roman Empire, takes shape in confrontation with the early, rapid expansion of the Muslim civilisation. The Battle of Tours, unfortunately, to which we could add the Crusades, the fall of Constantinople and Granada, the Battle of Lepanto and the Siege of Vienna, are not dead letters in either European or Muslim purview. The spirit of confrontation has marked all periods of interaction of Europe and the Muslim world up to and including the present. The genuine legacy of confrontation constructs a deformed relationship that obscures far more than it reveals. A millennium is long enough to be impeded, but overcoming the impasse cannot ignore the ideas, reflexes and stereotypes that have been made real by the honouring of time, revisited, refashioned and reconstructed to serve time and again as circumstances dictate. Attaining a new mutual understanding as a basis for coexistence means transcending the realities of history. It is the ability to unmake the conventions of history that will determine whether Europe is ready to live in a plural world in the next millennium. The fate of the Muslim world, along with many others, depends on such a humane determination. This is not to suggest there is no need for rethinking on the Muslim side of this cohabitation equation: Muslims have a dire need not just to rethink their history but to rethink the very foundations of their history. But putting Europe first in the need to overcome the legacy of prejudice is an honest reflection of the dynamics of power in the world forged by European born ideas of dominance.

In essence, what is needed is a shift from the dynamic and ethos of power and dominance to the dynamic of principle, the best principles that inform and educate our conscience on the "ought" and "should" of resolving human problems. As a mutual process this requires a new ability to debate matters of principle, both European and Muslim. The prospect this opens is one of dialogue, a dialogue in which many areas of common ground will and can be found. Dialogue, conscientiously and courteously engaged in, will also disclose common problems and similar conundrums that are equally resistant to simplistic resolution on both sides. What is actually needed is the ability to listen and learn across the divide of difference. We need to see difference not as an unacceptable, irreducible force that can only breed division, but as a source of constructive possibilities. Creating genuinely plural societies requires making the leap to the true meaning of tolerance as a basis for free enjoyment of civic rights and responsibilities. True tolerance is accepting the validity and right to full expression not merely of that with which one disagrees but that which one finds objectionable or even unacceptable. Tolerance is the legacy Europe would like to think has come out of its own horrendous religious wars. But the fact is Europe learned tolerance from the Muslim civilisation at its zenith. And, in contemporary times, the European Muslim community tacitly finds Europe's claims to tolerance a debatable point.

Secularisation is the complex historic process by which Europe sought to accommodate virulent religious differences within its own boundaries. But the ambit of those who could be included within this studied secular toleration was always limited. Jews could only apply for admission on the grounds of wholesale assimilation, often including conversion. Assimilated or not, the fate of Europe's Jews in this century is known. In recent decades the emergence of secularism as a full-blown ideology begs many questions for people in the West and is a serious area of contention. It is no secret that Muslims in Europe, especially in Britain and France, are also embroiled in these issues. Whether it is the Rushdie affair or the issue of hijab as it is being fought out in France, the experience of Muslims leads them to the conclusion that Europe is not ready to extend conscientious principles of equal toleration to them. It also leads European Muslims to conclude, along with many of their fellow European citizens, that there is a sharp and unresolved distinction between a process of secularisation and an ideology of secularism. Muslims are not the only ones who feel that the ideology of secularism, so ascendant in Europe, places real problems in the way of discussing matters of principle. In European terms these principles actually derive from conscientious religious ideas inadequately translated, and incapable of proper debate within secular terms. For example, the ethical and moral issues of science and society, such as genetic engineering and human cloning, are not amenable to a secular framework that elevates man to the status of God; only the language and concepts of a religious world view provide the means to discuss human fears and determine what is acceptable and appropriate. Such issues do not only trouble the sensibilities and conscience of Christians, they are matters of common concern on which debate from different perspectives can be constructive for both Christians and Muslims as well as representatives of the many other faiths now present in Europe.

To engage in dialogue that constructively empowers difference, however, requires a major effort on the part of Europeans. Europe is the seedbed and breeding ground of all of the West's idealised notions of universals. It is deeply attached to the false idea that these universals are the only possible universal statements, and once found they are binding on all. Alongside this universal determinism is the self assurance that European scholarship, as objective impartial inquiry, gives Europe the possession of a clear understanding of what Muslims, and many others, believe, think and know. Both assertions are wrong, to put it baldly; or inadequate and partial ideas, to state the matter politely. Europe desperately needs to acquire the ability to let Muslims define themselves, their beliefs, ideas and aspirations in their own terms, freed from the confines of European interpretation of what Muslim definition, belief, ideas and aspirations are. Both sides approach the definition of universals in their own distinctive fashion. A willingness to allow those distinctions to emerge as constructive parts of an ongoing dialogue, rather than difficulties to be papered over as unfortunate, offers the best prospect of deriving genuine universal acceptance of common principles, rooted in and vigorously supported by distinct and different systems of belief and thought.

Turning away from the vast body of interpretation that convinces Europe it knows what Muslims believe, how they think and what are the essentials of their world view, is the hardest task, and is properly placed first. Europe's ideas about Muslims and Islam have been fashioned and filtered through a millennium of opposition, trepidation, false characterisation and will to power: what has come to be known as Orientalism. As constructed scholarly and artistic ignorance, Orientalism leads Europe, which is so conscious of its own diversity, to consider Muslims and Islam as an ascribed monolith, a mass with no means for differentiation, diversity or dynamic interpretation. In keeping with history, today the Muslim is a stock character whose persona is fixed and given by Europe's misrepresentations of Islam. In our time the Muslim is the terrorist bent on mindless revenge and awful violence who holds the female by force behind a shroud of hijab. With such characters, dialogue seems fruitless. A closer look at the European Muslim community, living and shaping itself within the European union, offers a swift antidote to this time-honoured body of ideas and interpretation.

The European Muslim community is a new community wrestling with the complex problems of nationality and identity, essential problems posed to all Europeans in the debate about the future course of European Union. The European Muslim community is the very essence of heterogeneity. Muslim citizens in any one European country come from many different nations, speak different mother tongues, have significant cultural differences and diverse racial and ethnic origins. Muslims in Britain, for example, come from Pakistan, India, Bangladesh, Turkey, Egypt, Morocco, Sudan, and Yemen ­ to mention only a few "nationalities". They are not one distinctive minority in any country, they are many minorities with one linking bond. The most powerful impulse that forges them into a community is the existence of a general antipathy towards Islam, which is often a stronger force for communal unity than their Islamic affiliation. European involvement in flash points around the world, where the ubiquitous Muslim terrorist or Muslim bogeyman has become the opponent, such asPalestine and Sudan, puts pressure on these minority communities, draws them together with a common sense that there is no genuine acceptance of them as citizens of any European nation.

The heterogeneity of the European Muslim community also extends to their Islamic outlook. Coming from many backgrounds they represent many different schools of Islamic thought and diverse traditions of interpretation of Islam embedded in their mother cultures. The Pakistani Muslims, for example, subscribe not just to the dominant Sunni and Shia sects, but also to a host of minority denominations such as Daeobandi and Beralvi, as well as numerous varieties of political Islam such as those associated with Jamaat-e-Islami and the Muslim Brotherhood. Acquaintance with the reality of the European Muslim community is the best antidote to the idea of Islam as a monolith. A more realistic understanding of the authentic, inherent, legitimate diversity of thought that is possible within an Islamic perspective has considerable implications for European policy options both at home and abroad. It is important to appreciate that this European-born Muslim community is better educated both in European and Islamic terms than any other Muslim community in the world. By virtue of living in Europe, they have access to better education in the basics of their religion, better access to materials on Islamic thought, history and contemporary ideas than if their forebears had remained citizens of the Muslim world. Indeed, the Muslim diaspora in the West is often at the forefront of thinking, writing and articulating contemporary interpretation of Islam as a system of ideas for living. The Muslims of the West are influential in many of the great debates within the Muslim world. On the other hand, it is also true that as a defensive strategy many Muslim organisations in Europe seek to foster particular ideas of tradition that are conservative, reactionary and antithetical to Western culture. The entire diversity of Islam as belief, thought and practice is to be found within Europe. Closer acquaintance with European Muslims is perforce a matter of embracing multiplicity and heterogeneity in all their implications, and all on Europe's own doorstep.

Maintaining the conventions of history risks making the European Muslim minorities into a disaffected, dissatisfied community united by a common sense of being unjustly treated and misunderstood. The alternative possibility is for Europe to cease thinking of Muslims as a uniform entity and begin to accept the diversity Muslims understand and recognise about themselves. Acceptance of this heterogeneous community and openness to its internal debates wrestling with very real and valid questions about nationality and identity can be a constructive encounter with plurality, the very plurality Europe itself needs if it is to develop as a genuine union of nations and peoples. The European Union, for all that it harks back to the original universalist idea of Europe, is perplexed by its own convoluted questions of nationality and identity. "What does it mean to be European?" is a question that must be asked by citizens of 15 nations, who must come to a new relationship with their own history. Muslims, grounded in Islamic ideas of supranational identity, each individual being a citizen of a worldwide ummah, a community of believers, must also wrestle with the meaning of modern nationalism. Within modern nations in both Europe and the Muslim world there are a variety of affiliations ­ religious, ethnic, linguistic ­ that add complexity to the question of identity in the context of the nation state. It would be instructive for Europeans to explore the historic answers developed in Islamic political thought on the questions of nationality and civic rights. In Islamic thought a strong sense of universalism was combined with very weak and very different concepts of nation as an operative unit of polity. This was blended with a strong universal and undifferentiated sense of civic rights that included from the outset the extension of these rights across a heterogeneous population. The best example of this model is Islamic Spain, where Muslims, Jews and Christians lived in an open polity that thrived on its plurality and creativity. This model was by no means universally applied throughout the Muslim civilisation; but it does have a long history of practical experience with plurality generated out of the complex issues of nationality and identity. When it comes to making sense of history and contemporary experience the European Muslim community has much to contribute to the "European" question.

The idea of European union has given new impetus to nationalisms, whether it be Mrs Thatcher's "Little England" mentality or the politics of Jean Marie Le Pen in France. Nationalism as a European concept forms a fault line along the meeting of the tectonic plates of the contending ideas, the other plate being the idea of Europe as a pan national community deriving from a shared culture grounded in the unity and ideology of Christendom. Both are authentic parts of European history; but they pull in contradictory directions and alternate as centripetal and centrifugal forces in the history of ideas and politics in Europe.

It is appropriate that nationalism should be a vexing problem for Europe. It is Europe that defined and bequeathed to the world the concept of the modern nation state, one of the most brutal, fatal and dehumanising legacies of colonialism for the non-Western world. The concept has been no less fraught with blood for Europe. Contending nationalisms are the history of Europe. The nation as a totalitarian concept, the supreme identity, is the legacy of the French Revolution gone rabid. Romantic nationalism, the idea of a people and their cultural/folk identity as a natural basis for a nation was the reactive antidote to revolutionary thought that turned just as rabid. The roots of Nazi National Socialism and its racism derive from romantic nationalism, as do the conundrums of the Balkans now and in history.

The nation as one people, one language, one identity with an innate right to exist is a potent idea that is seemingly accepted as a universal principle. It is derived from European ideas, yet it is actually and historically untrue of the composition of virtually all European nations as well as virtually all nations around the globe. The nation state is simply a mess, socially, culturally, and most of all politically. Unpicking this unholy mess is a problem Europe shares with the rest of the world. Incidentally, it is unholy because there is no religious philosophy that specifically warrants the concept of the modern nation state, centuries of "God on our side" notwithstanding. The One Nation Under God across the Atlantic pond could only resolve this inherited problem of European ideas by strict separation of church and state, a matter that is still causing them considerable difficulties.

The modern nation state does not answer important questions of identity, either in Europe or elsewhere in the world for all its citizens. Identity is a more basic ingredient that has been overwritten, displaced and marginalised as well as brutalised into submission by nation states and their simplistic nationalism. The establishment of the European Union has revitalised older, still extant identities within Europe. Unfortunately, the supremacy of the set of ideas associated with nationalism and the nation state make the politics of identity a mixed blessing. Marginal identities grasp the ideology of becoming a nation state in their own right as the only option because the idea of the polyglot, heterogeneous state has no valid place in the repertoire of modernity. It has been the work of centuries in Europe to build up the commonality of a single, singular national identity, backed by imagery as well as ritual and ceremonial support. Establishing such uniformity on a secular basis that includes different religious persuasions is the origin of all the concepts of civil rights in Europe. But that state operates and delivers these civic rights only on the basis of an undifferentiated nation as a whole, denying autonomy and self-determination to minority identities.

The politics of identity has acquired the odium of being aggressive, destructive and fragmentary, the end of civilization as we know it. This reputation persists, notwithstanding the acceptance that national policy often produces real civil injustice in the treatment of minorities. This argument has been fought out within Europe, among the Basques, in Ireland, as much as it constitutes the crisis of Kosovo and afflicts country after country whose national borders have been created by colonialism around the world.

Looked at more closely, the European Union is its own answer to its own problem. The operation of the Union has empowered and enriched regionalism, and thereby revitalised marginal identities. The strong and well-funded regional policies have enabled Europe to uncover its older complexity. Both Welsh and Scots nationalists, for example, have eagerly embraced the European Union. As political parties they have been disproportionately represented in Europe. Access to European regional funds has been constructively and creatively used to give new vibrancy to the cultural life of their erstwhile marginal identity, as well as their battered and impoverished economies. It can be argued that the British politics of devolution could only have happened within the context of Europe.

To develop further according to its own principles of democratic accountability, the European Union will have to find answers to the conundrums in the nexus of nationality and identity. The answers all lie in the direction of setting identity free from the single vessel of the nation state, accepting the celebration of identity that is not a necessary part of nationality nor the sole definition for membership and rights within a nation state or supranational federation of states. It is here that the emerging European Muslim community, as well as the older marginal identities of European minorities, can play a vital role as constructive participants in defining and refining the possibilities. The future for a genuine European Union requires the construction of a consensual understanding of heterogeneity, a consensus that respects and accepts multiple identities.

If the European Union can embrace plurality at home it will develop a new potential to appreciate the complexity of problems elsewhere. Operating on its own conventions has given European governments an unenviable record in their acts of commission and omission in trouble spots around the world. The former Yugoslavia is an obvious example. Throughout the long agony of Bosnia the lines of contention were seen as competing nationalisms defined along religious lines. Europe proved itself incapable of hearing what the Bosnians repeatedly insisted they were standing up for ­ a plural, not a Muslim, state, that was true to their history in the face of a militant, totalitarian and ethnically dominated Serbian nationalism. The NATO solution was to separate out different identities and deny plurality, a tacit victory for Serbian nationalism. The enforced resolution in Bosnia also ensures that the problems of nationality and identity will be a continual source of problems for generations to come. The imposed singular identities will be active ingredients in political competition for national control and access to limited resources. In Kosovo it is the rights unfailingly ascribed to nations that impedes support of what are supposed to be universally accepted human rights. Again Serbian nationalism is able to manipulate the problematics of European ideas while it denies legitimate human rights and self-expression to the diverse community of ethnic Albanians. There is a bankruptcy of ideas in the West when it comes to finding humane resolution to the problems of the Balkans. Western intervention, hidebound by its bankruptcy of ideas, solidifies the problems by forcing everyone to adopt the untenable lines of simplistic nationalism so familiar to Western ideas. Alternative principles, principles that have been part of Balkan existence for centuries and which might offer an indigenous basis for sorting out their own problems, find no support among Western power brokers. Just as elsewhere in the world, the dynamic of power and its repertoire of ideas, that are derived from the history of Europe and the West, end up giving most support to the unconscionable and unprincipled, in spite of the best ideals of Europeans.

In instance after instance around the world, European Muslims see European governments support the realpolitik of power and nationalism, despite the grievous shortcomings or outright abusiveness of regimes in power. Saddam Hussein is the most notable, but by no means the only, example of this procedure. He was first championed as a "friend of the West" and encouraged to attack Iran, then demonised as evil incarnate when he attempted to compromise Western interests. The authoritarian Saudi regime and its violations of human rights are overlooked because it is an "ally"; but Sudan is cast as a pariah state because it rejects certain Western "universals". This consistent and continuous double standard has forced European Muslims to conclude that, for Europe, conscience and principles are a matter of political expediency. Popular aspiration for reform in many parts of the Muslim world embraces the legitimation of Islamic ideals of justice and equity. Unfailingly this language of hope among the hopeless is seen as an inherent threat and opposed by the power and dominance of the West. In response, allegiance to spearhead movements of popular discontent comes to embrace more and more hardline, reactionary and obscurantist Islamic ideologies whose militancy is directed towards becoming a mirror image of the power and dominance dynamic of the West. In Algeria, for example, Europe could not get itself to support democracy which would have surely brought a Muslim party into power; instead, it supported the brutal, but secular, military regime. It is hardly surprising then that the Muslims in Algeria feel such bitter hatred towards Europe. What is expunged by this pincer movement of action and reaction is genuine opportunity for humane answers. So long as power is more important than principle, forging the contemporary meaning and operation of conscientious principle is not an option, and gross abuse and neglect of basic human rights and needs remains the lot of millions of people around the world.

How does this unending cycle of backing the wrong options for the wrong reasons come to an end? There is no simple answer but there are many difficult possibilities. As Europe moves to define itself in new terms it has the potential to learn a new openness to alternative options in the sphere of politics and social reform that have traditional and popular support in other parts of the world. If Europe genuinely opens itself to welcome and encourage the development of a distinctive Muslim community within its own boundaries it can find that principled dialogue at home uncovers new possibilities for understanding. What dialogue makes visible and possible within Europe builds the possibility of taking more informed and more principled positions on trouble spots abroad. A distinctive European Muslim community is not only concerned with issues of nationality and identity in the sense of "are we Muslims before we are British or French or European?", whatever that last component may imply; what this new, well-educated community is wrestling with is what it means to have a fully operative Islamic identity in the context of European nationality and identity in the twenty-first century.

Openness to the debates within the European Muslim community would reveal a lively and questioning attitude to many issues that have a common resonance for all Europeans. Islam has a rich repertoire of concepts that define its foundations ­ such as adl (social justice), istislah (public interest), shura (consultation), khalifah (stewardship of common resources), ijma (consensus) to name a select few. This inheritance leads many European Muslims to believe that they can participate in common cause in the common context of European politics and social action from the premises of their Islamic identity. There are European Muslims who see this as the humane and principled plural alternative, an alternative that leaps beyond old ideas of assimilation and contemporary virulent secularism. In fact it is a reversal of the old equation: difference of religious identity becomes the spur to finding common ground, common cause and commitment to act in concert with fellow citizens of different backgrounds and persuasions.

It may come as a shock to Europeans to realise that Islam not only insists, but encourages and validates, an open, tolerant, plural approach to politics and the creation of community. It may also be something of a revelation that Islam has its own tradition of ideas on human and civic rights, obligations and responsibilities, environmental duties and obligations and just as many vexing ethical dilemmas in the field of science and medicine as concern Europeans in general. It is axiomatic for European Muslims that these Islamic principles have not been seen in action in Muslim nations for centuries, but that does not make them irrelevant. There are European Muslims who see the best expressions of conscientious principle developed in the West as Islamic, that that which is good, humane and promotes human welfare has every right to be claimed as Islamic wherever and by whomsoever it has been devised. It will be an acid test of openness and plural possibilities if Europeans could come to the conclusion that there just might be good, humane ideas within the fabric of Islamic thought that they too could utilise. If both parties can see human welfare and human betterment as a common objective, good ideas and sound principles can be adopted wherever they originate. It is not the brand name but the quality, applicability and appropriateness of the solution, its ability to bring about human betterment that should be our aim. In other words, we should not assume we have already discovered the last word on universals leaving only a battle of wills, a bid for dominance to decide whose universals get to be adopted. Europeans can do better than that; and European Muslims certainly aim to do better.

European Muslims, by definition, are persons with multiple affiliations that contribute to their identity. European Muslims are concerned citizens of the European nations of their birth, to whom they owe allegiance. It should be accepted that their concerns begin and revolve around how to contribute to the welfare and betterment of their country and society as a whole, and not merely to define enclaves in which they can exist as Muslims, a breed apart from their fellow countrymen and women. European Muslims can be constructive and positive agents in making a plural society a reality in Europe. In which case European Muslims can help Europe to be a more constructive force in resolving the human problems of poverty, oppression and conflict around the world. Globalisation, the modern and postmodern force of homogeneity, can only be controlled, ordered and made conducive to uplifting the human condition equitably around the world if we can place pluralism at the centre of our thinking. Globalisation that is not based on universalism through diversity would be the next totalitarian system. Untempered and unbalanced by commitment to pluralism, globalisation would carry many of the most virulent and bloody conflicts of the twentieth century into the next millennium. The European Union is as prone to xenophobia and narrow, nationalistic definitions of identity as any other collection of people. The dynamics of power and dominance are incapable of creating a humane, plural global order. We have to look to the dialogue of principle to secure our human future, whoever we are, whatever our particular set of multiple affiliations, in the Europe of tomorrow.