As Muslims call Europe home, isolation takes root

[Corlyss_D]

As Muslims call Europe home, isolation takes root
First in a series
Monday, July 11, 2005

By Ian Johnson and John Carreyrou, The Wall Street Journal


TORCY, France -- Mourad Amriou slowly warmed up the crowd inside a small mosque on the outskirts of Paris, giving the congregation a pep talk after the Friday evening prayer.

"Just nearby here are Fatimas and Mohammeds who are drinking," said the beefy 26-year-old former rapper, using generic names for Muslim women and men. "Can you believe it? Just around the corner, going to nightclubs. Do you accept it?"

There were murmurs of disapproval as he continued. Life, he said, should center on mosques. Not just for prayer, but for everything from language classes for children to social life. Otherwise, he said, Muslims will become indistinguishable from their French neighbors. "Society has to be based on Islam," he told the gathering.

In France and across Europe, messages like this are finding a broad audience. Compared to the deadly subway and bus bombings that rocked London last week, they may sound mild. There is no call for jihad or violence and the message is delivered by local citizens, not outside agitators. Yet the message is radical: People who are different are held in contempt. Mingling with mainstream society is frowned upon. Society should be founded on one religion: Islam. Magnified by the power of demographics, messages like Mr. Amriou's are presenting a profound challenge to Europe's secular democracies.

Europe is undergoing a massive population shift -- some say the largest in more than a millennium -- as Muslims from the Middle East and North Africa cross the Mediterranean in search of work and a better life. The Muslim population of Europe is increasing dramatically; in countries like France, it is already about six million, or 10 percent of the total, and could easily double in percentage terms in the coming 20 years.

Declining birthrates mean that Europe needs these immigrants to stay vibrant. And indeed, many of them have integrated successfully, gaining education, wealth and prestige. Yet across the continent, some of Europe's Muslims are drifting off into separate troubled societies. In some European cities, nearly half of Muslim youths drop out of high school and unemployment rates are high. Racism is on the rise, helping to drive Muslims back into their communities. The situation was crystallized in a report last year by the French domestic intelligence agency, which surveyed 630 communities with a heavy concentration of Muslim migrants. Half of them, the report said, are "ghettoized" along religious lines.

In Paris, this parallel society is centered in a string of suburbs along the capital's northern and eastern fringes. There, amid housing projects slapped up a generation ago to accommodate a booming immigrant population, the signs of fundamentalist Islam are on the rise. Women who don't wear headscarves are harassed. People who consume food or beverages during the month of fasting, Ramadan, are publicly criticized. And some families refuse to let women be treated by male doctors or nurses.

This development is a paradox to many sociologists, who figured that such behavior was confined to newcomers who brought it with them. With time, the theory went, immigrants would moderate their views. Instead, it is Europe's second- and third-generation Muslims who are the most radical.

"Often young Muslims in the West are unmoored from their traditional beliefs and ripe for recruitment by radicals," says Olivier Roy, a leading expert on political Islam and an adviser to the French government.

Those recruiters sometimes come in the form of jihadist preachers who encourage acts of terrorism like Thursday's bombings in London, which killed at least 49 people and wounded 700. While police haven't identified any suspects yet, their investigation is focusing on European-based Islamic extremists. A network of terrorists drawn from the fringes of Europe's Muslims staged spectacular attacks in Madrid and the murder of a Dutch filmmaker last year. Four of the lead actors in the Sept. 11 attacks on the U.S. became drawn to terrorism in one of Germany's radical Muslim communities.

Laying the groundwork for such radicalization is the seductive idea of political Islam, which preaches a Utopian view of society where all citizens are part of a just and fair "umma," or community of Muslims. In this world, the separation of religion and politics is heretical, and Europe's Muslims -- now representing between 5 percent and 10 percent of the continent's population -- need to be walled off from Western culture.

Such views are popularized by the Muslim Brotherhood, a Cairo-based organization that is the progenitor of many major radical Islamic groups. In the 1950s and 1960s, the Brotherhood established a beachhead in Europe after it was banned in many Middle Eastern countries. Although its formal structures have weakened, its matrix of ideology has taken hold in Europe, strengthened by a network of Brotherhood-inspired organizations.

In France, the organization the Brotherhood loosely spawned is called the Union of French Islamic Organizations, or UOIF as it is known by its French acronym. Mr. Amriou is one of the UOIF's thousands of unpaid activists. In recent years, the UOIF has become one of France's most powerful Muslim organizations, but also its most controversial because of the views it spreads. The UOIF says it is a moderate group and denies any links to Islamist ideology.

But many observers remain unconvinced. Dounia Bouzar, a prominent French Muslim social scientist, initially supported groups like the UOIF. In a book she wrote in 2001, she argued that they are valuable mediators between mainstream society and Muslim migrants. Many perform social services, such as after-school tutoring, day care or women's activities. With time, they would help Muslims integrate, she argued.

After watching the developments of the past few years, however, Ms. Bouzar has changed her view. Instead of integrating Muslims, this all-embracing form of Islam builds a cocoon in which people have little contact with mainstream society, she says. Education is often stunted and the chance of professional success limited, she says.

"It's a vision of society that separates people into two camps, Islamic and non-Islamic," says Ms. Bouzar. "They have a need to Islamicize everything."

In many parts of the world, the word "suburb" conjures a vision of single-family homes with yards -- a mixture of country and city where the better-off live and commute to the city to work or shop. In France, the equivalent word "banlieue" is synonymous with poorly maintained housing projects filled with immigrants or the poor. To the north and east of Paris are a string of these banlieues, such as Aubervilliers, Saint-Denis, La Courneuve, Stains and Torcy. They lie just outside a vast ring road, the aptly named "peripherique," which slices the prosperous capital off from its impoverished neighbors.

Mr. Amriou quips that he "immigrated to France at the local maternity ward." He grew up in a housing complex in La Courneuve nicknamed "the city of four thousand" for the number of units in it. It was a slum upon completion. Now, 40 years later, it is being torn down. It was recently in the news after an 11-year-old boy was killed there by a stray bullet.

Mr. Amriou's father was initially happy to get a flat in the complex. He had moved to France from Algeria in the 1960s to take a job in construction. He brought over his wife and soon had a large family to house. Mr. Amriou was born in 1977, the youngest of 10 children. The parents encouraged their children to go to school and to get jobs. But Mr. Amriou's father was busy all day long, working at a job where he had little chance for promotion. Mr. Amriou says he became dismissive of his father's efforts to fit in and boasts that he "couldn't control me anymore."

Mr. Amriou felt that French society was against him. His father's generation came to Europe to fill low-skilled jobs. There was no effort at integration -- for example, the immigrants didn't receive language classes -- because the host governments expected them to return home one day. But work was plentiful and many migrants accomplished their main goal: saving money and sending it back home. Mr. Amriou wasn't so lucky. By the time he came of age in the early 1990s, low-skilled jobs had migrated to the developing world. Unemployment in the banlieues skyrocketed and now in many regions is over 20 percent. Despite his high-school diploma, he couldn't get a job. He says he went to prison twice for drug possession.

One August night in 1999, he says he was hanging out with friends on a square, drinking beer and smoking marijuana. A man on a bike approached. He was a member of the Tabligh, a Muslim sect that originated in 1920s India and has spread around the world, preaching strict adherence to Islam but also a disengagement from politics or society. Mr. Amriou's friends ran away from the missionary, but Mr. Amriou decided to stay put.

The older man sat down and made small talk. The stars were bright that night, Mr. Amriou says, and he mentioned that he liked astronomy. "He said to me: 'You like creation, but did you wonder about the creator?' I had to admit I hadn't thought of that."

The two men talked until dawn. They met day after day for a week. By the second week, Mr. Amriou was, as he puts it, "re-Islamicized." He got rid of his jeans and T-shirts and started wearing the white gown and skullcap that he wears today. He cut his hair but let his beard grow thick and long. He quit smoking, drinking and started praying five times a day.

After his re-conversion, Mr. Amriou quickly gravitated to mosques run by the UOIF. There he shed the apolitical beliefs of the Tabligh and began to learn about current events and Islam's role in them. The key message is that everything in life, including politics, has a religious dimension. The separation of church and state, Mr. Amriou says, is "un-Islamic."

Mr. Amriou's rebirth was part of a religious awakening that started in the late 1980s and spread quickly among Europe's Muslims. A turning point was 1989. The Berlin Wall fell, ending the Cold War -- an event that many Muslims saw as due in part to the actions of Islamic holy warriors, the mujahedeen, who through the 1980s had fought the Soviet Union to a standstill in Afghanistan. That was also the year Iran's paramount leader, Ayatollah Khomeini, issued a religious opinion, or fatwa, calling for the death of the British writer Salman Rushdie, whose novel "The Satanic Verses" in part criticized and satirized Islam. Fatwas are traditionally only valid in the Islamic world, so Khomeini's fatwa implied something profound: Europe was part of the Islamic world. It was a revolutionary change that now is accepted by many Islamic theologians and thinkers.

The trend accelerated in the 1990s with the advent of the Internet, allowing young people to plug into a growing pan-Islamic movement that was inspired by orthodox Muslim groups, such as the Muslim Brotherhood, and backed by wealthy donors in Saudi Arabia and other oil-rich states. Girls began to wear headscarves and boys collected audio and videotapes of preachers who advocated a stripped-down form of Islam that emphasized the culture's past glories and a handful of simple religious regulations.

The effect on Paris's banlieues was dramatic. People living and working there recount how personal freedoms were restricted as the new ideology took hold.

Nacera, a 27-year-old clerk living in Paris who asked that her last name not be used for fear of harassment, recalls that era. Like many Muslim children, she attended a mosque to study the Quran. She liked learning classical Arabic and counts the time there as one of the most memorable of her childhood.

By the time she was a teenager, however, things began to change in her banlieue of Stains. As the Muslim community became more established, mosques began to pop up. Many were normal places of prayer, but others offered an agenda on how to behave. Her family's mosque, frequented by Mr. Amriou, fell into the latter category.

"It used to be that at weddings people would mix and dance," she says. "Then we weren't allowed to mingle. It was an accumulation of little things."

The religious fervor hit her youngest sister, who started wearing a veil. She quickly gave up school and married. Her brothers began to collect religious videos and books by Middle Eastern religious authorities on how to be a good Muslim.

After repeated requests by stalwarts at the local mosque and pressure at home, Nacera started wearing a veil and was urged to marry and have children. But she was a few years older than her sisters and had already started to work. About two years ago, she realized she wanted a career. To do so, she says, she had to break with her family.

"I felt I needed my own territory," says Nacera. She left Stains for a new home in the south of Paris. "I didn't want everything decided for me by the mosque."

Others notice similar changes. Jocelyne Clarke, a teacher at a high school in Aubervilliers, says it is becoming harder to organize field trips and cultural outings with her students because Muslim boys and girls refuse to mix with the other sex. Some Muslim students have walked out of class during readings of Voltaire because the 18th-century author was scornful of religion in his writings, she says.

Two years ago, the city council of Aubervilliers gave in to Muslim associations' demands that it close off the municipal pool to men at certain times of the week so that Muslim women could bathe in private, in keeping with the Quran's admonition that women dress and behave modestly. The city council also agreed to put up curtains over the pool's big bay windows, which give onto the street.

In Saint-Denis, El Mostafa Ramsi says junior high-school students brought to tour the neighborhood's famous basilica, where most of France's kings are buried, have refused to enter the church on the grounds that it is "an impure place." Mr. Ramsi, 46, who emigrated to France from Morocco when he was 20 and now serves as the local representative of a center-left political party, says parents of children who attend the local elementary school have asked for translations of parent-teacher meetings in Arabic. "It shows that they couldn't care less about integrating," he says. "They don't even make the effort of learning French."

Nadia Amiri, a 45-year-old Algerian immigrant who works in the central office of France's state-run hospital association, says the divisions go beyond schools. Hospitals are under pressure not to allow men and women into the same wards -- even as visitors. If carried out, that would require separate Muslim hospitals, she says. Doctors are also increasingly asked by fathers to issue their daughters virginity certificates.

The UOIF is an amalgamation of several Islamist groups with roots in the Muslim Brotherhood's initial European toeholds of Munich and Switzerland. The group came to prominence in 1989 when a major event took place in France: Two girls were ejected from school for wearing a headscarf. The UOIF began to organize protests and quickly established itself as the force to be reckoned with in the banlieues. Until then, France's Muslim organizations were divided along national lines. The Grande Mosque of Paris, for example, is still openly financed by the Algerian government and its head is an Algerian civil servant.

The UOIF instead advocated an "Islam de France" that was also part of the growing pan-national Islam. The group receives extensive funding from Arab countries. Even today, UOIF officials say, one-quarter of its annual budget of 2.75 million euros, or $3.3 million, comes from donors abroad, especially Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and Kuwait. But the UOIF projects a modern, global image, inviting speakers from around the world to its annual congress.

The UOIF joined other French Muslim groups in denouncing the London bombings last week. It said it wrote a letter to the British ambassador to France expressing "its firmest condemnation of these odious and inhuman acts."

Lhaj Thami Breze, the UOIF's president, says the UOIF supports democratic society. If there is a conflict between Islamic law and French law, Mr. Breze says French law takes precedence. However, the UOIF encouraged Muslim schoolgirls to wear bandanas instead of headscarves last year to circumvent a new law banning overt signs of religious affiliation at public high schools. The UOIF opposes the law, arguing that it violates Muslim girls' freedom of choice.

"We've made a huge effort to adapt our Islam to France," says Mr. Breze. "The people who still call us fundamentalist ... haven't bothered to come see us in a while and don't know how much we've changed. We've matured and come of age. We've reached respectability."

Mr. Breze says the UOIF has made a formal break with the Muslim Brotherhood. He acknowledges that one of his predecessors in the 1980s was a member of the brotherhood but says the UOIF has had no links to the group since the 1990s. Yet, UOIF preachers and activists often cite Tariq Ramadan, the grandson of Muslim Brotherhood founder Hassan al-Banna and son of Said Ramadan, the man who brought the brotherhood to Europe, as their theological role model. Though based in Geneva, the influential Mr. Ramadan has a home and office in Saint-Denis, not far from the UOIF's headquarters in La Courneuve. Mr. Ramadan's prolific writings are ubiquitous at the UOIF's annual congress.

Two years ago, government officials drew up plans for an elected body called the French Council of the Muslim Faith to represent the country's estimated six million Muslims. But they ran into a problem: who should vote? French citizens don't register their religious affiliation, so there were no official lists of Muslims.

The solution: Mosques would elect the representatives, with bigger mosques given more votes. That helped the UOIF, which boasts many large mosques thanks to generous sponsors in Saudi Arabia and other Gulf states. The result: the UOIF won control of 12 of the 25 regional councils that represent the central council across France, thrusting it into a position of power. That forced the French government to recognize the UOIF as one of its main points of contact in the Muslim community. In new elections last month, the UOIF didn't fare as well as in 2003, mainly because other French Muslim groups copied its strategies to organize and mobilize their followers. The UOIF lost control of six of the 12 regional councils it had presided over. But it continues to wield significant influence and obtained the vice presidency of the central council.

French officials concede they are taking a calculated risk in dealing with the UOIF but say it's part of a strategy to co-opt and soften the organization. Even though it might not represent the views of most Muslims, the UOIF is by far the best-organized of France's Islamic organizations and has the most reach in France's troubled ethnic neighborhoods.

"I never said the UOIF was for integration," says a senior official in the French Interior Ministry. "But they accept the rules and they want to play the game."

Inside UOIF mosques, the talk isn't of integration, but of how to protect oneself from harmful French society. Activists like Mr. Amriou help keep the message simple: The mosque is safe; the outside world is dangerous.

One Friday evening, he stopped by the new mosque in Torcy. The head of the mosque is a Senegalese convert named Ibrahim who had met Mr. Amriou at a UOIF conference. The group holds frequent religious revival meetings, which are chances to make contacts and buy books and videos by well-known Islamist preachers. Ibrahim had invited Mr. Amriou here to help set the tone in the community.

Mr. Amriou's visit was part of his daily routine. His life, as he likes to put it in English, is "speed, speed, speed" -- hurrying to work, to prayer and to a UOIF mosque to help out with organizational work or to hold a lecture. Married, he has no children and holds odd jobs like repairing computers and selling phone cards at a store. That leaves plenty of time for religion. He orbits Paris in his small Fiat, living in one banlieue, working in another, praying in a third and spending free time at the UOIF headquarters.

"I'm tres speed today," Mr. Amriou said as he unzipped a thick wool jacket that he'd worn over his gown against the cold. The prayer room was about two-thirds full with 90 men sitting cross-legged or kneeling. The few women who had come were in an adjoining office listening through the door. After settling into a director's chair and adjusting the microphone, he launched into his pep talk.

After telling about how he was saved, he moved on to a broader point: the need to enforce orthodox Islam on all French citizens of the Muslim faith. After half an hour, he took a few questions and then mingled with the crowd. Over tea and sweets, Mr. Amriou did some damage control for the UOIF. A UOIF preacher had been publicly accused of anti-Semitism and some of the members were worried and wondered what to think. "He said nothing unusual," Mr. Amriou said with a shrug. He clicked on his cellphone, bringing up a picture of a Palestinian boy allegedly killed by Israeli troops. He showed it to the men and they nodded in agreement, anger crossing their faces. The preacher's questionable remarks were forgotten.

A few moments later, Mr. Amriou's busy schedule caught up with him. He made a quick getaway from the mosque and hopped into his car for a drive home along the rim of Paris. Mr. Amriou used to try his hand at rap music and even cut a single. As he drove, he listened to Zacharia, a young boy he is mentoring who has learned most of the Quran by heart. Mr. Amriou taped him singing the Quran at his home and popped in a cassette.

Mr. Amriou drove by one of the prisons where he had been held. It was now nearly 11 p.m. and the traffic was light. Paris glowed on one side of the highway, while prison floodlights blazed on the other. Mr. Amriou turned up the volume.

"Listen," Mr. Amriou said. "His singing is beautiful, but it is even better when you know the meaning of the Arabic."

"This is my path," sang Zacharia. "With sure knowledge I call on you to have faith in Allah, I and all my followers. Glory be to Allah! I am not among the idolaters."

On the Outside

In France, foreign youths from predominantly Muslim countries have a particularly high rate of unemployment. Rates for ages 15-29:

Foreigners from North Africa, Sub-Saharan Africa and Turkey 40 percent Foreigners (all nationalities) 26 percent French by birth 16 percent French by naturalization 15 percent

Note: Data are from 2002
Source: Advance excerpts from "Integrating Islam: Political and Religious Challenges in Contemporary France

http://www.post-gazette.com/pg/05192/536250.stm
Copyright ©1997-2005 PG Publishing Co., Inc. All Rights Reserved.

[Ralph]

The article can be reduced to one sentence: assimilation is hell for the devout.

[pizza]

The End of Europe

By Robert J. Samuelson
Post
Wednesday, June 15, 2005

Europe as we know it is slowly going out of business. Since French and Dutch voters rejected the proposed constitution of the European Union, we've heard countless theories as to why: the unreality of trying to forge 25 E.U. countries into a United States of Europe; fear of ceding excessive power to Brussels, the E.U. capital; and an irrational backlash against globalization. Whatever their truth, these theories miss a larger reality: Unless Europe reverses two trends -- low birthrates and meager economic growth -- it faces a bleak future of rising domestic discontent and falling global power. Actually, that future has already arrived.

Ever since 1498, after Vasco da Gama rounded the Cape of Good Hope and opened trade to the Far East, Europe has shaped global history, for good and ill. It settled North and South America, invented modern science, led the Industrial Revolution, oversaw the slave trade, created huge colonial empires, and unleashed the world's two most destructive wars. This pivotal Europe is now vanishing -- and not merely because it's overshadowed by Asia and the United States.

It's hard to be a great power if your population is shriveling. Europe's birthrates have dropped well below the replacement rate of 2.1 children for each woman of childbearing age. For Western Europe as a whole, the rate is 1.5. It's 1.4 in Germany and 1.3 in Italy. In a century -- if these rates continue -- there won't be many Germans in Germany or Italians in Italy. Even assuming some increase in birthrates and continued immigration, Western Europe's population grows dramatically grayer, projects the U.S. Census Bureau. Now about one-sixth of the population is 65 and older. By 2030 that would be one-fourth, and by 2050 almost one-third.

No one knows how well modern economies will perform with so many elderly people, heavily dependent on government benefits (read: higher taxes). But Europe's economy is already faltering. In the 1970s annual growth for the 12 countries now using the euro averaged almost 3 percent; from 2001 to 2004 the annual average was 1.2 percent. In 1974 those countries had unemployment of 2.4 percent; in 2004 the rate was 8.9 percent.

Wherever they look, Western Europeans feel their way of life threatened. One solution to low birthrates is higher immigration. But many Europeans don't like the immigrants they have -- often Muslim from North Africa -- and don't want more. One way to revive economic growth would be to reduce social benefits, taxes and regulations. But that would imperil Europe's "social model," which supposedly blends capitalism's efficiency and socialism's compassion.

Consider some contrasts with the United States, as reported by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. With high unemployment benefits, almost half of Western Europe's jobless have been out of work a year or more; the U.S. figure is about 12 percent. Or take early retirement. In 2003 about 60 percent of Americans ages 55 to 64 had jobs. The comparable figures for France, Italy and Germany were 37 percent, 30 percent and 39 percent. The truth is that Europeans like early retirement, high jobless benefits and long vacations.

The trouble is that so much benevolence requires a strong economy, while the sources of all this benevolence -- high taxes, stiff regulations -- weaken the economy. With aging populations, the contradictions will only thicken. Indeed, some scholarly research suggests that high old-age benefits partly explain low birthrates. With the state paying for old age, who needs children as caregivers? High taxes may also deter young couples from assuming the added costs of children.

You can raise two objections to this sort of analysis. First, other countries are also aging and face problems similar to Europe's. True. But the aging is more pronounced in Europe and a few other nations (Japan, for instance), precisely because birthrates are so low. The U.S. birthrate, for example, is 2.1; even removing births to Hispanic Americans, it's about 1.9, reports Nicholas Eberstadt of the American Enterprise Institute. Second, Europeans could do something about their predicament. Also, true -- they could, but they're not.

A few countries (Britain, Ireland, the Netherlands) have acted, and there are differences between Eastern and Western Europe. But in general Europe is immobilized by its problems. This is the classic dilemma of democracy: Too many people benefit from the status quo to change it; but the status quo isn't sustainable. Even modest efforts in France and Germany to curb social benefits have triggered backlashes. Many Europeans -- maybe most -- live in a state of delusion. Believing things should continue as before, they see almost any change as menacing. In reality, the new E.U. constitution wasn't radical; neither adoption nor rejection would much alter everyday life. But it symbolized change and thereby became a lightning rod for many sources of discontent (over immigration in Holland, poor economic growth in France).

All this is bad for Europe -- and the United States. A weak European economy is one reason that the world economy is shaky and so dependent on American growth. Preoccupied with divisions at home, Europe is history's has-been. It isn't a strong American ally, not simply because it disagrees with some U.S. policies but also because it doesn't want to make the commitments required of a strong ally. Unwilling to address their genuine problems, Europeans become more reflexively critical of America. This gives the impression that they're active on the world stage, even as they're quietly acquiescing in their own decline.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/co ... 01340.html

[Ralph]

I'm not so ready to bury Europe yet. Let's return to this thread in 2015 and see what's happened in a decade.

[MartinPh]

I don't know if Europeans got their idea of Texas from 'Dallas' reruns, as Corlyss's signature says - but I'm sure I don't know where Americans get their ideas of Europe. The things I read here are quite ridiculously dramatized. Yes, we have our problems, but so does the US. I think neither of us are going to disintegrate any time soon.

The public discontent I do see in my country is mainly caused by the deliberate efforts of our government to break down our "social model" and move towards a US-like system where health care, public services etc. are all privatized. Which has two already visible effects: the quality of services goes down, and life gets significantly more expensive for everyone. Which, obviously, stops people from spending money and isn't much of a help to the economy...