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Monday, July 04, 2005 12:56:05 PM
Symposium: Muslims in France: A Ticking Time Bomb?
By Jamie Glazov
FrontPageMagazine.com / July 4, 2005
France’s Muslim population is exploding and fundamentalist Islam is gaining control over it. French society remains almost completely oblivious. Does this phenomenon entail a ticking time bomb? What consequences does it pose to the West? What lessons is it teaching? To discuss these issues with Frontpage Symposium today, we are joined by a distinguished panel. Our guests:
Mohamed Ibn Guadi, an Islamologist at Strasbourg University and a researcher in Semitic Philology. He is a contributor to Figaro, Le Point and other journals. He has lectured at the Theological Seminary of Montpellier (France) in Islamic Law and Islamic Warfare during the Abbasside empire at Fez (Morocco) and has taught Persian, Arabic, Sumerian and other Semitic languages in Switzerland;
Dr. Soner Cagaptay, an adjunct assistant professor at Georgetown University and a senior fellow and director of The Washington Institute's Turkish Research Program.
Laurent Murawiec, a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute. His book Princes of Darkness: The Saudi Assault on the West will appear in August:
and
Reza Bayegan, a Paris-based university lecturer, political analyst and human rights activist. He writes regularly about Iran and the Middle East and is a political commentator for Iranian radios in exile.
FP: Mohamed Ibn Guadi, Soner Cagaptay, Laurent Murawiec and Reza Bayegan, welcome to Frontpage Symposium.
Mr. Cagaptay, let’s start with a brief overview of the phenomenon of Muslims in France. Tell us about the situation there. Is there a ticking time bomb? If there is, what is it? Does it pose a threat to the rest of the West?
Cagaptay: Here is the picture: percentage-wise as well as in cumulative terms, France has the largest Muslim community in the EU. There are no official figures, since France does not collect numbers on religious affiliation, but according to official estimates, there are 6 million Muslims in France, that is 10 percent of the population. Unofficial estimates point at an even higher figure, suggesting as many as 8-9 million Muslims. What is more, given the low birth rate in the general French society, and the continuing immigration of Muslims from North Africa, this number is bound to increase.
The issue I would like to raise in this context is not that we should be concerned that there are so many Muslims in France, rather it is that the Muslims in France see themselves at the margins of the society and resent that fact. The Muslims in France are the worst integrated Muslim community in any EU country. Mass Muslim immigration to France is a post-WWII development. Many came from North Africa, especially Algeria, to look for jobs. However, France has done a terrible job in integrating them. The benign founding myth of the French state, that there are no differences between the citizens, has worked against the integration of the Muslims. On the one hand, from the very beginning, Muslims in France, already from a background of conservative--rural Islam, had few avenues towards assimilation into the metropolitan French society, and on the other, the society has acted as if these barriers do no exist.
The end result is that vast segments of the Muslim population in France have little to do with the rest of the society. There are for instance no Muslims in the French parliament, and when is the last time anyone met a Muslim diplomat representing France? The banlieus of Paris, Marseilles, and other major French cities are full of disgruntled and poor North African Muslims today, who feel discriminated in the school system, in the public sector and in access to government services. The bottom line is that elite institutions, means of upward mobility, as well as quality government services are in accessible to most Muslims in France. What is more, with the rise of radicalism in the 1990s, these neighborhoods are now under the effective control of fundamentalist Muslims. If I were French, I would be very worried.
FP: Fair enough, but wait a second here. Can you completely blame France and the French government itself for Muslims not “integrating” into French society? It’s many of the Muslims themselves that despise their host society and isolate themselves into their own communities and cultures, no?
Mr. Bayegan?
Bayegan: I don't think it is the issue of whether it is the fault of the French government and people, or whether it is the Muslim community here that is to be blamed. The issue is very complex. The French colonization of North Africa created a new relationship that the French could not pick up and drop down at will. The French language and culture had a greater and more permanent impact in Algeria, Morocco, Tunisia and Lebanon than anything that could ever be accomplished by military might. It is very significant that Albert Camus, one of the greatest twentieth century French novelists, was born in Algeria. During its colonization of Algeria for one hundred and thirty years France transformed Algeria to a French département. Small villages were turned into French villages and the whole Algerian economy was geared towards serving France's needs. Algeria became so Frenchified that one could go to a village restaurant there and order croissants and cafe au lait for breakfast.
Many Arabs have come to live in France not merely for economic reasons, but also because they felt France is their cultural homeland. There is no resemblance between these people and say Turks in Germany who have no historical or cultural ties with their adopted country. As Dr. Cagaptay pointed out, a large number have also come to France from rural, uneducated backgrounds. What ails these people and makes them stick out like sore thumbs in French society is not so much Islam and Islamic teaching but backward traditions they have brought with them from home. One of most problematic of these cultural baggages is the status of women within these communities. Second or third generation North African women in France still live under tremendous pressures to uphold the retrograde practices of their paternalistic communities. Women are treated as inferior to men and are bossed around by their husbands, brothers and fathers.
Here in France, French art and especially French cinema is playing a role in dramatizing this predicament and educating the public. A recent movie 'Chaos' directed by Coline Serreau was about the plight of an Algerian prostitute who was led to a life of crime and violence through a forced marriage.
There is also an attempt within the Muslim community to modernize Islam and bring it into line with the realities of the twenty-first century. Soheib Bencheikh, mufti of Marseilles and his preaching of a progressive Islam that rejects backwardness and fundamentalism, can be cited as a good example.
The French government has also tried to defuse Islamic fundamentalism. In December 2002, the then Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy persuaded the country's three main Islamic organizations to settle their differences and form a body called the French Council for the Muslim Religion. The jury is still out about the long term consequences of this move. In a country where only a small percentage of Muslims attend mosque regularly, this religious council can hardly be representative of the secularized Muslims.
What is certain is that there are no short cuts, easy answers or quick fixes here. The presence of six million Muslims in France is a reality as strong as the presence of Basque, Breton, and Corsicans in the multicultural French mosaic. This reality is not going to go away. The more the French Muslims are antagonized and alienated the better it would be for the spreading of fanaticism and the growth of a violent version of Islam. Efforts should be made in further enhancing a culture of tolerance and mutual understanding between Muslims, Christians and Jews within the French society.
FP: Dr. Ibn Guadi?
Ibn Guadi: I agree with Dr. Cagaptay. I think the French state could be blamed and in particular for the French model. In this model, individuals do not exist -- only French citizens. The general interest takes precedence over the particular interests. As a community, the Muslims see themselves with difficulty recognizing the right to the difference. The French state succeeded in imposing the ideology of its model on a society which is not it. That's why, as Dr. Cagaptay pointed out, they are the worst integrated Muslim community in any EU country. France wants to build a French Islam but without Islamic institutions. It is impossible. The dilemma is that the French law is disconnected from the religious questions.
Is there a ticking bomb? Probably. But not necessairement because of Islam. For several years the French have been also very confused concerning their own values. For a long time, they believed that they could manage to set up an exemplary society by eliminating the religious sphere, and in particular Christianity. The religious feeling is almost non-existent in France. It is normal that Islam, a young religion in France, occupies the essence of spiritual space here in this country. And in particular today, Islam generates fear, fascination and questioning. The place of the Muslims and Islam in France will in the future present new anthropologic and sociological challenges for the French people.
Reza Bayegan mentioned Soheib Bencheikh, the mufti of Marseille. Unfortunately, the Mufti Bencheikh is not really representative of the majority of Muslims in France. Actually, most of the Muslims in France wish to be represented by the leaders of the UOIF (Union of Islamic Organizations of France). It is a normal reaction since the UOIF means an Islam expurgate of artifices regarded as specifically Western - reform, secularism, integration, etc. - It is illusory to think that the Muslims "moderates" are or form the majority in France.
As far as foreign policy is concerned, France - and Europe - is not the center of the history anymore. France does not have the means to follow an international politic distinct from the United States. In the Arab world, France is seen especially as an undecided and ambiguous country vis-à-vis of Islam and Muslims. France believes that it has weight on the international chess-board against the United States only because it calls upon the relations with its old colonies. France is not the model anymore for Arabs. Public opinion remains still very badly informed on these fields.
FP: So Soheib Bencheikh, the mufti of Marseille, doesn’t represent the majority of Muslims in France. In other words, if this is true, the majority of Muslims in France are not interested in reforming Islam to make it a religion compatible with modernity and democracy. What danger does this spell for the future of France and Europe?
Murawiec: I fail to distinguish an Islamic community that is "well integrated" anywhere in Europe. Turks in Germany were not allowed to become German until a few years ago. British Muslims are dominated by radical rabble-rousers. Dutch Muslims, I'm afraid, have not distinguished themselves.
The large-scale Muslim presence in Europe is the unanticipated consequence of scores of State and individual decisions. Nobody imagined thirty years ago that a permanent Muslim community of 6-plus million would live in France. For instance, president Giscard d'Estaing in 1975, in order to display his compassion, took the decision that legal immigrants could bring in their families. As a result, such problems as polygamy arose on French soil.
A second set of problems: all earlier waves of immigration into France, from Italians in the 1880s onward, Jews, Poles, Spaniards, Portuguese - when I was in the military, I checked the rostrum of my regiment: close to twenty per cent had foreign surnames - all passionately wanted to become French, and did. This was not and is not the case with the preponderance of Muslim immigrants, North Africans and West Africans in the first place. The price of the entry ticket was higher for the Muslims than for Christians, or Ashkenazi Jews, from other parts of Europe.
Thirdly, France used to be an effective melting pot. After 1968, the culture in general collapsed, the moral fibre of society, which stopped believing in its own values, that traditionally were Christian. France's intelligentsia deconstructed the nation - this is no incentive for integration. I agree with Mohamed - there is no competition between a lame, self-loathing ex-Christian and a young Muslim who is all the more intent on his belief than he knows very little about the religion, and the Arabic language. The current of conversions through marriages is one-sided.
The French elite, and that benighted president Chirac, have been sucking up to the Muslim world in the imperial hope of taking the lead in a world-wide We Hate America alliance. Arab leaders in particular have used that conceit to their advantage. Chirac was a prime supporter of Arafat, fought against any measures to curb Hezbollah and Hamas, and so did Villepin. France has mostly reaped a great deal of the contempt reserved for the dhimmi-s. To me, the ticking bomb is the European drift toward dhimmitude, as Bat Ye'or has shown. It empowers Muslim radicals. The Union of Islamic Organizations in France is dominated and run by the Muslim Brotherhood. The textbooks are Wahhabi. A large number of the imams are Wahhabi-trained.
I do not think that the assassination of Theo van Gogh has had the same impact in France as it has in the Netherlands, but also in Germany. I think that some fundamental reorientations are afoot, concerning immigration, Islam, and definitions of nationhood. Look at the results of the referendum on the European Constitution.
FP: In other words, for the sake of worshipping at the altar of anti-Americanism, France has committed national suicide.
So gentlemen, paint me the worst case scenario in terms of this ticking time bomb. And what can we do to take the edge off of the explosion when it comes?
Cagaptay: First, I agree with Laurent that there are no well-integrated Muslim communities on the continent. Yet, it is the case that some Muslims have assimilated better the others. One case is the Turks in Germany, which gives me a chance to look at where the problem is with regard to the Muslim communities on the continent. Even if for a long time the German state made it difficult for Turks to assimilate, until 2001, for instance, the Turks could not even take German citizenship, the Turks, nevertheless, persisted. They moved into middle-class German society faster and in bigger numbers than Muslims in other countries, such as the North Africans in France. Why? Because the Turks are "Western leaning" Muslims. Even if they may be of the poorest and least educated segments of Turkey, Turks have come to Germany from Ataturk's Turkey, having been exposed to Western values and institutions. Accordingly, even if there are Turkish working class neighborhoods in Germany, you do not see the problem of Islamist-run, and, due to the ineffectiveness of past French governments, often criminal ghettos there as you do in France.
Next, the worst case scenario. But, first let's deal with a cliché. Europe is not a continent with religious tolerance. Look at 1492, the expulsion of Jews and Muslims from Spain and then Portugal, St. Bartholomew's Day Massacre of French Protestants in 1572, Thirty Years War, incessant pogroms against Jews in Eastern Europe from the 17th century until the 20th, the Holocaust, and last but not least, expulsion and annihilation of European Muslims in Central Europe, Balkans and Russia ever since the seventeenth century.
Why am I making this point? Even under the veneer of post 1968-multiculturalism, which Laurent skilfully mentions, there persists a Europe that is intolerant towards religions other than Christianity. What is interesting is that in this day and age, when a majority of Europeans are either non-believers or lapsed Christians, and Europe is arguably the most secular,
Europeans view Muslims through their religious identity and their European credentials, or the lack thereof. Given this dynamic and the historically combustive mix of religious hatred on the continent, here is my prediction for a worst case scenario, which I should add I would never want to see: imagine for a minute that there were 9/11 style attacks in France, what would the French response be?
We have a small scale test case to answer this question. Remember what happened after the murder of Van Gogh in the Netherlands. This was a gruesome and appalling murder. Yet, the response to it, acts of violence against Muslims and mosques collectively in the old --but apparently still alive-- European fashion showed that even in the very liberal Dutch society, the old European mind set still persists. Hence, to go back to my worst case scenario, if there were a 9/11 type of attack in France, I shudder to think in which ways the majority French people will take on the Muslims in the country.
FP: Sorry if I am misunderstanding you here, but this interpretation implies a theme that gets my blood boiling. It reminds me of the lefties here in America who, after the 9/11 attacks, instead of being sympathetic to the victims and their families and angry at the perpetrators, and supporting revenge against those who committed the crimes and those who harboured them, instead were agonizing about how Arab and Muslim rights were now going to be violated.
I am a Russian. If tomorrow, hypothetically, some Russians massacred 3,000 innocent people, my heart would go out to thee victims and to their families, and I would want to see retaliation against those who committed the crime. My greatest concern would not be sitting around thinking: “Oh and now they will discriminate against people like me, people with the ending ‘ov’ at the end of their name.”
I think that this emphasis reveals a certain ideological bent.
Sorry, but when I think of the problem of the growing presence of Muslims in France, the first thing that comes to my mind is the heart-breaking reality of forced marriages and honor killings being perpetrated on Arab-Muslim girls on French territory. I think of forced veiling. I think of the gang-rapes of Muslim and non-Muslim girls who are not veiled in Arab-Muslim ghettoes. I think of female genital mutilations. I think of the growing radical element that might perpetrate another 9/11 over there. I think about all we can possibly and hopefully do to crush these forces. Needless to say, that is what is on my mind, not sitting around worrying what will happen to someone else afterwards, someone that is not even a victim of the huge crime that is perpetrated and should be thought about and condemned.
Bayegan: The worst case scenario will emerge out of our failure to discriminate between Muslims and Islamism. By Islamism, I mean the fundamentalist, extremist doctrine that is based on a violent and intolerant interpretation of Islam. The worst case scenario will show its ugly and violent face when in our rage against fanaticism we subscribe to another form of fanaticism ourselves. In other words, as Amos Oz the Israeli novelist has said, 'In our anti-fanaticism we can turn into the worst kind of fanatics'.
Remember that the person who assassinated Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin was not a female-genital mutilating, honor killing Muslim, but a fanatical Jew. The worst case scenario would develop out of blind ignorance in all its various shapes and forms. Blind ignorance is not the monopoly of Muslims, it has a fertile breeding ground wherever reason and sound judgment give way to hatred and bigotry. Do not forget that The Holocaust was perpetrated by refined Christians who enjoyed listening to Wagner and perused the works of Heidegger and Celine, and not gang-raping Arabs. What the fundamentalists want, and as an Iranian I can testify to, is to polarize and radicalize the conflict between Islam and the West as much as possible. They want to push the West over the Rubicon of waging a wholesale war against all Muslims. Achieving this task they can turn around and tell their fellow Muslims that the argument of moderate, tolerant Muslims is ineffective and irrelevant. They want to make all Muslims believe that anyone who argues that peaceful coexistence with the West is possible is a traitor to Islam and acts as a fifth column.
The West should concentrate its efforts in defeating Islamism, and not in the alienation of Muslims.
As a child growing up in pre-revolutionary Iran, I remember that my Muslim parents had their best friends amongst the Jews. One of these Jewish friends helped me to leave Iran for Canada after the Revolution and his family provided me with all the love and assistance they could offer at a time when I needed it most: early difficult years of separation from my parents and country. During the time of the Shah, religion did not create division and hatred amongst the Iranian people, but it was a force for gaining spiritual strength and provided the ability to empathize with other human beings irrespective of their race, religion or color. If the fundamentalists eventually prevailed, it was to a large extent due to the unfortunate fact that forces of moderation failed to develop a discourse for safeguarding the spirit of peace, tolerance and political evolution. They took for granted that political stability will last for ever without thinking it necessary to intellectually nourish and defend it. Accordingly the challenge of the writers and orators who were preaching sabotage and violence went unanswered. Fanaticism won by going unchallenged and in absence of a cogent counter-argument.
Dr. Ibn Guadi remarks that it is illusory to think that Muslim moderates form a majority in France, and the moderate Soheib Bencheikh the Mufti of Marseilles does not represent a wide section of the Islamic population in France. The corollary is that the bulk of the Muslim population in France supports groups affiliated with Islamic extremism. This is not an inference reached on the basis of evidence and reasoning. In a country like France where the public opinion shifts from socialism to the far right in a matter of months, it is not fair or consistent to assert that Muslim public opinion is exempt from the same vagaries and is locked in a certain inflexible mode. Muslims, like every member of the human species respond to changes in political, societal and economic circumstances. It would be as ridiculous to suggest that white French Christians are represented by the National Front and Jean-Marie Le Pen because they agreed with him in rejecting the proposed European Constitution; or to say that the protest vote against the Socialists in 2002 was a vote of popularity for Jean-Marie Le Pen and his fascistic views.
Adam Lebor, the author of 'A Heart Turned East' is very illuminating when he says : "In most (French) people's minds to be an Arab is to be a Muslim, and to be a Muslim or a fundamentalist is the same thing. Everywhere young Muslims are told that they ae fundamentalists... So it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy". (p. 174). The worst case scenario can also become a self-fulfilling prophecy. It will happen if people are deprived of their hope to live with dignity and are driven to desperate mindless acts. I believe the very fact that moderate Islamic discourse such as the one propounded by Soheib Bencheikh exists is a cause for hope. I am not here calling for appeasement or promoting wishful thinking, but am suggesting that since there are rational elements within the Islamic community in France, one should do one's best to encourage and disseminate its message. In medieval Spain for more than seven centuries Muslims, Jews, and Christians lived together in an atmosphere of tolerance, where literature, Science, and arts flourished. If such a co-existence was possible in the so called Dark Ages it cannot be impossible in the twenty-first century.
There has been also some change in French attitudes in the past seven years towards Arabs which seems hopeful. When in 1998 Zinedine Zidane, the French soccer player of Algerian origin scored two goals for France in the World Cup helping France defeat Brazil and claim its first World Cup, everyone in France celebrated; Jews, Muslims and Christians.
Jingoism and casus belli are the attitude of the of Eastern and Western fanatics. A creative solution on the other hand requires a search for a way of peaceful coexistence of diverse and seemingly incompatible elements. The worst case scenario will only come about as a result of victory of ignorance over common sense. Unfortunately there have been many historical precedents for such a victory. It is also possible to change the ticking time bomb into a mellifluous instrument of peace and harmony there have been precedents for that also.
FP: Sorry gentlemen, my eyes are starting to glaze over.
When organizing this symposium, I thought about the term “ticking time bomb” and thought it was a given that it referred to the growth of the Muslim population in France and the dangers it poses. There is an obvious Islamist component here. Within this whole phenomenon lies a clear threat to democracy, freedom, individual rights (of Muslims and non-Muslims) in France, not to mention the rise of extremism and terror etc. As this discussion proceeds, it appears that several members on this panel believe that the ticking time bomb is the potential response that some French citizens might engage in to Islamist terror and extremism. In other words, Islamist terror and extremism is not the problem, but the response that might be made to it.
Obviously we need to avoid alienating Muslims. It is clear we need to try to nurture a moderate Islam and to ally ourselves with Muslims who seek to modernize and democratize Islam. But to pretend that the threat to France posed by Islamism has nothing to do with the growth of the Muslim presence in France is mind-boggling.
The reminder to us that a fanatical Jew killed Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin is an absurd distraction to this conversation. Sorry, I think the last thing the victims of Islam’s gender apartheid, and all the victims of Islamist terror, worry about at night are fanatical Jews. The homosexual Palestinians that flee to Israel to avoid their death sentences under PA culture for being gay, I assure you, do not live their lives in dread worrying about fanatical Jews. And trust me, when I go to sleep at night and worry about the world’s safety and future, I think about things like 9/11, about Tehran’s Mullahs having nuclear weapons, about Zarqawi and Bin Laden getting their hands on WMDs. The threat of fanatical Jews, I am afraid, does not loom large in my fears at night.
The point about the Holocaust being “perpetrated by refined Christians” is a crock and the people who utter it know it is a crock. The Holocaust was not perpetrated for a Christian reason. It was not perpetrated by Christians acting out of loyalty to their faith and following their religious texts. The Holocaust’s evil was not perpetrated and legitimized, step by step, by references to verses from the New Testament. The Holocaust was the ultimate anti-Christian act that might have been committed by some people who happened to be Christian but who were violating the basic tenets of their religion. You cannot find anything in the New Testament that serves as a foundation for the legitimacy of the Holocaust nor can you find a reference to anything even close to justifying the acts used in carrying it out. And I am not going to waste my time here going over how Islamist terror finds its roots in Muslim texts. Go read Robert Spencer’s Onward Muslim Soldiers: How Jihad Still Threatens America and the West.
Do we support Muslims who want to reform Islam and democratize it and make it a religion of peace? Yes. Can we deny that when Osama and al Zarqawi refer to Surahs in the Koran to justify their violent acts that they are referring to real Surahs? No.
The Muslim community is as diverse as any other group, culture and community? Please. When there are Muslim women from the Muslim world freely competing in sports and in the Olympics, get in touch with me. When they are free to become prominent intellectuals and critics in their own society and receive material and cultural rewards for being prominent dissidents, get in touch with me. When they are free, if they so choose, to engage in Muslim beauty pageants, get in touch with me. When Muslims throughout the Arab world start creating the most hilarious self-critical stand-up comedy routines, get in touch with me. When Muslims create heated and controversial talk shows, books and films, where free opinions startle and provoke thought on all limits, and the creators are not hiding in desperate fear of their lives, get in touch with me.
Again, is there a fight happening for the soul of Islam? Yes. Must we support Muslims, like groups such as The Free Muslims Against Terrorism? Yes. But please spare me the absurdity of the Muslim community being as "diverse" as any other community. When Jews and Christians rise in its ranks and become members of it on many levels and realms, like Muslims have done in the West, get in touch with me. In the old Islamic empires, Jews and Christians who attained political influence were often the target of violence and resentment by Muslims. Today, Christians like Tariq Aziz, the former Iraqi Deputy Prime Minister, have risen in power only in states where Islamic law has been set aside.
When you can name me ten fatawa, off the top of your head, made by ten famous Muslim clerics against bin Laden within this “diverse” community, get in touch with me. Yes, of course these fatwas exist, but why are they so few in number and what effect have they had on widespread support for Islamic terrorists within the Islamic community worldwide? Does this not say something about "diversity" in the Muslim community?
Kindly also spare us the nonsense about the Islamic “tolerance” that was practised in medieval Spain. Newsflash: it never happened. Robert Spencer has meticulously delegitimized this myth in his Ch. 7, “The Modern Myth of Islamic Tolerance,” in Onward Muslim Soldiers.
In any case, Dr. Ibn Guadi? Sorry, it’s getting a bit hot in here.
Ibn Guadi: I see.
I share the concerns of Reza Bayegan on the fact that no one should favor excess pressure against Muslims. We need, on the contrary, to nourish relations with Muslims who wish to democratize the institutions in the Arab countries. But the error would be to believe that the Islamic religion is accessible to the reform. What I mean to say is that those who wish to change the political institutions don’t want to necessarily change the Muslim institutions. They are two different things. As faith and policy are inseparable to Muslims, the subtraction is difficult. The change is more difficult because it requires the re-examining of several centuries of traditions and Islamic jurisdictions. The authority in Muslim theology rests on Bukhari, Muslim, Shafi'i, Ibn Hanbal and other schools. To be able to "reform" some religious elements, it has to be justified by a person of a higher authority. Which is impossible, given the doctrine they follow.
On the theological level, no one can avoid or draw aside the Hadiths. Several Islamic regulations do not come from the Koran but primarily from the Hadiths. The Canonical circumcision or the five canonical prayers do not appear in the Koran but in the collections of Sahih Bukhari, one of the greatest authorities in the chain of the traditions. Other regulations which do not find their source in the Koran but in the Hadiths are the subject of a religious decree (fatwa) to abolish these precepts as the death penalty for apostasy (Bukhari Jihad 149: II, 56, p. 352, 2), the punishment relating to adultery (Muslim, Hudud 12) or the night voyage of Muhammad to the sky (Bukhari, Manaqib Al-ansar, 42: III, 63, 42, p. 37, 1) which is important to negotiations related to the statute of Jerusalem. But even as great authority as the Mufti of Al-Azhar was, even he could not abolish these precepts. Because to some, when you discuss these points you call into question the legitimacy of the Muslei faith. It is precisely for this reason that the leaders of the UOIF (Union of Islamic Organizations of France) have had disputes with the French government. For the Moslems in France and elsewhere, to discuss these points is to reduce their faith.
It should be realized that in the eyes of some Muslims, the religion of Islam is itself the reform the world needs. According to the Islamic doctrines, Judaism and Christianity are good religions but not sufficiently reliable to claim the authority on the questions of faith. For the Muslims, the Christians and the Jews were misled in their writings. In the spirit of Islam, the religion was reformed because the Koran corrected the preceding revelations.
Even if it is difficult to admit, I must recognize that Jamie is right when he says that no one can be unaware of the various texts in which Osama bin Laden or others are using. In February 1998, in a text of six pages, bin Laden declared the war on the Jews and the Christians through a fatwa. No Muslim religious authority produced a fatwa to refute the remarks of Osama. Few Muslims would be in disagreement with what bin Laden said on November 3, 2001 on chain Al-Jazira: "It is impossible to forget the hostility which exists between the inaccurate ones and us. It is a question of religion and creed". From a purely objective point of view, he was right.
Some Muslims are better assimilated than others. Yes, but if they are better assimilated it’s because they are "less" Islamic. The more spiritual questions that face the Muslims in France, the less they feel related to the country which they live.
Moreover, contrary to the Turks in Germany, the Muslims in France did not need to insist to get their citizenship because a residence permit can be sufficient. The residence permit is delivered to aliens for a 10 years period. Several immigrants whom I know have had this card for 40 years and don’t know the French language at all.
Moreover, they do not wish to acquire French nationality and speak about it rather with contempt.
About the worst case scenario in France. On the one hand, France could implode. But on the other hand, I don’t think that this implosion would have a huge impact in French society. I agree with Laurent about the Theo van Gogh impact among the French people.
Bayegan talks about Jean-Marie Le Pen. But most of Muslims in France have been like (even admire) him since the end of 80’s. This field is taboo in France, but when Jean-Marie Le Pen says in some interviews that most of aliens agree with him, he is right.
Murawiec: The sad truth, I think, is that little indigenous to Europe will seriously contribute to defusing the “time bomb.” There is a bomb ticking because the world of Islam has proven itself incapable of facing modernity, because of the stubborn adherence of its rent-seeking and rent-owning elites to a mythical view of the world, because Muslims have been left with the delusional world-view of a Golden Age of Islam to which one should aspire to return, because a self-image of the Muslim-as-victim (of “imperialism,” of “colonialism,” of “Zionism” and whatever else) has been systematically propagated by those elites, and accepted by large numbers. So we have large numbers of alienated Muslims throughout Europe.
Soner is right about the Turks: since they come from a more structured society with strong historical traditions and a sense of self-respect born of a millennial domination of the region south and east, their self-identity tends to be less based on self-aggrieved victimhood than that of Arabs. However, even the Turkish model, which has much to be admired, today faces the rising tide of an Islamic regime which is drowning the secular modernizers. The limits of the Ataturkian model have been reached: Mein Kampf is the #1 bestseller in Turkey today, it is sold at train stations, museums, newsstands, etc. Once again, it is perfectly true that Turkish areas in German towns are no ghettoes. So both Turks and Germans are better off. Still, it does not dispense us from dealing with the problem that Islamism in general poses.
We’ve got to deal with Islam – I’ll agree with Mohamed. Now, being alienated does not mean being right. “Suffering bestows no right,” said Albert Camus. The problem is that today’s world of Islam considers it licit and even recommended to kill Infidels as a way of “solving” problems. Al-Azhar says that. Qaradhawi says it. The Saudi shaykhs repeat it endlessly. Arafat built a career on it, as well as Saddam, Assad, etc.The ideology of terror has been promoted, extolled, lionized, and adopted, in the world of Islam as in no other part of the world. It is symptomatic of the generalized blindness that prevails in the world of Islam: a love of destruction, a desire for annihilation: Nihilism has become a principal intellectual force. Blame Khomeini and Shariati, al-Banna and Qutb, as well as Michel Aflaq and the ideologues of “secular” nationalism. This is what powers the time bomb.
Now, Europe’s attitude has been to pretend that this does not exist, and look the other way. In the UK, the Labour Party is so craven toward the radicals in the Muslim population, there is little that it will not do to gain its favors. While France was watching existentialist movies and dreaming of imperial glory, huge swaths of surburban (banlieue) territory have become “lawless areas” (zones de non-droit). So it’s not just a French problem, though the problem there is acute. Bat Ye’or has a very strong point when she analyzes Europe’s evolution as moving toward what she called “Eurabia.” To deal with a problem, you would need to recognize it to start with. I’m alright, Jack, says the French elite. Europe, I predict, will do nothing. It will wait, like the proverbial Roman patricians, waiting for the Barbarians at gates to enter and slaughter them.
Now, dealing with Islam. It seems to me that we have to escape the fatal dilemma: “it’s their religion, we can’t touch it.” The problem is that Islam has been captured by Islamism; we can live with Islam in general, we cannot live with Islamism. Islam has failed to cope with Islamism. We have to do so, because it will not let us live, but make us die.
In part, slowly, haphazardly, awkwardly, the U.S. has started facing the problem. See Condi Rice’s superb speech in Cairo – challenging our pseudo-friends and revoking the disastrous Eisenhower Doctrine in the Middle East, which, as she emphasized, put stability ahead of democracy to the point of forgetting the latter altogether. So we’re moving ahead. This in turn encourages those in Europe who are unhappy with continental suicide, and, even more importantly, those in and around the world of Islam, who want it to change: Irshad Manji, Nasser Abu Zaid, Ibn Warraq, Yousef Seddik, Abdelwahab Medeb, Kanan Makiya, etc. Dissidents all, each in their own way. They are the seeds. We must help them, because their societies are too despotic and frightened to give them much help. We’ve started with Iraq – we’re doing the right thing, through our innumerable stupidities and mistakes. Let’s go on. The idea is that it is at the root – Iran, Saudi Arabia, Syria, etc. – that terror as the preferred and extolled solution to the crisis of Islam must be tackled.
Am I far from France? Oui et non. There is indeed a ticking time bomb. The growing self-assertiveness of a radical and violent minority has already started to spill over into the hip and posh areas – a recent street demonstration of high-school students in Paris was violently attacked by Arab thugs from the suburbs who proceeded to beat up and loot the ‘rich French kids,’ with abundant displays of racial hatred. Not that I think that the multiculturalist elites will take heed. When you're bent on self-annihilation, you don't "notice" the Barbarians. There we are.
Cagaptay: Let's put things straight. First, no need to compare Europe to the US when we discuss the issue of and how and if Muslims fit into these societies, etc. The US is light years ahead of Europe in terms of religious coexistence and also its ability to frankly discuss such issues. (I am not even going into why we should not compare Russian cases to America: just remember the "rescue" effort when Chechen terrorists took hostages at the Moscow theater: Russian security forces stormed the building and killed over a hundred of their own citizens instead of saving them). Anyhow, the point I am making, which I should repeat so it does not get blurred behind the moderator's comments, is that we face two gruesome problems: a large, growing, unintegrated, poor, and increasingly radical Muslim population, which because it has been left in the hands of fundamentalists is becoming monochromic and is segregated from the rest of France, and a larger French society that will not even admit that these problems, is at a loss as to how to deal with it. This society, I am afraid, will be rudely awakened and will react harshly as deserved but not wisely as needed for victory -because of its lack of religious tolerance when the fundamentalist Muslims show the first signs if serious unrest or conduct terrorist attacks in France. Now, is that a time bomb and a half or what?
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Symposium: Muslims in France: A Ticking Time Bomb?: Part II
By Jamie Glazov
FrontPageMagazine.com / July 4, 2005
FP: Fair enough, thank you. Sometimes I get a little aggressive just to get all the cards on the table and have things crystallized. You are right Dr. Cagaptay, this is a time bomb and half indeed. Mr. Bayegan?
Bayegan: Going back to the subject of encountering fanaticism, I should say that my own greatest authority on this topic is Amos Oz. whom I have mentioned before and who deals with this issue even-handedly and with great intelligence. In one of his addresses to Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, he said that "fanaticism is ancient and comprehensive. It is older than Islam, older than Christianity and older than Judaism. It might be a potential presence in every human being. It might be a bad gene. It is everywhere." He suggests that in different countries schools, colleges and universities should offer courses in what he calls "comparative fanaticism", contrasting the moral disease of fanaticism in various cultures and searching for a creative remedy.
Murawiec quotes Albert Camus that "Suffering bestows no right". Camus here speaks about right in order to show its moral limitations. Furthermore, Camus exalts human responsibility over a mere right. In both his fiction and nonfiction writing, Camus' existentialism consists of human responsibility for ourselves and each other. Camus also has another famous saying which might be useful for the purpose of our discussion. He says: "We are all special cases. We all want to appeal against something! Everyone insists on his innocence, at all costs, even if it means accusing the rest of human race and heaven". (The Fall, 1956)
Keeping in mind Camus' statement, let us also not forget that an 'eye for an eye' was not invented by Muslims. Let us not forget that the violence and mayhem in Mosaic books such as Leviticus and others of the Old Testament like the book of Joshua make the Koran sound like a book of nursery rhymes. The point is that the moment we insist on our own innocence and accusingly point a finger at other people's guilt, we should remember the wisdom of Christ's words that "He who is without sin among you, let him cast the first stone". The problem of fanaticism is a curse for all humanity and its eradication requires universal effort and solidarity. Dr. Luther King was right when he said that "we must learn to live together as brothers or perish together as fools".
Jamie mentioned that Osama and al Zarqawi refer to Surahs in the Koran to justify their violent acts and that they are referring to real Surahs. Osama and Zarvagi will see in the Koran what they want to see in the Koran, like David Koresh saw in the Bible what he wanted to see in the Bible and the fanatical puritans of the Massachusetts when they were burning 'witches' at the stake in Salem interpreted the Bible to suit their fanaticism. No, Islam is not intrinsically incompatible with peace and humanity. Interestingly enough, every Surah that Mr. Zarvagi reads like all other Surehs in the Koran start, with the words: "In the name of God, the compassionate, the merciful."
Fundamentalists however, are unable to see any message of peace and human solidarity in it because their religion is not in the service of humanity, but is in the service of an ideology. If in our fight against fundamentalism we fall into the trap of an ideology ourselves and supplant sound judgment with knee jerk reactions, we too become infected with the virulent virus of fanaticism.
What we have to recognize is that Islam is in need of reformation. The Enlightenment that helped to evolve Christianity and Judaism and brought them up to date with the needs of the modern world, for historical and geographic reasons did not occur in Islam. Years of foreign domination, mass poverty and illiteracy rampant in Islamic states have not helped the burgeoning of this process either. What is hopeful, however, is that Moslems have started looking critically at themselves and a sense of humor that Amos Oz singles out as an important element which fanatics are deprived of, is developing within the Islamic community regarding matters that were untouchable until quite recently. Maybe Moslem "beauty pageants and hilarious self-critical stand-up comedy routines" that Jamie refers to - presumably as signs of progress - are rare or non-existent in Islamic world, but I can tell you that as far as Iran is concerned, Iranian cinema today deals with topics that were taboo not very long ego. A recent movie called 'The Lizard' lampoons mullahs and criticizes their greed and detachment from society. Malaysian born Saudi woman poet, Nimah Ismail Nawwab in her marvelous verse criticizes gender inequality, human rights abuses and fanaticism in Saudi Arabia without for one moment attributing those problems to Islam. Moreover, she sees them as symptoms of a retrograde society that does not live up to Islam's moral and humanitarian message:
Fanaticism rearing brazenly flouting
The very principle Islam espouses
Of the equality in the eyes of one God
This kind of reading of Koran is possible as it was also possible to adjust the Bible with the realities of the modern world and not take literally those verses in it which exalt men over women .
On Sunday June 19 the results of elections to France's Muslim Council were a positive step in the direction of strengthening moderate forces and integration of Muslims into France's secular society. Reuters reported that the voting brought gains for a "moderate mosque network and rebuffed an activist group that had flirted with defiant Islamic stands".
In France, as elsewhere, an agenda for hope and peaceful coexistence needs to be espoused by all major religions. Muslims want to keep and protect their religious heritage. They know that it is a sine qua non to their identity. They need all the help they can get to realize that the greatest dangers to their collective soul and their spiritual heritage are backwardness and fanaticism.
FP: Mr. Bayegan, even though it was your last turn, I will return to you now, as I really need to see your evidence for your arguments.
You made an analogy between Islamic violence and violence that was perpetrated by someone that you alleged was a Christian and that you argued engaged in violence for Christian reasons. I emphasized that Osama’s violence can be legitimized by Islamic texts and that is why Osama refers to them when justifying his violent jihad. Again: nowhere can an Adolf Hitler refer to anything in the New Testament to legitimize what he did – and that is why he didn’t, because he wasn’t a Christian and he wasn’t acting for Christianity. Hitler was the ultimate anti-Christian and the Holocaust was the greatest of anti-Christian acts.
Instead of responding to this crucial distinction, you simply start throwing more dust into the eyes. You move on to new accusations, this time comparing violent Islamic jihad with David Koresh and Christian “witch” burners. Since you hide from showing the verses that Hitler could point to in the New Testament to justify the Holocaust, do tell what it was that Koresh did that you compare to Islamic jihad and what verses in the New Testament he would have used to legitimize it. Also please give me verses in the New Testament that fanatical puritans of Massachusetts would have used to justify burning “witches.” The verses, of course, need to be as specific as Surah 9:5 (the famous Verse of the Sword) in the Koran in terms of a specific instruction.
Mr. Bayegan, instead of substantiating your charges, you make an implied accusation against an argument I never made, saying: “No, Islam is not intrinsically incompatible with peace and humanity.”
Where did I say this? Who are you arguing with? I specifically stressed that we need to work with Muslim forces that seek to reform Islam, to make it pluralistic and tolerant, and to bring it into the modern world. That is why I mentioned The Free Muslims Against Terrorism. Why would I promote this organization and stress that we need to work with it if I believe the whole enterprise is pointless?
Your point that the Old Testament makes the Koran sound like a book of nursery rhymes is so absurd that I cannot even dignify it with a response.
In the previous round, you brought up the absurd and utterly false contention that the Muslim community is just as diverse as any other community. I delegitimized this blatant falsehood by naming just a few (out of an infinite number) of obvious realities that do not exist in the Muslim world – realities that would (and must) exist in a world that can be described as being “diverse.” Instead of defending your contention, you again shift to an unconnected and illegitimate theme.
I asked you to name me ten fatwas that have been issued by Muslim clerics against Osama. I asked you to name me beauty pageants and stand-up comedy routines in the Muslim world. I did not ask you these things looking for your moral approval for the existence of these realities. I asked you them because the non-existence of these phenomena demonstrates the non-existence of diversity in the Muslim world.
Instead of trying to prove your argument that there is diversity in the Muslim world, you dismiss beauty pageants and stand-up comedy routines, quipping that I mention them “presumably as signs of progress.” I am shocked that an individual who is supposedly fighting for freedom in a certain part of the world would make a snide remark about this phenomenon, especially in the context of the millions of human beings who have been tortured and killed because of the demonization of the female body and humor.
So let’s narrow in on these themes in case you do not understand their importance. Women’s right to be seen, and their freedom to have the right to personal self-determination, which includes the right to sexual self-determination, is a crucial right for a free and democratic society. A society cannot be free and democratic if it does not allow this type of freedom to its female gender, just like free speech is instrumental for a free society. I am not asking you what you think of beauty pageants. I don't care what you think of them. I raise them as an example to show that their non-existence reveals the lack of diversity and freedom in a culture. The key here is that if an attempt was made by humans to hold a beauty pageant, it would be forbidden and there would be punishment for those involved. If you do not understand that this is a reflection of totalitarianism, I do not know what to tell you.
I also make the same point about humor and laughter by using the example of stand-up comedy. Any serious person that studies totalitarianism understands the crucial nature of the phenomenon of laughter and the threat it poses to a despotic society. Anyone who is cognizant of what is fundamental for a society to be truly free and diverse will understand the example I raised in connection to the freedom of laughter and self-critical comedy.
I would suggest rethinking what wisdom or nobility exists in dismissing the crucial role of comedy in society. When you watch Chris Rock in his stand-up performances and try to picture if a Muslim Chris Rock-type of comedian could do the same thing in front of Muslim audiences throughout the Islamic world – it means everything. It crystallizes what freedom is. There cannot be freedom if there is no Chris Rock allowed to do what he does in a society. Mr. Bayegan, it doesn’t matter what you think of Chris Rock. The point is that society can only be free if it allows an individual to engage in that form of entertainment, and allows people who like it to be an audience, and for all the participants involved not to fear punishment for being involved. If a society cannot allow the freedom for that possibility and for the incarnation of that form of comedy, than it is by necessity a totalitarian society.
It is depressing that I have to take the time here to explain these things, which one would think were simple givens.
It is shocking that my examples of female freedom and the right to engage in self-critical comedy, and these phenomena being directly connected to freedom, is mocked by a person that is supposedly fighting for freedom in a part of the Middle East.
If anyone, a person connected to the Middle East would understand these things, since the connection of women and laughter is the key phenomenon that represents the struggle between freedom and totalitarianism in the Middle East. I had a fascinating discussion with journalist Steven Vincent, the author of The Red Zone, who, fortunately, unlike you Mr. Bayegan, takes these issues to heart. He gave some fascinating insights into why militant Islam regards female laughter as such an evil threat and why it forbids it – especially in young girls. His analysis of what laughter, especially a woman’s laughter, represents, and why it is such a threat to totalitarian structures in militant Islam, is fascinating. I encourage everyone to read his insights.
In any case Mr. Bayegan, I am listening and waiting for answers to my questions. Please do not throw more dust into the eyes or start new arguments. Give me specific verses out of the New Testament that would legitimize your analogies.
Bayegan: Thank you Jamie,
When at your insistence I accepted to participate in this symposium, I thought it would be a civilized exercise with you as a moderator. A moderator's job first and foremost is to listen. With all due respect I don't think you have even bothered to comprehend my interventions. This is what scares me most: if we cannot hear each other out intelligently and impartially here in a democratic forum such as this, then where? Cant and rant are two deadly enemies of ratiocination and enlightened arguments which will hinder us from arriving at a meaningful solution.
You say if I talk the way I do, how can I be a human rights activist? You say my argument is a crock. You say your dignity is beyond replying to my points. You ask for my reply by saying: can you answer "without throwing more dust into the eyes." I am your guest here remember? I was invited because you deemed my views important. The least you can do is to treat your guests with courtesy and reply to them without discrediting them or resorting to personal attacks. For me human rights activism consist above all in doing my best to think justly and argue objectively.
If you had read my last intervention carefully you could have seen that you and I are saying exactly the same thing as far as the need for sense of humour, self-criticism and laughter are concerned. I even quoted Amos Oz and his views that a sense of humour is one of the best remedies against fanaticism. So why are you making out as if I am saying something different?
Yes, you do say that one should support moderate Islamic groups, but you also say that you are not going to waste your time here going over how Islamist terror finds its roots in Muslim texts and you also mention that Osama and al Zarqawi refer to real Surahs in The Koran. By the way, I do agree with you on this. But saying that and at the same time failing to mention that there are also many Surahs in The Koran (the learned members of this symposium can testify to that) that are invitation to peace, kindness and compassion is to imply that Islam has no room for tolerance and peaceful coexistence. I was simply trying to say that the Islam that came to existence in the context of 6th century tribal Arabia has the capacity to recreate itself as a spiritual force for the modern world of the 21st century. The challenge is to turn The Koran into a spiritual source against political corruption and social decay instead of a manual for running the political life of the country, as for instance is happening in Iran today.
You challenged me to cite verses from the Bible that could be used as justification for violence. If you would have read my intervention carefully you would have found out that I said that fanatics see in the Bible (that is they misread) what they want to see in the Bible, the same way that Islamist fanatics interpret The Koran to suit their deadly agenda. For an example of using the Bible to suit a deadly agenda please read "A People's History of The United States" by Howard Zinn, HarperCollins, p.14 where he discusses the Puritans' carnage of Indians and confiscation of their land. He writes:
"The Puritans also appealed to the Bible, Psalms 2:8: "Ask of me, and I shall give thee, the heathen for thine inheritance, and the uttermost parts of the earth for thy possession." And to justify their use of force to take the land, they cited Romans 13:2: "Whosoever therefore resisteth the power, resisteth the ordinance of God: and they that resist shall receive to themselves damnation."
FP: Mr. Bayegan, I apologize to you if I am not being a very gracious host. I have lost all sense of manners I suppose.
The problem, sir, is not that I am not listening to you, but that perhaps I am listening a little too much. When you make allegations (i.e. the Muslim community is as diverse as any other, Islamic violent jihad has equivalent parallels in Christian texts, etc.) and then do not substantiate them when asked to, but simply move on to make other dubious charges, these are very serious things. And I am sorry, but the suggestion that Adolf Hitler could have found some kind of inspiration or legitimacy for the Holocaust in Christianity, as Osama and al Zarqawi find the inspiration for violent jihad in Qur’anic texts, is an allegation that does not instil tremendous cheer and a spirit of camaraderie in me, especially when I keep asking for substantiation and do not receive it.
Incidentally, I don’t need the learned members of this symposium to testify to the fact that there are Surahs in the Qur’an that are an invitation to peace, kindness and compassion. I have read the Qur’an. I study it everyday. I know those parts exist. When did I ever say they did not? And how is this a substantiation for the points you have made and I am pressing you on?
Again, no one here is saying that Islam has no room for reform and that it does not have the capacity for it. That is why we all agree that we must support moderate forces that seek to bring the best out of Islam and to let it subordinate the parts that militant Islamists use to inhale their jihadist oxygen.
While you might want to rethink referring to Howard Zinn’s interpretations as back-up for your arguments, I am still to get the evidence backing up your arguments about diversity in the Muslim community and about Hitler, Koresh and “witch” burners and what it was specifically that they found in the New Testament that inspired them to do what they did. But I give up.
As for your reference to Psalms 2:8 and Romans 13:2, I really don’t know what your point is in connection to our discussion. I am at a complete loss at how these verses serve as an analogy to the Surahs in the Koran that command violent jihad against unbelievers until the whole world is submitted to Islam. Incidentally, the “damnation” in Romans 13:2 refers to damnation in the afterlife; it is not an instruction, as the many Surahs in the Qur’an instruct, for believers to become God’s executioners and to smite the unbelievers on this earth.
In any case, Mr. Bayegan, we share the same aspiration to bring Islam into the modern world and to separate it from the political sphere. The question, of course, is how this can be done – especially in the context of Islam not recognizing the separation of church and state.
I apologize to our guests here for this sideline debate and am grateful to them for waiting patiently. But these questions regarding diversity within Islam and the roots of Islamic jihad are, as we all know, all crucial to the terror war and, of course, to the precarious situation in France.
Dr. Ibn Guadi, I hope you are still with us my friend. Feel free to say whatever you wish in your final comment and kindly include a last word on the ticking time bomb in France.
Ibn Guadi: Thank you, Jamie.
I just would like to reconsider the references of Reza Bayegan to Psalms 2:8 and Romans 13:2. The passage of the Psalms does not start with verse 8 but with verse 7 until verse 9. Actually, for the Christians, this chapter talks about the Messiah and not the israeli people. Thus, the Christians see the fulfillment of this verse in the book of Revelation 2: 27 where it is written: He shall rule them with A grinds of iron ; They shall Be dashed to parts like the potter's vessels. That’s exactly the same verse of Psalms that Reza Bayegan quoted.
In the same way, it’s not sufficient to quote Romains 13: 2 in order to understand. This verse is famous among Christians to be the guide of the respect of the political authority and not a justification to break the law. The majority of the Arab Christians in the Muslims countries apply this text to respect the laws of the Muslim country where they live. In this chapter it required to Christians to respect the country in which they reside. According to Christians, the believers should not rebel against the human authority because this authority was instituted by God. For this reason Paul asks Timothy (1 Timothy 2.1-2) to pray for the authorities, the kings, the governors, etc...
So, the roots of the separation of the religion and state are anchored in the Bible even if in the history that were not always the case. But, for the Christians, there were sufficient data in their texts to re-examine the question. Unfortunately, the similar process was not the same one in Islam. That’s why I said that Muslims community present some new sociological challenges for the French people.
As Bayegan says, it true that some Christians can want to read what they want. We have many examples of it. Nevertheless, the problem really does not come from there. No matter what our discussions on the contents of the Bible might be, France is a completely Dechristianized country. The ticking time bomb is already here. I' m afraid, as Laurent and Soner pointed out, the French society won't react or won’t admit these problems, as today. And some French Muslims have understood it.
FP: Final word goes to you Mr. Murawiec.
Murawiec: Well I guess we have strayed from our explicit subject, but being led astray may be very useful: some of the issues tackled in the detour are crucial to our debate about Muslims in France, and elsewhere. We have two terms: the French (country, state, nation, culture, society, etc.) and the Muslims. We already discussed a number of the problems of the host country. If France "felt" better about itself - if it were in better shape - it would be better able to help the guests. It is not the case, though. France is sick, and it is receiving a steady inflow of people from a very sick culture. Islam is the Sick Man of the world. And while France's diseased state is a noxious and oftentimes aggravating problem, we can live with it. With the disease in Islam, we can die. This dictates some priorities.
Mr. Bayegan states, and, undoutebtedly, believes, that "Islam has the capacity to recreate itself as a spiritual force for the Muslim world for the 21st century." I welcome his proclamation, but unfortunately, it is only that, a proclamation. It may have the "potential," but it is not implementing or using it. Far from that, what Islam, or to be more precise, the world of Islam, has produced since, say, 1945, is sadly at odds with the proclamation. Not only has it not exerted that "capacity to recreate itself," it has in fact done exactly the contrary. Al Azhar, for the Sunni world, and Qom, have been dominated by nihilism, by a self-destructive adhesion to a mythical (delusional) self-image based on a nonsensical image of the past. Islam is mired in its own dream of itself, and gets very angry when awakened by reality. Hence violent reactions when reality intrudes.
If "Islam ha[d] the capacity to recreate itself as a spiritual force for the Muslim world for the 21st century," it would be abuzz with scholars' debates and popular interest in such debates:
- the confusion, rampant in Koran, hadith and sharia, between the tribal code of honor, and morality, must be dissipated
- quranic and shariatic law concerning apostasy need to be abolished wholesale
- the very concept of dhimmi needs to be abolished
- the idea that the world is divided between a dar al-Islam and a dar al-Harb must be thoroughly reexamined
- quranic and shariatic prescriptions concerning jihad must be revised entirely
- the untying of things legal, things religious and things political is urgent and fundamental
How fundamental these points are barely needs to be stressed. In turn, this would demand a serious debate on the spurious and deadly concept of the Koran's "uncreation," one of the strongest possible impediments to sustained progress in both Islam-religion and the world of Islam. Ditto with the conception of change: as long as the Koranic equation of bida, heresy, with innovation, remains, it wil stand in the way of any progress.
When Mr. Bayegan states "What we have to recognize is that Islam is in need of reformation. The Enlightenment that helped to evolve Christianity and Judaism and brought them up to date with the needs of the modern world, for historical and geographic reasons did not occur in Islam. Years of foreign domination, mass poverty and illiteracy rampant in Islamic states have not helped the burgeoning of this process either " his faulty diagnosis exemplifies at least in part what the problem is: The Enlightenment was not a meteor that fell upon Christian heads - it was the product of Christian, or Judeo-Christian, civilization and culture, and history. It was a self-generated movement. Islam's failure to generate from within anything remotely comparable is the problem. There are figures in the world of Islam that exemplify the existence of a potential: Sir Syed Ahmad Khan [1817-1898], the great Muslim reformer in India, was a case in point. And today, we have the magnificent figures of Kanan Makiya, Fouad Ajami, Irshad Manji, we have the cases of Nasr Abou Zeid, of Abdelwahhab Medeb, of Youssef Seddik: there are seeds for a renaissance, just as, in other contexts, Havel and Walesa, or Sakharov, were. But let us not forget that sometimes the critical mass is reached, and reform occurs, while in other cases, as in Russia, it fails.
The first precondition for success is to be ruthlessly truthful with oneself, one's own culture, one's own past history. "Attempting to live in the truth," Havel wrote. Seeing the seeds of today's problem with Islam in "years of foreign domination, mass poverty and rampant illiteracy" is a sure recipe for failure. Why do I never hear those words from Indians? Unless Muslims once and for all give up a self-conception as aggrieved victims of others, and thereby acknowledge the reasons for the decadence and decline that befell that part of the world that was ruled by Islam, they will go nowhere. And going nowhere, many of them will seek to blame others for their own folly. And whenever and wherever they are able to do so, they will express their angst in aggressive forms. The kind of thrust for modernization that U.S. guns have spearheaded has become necessary and irreplaceable. But it does not replace the critical self-examination of Islam. It is not for vague "historical and georgraphical reasons" that Islam failed to renew itself: the reasons were (and are) religious, theological, cultural, psychological, societal.
In my mind, it is difficult to disentangle the ticking time-bomb of Muslims in France from the global problems of Islam. Muslims in France carry the decline and decadence of their culture of origin with them. They arrive in a sick culture. There is a frightening risk of explosive developments in France, because France seems to cumulate the problems of both worlds.
FP: Mohamed Ibn Guadi, Soner Cagaptay, Laurent Murawiec and Reza Bayegan, thank you, we are out of time. It was a pleasure to have you here on Frontpage Symposium.
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Jamie Glazov is Frontpage Magazine's managing editor. He holds a Ph.D. in History with a specialty in Soviet Studies. He edited and wrote the introduction to David Horowitz’s new book Left Illusions. He is also the co-editor (with David Horowitz) of the new book The Hate America Left and the author of Canadian Policy Toward Khrushchev’s Soviet Union (McGill-Queens University Press, 2002) and 15 Tips on How to be a Good Leftist. To see his previous symposiums, interviews and articles Click Here. Email him at jglazov@rogers.com.
By Jamie Glazov
FrontPageMagazine.com / July 4, 2005
France’s Muslim population is exploding and fundamentalist Islam is gaining control over it. French society remains almost completely oblivious. Does this phenomenon entail a ticking time bomb? What consequences does it pose to the West? What lessons is it teaching? To discuss these issues with Frontpage Symposium today, we are joined by a distinguished panel. Our guests:
Mohamed Ibn Guadi, an Islamologist at Strasbourg University and a researcher in Semitic Philology. He is a contributor to Figaro, Le Point and other journals. He has lectured at the Theological Seminary of Montpellier (France) in Islamic Law and Islamic Warfare during the Abbasside empire at Fez (Morocco) and has taught Persian, Arabic, Sumerian and other Semitic languages in Switzerland;
Dr. Soner Cagaptay, an adjunct assistant professor at Georgetown University and a senior fellow and director of The Washington Institute's Turkish Research Program.
Laurent Murawiec, a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute. His book Princes of Darkness: The Saudi Assault on the West will appear in August:
and
Reza Bayegan, a Paris-based university lecturer, political analyst and human rights activist. He writes regularly about Iran and the Middle East and is a political commentator for Iranian radios in exile.
FP: Mohamed Ibn Guadi, Soner Cagaptay, Laurent Murawiec and Reza Bayegan, welcome to Frontpage Symposium.
Mr. Cagaptay, let’s start with a brief overview of the phenomenon of Muslims in France. Tell us about the situation there. Is there a ticking time bomb? If there is, what is it? Does it pose a threat to the rest of the West?
Cagaptay: Here is the picture: percentage-wise as well as in cumulative terms, France has the largest Muslim community in the EU. There are no official figures, since France does not collect numbers on religious affiliation, but according to official estimates, there are 6 million Muslims in France, that is 10 percent of the population. Unofficial estimates point at an even higher figure, suggesting as many as 8-9 million Muslims. What is more, given the low birth rate in the general French society, and the continuing immigration of Muslims from North Africa, this number is bound to increase.
The issue I would like to raise in this context is not that we should be concerned that there are so many Muslims in France, rather it is that the Muslims in France see themselves at the margins of the society and resent that fact. The Muslims in France are the worst integrated Muslim community in any EU country. Mass Muslim immigration to France is a post-WWII development. Many came from North Africa, especially Algeria, to look for jobs. However, France has done a terrible job in integrating them. The benign founding myth of the French state, that there are no differences between the citizens, has worked against the integration of the Muslims. On the one hand, from the very beginning, Muslims in France, already from a background of conservative--rural Islam, had few avenues towards assimilation into the metropolitan French society, and on the other, the society has acted as if these barriers do no exist.
The end result is that vast segments of the Muslim population in France have little to do with the rest of the society. There are for instance no Muslims in the French parliament, and when is the last time anyone met a Muslim diplomat representing France? The banlieus of Paris, Marseilles, and other major French cities are full of disgruntled and poor North African Muslims today, who feel discriminated in the school system, in the public sector and in access to government services. The bottom line is that elite institutions, means of upward mobility, as well as quality government services are in accessible to most Muslims in France. What is more, with the rise of radicalism in the 1990s, these neighborhoods are now under the effective control of fundamentalist Muslims. If I were French, I would be very worried.
FP: Fair enough, but wait a second here. Can you completely blame France and the French government itself for Muslims not “integrating” into French society? It’s many of the Muslims themselves that despise their host society and isolate themselves into their own communities and cultures, no?
Mr. Bayegan?
Bayegan: I don't think it is the issue of whether it is the fault of the French government and people, or whether it is the Muslim community here that is to be blamed. The issue is very complex. The French colonization of North Africa created a new relationship that the French could not pick up and drop down at will. The French language and culture had a greater and more permanent impact in Algeria, Morocco, Tunisia and Lebanon than anything that could ever be accomplished by military might. It is very significant that Albert Camus, one of the greatest twentieth century French novelists, was born in Algeria. During its colonization of Algeria for one hundred and thirty years France transformed Algeria to a French département. Small villages were turned into French villages and the whole Algerian economy was geared towards serving France's needs. Algeria became so Frenchified that one could go to a village restaurant there and order croissants and cafe au lait for breakfast.
Many Arabs have come to live in France not merely for economic reasons, but also because they felt France is their cultural homeland. There is no resemblance between these people and say Turks in Germany who have no historical or cultural ties with their adopted country. As Dr. Cagaptay pointed out, a large number have also come to France from rural, uneducated backgrounds. What ails these people and makes them stick out like sore thumbs in French society is not so much Islam and Islamic teaching but backward traditions they have brought with them from home. One of most problematic of these cultural baggages is the status of women within these communities. Second or third generation North African women in France still live under tremendous pressures to uphold the retrograde practices of their paternalistic communities. Women are treated as inferior to men and are bossed around by their husbands, brothers and fathers.
Here in France, French art and especially French cinema is playing a role in dramatizing this predicament and educating the public. A recent movie 'Chaos' directed by Coline Serreau was about the plight of an Algerian prostitute who was led to a life of crime and violence through a forced marriage.
There is also an attempt within the Muslim community to modernize Islam and bring it into line with the realities of the twenty-first century. Soheib Bencheikh, mufti of Marseilles and his preaching of a progressive Islam that rejects backwardness and fundamentalism, can be cited as a good example.
The French government has also tried to defuse Islamic fundamentalism. In December 2002, the then Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy persuaded the country's three main Islamic organizations to settle their differences and form a body called the French Council for the Muslim Religion. The jury is still out about the long term consequences of this move. In a country where only a small percentage of Muslims attend mosque regularly, this religious council can hardly be representative of the secularized Muslims.
What is certain is that there are no short cuts, easy answers or quick fixes here. The presence of six million Muslims in France is a reality as strong as the presence of Basque, Breton, and Corsicans in the multicultural French mosaic. This reality is not going to go away. The more the French Muslims are antagonized and alienated the better it would be for the spreading of fanaticism and the growth of a violent version of Islam. Efforts should be made in further enhancing a culture of tolerance and mutual understanding between Muslims, Christians and Jews within the French society.
FP: Dr. Ibn Guadi?
Ibn Guadi: I agree with Dr. Cagaptay. I think the French state could be blamed and in particular for the French model. In this model, individuals do not exist -- only French citizens. The general interest takes precedence over the particular interests. As a community, the Muslims see themselves with difficulty recognizing the right to the difference. The French state succeeded in imposing the ideology of its model on a society which is not it. That's why, as Dr. Cagaptay pointed out, they are the worst integrated Muslim community in any EU country. France wants to build a French Islam but without Islamic institutions. It is impossible. The dilemma is that the French law is disconnected from the religious questions.
Is there a ticking bomb? Probably. But not necessairement because of Islam. For several years the French have been also very confused concerning their own values. For a long time, they believed that they could manage to set up an exemplary society by eliminating the religious sphere, and in particular Christianity. The religious feeling is almost non-existent in France. It is normal that Islam, a young religion in France, occupies the essence of spiritual space here in this country. And in particular today, Islam generates fear, fascination and questioning. The place of the Muslims and Islam in France will in the future present new anthropologic and sociological challenges for the French people.
Reza Bayegan mentioned Soheib Bencheikh, the mufti of Marseille. Unfortunately, the Mufti Bencheikh is not really representative of the majority of Muslims in France. Actually, most of the Muslims in France wish to be represented by the leaders of the UOIF (Union of Islamic Organizations of France). It is a normal reaction since the UOIF means an Islam expurgate of artifices regarded as specifically Western - reform, secularism, integration, etc. - It is illusory to think that the Muslims "moderates" are or form the majority in France.
As far as foreign policy is concerned, France - and Europe - is not the center of the history anymore. France does not have the means to follow an international politic distinct from the United States. In the Arab world, France is seen especially as an undecided and ambiguous country vis-à-vis of Islam and Muslims. France believes that it has weight on the international chess-board against the United States only because it calls upon the relations with its old colonies. France is not the model anymore for Arabs. Public opinion remains still very badly informed on these fields.
FP: So Soheib Bencheikh, the mufti of Marseille, doesn’t represent the majority of Muslims in France. In other words, if this is true, the majority of Muslims in France are not interested in reforming Islam to make it a religion compatible with modernity and democracy. What danger does this spell for the future of France and Europe?
Murawiec: I fail to distinguish an Islamic community that is "well integrated" anywhere in Europe. Turks in Germany were not allowed to become German until a few years ago. British Muslims are dominated by radical rabble-rousers. Dutch Muslims, I'm afraid, have not distinguished themselves.
The large-scale Muslim presence in Europe is the unanticipated consequence of scores of State and individual decisions. Nobody imagined thirty years ago that a permanent Muslim community of 6-plus million would live in France. For instance, president Giscard d'Estaing in 1975, in order to display his compassion, took the decision that legal immigrants could bring in their families. As a result, such problems as polygamy arose on French soil.
A second set of problems: all earlier waves of immigration into France, from Italians in the 1880s onward, Jews, Poles, Spaniards, Portuguese - when I was in the military, I checked the rostrum of my regiment: close to twenty per cent had foreign surnames - all passionately wanted to become French, and did. This was not and is not the case with the preponderance of Muslim immigrants, North Africans and West Africans in the first place. The price of the entry ticket was higher for the Muslims than for Christians, or Ashkenazi Jews, from other parts of Europe.
Thirdly, France used to be an effective melting pot. After 1968, the culture in general collapsed, the moral fibre of society, which stopped believing in its own values, that traditionally were Christian. France's intelligentsia deconstructed the nation - this is no incentive for integration. I agree with Mohamed - there is no competition between a lame, self-loathing ex-Christian and a young Muslim who is all the more intent on his belief than he knows very little about the religion, and the Arabic language. The current of conversions through marriages is one-sided.
The French elite, and that benighted president Chirac, have been sucking up to the Muslim world in the imperial hope of taking the lead in a world-wide We Hate America alliance. Arab leaders in particular have used that conceit to their advantage. Chirac was a prime supporter of Arafat, fought against any measures to curb Hezbollah and Hamas, and so did Villepin. France has mostly reaped a great deal of the contempt reserved for the dhimmi-s. To me, the ticking bomb is the European drift toward dhimmitude, as Bat Ye'or has shown. It empowers Muslim radicals. The Union of Islamic Organizations in France is dominated and run by the Muslim Brotherhood. The textbooks are Wahhabi. A large number of the imams are Wahhabi-trained.
I do not think that the assassination of Theo van Gogh has had the same impact in France as it has in the Netherlands, but also in Germany. I think that some fundamental reorientations are afoot, concerning immigration, Islam, and definitions of nationhood. Look at the results of the referendum on the European Constitution.
FP: In other words, for the sake of worshipping at the altar of anti-Americanism, France has committed national suicide.
So gentlemen, paint me the worst case scenario in terms of this ticking time bomb. And what can we do to take the edge off of the explosion when it comes?
Cagaptay: First, I agree with Laurent that there are no well-integrated Muslim communities on the continent. Yet, it is the case that some Muslims have assimilated better the others. One case is the Turks in Germany, which gives me a chance to look at where the problem is with regard to the Muslim communities on the continent. Even if for a long time the German state made it difficult for Turks to assimilate, until 2001, for instance, the Turks could not even take German citizenship, the Turks, nevertheless, persisted. They moved into middle-class German society faster and in bigger numbers than Muslims in other countries, such as the North Africans in France. Why? Because the Turks are "Western leaning" Muslims. Even if they may be of the poorest and least educated segments of Turkey, Turks have come to Germany from Ataturk's Turkey, having been exposed to Western values and institutions. Accordingly, even if there are Turkish working class neighborhoods in Germany, you do not see the problem of Islamist-run, and, due to the ineffectiveness of past French governments, often criminal ghettos there as you do in France.
Next, the worst case scenario. But, first let's deal with a cliché. Europe is not a continent with religious tolerance. Look at 1492, the expulsion of Jews and Muslims from Spain and then Portugal, St. Bartholomew's Day Massacre of French Protestants in 1572, Thirty Years War, incessant pogroms against Jews in Eastern Europe from the 17th century until the 20th, the Holocaust, and last but not least, expulsion and annihilation of European Muslims in Central Europe, Balkans and Russia ever since the seventeenth century.
Why am I making this point? Even under the veneer of post 1968-multiculturalism, which Laurent skilfully mentions, there persists a Europe that is intolerant towards religions other than Christianity. What is interesting is that in this day and age, when a majority of Europeans are either non-believers or lapsed Christians, and Europe is arguably the most secular,
Europeans view Muslims through their religious identity and their European credentials, or the lack thereof. Given this dynamic and the historically combustive mix of religious hatred on the continent, here is my prediction for a worst case scenario, which I should add I would never want to see: imagine for a minute that there were 9/11 style attacks in France, what would the French response be?
We have a small scale test case to answer this question. Remember what happened after the murder of Van Gogh in the Netherlands. This was a gruesome and appalling murder. Yet, the response to it, acts of violence against Muslims and mosques collectively in the old --but apparently still alive-- European fashion showed that even in the very liberal Dutch society, the old European mind set still persists. Hence, to go back to my worst case scenario, if there were a 9/11 type of attack in France, I shudder to think in which ways the majority French people will take on the Muslims in the country.
FP: Sorry if I am misunderstanding you here, but this interpretation implies a theme that gets my blood boiling. It reminds me of the lefties here in America who, after the 9/11 attacks, instead of being sympathetic to the victims and their families and angry at the perpetrators, and supporting revenge against those who committed the crimes and those who harboured them, instead were agonizing about how Arab and Muslim rights were now going to be violated.
I am a Russian. If tomorrow, hypothetically, some Russians massacred 3,000 innocent people, my heart would go out to thee victims and to their families, and I would want to see retaliation against those who committed the crime. My greatest concern would not be sitting around thinking: “Oh and now they will discriminate against people like me, people with the ending ‘ov’ at the end of their name.”
I think that this emphasis reveals a certain ideological bent.
Sorry, but when I think of the problem of the growing presence of Muslims in France, the first thing that comes to my mind is the heart-breaking reality of forced marriages and honor killings being perpetrated on Arab-Muslim girls on French territory. I think of forced veiling. I think of the gang-rapes of Muslim and non-Muslim girls who are not veiled in Arab-Muslim ghettoes. I think of female genital mutilations. I think of the growing radical element that might perpetrate another 9/11 over there. I think about all we can possibly and hopefully do to crush these forces. Needless to say, that is what is on my mind, not sitting around worrying what will happen to someone else afterwards, someone that is not even a victim of the huge crime that is perpetrated and should be thought about and condemned.
Bayegan: The worst case scenario will emerge out of our failure to discriminate between Muslims and Islamism. By Islamism, I mean the fundamentalist, extremist doctrine that is based on a violent and intolerant interpretation of Islam. The worst case scenario will show its ugly and violent face when in our rage against fanaticism we subscribe to another form of fanaticism ourselves. In other words, as Amos Oz the Israeli novelist has said, 'In our anti-fanaticism we can turn into the worst kind of fanatics'.
Remember that the person who assassinated Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin was not a female-genital mutilating, honor killing Muslim, but a fanatical Jew. The worst case scenario would develop out of blind ignorance in all its various shapes and forms. Blind ignorance is not the monopoly of Muslims, it has a fertile breeding ground wherever reason and sound judgment give way to hatred and bigotry. Do not forget that The Holocaust was perpetrated by refined Christians who enjoyed listening to Wagner and perused the works of Heidegger and Celine, and not gang-raping Arabs. What the fundamentalists want, and as an Iranian I can testify to, is to polarize and radicalize the conflict between Islam and the West as much as possible. They want to push the West over the Rubicon of waging a wholesale war against all Muslims. Achieving this task they can turn around and tell their fellow Muslims that the argument of moderate, tolerant Muslims is ineffective and irrelevant. They want to make all Muslims believe that anyone who argues that peaceful coexistence with the West is possible is a traitor to Islam and acts as a fifth column.
The West should concentrate its efforts in defeating Islamism, and not in the alienation of Muslims.
As a child growing up in pre-revolutionary Iran, I remember that my Muslim parents had their best friends amongst the Jews. One of these Jewish friends helped me to leave Iran for Canada after the Revolution and his family provided me with all the love and assistance they could offer at a time when I needed it most: early difficult years of separation from my parents and country. During the time of the Shah, religion did not create division and hatred amongst the Iranian people, but it was a force for gaining spiritual strength and provided the ability to empathize with other human beings irrespective of their race, religion or color. If the fundamentalists eventually prevailed, it was to a large extent due to the unfortunate fact that forces of moderation failed to develop a discourse for safeguarding the spirit of peace, tolerance and political evolution. They took for granted that political stability will last for ever without thinking it necessary to intellectually nourish and defend it. Accordingly the challenge of the writers and orators who were preaching sabotage and violence went unanswered. Fanaticism won by going unchallenged and in absence of a cogent counter-argument.
Dr. Ibn Guadi remarks that it is illusory to think that Muslim moderates form a majority in France, and the moderate Soheib Bencheikh the Mufti of Marseilles does not represent a wide section of the Islamic population in France. The corollary is that the bulk of the Muslim population in France supports groups affiliated with Islamic extremism. This is not an inference reached on the basis of evidence and reasoning. In a country like France where the public opinion shifts from socialism to the far right in a matter of months, it is not fair or consistent to assert that Muslim public opinion is exempt from the same vagaries and is locked in a certain inflexible mode. Muslims, like every member of the human species respond to changes in political, societal and economic circumstances. It would be as ridiculous to suggest that white French Christians are represented by the National Front and Jean-Marie Le Pen because they agreed with him in rejecting the proposed European Constitution; or to say that the protest vote against the Socialists in 2002 was a vote of popularity for Jean-Marie Le Pen and his fascistic views.
Adam Lebor, the author of 'A Heart Turned East' is very illuminating when he says : "In most (French) people's minds to be an Arab is to be a Muslim, and to be a Muslim or a fundamentalist is the same thing. Everywhere young Muslims are told that they ae fundamentalists... So it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy". (p. 174). The worst case scenario can also become a self-fulfilling prophecy. It will happen if people are deprived of their hope to live with dignity and are driven to desperate mindless acts. I believe the very fact that moderate Islamic discourse such as the one propounded by Soheib Bencheikh exists is a cause for hope. I am not here calling for appeasement or promoting wishful thinking, but am suggesting that since there are rational elements within the Islamic community in France, one should do one's best to encourage and disseminate its message. In medieval Spain for more than seven centuries Muslims, Jews, and Christians lived together in an atmosphere of tolerance, where literature, Science, and arts flourished. If such a co-existence was possible in the so called Dark Ages it cannot be impossible in the twenty-first century.
There has been also some change in French attitudes in the past seven years towards Arabs which seems hopeful. When in 1998 Zinedine Zidane, the French soccer player of Algerian origin scored two goals for France in the World Cup helping France defeat Brazil and claim its first World Cup, everyone in France celebrated; Jews, Muslims and Christians.
Jingoism and casus belli are the attitude of the of Eastern and Western fanatics. A creative solution on the other hand requires a search for a way of peaceful coexistence of diverse and seemingly incompatible elements. The worst case scenario will only come about as a result of victory of ignorance over common sense. Unfortunately there have been many historical precedents for such a victory. It is also possible to change the ticking time bomb into a mellifluous instrument of peace and harmony there have been precedents for that also.
FP: Sorry gentlemen, my eyes are starting to glaze over.
When organizing this symposium, I thought about the term “ticking time bomb” and thought it was a given that it referred to the growth of the Muslim population in France and the dangers it poses. There is an obvious Islamist component here. Within this whole phenomenon lies a clear threat to democracy, freedom, individual rights (of Muslims and non-Muslims) in France, not to mention the rise of extremism and terror etc. As this discussion proceeds, it appears that several members on this panel believe that the ticking time bomb is the potential response that some French citizens might engage in to Islamist terror and extremism. In other words, Islamist terror and extremism is not the problem, but the response that might be made to it.
Obviously we need to avoid alienating Muslims. It is clear we need to try to nurture a moderate Islam and to ally ourselves with Muslims who seek to modernize and democratize Islam. But to pretend that the threat to France posed by Islamism has nothing to do with the growth of the Muslim presence in France is mind-boggling.
The reminder to us that a fanatical Jew killed Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin is an absurd distraction to this conversation. Sorry, I think the last thing the victims of Islam’s gender apartheid, and all the victims of Islamist terror, worry about at night are fanatical Jews. The homosexual Palestinians that flee to Israel to avoid their death sentences under PA culture for being gay, I assure you, do not live their lives in dread worrying about fanatical Jews. And trust me, when I go to sleep at night and worry about the world’s safety and future, I think about things like 9/11, about Tehran’s Mullahs having nuclear weapons, about Zarqawi and Bin Laden getting their hands on WMDs. The threat of fanatical Jews, I am afraid, does not loom large in my fears at night.
The point about the Holocaust being “perpetrated by refined Christians” is a crock and the people who utter it know it is a crock. The Holocaust was not perpetrated for a Christian reason. It was not perpetrated by Christians acting out of loyalty to their faith and following their religious texts. The Holocaust’s evil was not perpetrated and legitimized, step by step, by references to verses from the New Testament. The Holocaust was the ultimate anti-Christian act that might have been committed by some people who happened to be Christian but who were violating the basic tenets of their religion. You cannot find anything in the New Testament that serves as a foundation for the legitimacy of the Holocaust nor can you find a reference to anything even close to justifying the acts used in carrying it out. And I am not going to waste my time here going over how Islamist terror finds its roots in Muslim texts. Go read Robert Spencer’s Onward Muslim Soldiers: How Jihad Still Threatens America and the West.
Do we support Muslims who want to reform Islam and democratize it and make it a religion of peace? Yes. Can we deny that when Osama and al Zarqawi refer to Surahs in the Koran to justify their violent acts that they are referring to real Surahs? No.
The Muslim community is as diverse as any other group, culture and community? Please. When there are Muslim women from the Muslim world freely competing in sports and in the Olympics, get in touch with me. When they are free to become prominent intellectuals and critics in their own society and receive material and cultural rewards for being prominent dissidents, get in touch with me. When they are free, if they so choose, to engage in Muslim beauty pageants, get in touch with me. When Muslims throughout the Arab world start creating the most hilarious self-critical stand-up comedy routines, get in touch with me. When Muslims create heated and controversial talk shows, books and films, where free opinions startle and provoke thought on all limits, and the creators are not hiding in desperate fear of their lives, get in touch with me.
Again, is there a fight happening for the soul of Islam? Yes. Must we support Muslims, like groups such as The Free Muslims Against Terrorism? Yes. But please spare me the absurdity of the Muslim community being as "diverse" as any other community. When Jews and Christians rise in its ranks and become members of it on many levels and realms, like Muslims have done in the West, get in touch with me. In the old Islamic empires, Jews and Christians who attained political influence were often the target of violence and resentment by Muslims. Today, Christians like Tariq Aziz, the former Iraqi Deputy Prime Minister, have risen in power only in states where Islamic law has been set aside.
When you can name me ten fatawa, off the top of your head, made by ten famous Muslim clerics against bin Laden within this “diverse” community, get in touch with me. Yes, of course these fatwas exist, but why are they so few in number and what effect have they had on widespread support for Islamic terrorists within the Islamic community worldwide? Does this not say something about "diversity" in the Muslim community?
Kindly also spare us the nonsense about the Islamic “tolerance” that was practised in medieval Spain. Newsflash: it never happened. Robert Spencer has meticulously delegitimized this myth in his Ch. 7, “The Modern Myth of Islamic Tolerance,” in Onward Muslim Soldiers.
In any case, Dr. Ibn Guadi? Sorry, it’s getting a bit hot in here.
Ibn Guadi: I see.
I share the concerns of Reza Bayegan on the fact that no one should favor excess pressure against Muslims. We need, on the contrary, to nourish relations with Muslims who wish to democratize the institutions in the Arab countries. But the error would be to believe that the Islamic religion is accessible to the reform. What I mean to say is that those who wish to change the political institutions don’t want to necessarily change the Muslim institutions. They are two different things. As faith and policy are inseparable to Muslims, the subtraction is difficult. The change is more difficult because it requires the re-examining of several centuries of traditions and Islamic jurisdictions. The authority in Muslim theology rests on Bukhari, Muslim, Shafi'i, Ibn Hanbal and other schools. To be able to "reform" some religious elements, it has to be justified by a person of a higher authority. Which is impossible, given the doctrine they follow.
On the theological level, no one can avoid or draw aside the Hadiths. Several Islamic regulations do not come from the Koran but primarily from the Hadiths. The Canonical circumcision or the five canonical prayers do not appear in the Koran but in the collections of Sahih Bukhari, one of the greatest authorities in the chain of the traditions. Other regulations which do not find their source in the Koran but in the Hadiths are the subject of a religious decree (fatwa) to abolish these precepts as the death penalty for apostasy (Bukhari Jihad 149: II, 56, p. 352, 2), the punishment relating to adultery (Muslim, Hudud 12) or the night voyage of Muhammad to the sky (Bukhari, Manaqib Al-ansar, 42: III, 63, 42, p. 37, 1) which is important to negotiations related to the statute of Jerusalem. But even as great authority as the Mufti of Al-Azhar was, even he could not abolish these precepts. Because to some, when you discuss these points you call into question the legitimacy of the Muslei faith. It is precisely for this reason that the leaders of the UOIF (Union of Islamic Organizations of France) have had disputes with the French government. For the Moslems in France and elsewhere, to discuss these points is to reduce their faith.
It should be realized that in the eyes of some Muslims, the religion of Islam is itself the reform the world needs. According to the Islamic doctrines, Judaism and Christianity are good religions but not sufficiently reliable to claim the authority on the questions of faith. For the Muslims, the Christians and the Jews were misled in their writings. In the spirit of Islam, the religion was reformed because the Koran corrected the preceding revelations.
Even if it is difficult to admit, I must recognize that Jamie is right when he says that no one can be unaware of the various texts in which Osama bin Laden or others are using. In February 1998, in a text of six pages, bin Laden declared the war on the Jews and the Christians through a fatwa. No Muslim religious authority produced a fatwa to refute the remarks of Osama. Few Muslims would be in disagreement with what bin Laden said on November 3, 2001 on chain Al-Jazira: "It is impossible to forget the hostility which exists between the inaccurate ones and us. It is a question of religion and creed". From a purely objective point of view, he was right.
Some Muslims are better assimilated than others. Yes, but if they are better assimilated it’s because they are "less" Islamic. The more spiritual questions that face the Muslims in France, the less they feel related to the country which they live.
Moreover, contrary to the Turks in Germany, the Muslims in France did not need to insist to get their citizenship because a residence permit can be sufficient. The residence permit is delivered to aliens for a 10 years period. Several immigrants whom I know have had this card for 40 years and don’t know the French language at all.
Moreover, they do not wish to acquire French nationality and speak about it rather with contempt.
About the worst case scenario in France. On the one hand, France could implode. But on the other hand, I don’t think that this implosion would have a huge impact in French society. I agree with Laurent about the Theo van Gogh impact among the French people.
Bayegan talks about Jean-Marie Le Pen. But most of Muslims in France have been like (even admire) him since the end of 80’s. This field is taboo in France, but when Jean-Marie Le Pen says in some interviews that most of aliens agree with him, he is right.
Murawiec: The sad truth, I think, is that little indigenous to Europe will seriously contribute to defusing the “time bomb.” There is a bomb ticking because the world of Islam has proven itself incapable of facing modernity, because of the stubborn adherence of its rent-seeking and rent-owning elites to a mythical view of the world, because Muslims have been left with the delusional world-view of a Golden Age of Islam to which one should aspire to return, because a self-image of the Muslim-as-victim (of “imperialism,” of “colonialism,” of “Zionism” and whatever else) has been systematically propagated by those elites, and accepted by large numbers. So we have large numbers of alienated Muslims throughout Europe.
Soner is right about the Turks: since they come from a more structured society with strong historical traditions and a sense of self-respect born of a millennial domination of the region south and east, their self-identity tends to be less based on self-aggrieved victimhood than that of Arabs. However, even the Turkish model, which has much to be admired, today faces the rising tide of an Islamic regime which is drowning the secular modernizers. The limits of the Ataturkian model have been reached: Mein Kampf is the #1 bestseller in Turkey today, it is sold at train stations, museums, newsstands, etc. Once again, it is perfectly true that Turkish areas in German towns are no ghettoes. So both Turks and Germans are better off. Still, it does not dispense us from dealing with the problem that Islamism in general poses.
We’ve got to deal with Islam – I’ll agree with Mohamed. Now, being alienated does not mean being right. “Suffering bestows no right,” said Albert Camus. The problem is that today’s world of Islam considers it licit and even recommended to kill Infidels as a way of “solving” problems. Al-Azhar says that. Qaradhawi says it. The Saudi shaykhs repeat it endlessly. Arafat built a career on it, as well as Saddam, Assad, etc.The ideology of terror has been promoted, extolled, lionized, and adopted, in the world of Islam as in no other part of the world. It is symptomatic of the generalized blindness that prevails in the world of Islam: a love of destruction, a desire for annihilation: Nihilism has become a principal intellectual force. Blame Khomeini and Shariati, al-Banna and Qutb, as well as Michel Aflaq and the ideologues of “secular” nationalism. This is what powers the time bomb.
Now, Europe’s attitude has been to pretend that this does not exist, and look the other way. In the UK, the Labour Party is so craven toward the radicals in the Muslim population, there is little that it will not do to gain its favors. While France was watching existentialist movies and dreaming of imperial glory, huge swaths of surburban (banlieue) territory have become “lawless areas” (zones de non-droit). So it’s not just a French problem, though the problem there is acute. Bat Ye’or has a very strong point when she analyzes Europe’s evolution as moving toward what she called “Eurabia.” To deal with a problem, you would need to recognize it to start with. I’m alright, Jack, says the French elite. Europe, I predict, will do nothing. It will wait, like the proverbial Roman patricians, waiting for the Barbarians at gates to enter and slaughter them.
Now, dealing with Islam. It seems to me that we have to escape the fatal dilemma: “it’s their religion, we can’t touch it.” The problem is that Islam has been captured by Islamism; we can live with Islam in general, we cannot live with Islamism. Islam has failed to cope with Islamism. We have to do so, because it will not let us live, but make us die.
In part, slowly, haphazardly, awkwardly, the U.S. has started facing the problem. See Condi Rice’s superb speech in Cairo – challenging our pseudo-friends and revoking the disastrous Eisenhower Doctrine in the Middle East, which, as she emphasized, put stability ahead of democracy to the point of forgetting the latter altogether. So we’re moving ahead. This in turn encourages those in Europe who are unhappy with continental suicide, and, even more importantly, those in and around the world of Islam, who want it to change: Irshad Manji, Nasser Abu Zaid, Ibn Warraq, Yousef Seddik, Abdelwahab Medeb, Kanan Makiya, etc. Dissidents all, each in their own way. They are the seeds. We must help them, because their societies are too despotic and frightened to give them much help. We’ve started with Iraq – we’re doing the right thing, through our innumerable stupidities and mistakes. Let’s go on. The idea is that it is at the root – Iran, Saudi Arabia, Syria, etc. – that terror as the preferred and extolled solution to the crisis of Islam must be tackled.
Am I far from France? Oui et non. There is indeed a ticking time bomb. The growing self-assertiveness of a radical and violent minority has already started to spill over into the hip and posh areas – a recent street demonstration of high-school students in Paris was violently attacked by Arab thugs from the suburbs who proceeded to beat up and loot the ‘rich French kids,’ with abundant displays of racial hatred. Not that I think that the multiculturalist elites will take heed. When you're bent on self-annihilation, you don't "notice" the Barbarians. There we are.
Cagaptay: Let's put things straight. First, no need to compare Europe to the US when we discuss the issue of and how and if Muslims fit into these societies, etc. The US is light years ahead of Europe in terms of religious coexistence and also its ability to frankly discuss such issues. (I am not even going into why we should not compare Russian cases to America: just remember the "rescue" effort when Chechen terrorists took hostages at the Moscow theater: Russian security forces stormed the building and killed over a hundred of their own citizens instead of saving them). Anyhow, the point I am making, which I should repeat so it does not get blurred behind the moderator's comments, is that we face two gruesome problems: a large, growing, unintegrated, poor, and increasingly radical Muslim population, which because it has been left in the hands of fundamentalists is becoming monochromic and is segregated from the rest of France, and a larger French society that will not even admit that these problems, is at a loss as to how to deal with it. This society, I am afraid, will be rudely awakened and will react harshly as deserved but not wisely as needed for victory -because of its lack of religious tolerance when the fundamentalist Muslims show the first signs if serious unrest or conduct terrorist attacks in France. Now, is that a time bomb and a half or what?
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Symposium: Muslims in France: A Ticking Time Bomb?: Part II
By Jamie Glazov
FrontPageMagazine.com / July 4, 2005
FP: Fair enough, thank you. Sometimes I get a little aggressive just to get all the cards on the table and have things crystallized. You are right Dr. Cagaptay, this is a time bomb and half indeed. Mr. Bayegan?
Bayegan: Going back to the subject of encountering fanaticism, I should say that my own greatest authority on this topic is Amos Oz. whom I have mentioned before and who deals with this issue even-handedly and with great intelligence. In one of his addresses to Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, he said that "fanaticism is ancient and comprehensive. It is older than Islam, older than Christianity and older than Judaism. It might be a potential presence in every human being. It might be a bad gene. It is everywhere." He suggests that in different countries schools, colleges and universities should offer courses in what he calls "comparative fanaticism", contrasting the moral disease of fanaticism in various cultures and searching for a creative remedy.
Murawiec quotes Albert Camus that "Suffering bestows no right". Camus here speaks about right in order to show its moral limitations. Furthermore, Camus exalts human responsibility over a mere right. In both his fiction and nonfiction writing, Camus' existentialism consists of human responsibility for ourselves and each other. Camus also has another famous saying which might be useful for the purpose of our discussion. He says: "We are all special cases. We all want to appeal against something! Everyone insists on his innocence, at all costs, even if it means accusing the rest of human race and heaven". (The Fall, 1956)
Keeping in mind Camus' statement, let us also not forget that an 'eye for an eye' was not invented by Muslims. Let us not forget that the violence and mayhem in Mosaic books such as Leviticus and others of the Old Testament like the book of Joshua make the Koran sound like a book of nursery rhymes. The point is that the moment we insist on our own innocence and accusingly point a finger at other people's guilt, we should remember the wisdom of Christ's words that "He who is without sin among you, let him cast the first stone". The problem of fanaticism is a curse for all humanity and its eradication requires universal effort and solidarity. Dr. Luther King was right when he said that "we must learn to live together as brothers or perish together as fools".
Jamie mentioned that Osama and al Zarqawi refer to Surahs in the Koran to justify their violent acts and that they are referring to real Surahs. Osama and Zarvagi will see in the Koran what they want to see in the Koran, like David Koresh saw in the Bible what he wanted to see in the Bible and the fanatical puritans of the Massachusetts when they were burning 'witches' at the stake in Salem interpreted the Bible to suit their fanaticism. No, Islam is not intrinsically incompatible with peace and humanity. Interestingly enough, every Surah that Mr. Zarvagi reads like all other Surehs in the Koran start, with the words: "In the name of God, the compassionate, the merciful."
Fundamentalists however, are unable to see any message of peace and human solidarity in it because their religion is not in the service of humanity, but is in the service of an ideology. If in our fight against fundamentalism we fall into the trap of an ideology ourselves and supplant sound judgment with knee jerk reactions, we too become infected with the virulent virus of fanaticism.
What we have to recognize is that Islam is in need of reformation. The Enlightenment that helped to evolve Christianity and Judaism and brought them up to date with the needs of the modern world, for historical and geographic reasons did not occur in Islam. Years of foreign domination, mass poverty and illiteracy rampant in Islamic states have not helped the burgeoning of this process either. What is hopeful, however, is that Moslems have started looking critically at themselves and a sense of humor that Amos Oz singles out as an important element which fanatics are deprived of, is developing within the Islamic community regarding matters that were untouchable until quite recently. Maybe Moslem "beauty pageants and hilarious self-critical stand-up comedy routines" that Jamie refers to - presumably as signs of progress - are rare or non-existent in Islamic world, but I can tell you that as far as Iran is concerned, Iranian cinema today deals with topics that were taboo not very long ego. A recent movie called 'The Lizard' lampoons mullahs and criticizes their greed and detachment from society. Malaysian born Saudi woman poet, Nimah Ismail Nawwab in her marvelous verse criticizes gender inequality, human rights abuses and fanaticism in Saudi Arabia without for one moment attributing those problems to Islam. Moreover, she sees them as symptoms of a retrograde society that does not live up to Islam's moral and humanitarian message:
Fanaticism rearing brazenly flouting
The very principle Islam espouses
Of the equality in the eyes of one God
This kind of reading of Koran is possible as it was also possible to adjust the Bible with the realities of the modern world and not take literally those verses in it which exalt men over women .
On Sunday June 19 the results of elections to France's Muslim Council were a positive step in the direction of strengthening moderate forces and integration of Muslims into France's secular society. Reuters reported that the voting brought gains for a "moderate mosque network and rebuffed an activist group that had flirted with defiant Islamic stands".
In France, as elsewhere, an agenda for hope and peaceful coexistence needs to be espoused by all major religions. Muslims want to keep and protect their religious heritage. They know that it is a sine qua non to their identity. They need all the help they can get to realize that the greatest dangers to their collective soul and their spiritual heritage are backwardness and fanaticism.
FP: Mr. Bayegan, even though it was your last turn, I will return to you now, as I really need to see your evidence for your arguments.
You made an analogy between Islamic violence and violence that was perpetrated by someone that you alleged was a Christian and that you argued engaged in violence for Christian reasons. I emphasized that Osama’s violence can be legitimized by Islamic texts and that is why Osama refers to them when justifying his violent jihad. Again: nowhere can an Adolf Hitler refer to anything in the New Testament to legitimize what he did – and that is why he didn’t, because he wasn’t a Christian and he wasn’t acting for Christianity. Hitler was the ultimate anti-Christian and the Holocaust was the greatest of anti-Christian acts.
Instead of responding to this crucial distinction, you simply start throwing more dust into the eyes. You move on to new accusations, this time comparing violent Islamic jihad with David Koresh and Christian “witch” burners. Since you hide from showing the verses that Hitler could point to in the New Testament to justify the Holocaust, do tell what it was that Koresh did that you compare to Islamic jihad and what verses in the New Testament he would have used to legitimize it. Also please give me verses in the New Testament that fanatical puritans of Massachusetts would have used to justify burning “witches.” The verses, of course, need to be as specific as Surah 9:5 (the famous Verse of the Sword) in the Koran in terms of a specific instruction.
Mr. Bayegan, instead of substantiating your charges, you make an implied accusation against an argument I never made, saying: “No, Islam is not intrinsically incompatible with peace and humanity.”
Where did I say this? Who are you arguing with? I specifically stressed that we need to work with Muslim forces that seek to reform Islam, to make it pluralistic and tolerant, and to bring it into the modern world. That is why I mentioned The Free Muslims Against Terrorism. Why would I promote this organization and stress that we need to work with it if I believe the whole enterprise is pointless?
Your point that the Old Testament makes the Koran sound like a book of nursery rhymes is so absurd that I cannot even dignify it with a response.
In the previous round, you brought up the absurd and utterly false contention that the Muslim community is just as diverse as any other community. I delegitimized this blatant falsehood by naming just a few (out of an infinite number) of obvious realities that do not exist in the Muslim world – realities that would (and must) exist in a world that can be described as being “diverse.” Instead of defending your contention, you again shift to an unconnected and illegitimate theme.
I asked you to name me ten fatwas that have been issued by Muslim clerics against Osama. I asked you to name me beauty pageants and stand-up comedy routines in the Muslim world. I did not ask you these things looking for your moral approval for the existence of these realities. I asked you them because the non-existence of these phenomena demonstrates the non-existence of diversity in the Muslim world.
Instead of trying to prove your argument that there is diversity in the Muslim world, you dismiss beauty pageants and stand-up comedy routines, quipping that I mention them “presumably as signs of progress.” I am shocked that an individual who is supposedly fighting for freedom in a certain part of the world would make a snide remark about this phenomenon, especially in the context of the millions of human beings who have been tortured and killed because of the demonization of the female body and humor.
So let’s narrow in on these themes in case you do not understand their importance. Women’s right to be seen, and their freedom to have the right to personal self-determination, which includes the right to sexual self-determination, is a crucial right for a free and democratic society. A society cannot be free and democratic if it does not allow this type of freedom to its female gender, just like free speech is instrumental for a free society. I am not asking you what you think of beauty pageants. I don't care what you think of them. I raise them as an example to show that their non-existence reveals the lack of diversity and freedom in a culture. The key here is that if an attempt was made by humans to hold a beauty pageant, it would be forbidden and there would be punishment for those involved. If you do not understand that this is a reflection of totalitarianism, I do not know what to tell you.
I also make the same point about humor and laughter by using the example of stand-up comedy. Any serious person that studies totalitarianism understands the crucial nature of the phenomenon of laughter and the threat it poses to a despotic society. Anyone who is cognizant of what is fundamental for a society to be truly free and diverse will understand the example I raised in connection to the freedom of laughter and self-critical comedy.
I would suggest rethinking what wisdom or nobility exists in dismissing the crucial role of comedy in society. When you watch Chris Rock in his stand-up performances and try to picture if a Muslim Chris Rock-type of comedian could do the same thing in front of Muslim audiences throughout the Islamic world – it means everything. It crystallizes what freedom is. There cannot be freedom if there is no Chris Rock allowed to do what he does in a society. Mr. Bayegan, it doesn’t matter what you think of Chris Rock. The point is that society can only be free if it allows an individual to engage in that form of entertainment, and allows people who like it to be an audience, and for all the participants involved not to fear punishment for being involved. If a society cannot allow the freedom for that possibility and for the incarnation of that form of comedy, than it is by necessity a totalitarian society.
It is depressing that I have to take the time here to explain these things, which one would think were simple givens.
It is shocking that my examples of female freedom and the right to engage in self-critical comedy, and these phenomena being directly connected to freedom, is mocked by a person that is supposedly fighting for freedom in a part of the Middle East.
If anyone, a person connected to the Middle East would understand these things, since the connection of women and laughter is the key phenomenon that represents the struggle between freedom and totalitarianism in the Middle East. I had a fascinating discussion with journalist Steven Vincent, the author of The Red Zone, who, fortunately, unlike you Mr. Bayegan, takes these issues to heart. He gave some fascinating insights into why militant Islam regards female laughter as such an evil threat and why it forbids it – especially in young girls. His analysis of what laughter, especially a woman’s laughter, represents, and why it is such a threat to totalitarian structures in militant Islam, is fascinating. I encourage everyone to read his insights.
In any case Mr. Bayegan, I am listening and waiting for answers to my questions. Please do not throw more dust into the eyes or start new arguments. Give me specific verses out of the New Testament that would legitimize your analogies.
Bayegan: Thank you Jamie,
When at your insistence I accepted to participate in this symposium, I thought it would be a civilized exercise with you as a moderator. A moderator's job first and foremost is to listen. With all due respect I don't think you have even bothered to comprehend my interventions. This is what scares me most: if we cannot hear each other out intelligently and impartially here in a democratic forum such as this, then where? Cant and rant are two deadly enemies of ratiocination and enlightened arguments which will hinder us from arriving at a meaningful solution.
You say if I talk the way I do, how can I be a human rights activist? You say my argument is a crock. You say your dignity is beyond replying to my points. You ask for my reply by saying: can you answer "without throwing more dust into the eyes." I am your guest here remember? I was invited because you deemed my views important. The least you can do is to treat your guests with courtesy and reply to them without discrediting them or resorting to personal attacks. For me human rights activism consist above all in doing my best to think justly and argue objectively.
If you had read my last intervention carefully you could have seen that you and I are saying exactly the same thing as far as the need for sense of humour, self-criticism and laughter are concerned. I even quoted Amos Oz and his views that a sense of humour is one of the best remedies against fanaticism. So why are you making out as if I am saying something different?
Yes, you do say that one should support moderate Islamic groups, but you also say that you are not going to waste your time here going over how Islamist terror finds its roots in Muslim texts and you also mention that Osama and al Zarqawi refer to real Surahs in The Koran. By the way, I do agree with you on this. But saying that and at the same time failing to mention that there are also many Surahs in The Koran (the learned members of this symposium can testify to that) that are invitation to peace, kindness and compassion is to imply that Islam has no room for tolerance and peaceful coexistence. I was simply trying to say that the Islam that came to existence in the context of 6th century tribal Arabia has the capacity to recreate itself as a spiritual force for the modern world of the 21st century. The challenge is to turn The Koran into a spiritual source against political corruption and social decay instead of a manual for running the political life of the country, as for instance is happening in Iran today.
You challenged me to cite verses from the Bible that could be used as justification for violence. If you would have read my intervention carefully you would have found out that I said that fanatics see in the Bible (that is they misread) what they want to see in the Bible, the same way that Islamist fanatics interpret The Koran to suit their deadly agenda. For an example of using the Bible to suit a deadly agenda please read "A People's History of The United States" by Howard Zinn, HarperCollins, p.14 where he discusses the Puritans' carnage of Indians and confiscation of their land. He writes:
"The Puritans also appealed to the Bible, Psalms 2:8: "Ask of me, and I shall give thee, the heathen for thine inheritance, and the uttermost parts of the earth for thy possession." And to justify their use of force to take the land, they cited Romans 13:2: "Whosoever therefore resisteth the power, resisteth the ordinance of God: and they that resist shall receive to themselves damnation."
FP: Mr. Bayegan, I apologize to you if I am not being a very gracious host. I have lost all sense of manners I suppose.
The problem, sir, is not that I am not listening to you, but that perhaps I am listening a little too much. When you make allegations (i.e. the Muslim community is as diverse as any other, Islamic violent jihad has equivalent parallels in Christian texts, etc.) and then do not substantiate them when asked to, but simply move on to make other dubious charges, these are very serious things. And I am sorry, but the suggestion that Adolf Hitler could have found some kind of inspiration or legitimacy for the Holocaust in Christianity, as Osama and al Zarqawi find the inspiration for violent jihad in Qur’anic texts, is an allegation that does not instil tremendous cheer and a spirit of camaraderie in me, especially when I keep asking for substantiation and do not receive it.
Incidentally, I don’t need the learned members of this symposium to testify to the fact that there are Surahs in the Qur’an that are an invitation to peace, kindness and compassion. I have read the Qur’an. I study it everyday. I know those parts exist. When did I ever say they did not? And how is this a substantiation for the points you have made and I am pressing you on?
Again, no one here is saying that Islam has no room for reform and that it does not have the capacity for it. That is why we all agree that we must support moderate forces that seek to bring the best out of Islam and to let it subordinate the parts that militant Islamists use to inhale their jihadist oxygen.
While you might want to rethink referring to Howard Zinn’s interpretations as back-up for your arguments, I am still to get the evidence backing up your arguments about diversity in the Muslim community and about Hitler, Koresh and “witch” burners and what it was specifically that they found in the New Testament that inspired them to do what they did. But I give up.
As for your reference to Psalms 2:8 and Romans 13:2, I really don’t know what your point is in connection to our discussion. I am at a complete loss at how these verses serve as an analogy to the Surahs in the Koran that command violent jihad against unbelievers until the whole world is submitted to Islam. Incidentally, the “damnation” in Romans 13:2 refers to damnation in the afterlife; it is not an instruction, as the many Surahs in the Qur’an instruct, for believers to become God’s executioners and to smite the unbelievers on this earth.
In any case, Mr. Bayegan, we share the same aspiration to bring Islam into the modern world and to separate it from the political sphere. The question, of course, is how this can be done – especially in the context of Islam not recognizing the separation of church and state.
I apologize to our guests here for this sideline debate and am grateful to them for waiting patiently. But these questions regarding diversity within Islam and the roots of Islamic jihad are, as we all know, all crucial to the terror war and, of course, to the precarious situation in France.
Dr. Ibn Guadi, I hope you are still with us my friend. Feel free to say whatever you wish in your final comment and kindly include a last word on the ticking time bomb in France.
Ibn Guadi: Thank you, Jamie.
I just would like to reconsider the references of Reza Bayegan to Psalms 2:8 and Romans 13:2. The passage of the Psalms does not start with verse 8 but with verse 7 until verse 9. Actually, for the Christians, this chapter talks about the Messiah and not the israeli people. Thus, the Christians see the fulfillment of this verse in the book of Revelation 2: 27 where it is written: He shall rule them with A grinds of iron ; They shall Be dashed to parts like the potter's vessels. That’s exactly the same verse of Psalms that Reza Bayegan quoted.
In the same way, it’s not sufficient to quote Romains 13: 2 in order to understand. This verse is famous among Christians to be the guide of the respect of the political authority and not a justification to break the law. The majority of the Arab Christians in the Muslims countries apply this text to respect the laws of the Muslim country where they live. In this chapter it required to Christians to respect the country in which they reside. According to Christians, the believers should not rebel against the human authority because this authority was instituted by God. For this reason Paul asks Timothy (1 Timothy 2.1-2) to pray for the authorities, the kings, the governors, etc...
So, the roots of the separation of the religion and state are anchored in the Bible even if in the history that were not always the case. But, for the Christians, there were sufficient data in their texts to re-examine the question. Unfortunately, the similar process was not the same one in Islam. That’s why I said that Muslims community present some new sociological challenges for the French people.
As Bayegan says, it true that some Christians can want to read what they want. We have many examples of it. Nevertheless, the problem really does not come from there. No matter what our discussions on the contents of the Bible might be, France is a completely Dechristianized country. The ticking time bomb is already here. I' m afraid, as Laurent and Soner pointed out, the French society won't react or won’t admit these problems, as today. And some French Muslims have understood it.
FP: Final word goes to you Mr. Murawiec.
Murawiec: Well I guess we have strayed from our explicit subject, but being led astray may be very useful: some of the issues tackled in the detour are crucial to our debate about Muslims in France, and elsewhere. We have two terms: the French (country, state, nation, culture, society, etc.) and the Muslims. We already discussed a number of the problems of the host country. If France "felt" better about itself - if it were in better shape - it would be better able to help the guests. It is not the case, though. France is sick, and it is receiving a steady inflow of people from a very sick culture. Islam is the Sick Man of the world. And while France's diseased state is a noxious and oftentimes aggravating problem, we can live with it. With the disease in Islam, we can die. This dictates some priorities.
Mr. Bayegan states, and, undoutebtedly, believes, that "Islam has the capacity to recreate itself as a spiritual force for the Muslim world for the 21st century." I welcome his proclamation, but unfortunately, it is only that, a proclamation. It may have the "potential," but it is not implementing or using it. Far from that, what Islam, or to be more precise, the world of Islam, has produced since, say, 1945, is sadly at odds with the proclamation. Not only has it not exerted that "capacity to recreate itself," it has in fact done exactly the contrary. Al Azhar, for the Sunni world, and Qom, have been dominated by nihilism, by a self-destructive adhesion to a mythical (delusional) self-image based on a nonsensical image of the past. Islam is mired in its own dream of itself, and gets very angry when awakened by reality. Hence violent reactions when reality intrudes.
If "Islam ha[d] the capacity to recreate itself as a spiritual force for the Muslim world for the 21st century," it would be abuzz with scholars' debates and popular interest in such debates:
- the confusion, rampant in Koran, hadith and sharia, between the tribal code of honor, and morality, must be dissipated
- quranic and shariatic law concerning apostasy need to be abolished wholesale
- the very concept of dhimmi needs to be abolished
- the idea that the world is divided between a dar al-Islam and a dar al-Harb must be thoroughly reexamined
- quranic and shariatic prescriptions concerning jihad must be revised entirely
- the untying of things legal, things religious and things political is urgent and fundamental
How fundamental these points are barely needs to be stressed. In turn, this would demand a serious debate on the spurious and deadly concept of the Koran's "uncreation," one of the strongest possible impediments to sustained progress in both Islam-religion and the world of Islam. Ditto with the conception of change: as long as the Koranic equation of bida, heresy, with innovation, remains, it wil stand in the way of any progress.
When Mr. Bayegan states "What we have to recognize is that Islam is in need of reformation. The Enlightenment that helped to evolve Christianity and Judaism and brought them up to date with the needs of the modern world, for historical and geographic reasons did not occur in Islam. Years of foreign domination, mass poverty and illiteracy rampant in Islamic states have not helped the burgeoning of this process either " his faulty diagnosis exemplifies at least in part what the problem is: The Enlightenment was not a meteor that fell upon Christian heads - it was the product of Christian, or Judeo-Christian, civilization and culture, and history. It was a self-generated movement. Islam's failure to generate from within anything remotely comparable is the problem. There are figures in the world of Islam that exemplify the existence of a potential: Sir Syed Ahmad Khan [1817-1898], the great Muslim reformer in India, was a case in point. And today, we have the magnificent figures of Kanan Makiya, Fouad Ajami, Irshad Manji, we have the cases of Nasr Abou Zeid, of Abdelwahhab Medeb, of Youssef Seddik: there are seeds for a renaissance, just as, in other contexts, Havel and Walesa, or Sakharov, were. But let us not forget that sometimes the critical mass is reached, and reform occurs, while in other cases, as in Russia, it fails.
The first precondition for success is to be ruthlessly truthful with oneself, one's own culture, one's own past history. "Attempting to live in the truth," Havel wrote. Seeing the seeds of today's problem with Islam in "years of foreign domination, mass poverty and rampant illiteracy" is a sure recipe for failure. Why do I never hear those words from Indians? Unless Muslims once and for all give up a self-conception as aggrieved victims of others, and thereby acknowledge the reasons for the decadence and decline that befell that part of the world that was ruled by Islam, they will go nowhere. And going nowhere, many of them will seek to blame others for their own folly. And whenever and wherever they are able to do so, they will express their angst in aggressive forms. The kind of thrust for modernization that U.S. guns have spearheaded has become necessary and irreplaceable. But it does not replace the critical self-examination of Islam. It is not for vague "historical and georgraphical reasons" that Islam failed to renew itself: the reasons were (and are) religious, theological, cultural, psychological, societal.
In my mind, it is difficult to disentangle the ticking time-bomb of Muslims in France from the global problems of Islam. Muslims in France carry the decline and decadence of their culture of origin with them. They arrive in a sick culture. There is a frightening risk of explosive developments in France, because France seems to cumulate the problems of both worlds.
FP: Mohamed Ibn Guadi, Soner Cagaptay, Laurent Murawiec and Reza Bayegan, thank you, we are out of time. It was a pleasure to have you here on Frontpage Symposium.
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Jamie Glazov is Frontpage Magazine's managing editor. He holds a Ph.D. in History with a specialty in Soviet Studies. He edited and wrote the introduction to David Horowitz’s new book Left Illusions. He is also the co-editor (with David Horowitz) of the new book The Hate America Left and the author of Canadian Policy Toward Khrushchev’s Soviet Union (McGill-Queens University Press, 2002) and 15 Tips on How to be a Good Leftist. To see his previous symposiums, interviews and articles Click Here. Email him at jglazov@rogers.com.
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