In actuality, the everyday choices of most Muslims in Europe are dictated more by their experience of globalized economies and cultures than their readings in the Koran or Shariah. Along with their Hindu and Sikh peers, many Muslims in Europe suffer from the usual pathologies of traditional rural communities transitioning to urban secular cultures: The encounter with social and economic individualism inevitably provokes a crisis of control in nuclear families, as well as such ills as forced marriage, the poor treatment of women and militant sectarianism.
However, in practice, millions of Muslims, many of them with bitter experiences of authoritarian states, coexist frictionlessly and gratefully with regimes committed to democracy, freedom of religion and equality before the law.
For many of these Muslim aspirants for full and equal citizenship, the urgent questions are whether the old-style liberalism of many European nation-states, which has traditionally assumed cultural homogeneity, can accommodate minority identity, and whether majority communities in Europe can tolerate expressions of cultural and religious distinctiveness. A part of the secular intellectual priesthood, which cannot survive without its theological opposition between the Enlightenment and Islam, thinks not. In 2004, France’s ban on the wearing of headscarves in public schools bluntly clarified that Muslims will have to renounce all signs of their religion in order to become fully French.
This expectation of identity suicide has a rather grim history in enlightened Europe. Voltaire burnished his credentials as a defender of reason and civility with attacks on “ignorant” and “barbarous” Jews who, as slaves to their scripture, were, “all of them, born with raging fanaticism in their hearts.” (The Nazis put together a sizable anthology of Voltaire’s rants against Jews.) Accused of mistreating their women and proliferating with devious rapidity, and goaded to abandon their religious and cultural baggage, many Jews in the 19th century paid an even higher cost of “integration” than that confronting Muslims today in France.
As it turned out, those Jews who suppressed the Torah and Talmud and underwent drastic embourgeoisement became even more vulnerable to malign prejudice in post-Enlightenment Europe’s secular nation-states. The persecution of Alfred Dreyfus in France convinced Theodore Herzl, the creator of modern Zionism, that “the Jew who tries to adapt himself to his environment, to speak its languages, to think its thoughts” would remain a potentially treacherous “alien” in the secular West. Reporting in the 1920s on Jewish communities exposed to a particularly vicious recrudescence of anti-Semitism, the novelist Joseph Roth denounced assimilation as a dangerous illusion, blaming its failure on the “habitual bias that governs the actions, decisions, and opinions of the average western European.”
Roth, who trusted Europe’s old “fear of God” more than its “so-called modern humanism,” bluntly questioned the “civilizing missions” of European empires in Asia and Africa in a preface he wrote to his book in 1937: “What is it,” he asked, “that allows European states to go spreading civilization and ethics in foreign parts but not at home?”
Joan Wallach Scott’s account of France’s colonial history reveals that violent prejudice against religious and racial “others” was also an intrinsic part of spreading European civilization and ethics abroad. The veil, fixed in the 19th century by the French as a symbol of Islam’s primitive backwardness, was used to justify the brutal pacification of north African Muslims and to exclude them from full citizenship. Geoffrey Brahm Levey and Tariq Modood, the editors of Secularism, Religion and Multicultural Citizenship, write: “How Muslims are perceived today is connected to how they have been perceived and treated by European empires and their racial hierarchies.”
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