Ziauddin Sardar5th December 2005
http://www.newstatesman.com/200512050006 Islamophobia is not a uniquely British disease: acrossEurope, liberals openly express prejudice againstMuslims. Do new pogroms beckon? Ziauddin Sardarreports from Germany, the Netherlands, Belgium andFrance.It's a bitterly cold night and the centre of Dortmundis deserted. On weekdays, says our taxi driver,everything closes by ten o'clock. It is not easy tofind a place to eat. Eventually, he drops us at theCava restaurant in Lindemannstrabe. Just one couplepunctuate the ultra-chic of this postmodern bistro. Wesit near them and order our food. Dortmund, Germany isthe first port of call on my journey through theindustrial heartland of northern Europe. After theterrorist attacks in London and the riots in theFrench suburbs, I want to assess the racial divide,the fear and the loathing that permeate so much of ourEuropean continent. Christoph Simmons is an insurance broker in hisforties; his girlfriend, Baneta Lisiecka, is a Polishimmigrant. They invite us to join them for a night outin their "green metropolis". We drive in Christoph'ssports car to Limette, "the only pub in Dortmund opentill 6am". Dortmund is a multicultural city integratedinto the global economy, explains Christoph; thisformer mining town is now a thriving base forhigh-tech research. "Our immigrant communities arewell integrated," he says. Greeks, Italians,Spaniards, Poles live in proverbial perfect harmonywith Germans. There is only one problem: the Turks -"they don't integrate". Baneta thinks they are "mostlycriminals" and she is afraid of them. Christoph alsosays: "They are conservative; their women cover theirheads. The Koran tells them to murder Christians." Hashe ever met a Turk, I ask. "No," he says. "They sticktogether and never come into our pubs." I talk toother people in Limette. Jasmine, a Catholic fromCorsica, sums up the overall feeling. "I don't likeTurks. I don't know why. I just don't like them." And yet I discover that these open manifestations ofracism do not seem to be reciprocated by German Turks.At the Orhan Narghile Grill Cafe, in the Turkish partof Dortmund, I meet Suniye Ozdemir, a single motherborn in Germany. "I don't know," she says with genuineamazement, "why the Germans hate us so much. I don'tknow why they are scared of the Turkish people. Maybethey're jealous. May-be they're afraid we will stealtheir jobs." She introduces me to a group of girlsfrom the Helmholtz Grammar School. Aged between 16 and18, these girls are confident and articulate, and theyspeak good English. They want to become professionalsand to succeed. Gulsum, who wears a hijab, says theyexperience racism every day - at school from theirteachers, on the bus, on the streets. Her friend, whodoes not wear a hijab, says: "We were born in Germanyand we are Germans. We stick together for protection,to avoid hostility." Throughout my journey, from Germany to theNetherlands, onwards to Belgium and finally intoFrance - the object of much recent attention - I meetpeople all too ready to describe Muslims in thecolours of darkness. Islamophobia is not a Britishdisease: it is a common, if diverse, Europeanphenomenon. It is the singular rock against which thetide of European liberalism crashes. There are common themes but also subtle differences inthe way each nation's history influences its people'spresent attitude to immigrant communities. Much ofthis is rooted in the various colonial histories.Germany came late to nationalism and colonialism, andcaught a bad case of both. In the 1880s it scrambledbriefly and brutally for colonies to prove itsimportance as a nation. The roots of its ethnicproblems lie deeper, however, in its history andcultural psyche. Many of the erstwhile principalitiesand tiny statelets that formed Germany were part ofCharlemagne's Holy Roman Empire, a unity forged undersiege and in reaction to the perceived threat ofMuslim civilisation. The Germans embraced the Crusadeswith great vigour: the first, infamously, commenced athome with pogroms against the Jews. The crusadingmotif is as important to the German self-image as itever was; the hatred of Turks I heard was oftenexpressed in crusading language - even if couched inliberal terms. Germany's present ethnic-minority population is thelegacy of its wartime military alliance with Turkey.Under the gastarbeiter ("guest worker") policy, theTurks were good enough to be imported en masse torebuild war-torn Germany but not good enough to begiven German nationality. They existed outside theambit of German identity. It was the continuation ofracial purity in another form. Now that they areissued with national identity cards, now that Germanyhas liberalised, is the concept of what it is to beGerman, I wondered, still a matter of ein Volk - onepeople, the Nazi notion of racial purity? "I am afraid it is," says Wolfram Richter, professorof economics at the University of Dortmund. There aremany factors why the Turks are hated, Richter says. Hecites social factors such as Turks shopping only inTurkish shops, cultural factors such as their womencovering themselves, language problems such as theolder generation of Turks still not speaking German.They are seen as disloyal. Then there is the "Anatoliabride syndrome": German Turks tend to go back toAnatolia to get married and bring their wives toGermany. But the overall factor in the fear andloathing of Turks, Richter says, is old-fashionedracism. "I am afraid we have not learned from ourhistory. My main fear is that what we did to Jews wemay now do to Muslims. The next holocaust would beagainst Muslims." Across the border into the Netherlands and toEindhoven, a lively cultural city with a youngpopulation, where fear of Muslims is equally evident.There are fewer than 5,000 Muslims in Eindhoven andthey are all hidden away in the Woensel district. Buttry to get a taxi driver to take you there. Kim dePeuyssenaece, our driver, is adamant: "It's adangerous area where you could get killed," she says.She has a Moroccan boyfriend, whose picture shedisplays on her mobile phone, yet she dismissesMoroccans as "mostly criminals" who are "ruining ourcountry". She drops us in front of a Moroccan bar nextto the new, clinically structured red-light district,a kind of John Lewis-meets-porn. Inside the Safrak Barand Cafe, the atmosphere is thick with smoke. Old mensit playing backgammon, chequers and dominoes. "We arenot part of the Dutch community," says the bar owner,a tall, aggressive Moroccan who does not want to givehis name. "They don't treat us with respect anddignity. They think we're separate. So we areseparate." That the Dutch see Muslims as a separate community isnot all that surprising. Holland has a brutal colonialhistory just as long as Britain's, and the jewel inits crown was the most populous Muslim nation onearth: Indonesia. The Islamist insurgency in Aceh is alegacy of the people's long war with the Dutch, a warthe colonisers never won and never ended. Slavery andcompulsory labour on Dutch plantations underpinned astrict system of separating the rulers from those theyruled. The Dutch were interested in categorising andneatly arranging the Otherness of those they ruled,the better to maintain their separateness anddependence. Colonial policy now reverberates at home. In another part of Eindhoven we meet Jamal Tushi, anIT consultant in his thirties. "They treat us likecolonial subjects," he says. "For them, all Muslimsare terrorists." Tushi was born and bred in Eindhovenand speaks perfect Dutch, yet finds it hard to getwork. "If you are a young Moroccan, forget the idea ofgetting a job," he says. During job interviews, themuch-acclaimed Dutch liberalism evaporates. "They wantto know what kind of Muslim you are. Do you pray? Doyou go to the mosque?" Dutch liberalism was meant only for the Dutch. Todayit extends to prostitution and drugs, but not toMuslim immigrants. It's like the "ethical policy"Holland developed for its colonies. The policy wasabout Dutch superiority; it had little to do with thereality of life for the people they ruled, and madelittle difference to their condition. The coloniesserved the metropolis, regardless of how they werespoken of and discussed. The language of ethics wasalways about the colonising "Us" and not the colonised"Them", just as all discussion about multiculturalismin Holland is at base about what kind of country "We"are, now that we have let "Them" in. Inclusion, thenor now, was not the point. Dutch liberalism is abouthow good and open "We" are - not an open negotiationabout what liberalism means to and for minoritycommunities. We take the train to Antwerp. Belgium is aninteresting case of multiculturalism, split as it isbetween the Dutch/Flemish-speaking Flemings andFrench-speaking Walloons. There is also a religiousdivide, between Catholics and Protestants. In 1994 arevised constitution introduced devolution in anattempt to tackle the long-standing division betweenthe communities, recognising three provinces andlanguage groups. However, dealing with its ownfractures of multiculturalism does not mean opening upto immigrant minority communities. In downtown Antwerp we come across Noor Huda and herfriend Fatimah Zanuti. Huda, in her early twenties, isa medical technician at a hospital in the city."Multiculturalism in Belgium is meant for theBelgians," she says. "We are not considered Belgian."Huda was born in Antwerp, as were her parents. "Butbeing a third-generation Belgian is not relevant. Weare still colonial subjects." Racism and hatred ofMuslims are so endemic in Belgium, she says, that "youhave to constantly guard what you say. We are alwaysafraid to speak our mind. You do not have the right tosay what you want to say." The barriers in Belgium, as elsewhere in Europe, areborn of colonial history and attitudes. And Belgiumhas one of the most vicious and inhuman of allcolonial histories. Conrad's Heart of Darkness and itspicture of Kurtz in his stockade surrounded by severedheads is based on reality, not the allegory ormetaphor of fiction. In Belgian colonies such as theCongo, the natives were a problem - and the problemwas that they were not working hard enough, notproducing enough rubber for the metropolis. So armedpolice would invade villages, round up women andchildren, imprison them, and murder groups of themuntil the required amount of rubber had been deliveredby the men. Armed police are much in evidence at the policestation in Lange Nieuwstraat. An officer wastes notime in pointing out that Muslims are a problem. "It'sa one-way street," he says. "We are waiting for themto come towards us the way they should and we wantthem to." But should you not also be moving towardsthem, I ask. "No," he replies without hesitation. "Weare not a problem. Islam is the problem. Anything ispossible where Islam is concerned." He expects a riotto take place, sooner or later. A riot, or rather a series of riots, did take place inLille, the last stop on our journey. A northernindustrial town in France, Lille experienced some ofthe worst of the recent unrest. Emmanuel Peronne, afashion designer from the suburb of Roubaix, has nodoubt what caused the riots. "It's economic injusticeand inequalities that successive generations ofMoroccan and Algerian Muslims have suffered inemployment, housing and educational opportunities, aswell as downright racism at the hands of Frenchsociety," he says. "They have no means to survive. Itis all about survival." Roubaix, scene of the mostviolent uprising, is a dilapidated holding area. "Theycall us immigres," says an angry halal butcher. "Butwe were born here. We have no standing in the idealsof 'liberte, egalite, fraternite'." Indeed. The ethos of the French revolution was nevermeant to be pluralistic. Its essential proposition wasbased on totalitarian uniformity - the scourge itunleashed as the ideological underpinning of modernityand European nationalism. It was also the bedrock ofFrench colonialism, which created parallel universes:the superior French and the inferior others.Assimilation into Frenchness and indirect rule overdifference were the twin tracks of French colonialism.So, officially, because France recognises onlyFrenchness, it claims to be colour-blind andnon-racist, yet it is both highly racist and attunedto a colour bar. In Lille as much as in Paris and elsewhere in France,there is a neat parallel that demonstrates thecontinuity of the colonial ethic. In North Africa,where most of the French immigrants come from, themedinas, ancient cities with a Muslim culture, wereencircled in their separateness. The medinas were seenas chaotic, confused and not fit for modernity - thephysical representation of what the French thought ofthe medinas' inhabitants and their culture. Aroundthese old indigestible cores were built modern citieson the French model, where the colonisers lived andfrom which they dominated. Today, Lille has its owntraditional core, a bounded city whose limits arejealously guarded. Around this inviolate core circlethe depressing banlieues: modern slums of the grey,inhospitable and inhuman hutches built to house theindigestible population of migrant workers. Therationale of the colony is neatly reversed and broughthome to the metropolis. It is a metaphor for all thathas not changed. Throughout our journey, we were surprised at howopenly prejudiced people were against Muslims. Eachcountry has its own extreme-right party, led byfigures such as Jean-Marie Le Pen in France or PimFortuyn, who was assassinated in Holland in 2002. InBelgium, the draconian right is represented by theVlaams Blok, a Flemish nationalist party founded in1977. Philippe Van der Sande, its spokesman inAntwerp, declares that "immigrants do not adapt. Theydon't want to learn the language. They are notinterested in our culture but just winning easymoney." Well, we would expect him to say that. Yet thepeople we spoke to were ordinary citizens who sawthemselves as liberals and enlightened individuals. European liberalism today may be a consequence ofdecolo-nisation. But it seems more like a denial ofuncomfortable, unanalysed traits than a genuineovercoming of the past. Europe is post-colonial butambivalent. Even among individuals with more relaxedattitudes to interracial relationships, racism isunashamed and upfront. In practice, now as in thepast, such relationships make little differencebecause they require subordination of the partner whois from an ethnic minority. Indeed, they can work toincrease the sense of superiority and separation. Itmeans less emphasis on race, but more on culture asthe quintessential dividing line. Everywhere I went, the thought that the nation mightchange in the process of accommodating its minoritieswas conspicuous by its absence. Minorities are fine asmenial workers, a subordinate class. It is whenminorities seek to be upwardly mobile, to live themodern liberal dispensation in their own, distinctiveway as self-assured, equal members of the nationaldebate - and that was the desire of all the youngMuslims I met - that the problems start and latentprejudice comes to the fore. The central mosque in Lille is located in the Wazemmesarea. It is a rather unremarkable structure: threehouses seem to have been knocked together and a dwarfdome and minaret added rather crudely. The mosque alsoserves as the first Muslim school in France. It isnamed after Averroes, the great 12th-century Spanishrationalist philosopher and humanist. It is a pitythat Europe appropriated his rationalism, butjettisoned his pluralistic humanism. Ibn Rushd, to usehis Muslim name, would demand that the establishedorder that calls itself honourable and ethical,liberal and tolerant, offer an appropriate explanationto those whom it continues to discriminate against,dehumanise and demean.
