Before you buy the idea that the West needs to ban all Muslim immigration please keep in mind that my parents (hard-working, bright, thoughtful people) are Muslims and that I (a decent guy if I must say so myself, and right-of-center) am an American-born secular Muslim myself. The guys you're reading on the "Muslim menace" have a lot to learn from Reuel Gerecht. The Moroccan kids in Holland you're talking about don't come from crime-plagued societies. Muslim immigrants in America thrive.In Britain they wind up in jail. You think this is a coincidence?
I appreciate the reader's point, and how it complicates my own ability to think clearly about the whole terrorism/crime/immigration issue with regard to Muslims in the West. It's hard to generalize, and as soon as I post something generalizing, I'm often reminded at once of this guy, and other Muslims I know who I would in no way want to keep out of this country. I do think that Europe faces a much different situation than we do with regard to Islamic immigration, for reasons that probably have a lot to do not only with the relatively rigid nature of European societies, but also with where the Islamic immigrants are coming from.
For example, a Dutch criminologist pointed out to me that the Muslim immigrants causing so much of the crime in Holland are heavily drawn from the Moroccan community. And that they come from a rural, mountainous region of Morocco -- Morocco's hillbillies, you might say. They are thrown from a primitive, Third World rural environment into a First World city, and are completely dislocated. Religious extremism provides a way for them to establish identity, and to act out their fears and hostility. Holland's extremely liberal and patronizing way of dealing with its immigrant population -- give them anything they ask for, don't pressure them to assimilate -- has only helped them to further self-ghettoize and refuse assimilation.
The point here is that the situation can be a lot more complicated than simply saying, "It's Islam's fault." And if you make a blanket indictment of Islam itself, as my friend points out, you risk marginalizing good people, solid citizens. But on the other hand, when you look at poll data of British Muslims, for example, you find shocking levels of support for Islamic law (versus British civil law). Whatever the root causes of this state of affairs, it's frightening.
I am reminded by all this of how little, really, we know about the Muslims who live in the West. Or at least in America. I know the kinds of Muslims I've interacted with professionally here in Dallas, and it's not encouraging to me as someone who would welcome truly moderate Muslims here. On the other hand, I've been told by Muslims and non-Muslims, people who know a lot more about this stuff than I do, that the leadership in mosques and Islamic institutions in the US has been bought by Saudis, and that ordinary Muslims don't dare object. Here's an excerpt from a 2003 National Review piece I did about fear and mistrust between Muslims and non-Muslims in my Brooklyn neighborhood:
If it's too dangerous for Arab Christians to speak out against Islamist neighbors, what is it like for dissenting Muslims? A senior terrorism analyst with The Investigative Project, which specializes in monitoring Islamic radicalism, insists that Muslims of goodwill believe, with reason, that standing up to Islamist thugs will get them killed. "Fundamentalists are the ones who have the drive. For non- fundamentalists, speaking out against them is not worth their life," explains TIP's Evan Kohlmann.
Kohlmann says that Islamic radicals get away with their activities both by stifling dissent within Muslim communities and by "turning any criticism into a civil-rights and a humanitarian issue. They know that by appealing to our sense of diversity and humanity, they evade scrutiny." Indeed, many non-Muslims in the liberal neighborhoods flanking the al-Farooq mosque would consider it racist and McCarthyite to question the loyalty of their Muslim neighbors.
Mansoor Ijaz, an American-born, New York-based consultant of Pakistani descent, says that most Muslims in America want nothing to do with Islamic radicalism. Those Muslim communities most open to radical appeals are like Brooklyn's: filled with God-fearing, working-class immigrants struggling to make it in a strange land where they don't speak the language, and who feel they are discriminated against. They get angry, and are easily manipulated by the radicals who run some of these mosques.
"We shouldn't blame the immigrants. They're basically shut inside a room where all the walls are caving in on them at the same time," Ijaz says. "The real disease exists in those people that run these mosques and religious institutions."
I guess what I'm trying to say is that I don't know where to take a hard stand on this issue. If all Muslims living in the West were like my friend and his folks -- or, for that matter, like the friendly Muslim shopkeepers I came to know and care for when I lived in Brooklyn -- I'd know exactly where to stand. If they were all like the loudmouth Euro-jihadis and smooth-talking U.S. Muslim Brotherhood backers, I'd know exactly where to stand. Fortunately America is not Europe, so I'm not faced with the kinds of choices Europeans are. But that's evading the issue, isn't it? Anyway, I think many of us have made our minds up that the Muslims among us are All Good, and that anyone who doubts that must be a racist, or that the Muslims among us are All Bad, and that anyone who doubts that must be a dupe. Demonstrably, neither is true.
But what is true? Thoughts?
UPDATE: A reader posts in the comboxes a link to a story that quotes Pope Benedict XVI (back when he was merely a cardinal) saying:
...the Koran is a total religious law, which regulates the whole of political and social life and insists that the whole order of life be Islamic. Sharia shapes society from beginning to end. In this sense, it can exploit such freedoms as our constitutions give, but it cannot be its final goal to say: Yes, now we too are a body with rights, now we are present [in society] just like the Catholics and the Protestants. In such a situation, [Islam] would not achieve a status consistent with its inner nature; it would be in alienation from itself.
This is my understanding of Islam. What particularly concerns me is that the degree to which Muslims are adapted to living and accepting Western liberal democracy and pluralism correlates with the degree to which they are alienated from normative Islam.
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Rod: "What particularly concerns me is that the degree to which Muslims are adapted to living and accepting Western liberal democracy and pluralism correlates with the degree to which they are alienated from normative Islam." I would say alienation from "normative Islam" is a positive thing, just like alienation from a gang of street thugs is good. It will hopefully help many of them on their way to conversion to Christianity.
Thanks, Rod. I agree that the Islamists appear to be closer to the letter and spirit of the Koran, as I understand it (with my very limited understanding of it) and the Hadiths than moderate Muslims (and forget about progressive Muslims, they fall off the planet, as far as the Islamists are concerned). I think, in fact, what liberals from the U.S. want to do is precisely what Sayyid Qutb feared they wanted to do, which is to privatize Islam and limit its practice to the private sphere and spread the idea of separation of Church and State.
It seems to me that great credit is due to Berman for identifying this problem, since it is in such direct contradiction to liberal, "pro-tolerance and pro-inclusion" values. It is represents a contradiction in liberal thinking, it seems to me. The reason I brought up Ayyan Hirsi Ali and Irshad Manji, above, is that these are people who have been burned by Islam, so they are alert to the dangers of appeasing the Islamists.
Most liberal Christians, not having been burned by Islam in quite this way, can afford to maintain contradictory attitudes, denying the danger of the Islamists and preaching tolerance while also assuming that Muslims will be content to "keep their faith in the private sphere" and practice separation of Church and State.
I think, in fact, what liberals from the U.S. want to do is precisely what Sayyid Qutb feared they wanted to do, which is to privatize Islam and limit its practice to the private sphere and spread the idea of separation of Church and State. I think Sayyid Qutb was a monstrous fanatic (he preached total war on infidels). I also think that he was right: that (to use the Pope's formulation) if Islam were to become Westernized, it would be alien to itself. He very clearly saw what Islam was up against.
The problem that Europe is experiencing with Muslim immigration is to some extent a case of karmic blowback from the colonial era. Or, as a British woman of Pakistani origin once told a friend of mine, "We are here because you were there."
But it is true that Muslims have no significant history of living in countries ruled by non-Muslims, and have no ideological handle on doing it. It's true that shari'a is an all-encompassing system, recognizing no distinction between secular and religious, or religion and state.
But guess what, folks! Both Judaism and Christianity started out the same way. The development of an autonomous civil realm came late to both, and brought a lot of strife and heartbreak with it. Islam hasn't gone through that phase yet. In the meantime, we've got a problem. But that doesn't mean Muslims are a totally different species of human being--just that their history has developed differently from ours.
the beginning statement could be applied to the way in which we treat low-income transplants from one city who goto another seeking a way out of a crime filled neighborhood. If you grow up in a crime ridden neighborhood, and move to an new place where you have no roots all you have to fall back on is the survival skills of your old heritage.
More needs to be done not only for the immigrant groups but also for those who immigrate from the inner-city seeking a better life to help them find their roots in a new place as productive citizens that can be more than people who came from a ghetto. Often people who have only one vision of themself, and who have little formal job skills are stuck in a cycle of anti-social surivalism and living day to day no matter where they go. Breaking this cycle by involving them in the local church-run work efforts or other social service efforts could be a key way not only to show the welcome of the community for the new person, but also to show them the confidence of the neighborhood in the ability of the immigrant to make something of themself and become more than their present poverty. It's as simple as working at a soup kitchen, its as simple as running a Clothes for Careers drive, its as simple as job skills training. These services and many more in tandem go a long way to breaking down barriers between communities and building up the strength of the community as a whole.
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