Published in: Jerald Gort, Henry Jansen and Wessel Stoker (eds.), Crossroad Discourses between Christianity and Culture. Rodopi (Amsterdam, New York 2010), 431-448
Present-Day Europe and Islam in Encounter
Emerging European Islam and its Dialogue Partners
Gé Speelman
Abstract:
As new generations of European-born Muslims are growing up, the Muslim community is changing. The way religion was experienced by their parents, an Islam connected to village communities, is being replaced by a more private Islam in the next generation. In this essay I want to sketch these changes and look at their implications for interreligious dialogue. In particular, I want to identify which Muslim groups are interested in interreligious dialogue, and why. I will highlight three trends in present-day European Islam: the salafimovement, which wants to go back to the sources, bypassing traditional religious authorities, the neo-Sufi movement, and the search for an Islam compatible with European citizenship.
After that, I will briefly explore different dialogue initiatives and the different actors engaged in them. I will end with an evaluation of these initiatives. What are the possible directions dialogue could take?
Europe and its Islam
The great influx of Muslims into Europe started a decade after the Second World War, when the growing industries of Western Europe needed labourers. The young men from Pakistan, Turkey or Algeria were perceived primarily as migrants at that time, strangers needing support and hospitality. When the gates of legal labour immigration gradually began to close after the oil crisis (1973), many migrants decided to have their families come over to join them. A new phase started, in which cultural and religious identity became important. Muslim men felt the need to open prayer areas where they could meet and where a qualified imam would be able to pass on their religious heritage to the next generation.
During the 1980s, as these children grew up, religious priorities found their way into the public sphere (Nielsen 2003: 355). No longer were these families seen by the larger society as “guest workers” or temporary migrants. It became clear that they were in Europe to stay and that they had a cultural and religious orientation that was in many ways different from that of the societies in which they lived.
This was expressed in the different “affairs” seen across Europe, starting with the Rushdie affair in Great Britain (1989) and the Foulard Affair in France (1989). These affairs, and the subsequent debates in the media among intellectuals and politicians, changed the perceptions the majority had of the new minorities living in their midst. They were no longer primarily “Turkish guest workers” or “Asian migrants”; instead, they became ”Muslims.” This development coincided with changes in the self-perceptions of peoples who had been established in Europe for a longer period of time.
After the collapse of the Soviet system, in many European countries the question of national identity so central and crucial during the nineteenth century once again became an issue. Communal religious adherence became strong in Eastern Europe again, as in the Catholic Croatian, Orthodox Serb or Muslim Albanian communities.
In 1993, Samuel Huntington wrote a seminal article, stressing the primacy of cultural roots in the clash of civilisations. A new agenda arose after the fall of the Berlin Wall, and religion became a focus again for European policy makers. The presence of Muslims was no longer connected only with social and economic questions; it became a political issue (Nielsen 2003: 357).
Towards a Private Islam
Today, some states in Western Europe have a growing number of Muslim inhabitants. The estimated numbers are: for Germany 4.4 million (4.9%), for Great Britain 1.6-2 million (2.7%), for France 4.4-6.4 million (7-10%), for the Netherlands 900,000-1 million (5.5-6%).[1] How does “Islam” look to them? How has their perception, their experience, the way they live changed their religion?
Religion “back home” was both territorialised and communal. The village community shared sacred times of festivals and sacred spaces like the graves of saints that could be visited. Women did not usually visit the mosque, but they were very actively involved in the cults of the saints. Through their migration Islam became detached from both the community and the sacred places. The new community migrants try to establish has only one focus, the mosque, to which people from different villages come. They share the core of Islamic practices, praying together and wishing one another a blessed Ramadan. But they do not share their daily lives with one another. The nuclear family became the main “celebrating community.”
Another change has been the growing awareness among Muslims of the diversity and variety of Islam. There were differences among the believers in Pakistan or Turkey, but not differences of such a bewildering variety as they meet in the immigrant situation. Obviously, “Islam” means something totally different to their Muslim neighbours, apart from the core rituals and convictions.
So there is a process of pluralisation, of de-territorialisation and of de-institutionalisation among Muslims. Olivier Roy brings these trends together in his analysis of the process of the individualisation of Islam (Roy 2003: 75-94). To both outsiders and European Muslims themselves, “Islam” becomes the core of a neo-ethnic identity. “The Muslim community” is sometimes used in the way the Ottoman millet functioned: as a minority defined by its religion. In the debates about the future of Islam, we no longer hear about Punjabi or Kurdish villagers but about “Muslims.“
But what is “Islam” if it is not rooted in the cultural practices of a particular group? A rather abstract core remains, partly structured around the mosque and the shared core rituals, partly around certain ethical values, like the importance of virginity of girls before marriage, a certain stress on family values, and criticisms of “the moral depravity” of the country of settlement.
“The Muslim community” becomes a rather abstract group of people sharing a nucleus of beliefs and practices, not an existing community of people related to one another (Roy 2003: 66).
Islam is no longer something whose makeup is obvious; it has become a subject of reflection for its adherents. They have to find reasons why they pray, fast, or dress in a certain fashion because they have to explain these practices to outsiders, to their children and to themselves. They are no longer part of a way of life; they are options to choose from among many other options. This process of reflection leads to an “objectification” of Islam.[2]
And so a new discourse about Islam comes into being among European Muslims. They learn to defend their faith and to express it in simple, understandable terms. What “Islam” means can be summarised in a few simple rules and practices. Whether one wants to follow these rules and practices becomes increasingly a matter of a reasoned personal choice as well. What Islam means to any Muslim living in Europe becomes his or her own affair, since there is less and less of a community controlling the behaviour of its members. Attempts at such controls do occur of course. Muslim women and girls can be under very severe pressure to follow certain patterns of behaviour. But there are escape routes, ways of giving shape to one’s own life.
And yet Dasetto warns us that individualised Islam does not mean instability or fragmentation regarding the identity of Muslims. The need for a shared discourse acceptable to Muslims from many different backgrounds leads to a reformulation of the faith that reorganises them around a shared common core and finds new committed communities (Dasetto 2000:23). Also, individualisation does not mean that Islam is necessarily liberalised; many Muslims opt for an interpretation that gives them control over their lives, and that may be a very stringent, severe, “Calvinistic” interpretation.
The Younger Generation: “Puritans,” Mystics, Citizens
Many Muslims of the older generation try to restore something of the “homeland atmosphere” in the mosques they have founded in the inner cities and suburbs of their new country. This type of nostalgic mosque, however, no longer appeals to their children. The involvement of Muslims in prayers at the mosque reflects a downward trend if we compare first- and second generation migrants. And yet younger Muslims indicate time and again that Islam is very important for their identity. They go on subscribing to “Islamic” norms and values, even the approximately 63% of young Muslims who never see a mosque from the inside, who can be said to be “believing without belonging ” (cf. Phalet and ter Wal 2006: 29).
Some younger people do feel, however, that they need to be a part of organised Islam. They try to reform Islam by taking over the mosque organisations from their elders (Nielsen 2001: 38), which may result in a struggle for power in the mosque organisations, both between old and young and between those of different ideological orientations (Jenkins 2007: 135). In this struggle younger visitors complain about the traditional, local forms of Islam the imam from their parent’s home villages preaches. They long for new ways of creating Islamic identity.
Salafis
In the search for new orientations, the young choose different directions. One of these is an involvement in the debate about rules of behaviour. These rules used to be decided by muftis, Muslim scholars who could guide individual believers confronted with new circumstances on how to regulate their behaviour in accordance with the Shari’ah. Can a member of the national football team refrain from fasting during Ramadan when he has to play an important match? Can a girl wear nail polish during Ramadan? Is organ donation possible for a Muslim? How much alimony should a man pay his divorced wife? A Shari’ah council has been set up in the United Kingdom to issue fatwas[3]in response to questions by the believers about everyday life. The difference with Islam back home is that believers in Europe are free to do whatever they like with the answers. The fatwa cannot be enforced. That means again that the nature of the fatwais changing radically: it is becoming personal advice to an individual believer (Roy 2003: 79).
Such traditional authorities are losing control in another way as well. Not only in Europe, although there more than in Muslim countries, the localised, embedded normative Islam is making room for a media or sound bite Islam. Islamic norms and values can be constructed and passed on by lay people who consult the Qur’an, the hadith and Usul al-Fiqh (sources of Islamic jurisprudence) themselves. All these resources are neatly placed on CD-roms, all hyperlinked and cross-referenced. The computer expert Sa’d al-Faqih says: “I am not an ‘alim … but with these tools, I can put together something very close to what they would produce when asked for a fatwa”(Mandaville 2000: 285).
Thus the traditional mufti, who needed a long and specialised training, is gradually losing his authority. His advice has to compete with those of self-appointed “experts” on the internet, where believers hotly pursue and debate proper Islamic norms. Moreover, many younger Muslims feel less attached to traditional Shari’ah law. Rather, they want to go back to the sources, the Qur’an and the Sunna, without having recourse to the intervening centuries of Islamic tradition (Waardenburg 2000: 59).
It is in this “internet Islam” that we can locate the strong Salafi (forebear) trends within European Islam. Salafis are Muslims who reject most of the traditional body of fiqh (Islamic jurisprudence) when it comes to rules of behaviour. Instead, they go back to the pristine Islam of their forebears, the community around Muhammed in Medina. They read the Qur’an and the Sunna for themselves and derive their own rules of behaviour directly from those sources.
Contrary to older forms of Islamism, like the Muslim Brothers,[4] most salafis have no clear political agenda. Rather, they seek to reform the personal lives of Muslims through strict adherence to a set of prescriptions. In no way can a believer swerve from the example of the Prophet and his Companions. They reject the division of the Muslim communities into different law schools. We should bear in mind that every law school is associated with a particular ethnic community. Salafis are seeking a global Islam, in which cultural differences have been overcome (Roy 2003: 128). They prefer a more radical, clear-cut, purified, rigorous Islam (De Koning 2007).
Some branches of the salafi movement have extended their rejection of the values of modern secular society into activism, even radicalism; they are often called jihadisalafis. The majority, however, prefer life within a small sectarian community of like-minded believers to involvement in society. Adherence to this type of “born again” salafi movement often goes hand in hand with a break with one’s parents and family. For such believers, Islam is no longer connected to territorial and generational ties; it has been delocalized. Their community may be an internet group or a small group meeting in a house. That makes them part of the privatised versions of Islam that abound in Europe today (Roy 2003: 144). Traditional religious leaders everywhere are having great problems confronting such young radicals (Lewis 2009: 279).
Neo-Sufism
But a puritan Islam is not the only option. We can see the emergence of new forms of the traditional mystical Sufi brotherhoods hand in hand with this development. In many Islamic cultures of the past and the present, these brotherhoods were rooted in local communities. One became a member, not as a result of an individual choice but rather as a family-tradition. This manner of being a mystic has given way to a new, individualistic form of Sufism.
One of the most prominent branches of this new Sufism in Europe is the Gülen movement. Fethullah Gülen is a Turkish scholar who was partly inspired by the teachings of Said Nursi, a Turkish reformer of the first half of the twentieth century, although he rejected Nursi’s social conservatism and narrow nationalism. Both Nursi and Gülen are rooted in the Naqshbandi Sufi brotherhood. Many European cities have groups of Gülen followers who are active in education and in interreligious dialogue. The form of Islam Gülen preaches, with a positive attitude towards religious pluralism but nevertheless a strong religious and moral identity, appeals especially to young Turkish professionals. In Turkey, the new middle class of businessmen from the provinces supports the movement.In Germany and the Netherlands Gülen groups are very active in setting up debating groups and organising interreligious dialogue.[5] Another field in which they operate is education. Many (interreligious) secondary schools have been set up by the Gülen movement.[6]
Not every Muslim actually joins a neo-Sufi group. Neo-Sufism could be qualified as part of a larger trend where people from the new generation are being inspired by forms of Islam that give clear-cut rules for behaviouron the one hand but pay close attention on the other to the personal motivations and emotions of the individual believer. Another indicator for this overall process is the popularity of preachers like Amr Khaled, who is sometimes called “Islam’s Billy Graham.”[7] His sermons, delivered in an emotional style, stress values that have to do with the inner life of the believer, such as love for humankind, patience, endurance, resisting evil in one’s personal life, spiritual development. Amr Khaled is very popular among young women in Moroccan mosques in the Netherlands (De Koning 2007).[8]
Muslims as Citizens
Some Muslim intellectuals see a challengeiin the privatisation of religion today to develop a more liberal Islam, open to rational enquiry. In some of the emerging student societies (others are very much influenced by the salafitrend), young people try to develop an Islamic identity that does justice to the fact that they are citizens of the country in which they grew up and are totally committed to its democratic institutions and ideals. They often opt for a reinterpretation of Islamic sources and history that puts the potential for debate and renewal of Islam at the centre (Speelman 2008: 196).
People like Mohammed Arkoun in France, Nasr Abu Zayd in the Netherlands or Bassam Tibi in Germany, who have been active in interreligious dialogue for many years, point to the potential for critical and liberal attitudes within the Islamic tradition. In 1992 Tibi outlined his idea of a Euro-Islam.
The concept of Euro-Islam is intended to provide a liberal variety of Islam acceptable both to Muslim migrants and to European societies, one that might accommodate European ideas of secularity and individual citizenship along the lines of modern secular democracy. (Tibi 2002: 37)
Tibi recommends a moderate degree of what Ibn Khaldun called asabiyya (awareness of one’s roots) (Tibi 2002: 42).
Nasr Abu Zayd is more active in the field of Qur’anic hermeneutics. He aims at a form of hermeneutics that mediates between the classical Islamic tradition and the modern world of freedom, equality, human rights, democracy and globalisation. Arkoun engages in a critical and rational analysis of Qur’anic texts.