Author: Daniel Williams
Publication: International Herald
Tribune, UK
Date: May 13, 2002
Naples: The ponticelli district
of western Naples looks like a piece of Italy that time, and the country's
striking economic progress, forgot.
Winding streets and a crumbling
old church seem cast from Italy's impoverished past. Street markets overflow
with shiny fresh squid and giant artichokes; the stalls look like 19th-century
still lifes. Old ladies wear black as if in perpetual mourning and wrinkled
men play cards lazily outside of storefronts. Watch out for pickpockets,
by the way.
Yet for all Ponticelli's anachronistic
feel, the district has been at the cutting and social changes wrought by
Italy's unending wave of immigrant. It is a debate that is raging across
Europe, highlighted by the effort of the anti-immigrant politician Jean-Marie
Le Pen in France to unseat President Jacques Chirac.
The ponticelli controversy centers
on the regional government's plans to build a $2 million mosque for Naples's
burgeoning population of Muslims from North Africa and Albania.
On one level, the debate focuses
on a Europeanwide fear that immigrant are imposing their culture on the
continent, sapping public resources and causing an increase in crime. Italy's
right-learning government is pressing for laws to jail some illegal immigrants
for up to a year, send naval boats to patrol the long coastline and allow
the destruction of ships that smuggle immigrants.
But the Ponticelli mosque story
is as much a tale about the peculiarities of Italian politics and the character
of this chaotic southern port as about immigration. While the right in
other parts of Europe seems to be feeding on the immigration controversy,
the right in Italy is divided on how to treat the mosque case.
Naples defies the belief that poverty
equals anti-immigrant sentiment. Though it is the poorest of Italy's big
cities, Naples is known for openness to outsiders, in contrast to wealthier
towns in northern Italy where anti-foreign feeling run deep. As a result,
proponents and opponents of the mosque tread warily. Naples's self-image
is at stake.
"Naples is a Mediterranean city
and has always interacted with its neighbors on the other shores," said
Bishop Antonio Riboldi, who opposes public funding for the mosque. "So
we are more welcoming. We want to be clear that criticism does not undo
centuries of getting along."
Naples, said Hamza Massimiliano
Bocclini, an Italian Muslim and Chief promoter of the mosque project, "is
accustomed to diversity, and we want to keep that."
Regional planners endorsed about
$2 million in funding for the mosque more than a year ago. There was no
public outcry. Aftyer all, the pope had approved construction of a mosque
in Rome six years earlier.
But that was before immigration
became a burning issue-and before Sept. 11. Naples, like other parts of
Italy, identified with the fears of New York and Washington and began to
suspect segments of its Muslim population of having fundamentalist leaning.
Some xenophobia surfaced nationwide.
"Anger and Pride," A book by the journalist Oriana Fallacci, Lauded Italian
patriotism and praised Italian cathedral architecture and Dante's poetry
at the expense of mosques and the Persian poet Omar Khayam. Italians bought
a million copies in five months-an unheard-of runway best sellers. The
rights Northern League, a minor participant in Prime Minster Silvio Berlusconi's
governing coalition, began to amplify its drumbeat of anti-immigration
rhetoric.
In December, Northern League members
mosques. A few members of the National Alliance, a larger party in Berlusconi's
coalition government, joined them. One politician suggested that the mayor
of Naples, Rosa Russo Jervolino, don a burqa, the full-length veil worn
by many Muslim women. The controversy was on.
In Naples, some Catholic Church
leaders criticized the funding for the mosque. The Reverend Ciro Cocozza,
a parish priests at Ponticelli's Madonna della Neve church explained delicately:
"It's not a question of intolerance. Indeed, people here wonder why, if
Italy can host mosques, why can't Saudi Arabia host Churches? It's a question
of reciprocity. And not only that, but the government pays!"
Riboldi said government funding
created a "dangerous precedent" and predicted, "There will be resistance
if the project goes forward."
On the streets of Ponticelli, criticism
is practical rather than philosophical. At the sacco barbershop, customers
wondered why the government had money to spend on a mosque when the roof
at Ponticlli's elementary school leaks, its road have potholes and petty
crime is rampant.
"It's a question of priorities,"
one said. Another voiced concern that the neighborhood would become a magnet
for what locals call "strange outsiders."
"This is not a neighborhood mosque
for people who live here," he said. "It will bring people from all Naples.
What will they do?"
A third man expressed the general
fear of immigrants. Ponticelli is a way station for immigrants from Albania,
a group that has been blamed for violent crime the length of Italy. "Why
Ponticelli for this mosque" Why not vomero?" the man asked referring to
a well-off district of Naples. "Haven't we had enough dumped on us?"
City planners expect the project
to go ahead. Liberal and conservative members of the city commission originally
endorsed the project. Muslims estimated to number 10,000 in this city of
3 million were already praying at provisional mosques in central Naples.
The National Alliance. Trying to moderate its image, largely supported
the plan.
Proponents argued that government
participation would ease suspicion that the mosque would become a center
for fundamentalism. "After Sept. 11, everybody wants to know who behind
the mosque," said Boccoloni, the head of Naples Islamic Association, who
converted to Islam six years ago. "The government is the perfect candidate,"
He said he campaigned for government funds to avoid foreign financing.
"I want our mosque to be Italian not foreign."
Macro Di Lello, a planner for the
regional government defended the decision to fund the mosque on the ground
that the state had long funneled money into religious projects including
refugee camps ran by Christian denominations and the sprucing up of Rome
for the Vatican's jubilee year in 2000.
Nonetheless, he said the government
would try to find supplementary funding from abroad. "The mosque provides
social services as well as religious space," Di Lello said. "So we don't
have trouble funding it."
The local government tried to make
the mosque project more attractive by combining it with a multimillion-dollar
redevelopment plan. The proposal includes housing and road repairs, public
transportation improvements, hotel construction and creation of high-tech
industry.
