Author: Patrick Sabatier
Publication: The Asian Age
Date: October 19, 2006
A year after the wave of violent demonstrations
throughout the Muslim world, protesting the publication of caricatures of
Mohammad by a Danish newspaper, frictions between Europe and the Muslim world
multiply, threatening to make the "clash of civilizations" a self-fulfilling
prophecy:
Pope Benedict XVI outrages the Muslim world
by quoting remarks critical of Prophet Mohammad by a 14th-century Byzantine
emperor.
Berlin's Deutsche Oper considers canceling
the staging of an opera by Mozart, for fear a scene exhibiting the severed
heads of several prophets, including Mohammad, might incite Muslim violence.
A French philosophy teacher flees and lives
under police protection, targeted for murder by Islamists, after writing an
op-ed piece that attacked Mohammad's blessing of violence in the service of
religion.
Former British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw
unleashes a furor by calling on Muslim women to remove their veils, suggesting
that not being able to see a person's face made him feel "uncomfortable."
Amid Muslim protests, incidents of harassment of veiled Muslim women have
been reported.
These controversies move beyond the usual
xenophobic and anti-immigration concerns of the far right about the perceived
intolerance, aggressiveness and even incompatibility of Islam with European
core values. They also feed dangerous strains of "Islamophobia"
throughout Europe.
These "clashes" are to some extent
a toxic byproduct of a globalized media system. Instant information and misinformation,
through satellite TV and the internet, tend to obscure complex issues, feed
on widespread ignorance on both sides and pour oil on long-simmering fires
of historical resentment, economic frustration and political conflict. The
large and fast dissemination of extremist minority views on isolated events
whip up collective passions, making a dialogue based on tolerance and rational
criticism more difficult. To that extent, it might be argued that globalization
plays in the hands of Islamists who preach "jihad," or holy war,
against the West, and those who dream of Europe walling itself against Islam.
Conflicts between a fundamentalist version
of Islam and European societies based on secularism, liberal democracy, individual
rights and non-discrimination of the sexes reawaken in European minds ancient
fears, steeped in centuries of wars and invasions - all the more so since
the phenomenon takes place under the persistent threat of Islamic terrorism,
which has struck Madrid and London since 2001 and targets other large European
cities. Conflict is aggravated by the pressures born out of immigration from
Muslim countries across the Mediterranean, which has made Islam, with more
than 20 million believers, one of the European Union's major religions,. The
conflict is also highlighted by the debate around the candidacy to the EU
of Turkey, whose 60 million Muslim inhabitants have elected an Islamist-influenced
government.
Robert Redeker, a 52 year-old French philosophy
teacher and author, known for his abrasive criticism of all religions, launched
a virulent attack on Islam in the September 19th issue of the conservative
daily "Le Figaro" - savaging the blessing of violence in "The
Koran" and harshly characterizing Mohammad as a "teacher of hatred
- looter, Jew-killer and polygamist." The next day, the popular Egyptian
preacher Youssef al-Qaradawi denounced Redeker on Al-Jazeera TV, and Redeker
received death threats after an Islamist group posted his address, cell-phone
number and photos online and called on Muslim "lions" to kill him,
as Dutch filmmaker Theo van Gogh was killed in 2004 in Amsterdam by a 27-year
old immigrant from Morocco. Van Gogh outraged militants by making a film denouncing
the oppression of women in Islamic societies.
Redeker's predicament, reminiscent of British
author Salman Rushdie's after Ayatollah Khomeini's 1989 fatwa calling for
his murder, has roused support from French unions, civil liberties defense
groups and politicians of all stripes. Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin
denounced the threats as "unacceptable" and defended "freedom
of expression." The incident has fueled a debate between those intent
on defusing tensions by refraining from criticism of Islam and those who view
that attitude as appeasement.
Redeker's essay, admittedly provocative, was
written to protest Pope Benedict's apology for a speech given September 12th
in Ratisbonne, Germany. The Pope had quoted Emperor Manuel II Paleologus who,
circa 1400, assailed use of the sword to spread Mohammad's teachings. The
quote prompted furious protests from Islamic preachers, threats of diplomatic
retaliation by Muslim governments and violent street demonstrations that led
to the murder of a nun. Benedict XVI expressed his regret for a "misunderstanding."
To Redeker and many other Europeans, the Pope's apology smacked of appeasement.
The sense of a creeping surrender of central
values such as freedom of expression and the right to criticize, and even
lampoon any creed and faith, was compounded by the decision of Berlin's Deutsche
Oper director to cancel showings of Mozart's "Idomeneo" for fear
of violence by Islamist extremists. German Chancellor Angela Merkel reacted:
"Self-censorship out of fear cannot be tolerated." The September
30th headline of the daily "Libération" asked: "Is it
still possible to criticize Islam?" The opera, originally scheduled for
November, may yet be performed later under police protection.
The absence of clear denunciations by moderate
Islamic theologians, preachers and representatives to calls of violence and
censorship is perceived as a sign of Islamists' growing clout. It also feeds
suspicions that silencing criticism of religion is, like female oppression,
part and parcel of Islam. The threats against France, recently reiterated
by Al Qaeda deputy Ayman al-Zawahiri, for the 2004 law prohibiting the Islamic
veil in schools and public-service jobs have reinforced the feeling that Islam
is trying to force its prejudices on secular European societies.
On the one hand, then, Muslims react more
violently and internationally to criticisms they deem "blasphemous"
and "Islamophobic." On the other, books and essays denouncing Islam
as "the new totalitarianism," in the line of fascism and communism,
have been popular since the 2002 anti-Muslim bestseller by Italian journalist
Oriana Fallaci, "The Rage and The Pride." European fear of a "green
peril" is a mirror image of Muslim phantasms of a Western conspiracy
against Islam," an inexorable spiral of false perceptions fueled by the
media cauldron of instant TV images and internet pronouncements by radicals.
All this obscures the fact that Muslim furor,
as shown during the caricature controversy, is often staged for media consumption
by small groups of extremists while the vast majority of Muslims remain indifferent.
Over 70 percent of Muslims living in Europe, according to a 2005 European-wide
study, describe themselves as hostile to Islamists. Most practice a peaceful
and tolerant brand of Islam, and many wish for the emergence of a European
form of Islam, through reforms that adapt the faith to the modern world.
But a daily diet of violent news, images and
threats - many bloodthirsty acts by Muslims against other Muslims - hides
to European eyes the extreme diversity of Islam and its deep divisions along
sectarian, ethnic or theological lines. The silence of tolerant Muslims ends
up making militant Islamism the only message of Mohammad heard by Europeans,
the very aim of proponents of "jihad" and xenophobes. The dire prediction
of André Malraux, made half a century ago, might one day become true.
"The political unification of Europe would require a common enemy,"
said the author and Gaullist minister of culture in 1956. "But the only
possible common enemy would be Islam."
Patrick Sabatier is a French author and columnist