Muslims in Europe – Called to be Neighbors

This text was originally written for a course in World Religion. It is pasted here if someone is interested. In my teacher’s remarks he pointed out that it is far from flawless, mostly due to my fragile English, and is uneven in quality at times. But I think it has some relevance anyway.

Introduction
My family had been invited to a potluck at my daughter’s childcare center. It was on a Saturday, the children at the childcare had practiced songs and painted pictures for the parents to see. We made a nice pasta-salad for the occasion. When we came, one of the employees looked at our bowl, and asked if it contained ham. As we replied, “yes,” the employee took a large Stick-It note and wrote “Warning Ham” on our bowl. I did not understand it until later. This was my first personal encounter with the Islamic faith.
In my research I looked at the social dimension of Muslim immigrants in Europe and a few specific cases of conflicts in Denmark and Iceland. Finally, I asked the question, how the church I belong to should deal with the presence of Islam and in doing that I tried to draw a sketch of my own theology about the issue.

The presence of Islam in Europe
From Muhammad’s time there has always been some presence of Islam in Europe, especially in Eastern and Southern part of the continent, first through traders and diplomats, later through Muslim communities in the Caucasus area, small communities of Muslims in Finland and on the border of Ukraine and Poland. As the Ottoman Empire extended into the Balkans and Central Europe, strong Muslim communities formed in Albania and Bosnia-Herzegovina, and there are minority groups of Muslims from that era in most countries in the Balkans and central Europe (Nielsen 2004, 1-6).
The most important presence of Islam until 20th century was during the so-called Middle Ages, when Muslims ruled Spain, Sicily and parts of Southern Italy. This time of Muslims in Europe came to a complete end in 1492. Mostafa Chendid, leader of the Islamisk Trossamfund in Denmark, describes the impact of this period in a magazine interview:

Muslim thinkers inspired the most respected European thinkers. Thomas from Aquinas used material from Averroes from Morocco. The blind poet John Milton brought “Paradise Lost” from Abu-l-Alla al-Maari and Machiavelli’s Prince, was a copy of a two hundred years old text. … We laid the foundation for scientific knowledge, which Europe today is based on. (Libak)

Similar understanding can be found in Tariq Ramadan’s writings (Ramadan 2007). According to Durkheim “religious beliefs are collective representations” relating individuals to specific group, and giving the group a common meaning. (McGuire 177) This emphasis on the Islamic rule in Spain is that kind of collective representation, giving the Muslim Community in Europe a common identity and making them an important part of Europe’s history. This understanding of religion according to its functions, in this case giving identity, is mentioned as a part of the Social dimension. (Smart 1983, 145)
For most of Western Europe, the establishment of Muslim communities came in two waves. The first one started after the WWII, mostly due to enormous need for working force in Western Europe. (Nielsen 1-6) Abdul Hadi Hoffmann, a German convert to Islam, starts his article about Muslims in Germany with the words: “We asked for workers, and we got human beings.” (Hoffmann 43)
The later wave started due to unrest in the Middle East in the late 1970’s and 1980’s, which led to a stream of Political refugee’s to Western Europe and was followed by a flow of refugees from the war in the Balkans, some of a Muslim background. (Nielsen 78-79)

A different life
The migration started with men who moved to Western Europe, to earn money for the family back home and the goal was to return home. Those men who came to work, did not have strong preferences for housing, and for them concern for public schools, the welfare system, language abilities and health care were not strong. As families began to move to Western Europe as well, these issues surfaced and the questions about regular religious life became more pressing, as it was no longer possible to connect the religious life with the family back home. (Nielsen 105, 107)
In her interview with Mostafa Chendid, Anna Libak, addresses a known presumption about immigrants from Islamic countries when she asks if the Muslims weren’t trying to move away from religious oppression, when they moved to Europe. Chendid rejects that notion claiming that the immigration was an escape from poverty and tyranny, and that situation had nothing to do with religion. (Libak)
When the migration started, “the myth of return” was strong, not only in minds of the migrants but among the citizens of the Western countries. One of the first steps to recognize the myth of return as nothing more than a wishful thinking was when the Danish government insisted in 1976 that children of immigrants went to public schools. (Smith 10, Simonsen 125)

Integration
The problem of integration is especially complicated when it comes to the role of the parents. There is a breach between the upbringing of the parents, their understanding of childhood, and their children. “Any similarities are likely to be coincidental and minimal.” (Nielsen 117) As parents learnt that their own experience was partly or in whole irrelevant to their children’s life, it became much more difficult to the parents to relate to their children and direct them in daily tasks. (Nielsen 117)
Many of the Muslim immigrants had moved from rural areas with a single over-arching worldview. (Nielsen 118) This made the move to a modern society even more difficult. In the new country the immigrants met a mosaic of worldviews and when their children started in schools they were introduced to a strong emphasis on critical thinking. This forced the immigrants to respond. Questions about the functionality of one’s religion and the emphasis on individual faith commitment were suddenly relevant in a way must people had never considered. (Smart 1983, 144; Schiffauer 154)
This focus on critical thinking and re-evaluation of former religious understanding of their families has made some young Muslims in Europe highly critical of the impure Islamic practices in the their land of origin, and called them to claim a new way of religiosity for Muslims in Europe. (Nielsen 120)
Ninian Smart reminds us to look at the social conditions that lead to a new religious movement. (Smart 1983, 151) Above I have mentioned the learned critical thinking. Lack of recognition and power, and being forced to become a sub-culture has also played an important role in formation of the new Islamic movement in Europe. [My teacher rejects this understanding of Islam in Europe as a NRM, and made a comment about that in my paper]

A myth and a reality
Nielsen emphasis that even though many cultural threads come together in Europe, there was a tendency in the nineteenth century to emphasis a strong mythical histories about the alleged common heritage in an attempt to strengthen growing nationalism. Those stories are still contributing to the understanding of a monoculture society in Europe. This re-writing of the cultural heritage did not accomplish the goal it attended to reach. Instead of making the society homogeneous, it contributed to the domination of a one cultural class, which identified itself with the mythical official culture, and took over the governmental institutions, the arts, the media, the education and the language. Other cultures became subcultures of the official understanding. (Nielsen 154)
When Muslims came to Europe in the second half of 20th century, they were placed as one of those sub-cultures. Due to the fact the Muslims took no part in creating this situation; it has been difficult for them to recognize the leadership and claimed superiority of the dominant class. (Nielsen 155) Lars Pedersen says in his article “Islam in the Discourse of Public Authorities and Institutions of Denmark”, that some Muslims he spoke to mentioned especially their lack of rights, calling for the same rights as the Dhimmis have in their own countries of origin. (Pedersen 206) The lack of recognition can be heard in Mostafa Chendid’s words when he says:

I don’t understand why it is offensive, that Muslim women use headscarf. When nuns use them here in Denmark, is it a symbol of purity and holiness. No one asks Mother Theresa to drop her scarf. (Libak)

In their critic of lack of equal rights in Denmark, Muslim leaders have emphasized that they do not have equal opportunities to practice and life out their faith. (Pedersen 206) This seems to imply that they have adopted the secular understanding that religion is in some sense private, and optional. (Smart 1983, 154)

A spokesperson
One aspect of the transition of Islam into the Western European context is the lack of organizational structures among especially Sunni Muslims. The lacks of such structures, which in Christianity are called congregations and more often than not hierarchical in their structure, have made it difficult, for example communicating with various governments. (Nielsen 125)
As the structure and hierarchy does not exist, the leadership roles are not fixed but earned. Especially in a new situation were the ascribed roles of the place of origin are not valid or possible to follow. (Nielsen 129-130)
This situation and lack of structures, has at the same time opened up possibilities for groups that have weak status or are illegal in their country of origin, for example Kurds from Turkey, to take an initiative as a prominent Muslim group in the immigration country. In some cases those Islamic groups have been political and even militant and have therefore given the impression that Islam in general is political and militant. In secular societies were separation of politics and religion is celebrated, this has led to a negative attitude towards the Islam faith. (Nielsen 126)
Here the role of media is important, as groups that are ready to come forward and take a strong stand are preferred by the media over individuals or groups that tend to take a more cautious position towards reality. (Nielsen 164) This tendency can be recognized in Denmark where the “Islamisk Trossamfund” with 800 members has been represented as the main Muslim group in the country, even though “Muslimernes Fællesråd” an umbrella organization of various Muslim groups has over 8000 members. (Libak)
Another side to the lack of authority in the Muslim community is that any attempt to speak on behalf of Muslims can be questioned and therefore a dialogue between Muslims and any other group or officials are made very difficult. (Hoffmann 48)
In my readings a came across few converts to Islam, that have taken on the task of being spokesmen for Muslims in their country of origin. Jane I. Smith mentions in her Introduction to the book Muslims in the West, that new converts sometimes play a vital leadership role in Europe, because of their ability to use the language and their understanding of the dominant culture. (Smith 12) Abdul Hadi Hoffmann, a former politician in Germany is one of those converts. Hoffmann mentions another problem with media, when he says in his article Muslims in Germany: The Struggle for integration.

All Muslims are made to be responsible by the media for everything any single Muslim does at any place in the world in the name of Islam. (Hoffmann 52)

One factor that also has impacted Islam is the recognition some governments in Europe has given to cultural or educational centers as an important part of the immigrants’ life and have given those centers financial support in a way religious centers have not received. This has encouraged Muslims to focus on opening cultural centers as a starting point, which has led to a strengthening ethnical and cultural identity of immigrants, at the cost of their Islam identity, at least officially. (Nielsen 128) Due to this strengthening of ethnic/cultural identity, the majority of Islamic groups are ethnic/cultural based. (Nielsen 130)
Some international Muslim organizations try to avoid the ethnic stamp in their work, and it has given them strong presence in the Muslim world. One of them is The Muslim World League, based in Mecca and an important financer for various Muslim projects around the world without specific Ethnics criteria. (Nielsen 141) Another organization that has great influence in Europe is the Brotherhood. Their main focus is to go back to the basics, claiming “anything … which did not have sanction in the life of the community during the time of the Prophet Muhammad was corrupting of Islamic principles” therefore rejecting all ethnic impurity in Islam. (Nielsen 143)
This lack of structures seems to indicate that Islamic religious groups tend to be loosely connected sects. As Muslims become more settled in Europe, we can expect the groups to become more denominational like, focusing more on social consistency than individual transformation. (Smart 1983, 156-157)

Few more words about the school system
Jørgen Nielsen states in his book Muslims in Western Europe, that the cultural encounters in the multicultural Europe, are mostly bound to the Shawarma or Falafel shops on one side, and the government officials, police, schools and healthcare on the other. (Nielsen 157)
That means that the strongest encounters are connected to the lives of the children of the immigrants, of the so-called second generation.” The children’s encounters are heavily one way; the children are introduced to the dominant culture and called to make a choice. (Nielsen 156)
These uneven options exist side by side as long as the cultural and preferences of the minorities do not interrupt the life of the majority. As the new community tries to “strengthen their internal links” it is met with the majority’s attempt to minimize links to reduce risk of interruption. As a consequence the new community is treated as foreign, therefore becoming foreign. (Nielsen 156-157)
This treatment as a foreign community can be seen in the public school system in Denmark, where the tendency seems to be either to “define Danish-ness as a central value of the cultural norm, leaving Muslim-ness to its marginality” or to see Islam as “a patriarchal form of repression” and therefore a threat. This tendency has as in some cases “forced” Muslim parents to transfer their children to private Islamic schools. (Pederson 209) This transfer has strengthened further segregation and pressed Muslims to take a stand against the society and therefore strengthening the sectarian status of Islam in the West.
In his research, Lars Pedersen noticed that few hospitals in Denmark offered any special service to Muslims, and that the service was not asked for. In his attempt to explain why, he states:

The Muslim patients do not expect – perhaps wrongly – the hospital system to meet their religious needs at all, as they know that Islam is generally understood to be a foreign religion. (Pedersen 211)

The Cartoon Controversy
This understanding of being foreign and not recognized appeared in the so-called Cartoon Controversy in Denmark.
September 30, 2005, the daily newspaper Jyllands Posten in Denmark published cartoons of Prophet Muhammad. The reason for publishing those cartoons was a story about a children book author that had a problem of finding an artist to decorate a book about the prophet, due to the ban on drawing pictures of him. To respond to this ban, Jyllands Posten hired a group of cartoonist to draw pictures of the Prophet and mock this ban. (Anderson)
In the debate that followed, the defenders of Jyllands Posten quoted the cultural tradition in Denmark of using cartoons (d. vittighedstegninger) to describe everything and also the freedom of the press that should not be stopped, especially not by religion. Muslims replied strongly and pointed out that freedom must have some limits and that even though Allah would not be offended, his followers were. (Libak)
When the government in Denmark showed no interest in listening to the Muslims complaining about the Cartoons, as they tend to look at religion as a private affair, and out of their scope of issues, (Smart 1983, 154) the leaders in the Muslim community had but one way of finding an authority to help them fight for justice. They asked for help from their countries of origin like some prominent Muslims had done in the Rushdie affair in UK few years earlier. (Anderson, Nielsen 159)
Mostafa Chendid emphasis that Muslims in Denmark used only diplomatic means in their attempt to get an apology from the owners and directors of Jyllands Posten, and kept away from all violence. He claims the reason they looked for help in the Middle East in the case was to let of steam among younger Muslims in Denmark that wanted to respond not only with paper and words. He also points out that there were not only Muslims in Middle East that took side on the issue and responded to the Cartoons, newspapers all around Europe published the cartoons, taking side against Muslims. (Libak)

Building a Mosque
The building of a mosque in Reykjavik, Iceland has not made it to any front page in Iceland, and has not called for loud protests, but The Muslim Association of Iceland sent in a request for a building site for a mosque 7 years ago to the City Council in Reykjavik. The Association has not yet received a reply. Since then, the Russian Orthodox Church and Asatru (The Asa religion) have requested a lot, and in November 2006, both of them received a positive answer from the council. (“Félag muslima” 2006) The importance of visible (material) signs of recognition of the Islam faith has caused various debates in Europe and the silent treatment used against The Muslim Association of Iceland is just a part of a fear of the Muslims coming more observant. Other issue of visibility (the material dimension) can be seen in various debates about Muslim women wearing headscarves. (Libak)
In her article Islam in France, Jocalyne Cesari points out that contrary to what majority of French people feared, the need for “a purpose built mosque” is not necessarily connected to a more observant Muslims. She claims that the need for “a purpose built mosque” implies that the Muslims now consider themselves permanent citizen of French, in need for established religious structure. Building a mosque is part of being established. (Cesari 37)
On the website for “Forening for moske og islamisk kulturcenter i Århus”, the chairperson Hicham Chouceir, explains the importance of mosque in Århus, Denmark. He emphasis the words “our own” (d. deres eget) and writes about the importance of a place where Muslims can build their identity and gain knowledge about themselves, their history and culture. He stresses that the goal is not to make converts, but to help Muslims gain self-understanding that will lead to more tolerance in the society. (www.moskeen.dk)
In Chouceir’s words we can easily see how the mosque is supposed to help Muslim community to life in the future. The mosque becomes the incarnation of the social and material dimensions. (Smart 1998, 21).

Celebrating diversity, open up a dialogue
In his book, Christian Theology – An introduction, Alister E. McGrath quotes Lesslie Newbigin, a British Theologian.

It has become a commonplace to say that we live in a pluralist society – not merely a society which is in fact plural in the variety of cultures, religions and lifestyles which it embraces, but pluralist in the sense that this plurality is celebrated as a thing to be approved and cherished. (McGrath 448)

In my theological evaluation I will try to explain how we can recognize this plurality of worldviews without necessarily celebrate the plurality as an aim in it self. I will base this evaluation partly on the book God – The World’s Future after the Lutheran Theologian Ted Peters.
Peters begins his theological evaluation of other religions on the assumption that there is

Within our soul the still small voice of the ecumené, the sense that we belong to a single universal humanity sustained by a mysterious but single divine reality. (Peters 349)

Peters then goes on and claims that all humans are guests of equal stature in God’s house. As God is one, humanity is one. (Peters 350) This assumption leads to a strong rejection of celebration of pluralism, in Peters writing as he claims that pluralism leads from the shared ecumene. (Peters 351)
This shared ecumene does not lead Peters to conclude that all truths are as valid. He rejects harshly what he calls Supraconfessional Universalism. He accuses those who stress this understanding of destroying the heart of the Christian commitment, and ruining all ground for interreligious dialogue, leaving “the yes-no conflict behind and entering a Shangri-la of yes, yes, yes.” According to Peters this way of rejecting the possibility of for example uniqueness of Jesus, actually makes a new confession.

[Supraconfessional universalists] believe they have already established an unassailable truth at the level of assumption – that is, they have taken the equivalent of a confessional stance. (Peters 361)

In addressing interreligious dialogue Peters, reminds us that there is nothing to fear. On the contrary,

The opportunity to converse with people of other religious traditions about the things of greatest importance to our respective faiths should be greeted with enthusiasm. (Peters 353)

Peters reminds us that in a religious dialogue, losing could in fact, means winning.

To lose – which consists in giving up some aspect of one’s position because a new and better insight has come to replace it – results in a net gain of knowledge and understanding and perhaps even a strengthening of faith. (Peters 353-354)

What I draw from Peters are three points that can be used to evaluate the social dimension of Muslims in Europe.

1. All humans have something in common.
2. By claiming all are right, we are in fact claiming all are wrong, except me.
3. A fair dialogue, were all come equal to the table strengthens all.

Here I would like to add the fourth point. Without considering about personal gain or lose we are called to serve. (John 15.15) Our service is not only to our own but the whole humanity. (Luke 10)

Conclusion
Muslims in Western Europe have gone through a difficult transition, from living in small rural communities with a single over-arching religious based worldview, into communities where freedom of religion is understood as a freedom from religion. (Roald 107)
In those new circumstances the church has responsibility helping all, not only its own. This applies especially in those cases where the church is protected by a constitution, to enable it to serve all. Therefore the church and its member should advocate harshly for Muslim rights, without consideration whether their doctrines are right or wrong.
Whether it is the right to build a mosque, a permission to live with one’s spouse or the right to dignity and respect for what is holy, it is the duty of a Christian to stand up, protect, and help our fellow humans to build their own identity and life out their faith. It is not a one-way street. As our fellow humans feel welcome and equal, the possibilities of real dialogue begins, making us all better human beings.

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