Counterterrorism and The Integration of Islam in Europe by Jytte Klausen, Brandeis University

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COUNTERTERRORISM AND THE
INTEGRATION OF ISLAM IN EUROPE
By Jytte Klausen

Jytte Klausen is associate professor of comparative politics
at Brandeis University. Her most recent book is The Islamic
Challenge: Politics and Religion in Western Europe (New
York: Oxford University Press, 2005). This article is based
on Dr. Klausen’s presentation to FPRI’s History Institute
for Teachers on “Islam, Islamism, and Democratic Values,”
held May 6-7, 2006; it is available online at www.fpri.org.

COUNTERTERRORISM AND THE
INTEGRATION OF ISLAM IN EUROPE

By Jytte Klausen

Samuel Huntington’s theory of a global confrontation between
Islam and “the West” is particularly attractive in Europe,
where problems with Islamic minorities are regarded as local
skirmishes in an international struggle at the heart of
which lie values, symbols, and identity, and where conflicts
over what to do with Muslims have reopened old debates about
the position of religion in society and created unlikely
political alliances.

French President Jacques Chirac enjoyed one of his few
political victories when he proposed a law prohibiting girls
from going to school wearing the Muslim headscarf. The law
overwhelmingly passed the National Assembly in 2004; oddly,
Jean-Marie Le Pen’s National Front, which advocates tough
measures against immigrants, voted against it due to worries
that secularists would put restrictions on Christians next.

Other politicians blame religion in general for stirring up
trouble, and regard Islam as an unwelcome setback in the
fight against clerical authority. Former German chancellor
Helmut Schmidt wrote in his 2004 autobiography that he
regrets having allowed Muslim labor migrants into the
country, since evidently Christians and Muslims cannot
tolerate each other. Schmidt blamed the Christian churches
for promoting resentment against Muslims, but also suggested
that accommodation between Islam and Christianity is
possible only in authoritarian states such as Singapore.

The reaction against Islam has even made Europeans reassess
the importance of Christianity. When Baden-Wrttemberg
passed a law in 2004 prohibiting teachers from wearing the
headscarf in the classroom, notwithstanding that the
crucifix is by law displayed in public classrooms, it argued
that Christian symbols are universal and “democratic,”
whereas Muslim women wearing the headscarf are
“proselytizing.” The state’s then culture minister, Annette
Schavan, warned against value neutrality. “We cannot allow a
spiritual vacuum to emerge that would leave our society
without guidance,” she said. “We must stand by our cultural
and religious traditions as they are expressed in our
Constitution.”

Religious pluralism, an unintended consequence of labor
immigration, has raised difficult questions about the
requirements of religious toleration. The Madrid train
bombings on March 11, 2004 and the July 7, 2005 bombings of
the London Underground, which reinforced the perception that
Islam is a threat to the European social and political
system, also induced governments and politicians to
reconsider how Islam might become a “European” religion.

National security and religious toleration are now widely
regarded as interrelated issues, and proposals for funding
Islam have the support of security officials. Ian Blair, the
Chief of the UK’s Metropolitan Police, endorses a
partnership between Muslim associations and the government
in order to “separate the extremists from the faith.” But
are European Muslims willing to become partners in
counterterrorism? And can security concerns overcome
political resistance to extending recognition and
representation to Muslims?

In researching The Islamic Challenge, I interviewed hundreds
of European Muslim civic and political leaders in the UK,
France, Germany, the Netherlands, Sweden, and Denmark,
members of what I describe as the new Muslim political
elite, to learn how important faith is to them and what if
any effect it has on their policy positions.

Islam is today the largest minority religious denomination
in Europe. There are more Muslims than Catholics in the
Protestant north, and more Muslims than Protestants in the
predominantly Roman Catholic countries. There are about 15
million Muslims in Western Europe, but only about 25 have
been elected to European parliaments.

In only a few countries does the census ask people their
religion. In one of them, the UK, it is estimated that about
1 million (out of 1.6 million) Muslims were eligible to vote
in the May 2005 election. In other countries, estimates are
derived from immigration statistics and estimated fertility
rates. In France, there are perhaps 5-6 million–some
estimate only 2.6 million-Muslims, few of whom vote. The
Netherlands has the highest proportion of Muslims –about 6
percent of Dutch residents, about half of whom can vote. In
Germany, 0.5 million of the estimated 3 million Muslims can
vote. In Italy, Muslims, like other immigrants, are
overwhelmingly illegal, and so only an estimated 50,000 of
Italy’s 2 million Muslims can vote.

The diversity of ethnicity and national origin varies
greatly from country to country and is increasing with new
waves of political refugees from new hotspots of civil war
and with the growing presence of native-born Muslims, who
prefer to speak the language they have grown up with. The
early waves of immigrants to Europe held on to the “myth of
return” and organized in transnational networks with the
primary aim of retaining contact to the home country.

In the 1990s the emigre associations of the past gave way to
new national associations, often modeled on organizations
created for other faiths. The Muslim Council of Britain
(formed in 1997) and the council of Muslims in Germany
(formed in 1995) both imitate the Jewish Council in
organization and objectives. The French council for the
Islamic faith, Conseil fran‡ais du culte Musulman, was set
up by the government in 2002 based upon the model of the
Consistoire for Jews created in 1808. With the notable
exception of terrorists and radical clerics, European
Muslims’ political engagement and expectations have since
the 1990s increasingly become framed in national European
idioms.

WHO ARE THE MUSLIM LEADERS?
Many of the people I interviewed referred to themselves as
“typically second-generation,” using the term to describe a
political outlook focused on integration and acceptance of
European norms. Actually, most of the current generation of
leaders are themselves immigrants. Most had arrived as young
adults, either as a political refugee or a student. Some had
been politically active in the universities and the security
services had caught up with them. Most had completed
secondary education prior to emigrating and were from
middle-class families with histories of learning and
political engagement. The share of native-born leaders was
highest in Great Britain and the Netherlands, reflecting the
earlier onset of mass migration to those countries.

POLITICAL AGENDAS
My findings support in part the argument made by Fouad Ajami
and Niall Ferguson: that European Muslims have brought their
political agendas with them from the Islamic countries, that
Europe’s Muslim associations are Trojan horses for the
banned Islamic organizations in the home countries, and that
Muslim political activism in Europe is driving a wedge
between the U.S. and Europe on important foreign policy
issues. But it also needs to be said that restrictive-access
naturalization is a barrier to immigrant participation in
mainstream political organizations and forces Muslims to
organize in “Muslims-only” organizations.

Some of the most notorious clerics active in Europe–Abu
Bakri Mohammad, the founder of al Muhajiroun, and Abu Hamza
al-Masri of Finsbury Park Mosque fame–were granted
political-refugee status in Europe in the mid-1980s, when
European policies were lenient. The Danish imam Abu Laban,
who was responsible for having a folder of Danish political
cartoons delivered to Cairo and Damascus, is also a
political refugee, barred from travel to Egypt. These
extremists found political freedom in Europe to continue
their projects, but so too did Ayaan Hirsi Ali, the Dutch-
Somali politician who has gained fame for her criticism of
Islam. Far more of the political refugees of the 1980s were
liberals than Islamists. Many described themselves as
fighting a similar battle now to the one they had fought
before, whether the objective was the Islamic state, human
rights, anti-fundamentalism, or freedom from religious
compulsion of any sort.

BEING MUSLIM
In Europe, “Muslim” connotes ethnicity and origin as well as
faith. Muslims are Europe’s new religious and ethnic
minority. Individuals balance this in different ways. For
some, faith is the key source of identity, but for many more
faith takes a backseat to origin and the increasing
hostility with which the surroundings recognize Muslims as
“other people.”

As the media and xenophobic politicians propagate
stereotypes of Muslims, Muslims react to the perceived bias
and appropriate the label as a source of counter-
mobilization. Islamophobia is how Muslims describe the
“culture war.” Non-believers self-identify as Muslims and
say they are victimized by discrimination. Believers feel
singled out and misrepresented. Both groups respond by
asserting their identity. Of course, the radicals weave a
conspiratorial tale about bias and injustice into a
political utopia about Islamic domination.

Observers of European politics often assume that the
“integrated” Muslims, those who participate in political
life, have left their faith behind. The German term Kultur-
Muslim, “culturally-Muslim,” is often used to describe
individuals who do not display their faith. But one cannot
presume that religiosity is incompatible with civic
competency or that the integrated Muslims are apostates.
Most of the leaders in my study said that Islam was
important to them personally, but religiosity did not
predict political affiliations.

Most of the very religious belonged to the political center
or the left. The largest subgroup in my study consisted of
personally religious self-described centrists. Non-
believers, in contrast, belonged mostly to the far left or
to the secular conservative parties. Many religious Muslims
indicated that ideally they would support the Christian
Democratic parties. In the Netherlands, Muslims have joined
that party in large numbers, and two Muslims in parliament
were elected from the CDA.

The German Christian Democratic party has chosen instead to
reemphasize Christianity as a prerequisite for being German.
Many German Muslims regretfully conclude that they cannot
support the party and turn instead to the Greens. Europe’s
Christian Democratic parties have long used the term
“secularly Christian” to describe their distinctive
objectives, and only the Dutch CDA has responded to the
presence of non-Christian conservative voters by developing
an Abrahamic approach, emphasizing the presumed commonality
among Christianity, Islam, and Judaism, to the
representation of the interests of believers.

Abortion, gay rights, and bioethics are some of the issues
where religious Muslims find common ground with other
religious associations and lobbies. The MCB has steadfastly
maintained that homosexuality is a sin and has joined the
Anglican and the Roman Catholic Church in opposing gay
adoption rights. When MCB General Secretary Sir Iqbal
Sacranie was criticized for denouncing same-sex
relationships, the organization pointed to the split in the
Anglican Church over gays and declared that Muslims would
not be “bullied” into speaking against scripture.

Many religious Muslims nonetheless regard “value
conservatism” as less salient than other issues, which are
generally important for the left–in particular, anti-
discrimination enforcement and social protection. Centrist
Muslims often migrate to the Green parties, because of those
parties’ human rights emphasis. The preponderance of
centrists among the more religious leaders may also reflect
a choice on the part of the Muslim associations to avoid
becoming taken for granted by the social democratic or
Labour parties that historically have been able to count on
immigrant voters.

Party choice also depends on what the political parties
offer. French Muslims complained bitterly about the
Socialist party’s intolerance of religious expression,
remarking that you had to be committed to “the holy
principle of la‹cit‚” (a form of secularism that prohibits
public recognition of faith) to succeed in the party.

Among the minority of non-believers were some I describe as
radical secularists. They would say, “We do not need imams
here,” or “The problem with Islam is that it cannot change.”
They readily identified with European anti-clericalism.

Among the believers, views varied with respect to the need
for theological reform. Some argued that “Islam is what it
is,” while others embraced Tariq Ramadan’s idea that
European Muslims have a historic opportunity to revitalize
the faith. A French Islamist‚ praised liberty for the same
reasons religious groups have supported the First Amendment
in the U.S. He opposed the French government’s plans for a
“French Islam,” because “We have for the first time the
liberty to develop Islam freely.”

On integration, there was consensus that ties to the Islamic
countries must be cut and ways found to educate imams at
European universities and normalize the legal situation of
mosque communities. There was disagreement, however, about
how far to push equity with the Christian churches. Some
perceived government pressure to “Christianize” Islam; some
argued that governments should provide “help to self-help”
but otherwise leave it to Muslims to build the institutions
of their faith. Others argued for legal and institutional
parity. “What goes for the pastor goes for the imam,” said a
Danish city councilor.

Islam’s development over the past 200 years has been
characterized by the collapse of religious authority. In
Europe, migration has allowed Islam to develop in the
absence of clerical control. One consequence is a return to
the “book.” Many young people are learning Arabic and
reading the Quran to “make up their own mind” about what it
says. Of course, the text is inaccessible absent theory or
interpretation, and while some of Europe’s Muslims celebrate
the freedom to interpret the Quran anew, others battle to
protect orthodoxy against assimilation.

THE IMAMS
There are perhaps 10,000 imams in Western Europe: at least
one for each of the 250 mosques in Sweden, 150 in Denmark,
400 in the Netherlands, probably 1,600 each in Britain and
France, and 2,600 in Germany. Most of these countries do not
know the exact number of mosques, who preaches in them, or
where the imams come from. Many are “backyard mosques,” a
concern for both security agencies and Muslim leaders.

A French security agency conducted a census that identified
over a thousand imams, about half working full-time. Less
than half were paid regularly; the rest were paid in kind or
unpaid. Of those who were paid, Turkey supported 60, Algeria
80, and Morocco two. Saudi Arabia paid the salaries of a
dozen graduates of Saudi Islamic universities. Less than 20
percent were French nationals, and most of them are
naturalized. Half were of Moroccan or Algerian origin.

Imams are mostly recruited by local mosque councils through
kinship networks in the home country. Muslims often complain
that these imams are out of touch with the younger,
European-born generations of Muslims and do not speak the
language. Indeed, only one-third of the imams in the French
study spoke French with ease, another third with some
difficulty, and the rest not at all.

Similarly, most British imams are trained abroad and
recruited by local mosque councils. So long as a mosque
council guarantees that it will provide an income for the
imam, work permits have not generally been a problem. But
Muslim community elders tend to recruit from the villages
that they came from, which often means imams who were
educated in madrassas. One leader of a mosque association
representing one-third of Britain’s mosques reported that 80
percent of his association’s imams were ill-prepared to cope
with the demands made upon them by the members of the mosque
communities and by local governments and other civic groups.

In northern Europe, Turkey is the single largest source of
imams. When Turkish “guest workers” began to appear in large
numbers in Scandinavia, Germany and the Netherlands, those
countries’ governments entered into contracts with Turkey to
supply pastoral care. The imams are paid by the Turkish
government and granted temporary visas by the national
governments. The Turkish imams do not preach “political
nonsense,” my interviewees told me, but are nonetheless no
solution for Muslims who want Islam to have a self-
sustaining European basis.

Host states’ policy at the time was to maintain ties between
the migrants and the home countries, to sustain the fiction
that the migrants were a temporary solution to overheated
labor markets. Both host governments and “sender”
governments sought to prevent integration; wanting the
migrants to return home at the end of their working years.

Today, everyone wants integration. A few European Muslims
believed the Islamic countries have the religious scholars
and “know best” how to train imams, but a large majority
said that it was an immediate priority to end dependency
upon the Islamic countries.

Interviewees observed that throughout Europe, theological
faculties educate Christian clergy, and governments make
funds available for clergy salaries and houses of worship,
but Muslims have access to none of these resources. Many
favored mainstreaming Islam within existing national state-
church frameworks, but a plurality preferred greater self-
governance for mosque communities. Still, nearly everyone
considered public funding to be essential for integration.

“Where will the money come from?” The question was raised in
every country. The Christian churches and many voters are
resistant to change. “It is difficult today to argue that
Muslims have special needs,” one Muslim member of the Dutch
parliament explained to me. “All Dutch voters can think
about is how they are disadvantaged by the foreigners.”
Another parliamentarian said, “it does no good for Muslims
to demand more rights, when most people already think we are
getting too much.”

COUNTERTERRORISM POLICIES
Counterterrorism policies may be the way to break the logjam
over public support for the development of mosque
communities. Following the July 2006 attacks, the British
government launched a new community-based approach to
counterterrorism. Described as a “partnership against
extremism,” the initiative signaled a shift from
counterintelligence to prevention. The government consulted
with Muslim community representatives and in October 2005
published its recommendations in a report entitled
Preventing Extremism Together, which includes proposals
ranging from improving community-police relations to
establishing imam education and mosque accreditation
procedures.

While there have been complaints about the lack of follow-
up, the process has nonetheless produced reform. Aiming to
forestall government-sponsored monitoring, four Muslim
associations that do not normally cooperate–the MCB, the
Muslim Association of Britain, the British Muslim Forum, and
the al-Khoei Foundation–have created the Mosques and Imams
National Advisory Board, to promote “best practices in the
country’s 1600 mosques.”

Are these measures effective counterterrorism measures or
simply good public policy? The days when extremists were
recruited in mosques and plots hatched with the assistance
of clerics such as Abu Hamza al-Masri may be over. The
social activities of the July bombers show that today
terrorists are more likely to bond while engaging in
ultimate sports like paint-balling or watching DVDs of
atrocities against Muslims and footage of suicide bombers in
private homes. It may be a Pyrrhic victory for those who
wish for the normalization of Islam in Europe if mosques
have ceased to be a meeting place for terrorists. Will
governments go back to disregarding the need to facilitate
the integration of Islam?

WHY NOW?
There are far fewer Muslims in America than in Europe, and
they are generally better educated, more likely to come from
the Middle East, and wealthier. American Muslims may not
have citizenship, but their children will, and when it comes
to building mosques and practicing Islam, U.S. Muslims
encounter little government resistance. In contrast,
European Muslims are poor. Between one-quarter and one-half
of them are disenfranchised permanent residents, with no
prospects of naturalization for themselves or their children
due to restrictive citizenship laws. Large numbers live in
highly segregated neighborhoods, with no access to work or
transportation, and send their children to sub-par “minority
majority” schools. Pockets of Europe today look very much
like the U.S. prior to civil rights.

Why are there problems with Muslims in Europe now, when
earlier generations of them lived there quietly for decades?
The answer is not Sept. 11 and the rise of Islamism, as many
assume, but that European Muslims have now decided to
integrate, and to do so they seek reforms that will enable
them to practice their faith and be European. European
Muslims in the mid 1980s arrived at the moment of collective
realization that the “myth of return” was exactly that, when
European Muslims started to create institutions for
practicing their faith and attaining political
representation. Reactions started at local politics, with
protests against mosque construction and the uproar over the
headscarf.

From an American viewpoint, European Muslims’ integration
problems are seen as a consequence of Europe’s general
hostility to religion and, worse, a source of increased
Muslim alienation and increasing security risks for the
West. The 9/11 terrorists’ European domicile and the Madrid
and London bombings are, perhaps too quickly, seen as
supporting evidence for the dangers that hostility to Islam
poses for us all. The problem, in the American view, is not
the faith but the perversion thereof. We are fighting
“Islamo-fascism,” as George Bush described the enemy, not
Islam.

Neither story gets it right. There are serious problems with
the integration of Muslims in Europe, but the alienation
that it causes is more likely to express itself in riots
such as those that racked the Paris suburbs in Fall 2005.
Socioeconomic deprivation and isolation fueled the
grievances, and Muslims and non-Muslims were equally likely
to join the rioters. Abou Jahjah, known as the “Muslim
Malcolm X,” founded the Arab European League to fight the
members of the far-right Vlaams Blok in Antwerp, but his
ambition is to built a separatist nationalist movement.

The recent terrorism is based upon a political theory of an
Islamic utopia that justifies the indiscriminate killing of
Muslims and Christians, Americans and non-Americans, as a
means to power. Many Muslims believe that killing in the
name of the Prophet is an abomination, but it is difficult
to draw the line between theology that leads to political
extremism and political extremism that assumes the guise of
doctrine. As for the view that European Muslims are a
wellspring of extremism, we have little reason to believe
that European Muslims are more susceptible to extremist
theology than Muslims in North America or elsewhere.

Why worry about Europeans’ problems with Muslims? Because
the new political ideology of Islamic terrorism has showed a
remarkable ability to change and adapt to our responses. The
polarization and socioeconomic disadvantage, combined with
the generalized escalation of violence against Jews,
Muslims, and Christians, provides a fertile ground for
recruitment to the extremist cause, even among the anomic
progeny of the middle-class and the ranks of university-
educated dropouts.

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Counterterrorism and The Integration of Islam in Europe by Jytte Klausen, Brandeis University

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