MB Civic

By H.D.S. Greenway  |  May 30, 2006  |  The Boston Globe

ZACARIAS MOUSSAOUI is an American nightmare. The concept of a Muslim fanatic taking lessons on how to fly an airliner is the quintessential horror of our new age. He is also Europe’s nightmare because, as with other 9/11 hijackers, he became radicalized not in the turbulent autocracies of the Middle East or North Africa, but in the open, free, and peaceful democracies of Western Europe.

Moussaoui’s is a typical story. Brought to France from Morocco as a young boy, he allegedly became radicalized in the heady extremism of a London mosque. In the wake of 9/11 and the bombings in London and Madrid, perhaps no social issue frightens Europeans more than the thought that their Muslims may not become good “Europeans” over time, and may become so alienated that they will continue to spin off violent terrorists.

Europeans ask each other: What have we done, and what should we do to better absorb our Muslims into our liberal democracies? For Muslims are Europe’s fastest-growing minority, and Islam is Europe’s third-largest religious affiliation after Catholics and Protestants.

The French model has always been assimilation, one of the definitions of which is “to cause to resemble.” Never mind multiculturalism, let’s all be French, is the ideal. While the British stressed their railways, their civil service, their courts with wigged judges in their far-flung empire, France stressed the civilizing aspects of its culture and language. So do come, France says, but you have to become French.

The doctrine of “Laïcité,” the 1905 separation of church and state, and the ideals of the French Revolution still dominate the cultural attitude toward immigration, even if they are not always carried out in practice. The Muslim ghettos of the unemployed that surround French cities — and the fact that there is not one member from a Muslim immigrant background in the National Assembly — suggests the French ideal has fallen short.

The British model is “integration — combining parts into a whole.” The British allow more official space than the French for Muslims to maintain their own cultures as part of the national whole. British Muslims tell me that Britain had a head start on multiculturalism because of having to absorb the Welsh, Scots, and Irish into the English majority to form a united kingdom.

Yet when British-born Muslims from the jobless mill towns of the north blew themselves up on London subways, the British began to seriously wonder where they went wrong.

The Dutch thought that just leaving Muslims alone in their own space, which is how Protestants and Catholics learned to live together after Europe’s religious wars, would be sufficient. But the violent murder of filmmaker Theo van Gogh by a Dutch-Moroccan religious fanatic has put the Dutch model into question.

The German model, until 2000, was accommodation, which can be defined as “providing a room for the night.” Germany said to its Muslims: Come and work, but don’t even think about becoming German. Citizenship is reserved for those with German blood. That’s changed now, and Germany is making it easier for immigrants to become citizens, but it is still a struggle.

Muslims started coming to Europe in great numbers to fill labor shortages after World War II. Europe thought they would all go home when their labor was no longer needed, but recent European history shows that “guest workers” don’t go home. They invite their families to join them. Today, Muslims pour into Europe legally and illegally.

American Muslims have not assumed the critical mass that their co-religionists in Europe have. When Americans think about immigration problems they think of Hispanics. Also, Muslims in America were not recruited wholesale from the poorest regions of Pakistan, Anatolia, and North Africa. Muslims who immigrated here generally were better educated than those who first came to Europe. And at least a third of American Muslims are not recent immigrants at all but African-American.

A major difference is that America is used to being a nation of immigrants, while Europe, for most of the 19th and early 20th century, was a net exporter of people, mostly to the New World. Europeans cannot quite accept that they are now a target for immigration the way the United States has long been.

The major problem that both Europe and America face, as far as their Muslim populations are concerned, is not to let vigilance against terrorism spill over into undermining civil rights and discriminating against the 99.9 percent of Muslims who just want to get along.