Islam shaping a new Europe
Staking out their place in Europe

By Evan Osnos
Tribune foreign correspondent
Published December 19, 2004

http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/nationworld/chi-0412190554dec19,1,2183319.sto\
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ST.-DENIS, France -- Butchered piglets hang in tidy
rows at the open-air market, and shoppers haggle over
cheese and oysters in a scene hardly altered since the
last Bourbon king was buried at the Gothic church on
the corner.

But slip out of the market on a Friday, and a
quarter-mile up the road you will find a very
different France: Hundreds of Muslims squeezed hip to
hip into an unheated canvas tent, bowing in sacred
silence toward Mecca, the birthplace of Islam, which
few of them have ever seen.

The worshipers at this makeshift mosque on the edge of
Paris are men and women, dressed in the latest
fashions and traditional robes, Arab, European and
African. They are moderate, conservative and
fundamentalist. They are first-, second- and
third-generation immigrants. They are content and they
are enraged. They are the future that Europe is
straining to handle.

What is happening in Europe may provide a partial
preview of what lies ahead for the United States and
its fast-growing Muslim population.

For the first time in history, Muslims are building
large and growing minorities across the secular
Western world--nowhere more visibly than in Western
Europe, where their numbers have more than doubled in
the past two decades. The impact is unfolding from
Amsterdam to Paris to Madrid, as Muslims struggle --
with words, votes and sometimes violence--to stake out
their place in adopted societies.

Disproportionately young, poor and unemployed, they
seek greater recognition and an Islam that fits their
lives. Just as Egypt, Pakistan and Iran are witnessing
the debate over the shape of Islam today, Europe is
emerging as the battleground of tomorrow.

"The French are scared," said Tair Abdelkader, 38, a
regular at the tented mosque whose light blue eyes and
ebony beard are the legacy of a French mother and
Algerian father. "In 10 years, the Muslim community
will be stronger and stronger, and French political
culture must accept that."

By midcentury, at least one in five Europeans will be
Muslim. That change is unlike other waves of
immigration because it poses a more essential
challenge: defining a modern Judeo-Christian-Islamic
civilization. The West must decide how its laws and
values will shape and be shaped by Islam.

For Europe, as well as the United States, the question
is not which civilization, Western or Islamic, will
prevail, but which of Islam's many strands will
dominate. Will it be compatible with Western values or
will it reject them?

Center stage in that debate is France, home to the
largest Islamic community on the continent, an
estimated 5 million Muslims. Here the process of
defining Euro-Islam is unfolding around questions as
concrete as the right to wear head scarves and as
abstract as the meaning of citizenship, secularism and
extremism. In some cases, conservative Muslims have
refused to visit co-ed swimming pools, study Darwinism
or allow women to be examined by male doctors.

One young St.-Denis fundamentalist recently set off
for Iraq and was captured fighting American troops in
Fallujah. Stunned by stories like that, France is
hoping to use the legal system to influence the
direction of Islam within its borders.

The government has deported 84 people in the past six
months on suspicion of advocating violence and drawn
wide attention for banning head scarves and other
religious symbols in public school. But even
supporters of that tough approach concede that the
measures can do little more than patch the widening
cracks in Europe's image of itself.

"I'm not sure we'll go much further than gaining a few
months or years" in the effort to limit Islam's
imprint on France, said Herve Mariton, a member of the
French Parliament who lobbied for the head scarf law.
"That may be useful. But there is no way this is the
ultimate answer to the challenge."

A new France

St.-Denis' narrow streets sweep outward from a soaring
12th Century basilica that is the final resting place
for generations of French monarchs. But today their
snowy stone statues stare down onto a city and nation
in transformation.

The Muslim migration to Europe began in earnest after
World War II, when North African workers arrived by
the thousands to help rebuild the continent. A
half-century later, no fewer than a third of
St.-Denis' 90,000 residents are of Arab origin.

Arabic script on butcher shops and storefronts touts
halal meat, handled to Islamic standards. Couscous
restaurants are as plentiful as brasseries. Muslim
settlement houses usher in new immigrants, and Muslim
funeral homes bid farewell to old ones.

Across the country, French Muslims still live more or
less where the first arrivals settled a half-century
ago, in suburban apartment blocks erected in the 1950s
for foreign workers. These suburbs, the banlieues,
have become the byword for France's virtually
segregated Muslim communities.

The complexes used to be integrated, with Polish,
Italian and French workers living among North African
arrivals, but over time the Europeans moved on--and
the Arabs did not. It is a scene repeated across the
suburbs of Paris.

"Gradually the French people left or died, and they
were replaced by more people from North Africa," said
Brigitte Fouvez, 55, deputy mayor in the neighboring
town of Bondy. "The French people who stayed would
say, `You can smell the cooking in the hallways,' and
eventually they left too."

Like other ethnic Europeans, Fouvez and her husband
moved from Paris in 1978 in search of more room for
their two children. She watched Bondy evolve.

"Before, we had a charcuterie and a butcher," she
said. "Now there are just three halal butchers, no
fish shop anymore, no traditional French stores."

But those changes weren't nearly as startling as the
sight of conservative Muslim women draped head to toe
in dark chador robes--to Fouvez's eyes, "as black as
crows."

Birth of an identity

Thirteen hundred years after the Frankish King Charles
Martel repelled Muslim armies from the central city of
Tours, Islam is now the second religion of France;
there are about 10 times as many Muslims as Jews.

From the Paris suburbs 25 years ago, Shiite Ayatollah
Ruhollah Khomeini planned a revolution that ultimately
overthrew the Shah of Iran and, in turn, helped
inspire a global Islamic revival. The fallout is
easily visible today as the children and grandchildren
of Muslim immigrants in Europe increasingly embrace
religion. In France and England, polls show greater
commitment to daily prayers, mosque attendance and
fasting during Ramadan than there was a decade ago.

Only one in five Muslims in France say they actively
practice the faith, but many who once defined
themselves in terms of Tunisian, Iraqi or Turkish
descent now consider their primary identity to be
Muslim.

"Nobody was talking about Muslims in France at the end
of the 1990s. People were talking about Arabs or
beurs," said French political scientist Justin Vaisse,
using the term applied to French of North African
immigrant descent.

Young French Muslims gravitate toward charismatic
spokesmen of a new European Islam, such as
controversial Swiss-born philosopher Tariq Ramadan,
whose French headquarters here in St.-Denis urges a
"silent revolution." In his writings, he advocates
using the political process, instead of violence, to
win Muslim rights and recognition across Europe.

Ramadan's supporters call him a major voice of
moderate Islam, but some critics say he is tied to
extremists, a charge he denies. He was scheduled to
begin teaching this year at the University of Notre
Dame until U.S. immigration authorities rescinded his
work visa, citing unspecified national security
concerns.

Unlike earlier immigrants, who were bent on returning
home flush with cash, more-recent arrivals have been
deterred by the turmoil in their homelands and stayed,
building families that are larger than those of their
graying ethnic European neighbors. The effect is
amplified by the decline of European Christianity. The
number of people who call themselves Catholic, the
continent's largest denomination, has declined by more
than a third in the past 25 years.

The results are stark. Within six years, for instance,
the three largest cities in the Netherlands will be
majority Muslim. One-third of all German Muslims are
younger than 18, nearly twice the proportion of the
general population.

With that growth, and the deepening strains between
the U.S. and the Islamic world, radical Muslim clerics
have found no shortage of adherents. A 2002 poll of
British Muslims found that 44 percent believe attacks
by Al Qaeda are justified as long as "Muslims are
being killed by America and its allies using American
weapons." Germany estimates that there are 31,000
Islamists in the country, based on membership lists of
conservative federations.

Year by year, European Islam pulls further away from
the cultural traditions of Morocco or Algeria,
refashioned all the while by the pressures of life in
Europe. For some, the solution is a more liberalized
Islam that incorporates Western concepts of individual
rights and tolerance. But for others, the answer lies
in a stricter interpretation of the core elements of
the faith.

"It is more fundamentalist in its essence because what
you subsist on is personal practice--reading of the
Koran, Shariah," Vaisse said. "It can take very
humanist forms, but in some cases, it can also lead to
political radicalization and terrorism."

The potentially serious effects of that radicalization
became clear on March 11, when coordinated bombings of
four commuter trains in Madrid killed 191 people and
wounded more than 1,800. Moroccan and Tunisian
suspects later killed themselves in a standoff with
police.

More recently, the Netherlands is in turmoil after the
brutal killing of Theo van Gogh, who made a
controversial film about violence against women in
Islamic societies. Police arrested a 26-year-old man
with Dutch-Moroccan citizenship and charged him with
stabbing and shooting van Gogh. The suspect allegedly
pinned a note to the body with a knife.

Within days, an Islamic school was set ablaze, and
retribution followed. Right-wing politicians in
Belgium and Germany demanded new curbs on immigration.
In time, however, a more ominous fact emerged from the
case: It was not the work of newly arrived immigrants
with extremist views, but the product of homegrown
radicalism. Police say suspect Mohammed Bouyeri wrote
the death note in Dutch, not Arabic.

"This [cultural] schizophrenia is the most dangerous
thing we face in Europe today," said Gilles Kepel,
head of Middle East studies at the Institute of
Political Studies in Paris and author of several books
on Islam in Europe. "It means Madrid. It means Mohamed
Atta," he said, referring to one of the Sept. 11
hijackers who lived for some time in Germany.

Two men, two visions

Where moderate Muslims ultimately place their loyalty
may be the defining--and unpredictable--ingredient in
the struggle to fashion an Islam of the West. To
understand the choices, visit the men who represent
the two competing visions of Islam in France.

Dalil Boubakeur, rector of the Grand Mosque of Paris
in the heart of the city, is a long-standing voice of
moderate Islam in France. On the other side is Lhaj
Thami Breze, president of the Union of Islamic
Organizations of France, the increasingly powerful
Islamist federation.

Trained as a dentist, Boubakeur, 64, runs the
1920s-era mosque in the heart Paris. He is prone to
quoting Immanuel Kant and is a favorite of French
officials and foreign ambassadors. He wears a red
rosebud on his lapel signifying membership in the
Legion of Honor. And he knows he is losing ground.

"Since Sept. 11, the world of Islam is changing faster
in the West than other places in the world," he said
at his antiques-lined office, his V-neck sweater,
rimless glasses and wispy gray hair giving him the air
of an English schoolmaster. "Western countries had had
a gentleman's agreement with fundamentalists: You can
stay here as long as you keep quiet. But the gentlemen
are not being as quiet as they used to be."

There is no question that Boubakeur's influence is
weakening. Last year he was handpicked to be president
of the official French Council of the Muslim Faith, a
new body established by the government in 2003 to give
Muslims a formal voice in dealings with the state.
Just as other bodies represent Catholics and Jews, the
council speaks for Muslims on issues such as the
construction of mosques and the training of clerics.

But things didn't go as planned. In the first
election, his moderate camp was trounced by
conservative candidates who won 70 percent of the 41
seats. The next vote is scheduled for April, and
moderates are expected to lose even more to the men he
believes are "radicalizing Islam" in France.

"The facts are there: Religions that close in on
themselves become sects, and that is what is happening
to Islam here," Boubakeur said. "And I am very sorry
about that."

Across town, beside the highway in the tough Paris
suburb of La Courneuve, Boubakeur's opponents are
confident. Breze greets visitors at his
glass-and-steel headquarters with a glossy package of
materials and a calm message of "coordination, not
confrontation."

"We are not extremists," he says, sipping espresso at
a conference table. "We practice our beliefs and have
respect for the state. We want one thing from Europe
and France: that they are faithful to their values."

Indeed, Breze and the union have thrived under Western
democracy. Just two decades after its creation, by two
foreign students, the union dominates French Islam. In
the last elections for the Council of the Muslim
Faith, Breze won control of a crucial post
representing central France.

Breze's federation draws 30,000 people to its annual
conference, and the crowd is increasingly vocal in
challenging the political powers that be. At last
year's convention, the interior minister was booed in
the middle of his speech when he suggested that women
must remove their head scarves for ID photos.

So what does Breze really want for Muslims in France?
He and his group carefully calibrate their demands.
They demonstrate against the ban on head scarves, for
instance, but urge young women to respect the law as
long as it is in effect. His federation is part of a
broader umbrella group for all of Europe that is known
for issuing decisions that help conservative Muslims
function in a modern Western society by permitting,
for instance, interest-bearing loans that would
otherwise be banned under Islam and allowing the
consumption of pork-based gelatin.

Push Breze on the most sensitive issues--does he seek
an Islamic state in France, or the application of
strict Islamic law and punishment--and he says no:
"Perhaps they are valid in Saudi Arabia or Palestine,
but they are not valid here."

To some critics, Breze is a "double talker" who says
one thing in French and another in Arabic. To others,
he is simply a shrewd strategist who understands the
coming power of the fast-growing Muslim communities
here.

For his part, Breze says his mission is to convey a
simple message: "France must respect this population."

A parallel world

By all appearances, she is as French as they come. A
law student at the Sorbonne, she has dark brown hair
that falls in stylish curls to her shoulders. Dining
with friends in downtown Paris, 23-year-old Faten
Mansour wears Diesel-brand jeans and red stiletto
heels. But she will be the first to point out that she
is not just French.

"I am a woman, I am an Arab and I come from the
suburbs. I have three handicaps," she says. "France is
not racist, but it is xenophobic. I can study the law
all night, but I don't know if I will find a job--not
because I'm not competent, but because I'm an Arab."

That feeling of exclusion has emerged as the central
issue in the struggle to integrate Islam in Europe.
Whether it is Turks in Germany, Indonesians in the
Netherlands or Pakistanis in Britain, polls show
Muslims feel they live in a parallel world within
Europe.

There are no Muslims in the French Parliament, no
Muslim CEOs of top French companies, and the national
news media is overwhelmingly white. Midlevel Muslim
politicians routinely recite instances of their
careers being diverted by higher-ups.

In an unusually blunt official assessment, the French
government's auditing agency in a report released Nov.
23 faulted the republic for failing to combat
segregation in housing, workplaces and schools. The
same week, France's largest insurer, AXA, presented a
report concluding that young immigrants in France
experience a rate of unemployment that is 2 to 5 times
as high as that of young people who are ethnic
European.

Moreover, that frustration is getting worse over time.
"The first generation came to Europe to work, the
second generation was caught in between two cultures.
But the third generation is completely French, and
they want all the rights of citizenship," said Khalid
Bouchama, the St.-Denis representative for Breze's
group.

For ethnic Europeans, the Muslim migration amounts to
a world upended: The continent that for centuries
exported its people, culture and religion to the Third
World is now being shaped by its former colonies. But
for the French establishment, the challenge is to
bring Muslims into European society without changing
the foundations of secular democracy.

No decision has sparked more controversy than the
French government's move to ban conspicuous religious
symbols from public schools, including Muslim head
scarves, Jewish yarmulkes and large crosses. To its
opponents, the law was a blunt refusal to accept
Muslim immigration. But to its supporters, it was a
decisive move to lower the barriers building between
France's young people.

"It showed you can only go so far, you can't go any
further," said Blandine Kriegel, an adviser to
President Jacques Chirac on integration issues. "The
issue touched a raw nerve. It is a nerve that is at
the very heart of our way of life."

Kepel, the professor, served on the commission that
recommended the law. He originally opposed the idea,
he says, until he heard testimony from teachers and
young women who described how young fundamentalists
used girls' decisions to wear a veil as leverage to
pressure them into adopting a more religious
lifestyle.

"If we were accused of being Islamaphobes, let's take
it and not give a damn. It was a time to give those
kids the opportunities to interact in the best
possible way and not jeopardize their futures in
French society," Kepel said.

French Muslims responded with mass protests.
Terrorists in Iraq abducted two French journalists and
demanded that the law be repealed or the captives
would be killed. The move backfired--French Muslims
roundly denounced the threat.

Four months into the first school year under the law,
45 girls across France remain out of school or in
mediation over their refusal to remove their scarves.
Considering that 2,000 girls were believed to be
wearing the veil last year, French officials have been
pleased with the outcome.

Other than the veil law, Kriegel said, the government
is trying to reduce segregation of Muslim immigrants
by expanding access to French language instruction and
combating workplace discrimination. The government,
she believes, is on the right track.

"There are no fires in the banlieues," she said.
"There are no riots as there were in the black ghettos
in the United States in the 1960s. Why don't we have
that? Because we've been rolling up our sleeves and
doing something. . . . We have turned the corner."

But in St.-Denis and other suburbs, the verdict is
less clear. The huddles of young men stand like
emblems of 17 percent unemployment, well above the
national average. Classrooms and public housing are
overcrowded with fast-growing immigrant families.

The mosques are busier than ever: the storefront
Tawhid Center for young followers of Tariq Ramadan;
the Tabligh mosque for the reclusive adherents of
Saudi-style conservative Islam; the many basement
prayer rooms for whoever stops by.

A French intelligence official who monitors
fundamentalist groups said he believes the veil
controversy and efforts to train imams have pushed
French Muslims to an awkward reckoning point: They
must decide whether to integrate with Europe or fight
back in earnest against official efforts to shape
their community.

"They are at a crossroads," he said. "They can either
go left or right."

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