[Kabar-indonesia] The Economist: Islam, America and Europe [+Malaysia's converts]

[Joyo at aol.com]

also: Malaysia's converts test freedom of faith

The Economist 
June 24, 2006

Islam, America and Europe

Look out, Europe, they say

Why so many Muslims find it easier to be American than
to feel European

HAVING narrowly escaped with his life from the
theocrats of his native Iran, Afshin Ellian likes the
relaxed, cerebral atmosphere of Leiden, the Dutch town
where he now teaches law. But this 40-year-old
professor is disillusioned by a Europe which he says
has become too soft-minded in its dealings with Islam.
It is a sign of the times, he thinks, that the country
where he settled 17 years ago is about to say goodbye
to Ayaan Hirsi Ali, a Somali-born Dutch politician who
has sharply criticised the Muslim tradition in which
she was raised.

Having got into trouble because she once fibbed to the
Dutch immigration authorities, Miss Hirsi Ali is
moving to America.

Some of Mr Ellian's criticisms of Europe are
philosophical: it is too cynical and mercantilist a
place to wage a war of ideas in defence of the
Enlightenment. Some are personal: "Five years ago, my
Afghan sister-in-law emigrated to the United States,
where she now works, pays taxes and takes part in
public life. If she had turned up in Europe, she would
still be undergoing treatment from social workers for
her trauma—and she still wouldn't have got a job or
won acceptance as a citizen."

Among Europeans of Middle Eastern heritage, Mr
Ellian's views are rather unusual. But they would draw
applause from many Europe-watchers in the United
States, in whose eyes the mishandling of Islam has
become the latest and gravest of Europe's
self-inflicted wounds.

During the cold war, America used to berate its
European friends for underestimating the Soviet threat
and failing to spend enough money on their own
defence. A little later, Europe was rightly scolded
for not doing enough to stop the bloodshed in its own
Balkan backyard. These days, the handling of Islam is
near the top of the long list of subjects on which the
American consensus differs sharply, and increasingly,
from the European one.

A different view

Two recent events have crystallised American views.
Late last year, when Muslims in many of France's
slum-suburbs erupted in almost uncontrollable
violence, this was seen as proof of Europe's failure
either to give the newcomers a decent economic life or
to confront extremism successfully. Then, earlier this
year, Danish cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad caused
worldwide riots. This was a sign both of official
Europe's weakness in defence of free speech—but also,
for some Americans, of a godless continent's failure
to understand the depth of other people's faith.

In running their economies, observes Charles Kupchan,
one of Washington's veteran Europe-watchers, the
Europeans know what is needed but lack the firmness to
do the right thing. When it comes to Islam, they just
don't know what to do.

It does not cheer America that, in several parts of
Europe, some Muslims have found a political voice in
alliance with the anti-establishment left. Britain's
"Stop the War" movement, which organised huge rallies
against the war on Saddam Hussein's regime, is a
curious partnership between supporters of the
international Muslim Brotherhood and largely
non-believing socialists. Tariq Ramadan, a Swiss-based
scholar who has also taught at Oxford University, has
won a large following with his mixture of loyalty to
Islam's holy texts and opposition to global
capitalism.

In some transatlantic squabbles, the American message
has been delivered more in sorrow than in anger. We
wish you Europeans would do the right thing (about
labour markets, say, or farm subsidies) both for your
own sake and for the sake of the global economy—but in
the end it will be your loss if you don't. But when it
comes to the handling of radical Islam, the argument
is getting more rancorous.

That is partly because Americans see a threat to their
own security from a Europe whose citizens can travel
easily to the United States.

The September 2001 attacks, remember, were planned in
Hamburg.

Europe has become a "field of jihad", and it may be
the part of the world where America faces the greatest
threat from Islamic extremism.

So says Daniel Benjamin, a former White House adviser
who is now a terrorism-watcher at the Centre for
Strategic and International Studies, a think-tank. Mr
Benjamin makes a demographic projection of a kind more
often heard on American lips than European ones. The
Muslim population of the European Union's existing 25
members may on present trends double from about 15m
now to 30m by 2025. And that leaves out EU-applicant
Turkey, with an almost entirely Muslim population of
around 70m.

To be sure, it is by no means clear just how many
Muslims there are in Europe. In France, whose secular
authorities never ask a religious question on a census
form, the number of people of Muslim heritage is
generally given as 5m, or 8% of the population. But
that is only an educated guess. Some studies,
extrapolating from the difference in birth rates, say
the figure might rise to 20% of the population by
2020.

Well, maybe. In a forthcoming book, two scholars at
America's Brookings Institution, Jonathan Laurence and
Justin Vaisse, say this estimate is much too high. It
underestimates the relative fecundity of non-Muslim
Frenchwomen (compared with, say, their Italian
sisters) and the fact that Muslims seem to have fewer
babies the longer they have been in France.

In fact, there is something weirdly paradoxical about
the Muslim scene in every major European country. The
secular French state has given mosques and clerics a
privileged role as representatives of Islam; yet
France's Muslims are as lax in attending their mosques
as Catholics are about going to church (though Muslims
are better at private prayer and observing religious
fasts).

In Germany, the great majority of the country's
Muslims have their origin in Turkey. German Turks tell
pollsters that they are happy with their host country,
and with the principle of separation of church and
state; but they also seem to be growing more fervent
in their attachment to Islam. In one survey of German
Turks, 85% said they were "rather" or "strictly"
religious, and the number of those who think women
should cover their head is rising.

Britain's authorities, both national and local, have
devoted much attention to making the country's nearly
2m Muslims feel more at home.

But Muslims remain at the bottom of the economic pile.
The main reason is that, compared with British Hindus
and Sikhs, or even French Muslim women, very few of
Britain's Muslim women—mostly from Pakistan or
Bangladesh—go out to work. Yet some Muslim sub-groups,
such as the Ismailis who came from southern Asia via
East Africa, have soared ahead. Islam itself is no
barrier to economic advancement.

Amid all the confusion, there is one clear trend among
European Muslims. Islam is increasingly important as a
symbol of identity.

About a third of French schoolchildren of Muslim
origin see their faith rather than a passport or skin
colour as the main thing that defines them. Young
British Muslims are inclined to see Islam (rather than
the United Kingdom, or the city where they live) as
their true home.

It does not help that all Europeans, whatever their
origin, nowadays find themselves "identity-shopping"
as the European Union competes with the older
nation-states for their loyalty. No wonder many young
European Muslims find that the umma—worldwide
Islam—tugs hardest at their heart-strings.

The argument gets blunter

In the short run, at least, there seems little chance
of Europeans and Americans finding a common language
over Islam. As many non-Muslim Europeans see things,
it is American foreign policy—in Iraq, above all—that
has radicalised their Muslim compatriots. If European
Muslims are anti-Western, they say, it is largely
because of the Bush administration's misdeeds.

In its gentler moments, the administration is
sensitive to European touchiness. Americans must be
"careful and modest" in telling other parts of the
world how to solve questions of identity and religion,
says Daniel Fried, the State Department's top man for
European affairs.

But, in his careful, modest way, Mr Fried makes some
firm points about Europe's difficulties in absorbing
Muslim newcomers. Europeans, he thinks, are still too
inclined to see these Muslims as "unwanted
foreigners". In facing a challenge like Muslim
immigration, "exclusionary nationalism will not help."
At the same time, Mr Fried fears, some European
governments are not very adept at distinguishing
between peaceful piety and the more violent kind. He
insists that the United States has a "deep and
legitimate interest" in the battle of ideas between
Islam's moderates and extremists in all parts of the
world—and that it will do its best to support the
moderate ones in Europe.

Yet, for Europe's angriest Muslims, their host
countries' gravest sin lies precisely in their
alignment with America—both as partners in the global
capitalist system and as supporters, in varying
degrees, of American foreign policy. So the suggestion
that America may have something to teach Europe about
how to make Muslims feel more comfortable (and
therefore less extreme) looks at first sight rather
strange.

It is, in fact, by no means absurd. Whatever the
defects in Muslim eyes of American foreign policy, the
United States has a substantial Muslim population
which on the whole seems pretty comfortable there, and
has produced some of the world's best Islamic
thinkers. That spectacular Middle East-looking mosque
at the top of this article is in fact in Dearborn,
Michigan.

For the same reason as in France—the fact that the
state does not like asking questions about
religion—the United States has a hard time estimating
the size of its Muslim population: the guesses range
between 3m and 7m. But, whatever the precise number,
America's Muslims neither see themselves, nor are seen
by other Americans, as being radically at odds with
American society. When Americans scold Europe for its
"exclusionary nationalism", it is partly because they
feel that their country has more successfully embraced
a variety of religions, including Islam.

Some American Muslims would quibble with that claim:
polls show a rising percentage of Americans with
negative views about Islam, and Muslim organisations
report a rising number of incidents of harassment or
discrimination. But, broadly speaking, freedom to
practise and preach Islam is protected by the American
system.

If America is better at absorbing its Muslims, this
may to some degree be a matter of luck. The majority
of Muslim Americans are either upwardly mobile
migrants from southern Asia or Iran, or black American
converts who lack any personal links to Islam's
heartland. Many European cities, on the other hand,
contain an exceptionally volatile Muslim under-class
which is poor, alienated and intertwined (by family
ties) with the hungriest and angriest parts of the
Muslim world.

But it is not just luck. The difference between
America and Europe in dealing with Islam reaches down
to some basic questions of principle, such as the
limits of free speech and free behaviour. America's
political culture places huge importance on the right
to religious difference, including the right to
displays of faith which others might consider
eccentric. In the words of Reza Aslan, a popular
Iranian-American writer on Islam, "Americans are used
to exuberant displays of religiosity." So the daily
prostrations of a devout Muslim are less shocking to
an American than to a lukewarm European Christian.
American society is open to religious arguments—and to
new approaches to old theological questions—in a way
that Europe is not.

In general, Americans are more optimistic—or less
gloomy—about Islam than Europeans. A poll published
this week by the Pew Research Centre says that
Americans who see Muslim-Western relations as
"generally bad" outnumber those who take the opposite
view by 55% to 32%. Not exactly cheery. But in Germany
the pessimists are ahead by 70% to 23%, in France by
66% to 33%, and in Britain by 61% to 28%.

Some things are off-limits even in America. In
Britain, for example, members of the radical (but
non-violent) Hizb ut-Tahrir movement have appeared on
television to express their rejection of the
principles of liberal democracy and secular justice.
That is unlikely to happen in America. Nor would it be
possible, in any American context, to argue for the
superiority of sharia—Islamic law—over laws passed by
elected law-makers.

But the right to say almost anything on most other
subjects is deeply entrenched in America. This means
that, whatever weapons the parties in America's
religious arguments try to use, they do not usually
include attempts to deny the other side's right to
speak.

The result is that there is more space for hard
religious argument. No law restrains that quite large
body of American thought which is critical not just of
extreme readings of Islam but of Islam itself—arguing
that the warrior ethos of the faith's earlier
centuries was one of its essential features, not just
a regrettable excess. But the American system also
guarantees the rights of those who argue for the
opposite view: that Islam is basically a peaceful,
universalist faith which restricts rather than enjoins
the use of violence.

This does not mean that America has a monopoly of
wisdom in distinguishing peaceful Muslim citizens from
the other sort. During the 1990s, a Washington-based
group called the American Muslim Council and its
leader, Abdurahman Alamoudi, were hailed by the
American government as valuable people to talk to. In
2004, Mr Alamoudi was given a 23-year jail term on
terrorism-related charges.

But one merit of the American system is that, even
when hard questions arise about the trade-off betweeen
freedom of speech and security, there is a robust
legal culture which enables people to fight back if
their rights are infringed. Last year some American
Muslims who had been detained in New York state on
returning from a conference in Canada promptly filed a
lawsuit against the federal authorities—and they were
helped to do so by the American Civil Liberties Union.

The idea that freedom is the cornerstone of politics
is one reason why people like Mr Ellian, that Iranian
who fled to Leiden, look hopefully towards America.
His argument goes as follows. Islam's sacred texts can
be read either in a spirit of militant intolerance or
in a spirit of altruism—and the latter can prevail
only in conditions of hard, open-ended debate in which
nobody holds back for fear of giving offence.
America's free-speech culture may have a better chance
of fostering such a debate than European political
correctness.

It's starting to change

There is no shortage of robust debate among European
Muslims, but it is more about politics—especially
left-wing politics—than about theology. In Belgium,
Muslims now have about a quarter of the seats in the
regional government of Brussels. In the municipal
politics of Britain and the Netherlands, some radical
Muslims quite often find themselves doing political
business with other anti-establishment groups on the
secular left, to the dismay of older immigrants.

During a recent contest in east London, the candidate
for the new Respect party—a young Muslim lawyer—was
chided by his co-religionists for sharing a platform
with homosexuals. But Abdurahman Jafar held his
ground: "We want equality for Muslims and we would
seem insincere if we didn't stand together with other
minorities who face discrimination."

The rhetoric that emerges from this sort of politics
in a variety of European countries is not always
attractive to American ears, since one of the few
common denominators between angry Muslims and secular
leftists is hostility to America. But, given a choice
between pious self-segregation and plunging into
public affairs, many European Muslims are choosing the
latter.

In places like Amsterdam, coalition-building between
Muslims and others is producing some positive results.
Ahmed Aboutaleb, a Moroccan-born city councillor in
Amsterdam, is proud of the fact that he was handsomely
re-elected this year—on a moderate centre-left
ticket—by a combination of native Dutch votes as well
as those of Muslim immigrants.

He says that the relatively benign inter-ethnic
climate in Amsterdam reflects the town hall's efforts
to make all races and religions feel part of a "united
camp". As a result, he claims, the risk of some new
incident setting off a general upsurge of tit-for-tat
violence between Christians and Muslims (as happened
when the film-maker Theo van Gogh was murdered by a
Muslim extremist in 2004) has been greatly reduced, at
any rate in Amsterdam (though he admits the risk is
still rather higher in other Dutch cities).

Of course, this does not mean that there is no longer
any cause to feel concern about Europe's ability to
absorb its asssorted Muslim peoples. The latest study
of the 900,000 Dutch Muslims, by Amsterdam University,
suggests that the feelings of "indignation and
humiliation" experienced by Muslims are worsening, not
fading away.

Such feelings are especially strong among
second-generation Muslims, who believe they have a
solid claim to a comfortable place in Dutch society
but still reckon they are being rejected.

The good news is that not everybody who harbours these
feelings is retreating into the margins of extremism
and violence. A process of political assimilation is,
hesitantly but visibly, taking place. This will change
the politics of Europe. It may affect Europe's
relations with the outside world. But, in the process,
Muslims will also change—and perhaps settle into their
new homelands as comfortably as most American Muslims
have done.

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Feature-Malaysia's converts test freedom of faith

By Sebastian Tong

KUALA LUMPUR, June 25 (Reuters) - Five days after she
declared legally that she had converted from Islam to
Christianity, several officers from Malaysia's state
Islamic department turned up at the woman's office and
arrested her.

She said they took her, then 21, to a drug
rehabilitation centre for men, where a Muslim teacher
counselled her on her conversion and on one occasion,
caned her back. After two months, she found an
unlocked door out of the compound and escaped.

"What they did was wrong. They shouldn't decide our
beliefs for us," said the woman -- who asked not to be
named -- of her ordeal in 1999.

While Malaysia is one of the world's most modern and
relaxed Muslim countries, its treatment of apostates,
primarily those who have given up the Muslim faith,
has ignited a heated debate.

Malaysia's Federal Court could rule in the next few
days on whether Islamic courts -- which have authority
over the country's Muslims, accounting for more than
60 percent of the population -- have the sole right to
judge apostates.

The ruling comes amid calls for capital punishment for
apostasy, and follows a spate of civil suits by
Malaysians seeking official recognition of their
decision to leave Islam.

Half of Malaysia's 26 million people are ethnic
Malays, who by law must be Muslim, while its Chinese
and Indian minorities include Muslims, Christians,
Buddhists, Hindus and Sikhs.

Islamic law is selectively enforced by local officials
in each of Malaysia's 13 federal states. Unmarried
Muslim couples caught in hotel rooms can be charged,
while believers seen eating in the daytime during the
fasting month of Ramadan can be fined.

Kelantan state, run by an Islamist party, has
separate-sex supermarket queues, but the national
capital, Kuala Lumpur, is more relaxed with plenty of
dance clubs where men and women mingle openly. Yet
many say Malaysia's secular status is being eroded. In
December, Islamic authorities gave Malaysian
mountain-climber M. Moorthy a Muslim burial against
the wishes of his Hindu widow.

Officials said he had converted to Islam before his
death, despite assertions to the contrary by most of
his family.

"Apostasy is not a new phenomenon but the issue has
come to the forefront because it underscores the
growing Islamisation of a country that was intended to
be secular," civil activist Haris Mohamed Ibrahim told
Reuters.

Officials also destroyed a commune last July,
arresting members of the Sky Kingdom cult which
preached a synthesis of all religions and had a giant
two-storey teapot on its premises. The government said
the cult practised a "deviant" form of Islam.

BIG SIN

Malaysia's civil courts have said they cannot
recognise conversions from Islam and refer apostates
to the Islamic courts, where sentences for various
offences range from caning to jail.

Although such sentences are rarely carried out on
apostates, Malaysians who leave Islam can find
themselves in a legal limbo, unable to register their
new religious affiliation or to marry non-Muslims.
Many keep quiet about their choice or move abroad.

Rights activists say such barriers to conversion are
at odds with Malaysia's status as a member of the
United Nations Human Rights Council and violate the
nation's constitutional guarantee of freedom of
worship.

Neighbouring Indonesia, which has the world's biggest
Muslim population, has no official sanctions against
such converts and recognises civil marriages between
Muslims and non-Muslims.

"Unfortunately, some people have fixed ideas about
Islam and see apostasy as a challenge to the
religion," said Norhayati Kaprawi of the Muslim
women's group Sisters in Islam.

Some groups, including the opposition party Parti
Islam se-Malaysia (PAS), want apostasy to be
punishable by death. One government cleric said about
250,000 Malaysians had left Islam.

The Koran forbids Muslims to abandon their faith, but
it doesn't specify the penalties, said Sohirin
Solihin, professor of Koranic studies at Malaysia's
International Islamic University.

But traditional writings, or Hadith, associated with
the Prophet Mohammad proscribe death.

"The Koran is clear that there is no compulsion of
religion but the issue of religious freedom is
different for Muslims and non-Muslims.

The Muslim understanding of this is different from the
Western one," he said.

Earlier this year, the case of an Afghan man who faced
the death penalty after he converted to Christianity
sparked an international outcry. He was later granted
asylum in Italy.

While efforts to make apostasy a crime punishable by
death in Malaysia are unlikely to succeed given the
government's multi-ethnic coalition of Malay, Chinese
and Indian parties, many fear that obstacles to
religious conversion will stay in place.

The minister in the Prime Minister's Department for
religious affairs, Abdullah Md Zin, declined to
comment. His spokesman referred questions to the
government's Department of Islamic Development where
officials declined comment.

But the department's Web site recommends isolating and
counselling apostates and then jailing them if they
fail to repent.

"If the person remains an apostate, it is left to the
respective authorities to impose the fitting sentence
that is death," the department said in its
Malay-language "Frequently Asked Questions" section.
(Additional reporting by Mohaini Ibrahim)

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