Re: Europe vs Muslims: No Turning the Clock Back

....for backside preaching.

"Islam Will Replace Collapsing Amerikan Empire"
<islam_to_replace_amerikan_empire@xxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
news:%Q8xf.23468$Pq4.210362@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
> Europe vs Muslims: No Turning the Clock Back
> By Soumaya Ghannoushi
> Tuesday 10 January 2006, 17:14 Makka Time, 14:14 GMT
>
> Amidst the turbulence of war and violence marking today's world, culture
has
> turned into the great mask behind which hides a racist agenda at home and
an
> expansionist policy abroad.
>
> In the name of culture, Bush's wars turn into a noble mission to bring
> democracy to the culturally hostile Middle East, while Blair's draconian
> crackdown on civil liberties becomes a necessary defence of "our British
> values" against cultural and religious aggression.
>
> The same dichotomy has dominated Western political discourse since the
> Enlightenment era, fuelled by the climate of European military and
economic
> expansion.
>
> The dichotomy between 'we' and 'they', 'we' the Europeans, or Westerners,
> who are imbued with the light of reason and spirit of progress, and 'they'
> who still dwell in the darkness of superstition and cultural stagnation.
>
> This colonialist rightwing discourse is on the ascendancy once more in
> Europe, such that the Chirac government could unashamedly recast the bleak
> decades of French colonisation of Africa and the Arab Maghreb as a
> 'civilising mission' in the history syllabus taught in French schools.
>
> Instead of driving European governments to forge more open relations with
> their socially deprived and institutionally marginalised religious and
> ethnic minorities and to review their policies of illegitimate military
> expansionism, September 11 has turned into a pretext for clinging to a
right
> wing aggressive agenda at home and an arrogant foreign interventionism.
>
> In this climate, multiculturalism has been painted as Europe's scourge and
> the root of its ills. As one writer put it, "the time for sophistry is
> over.. our country must assert its values".
>
> Europe's minorities are in other words the cause of all its social,
> political and economic deficiencies. The remedy lies in suffocating them
> through stringent legislations and ruthless practices, from stop- and-
> search and surveillance, to control orders and shoot- and- kill police
> tactics.
>
> They and their faith have been reduced to a security problem to be dealt
> with exclusively by the intelligence services. However much Europe's
Muslims
> attempt to prove their allegiance to the nation-state, they remain in the
> eyes of its strategists a fifth column and a threat to homeland security.
>
> Critics of multiculturalism should bear the following point in mind.
Whether
> we like it or not, Europe is a multicultural continent. To turn the clock
> back and return to a closed notion of national identity based on
uniformity
> is simply not an option.
>
> Countries like France, still struggling to reverse this powerful trend in
> the name of 'laicite' and 'les valeurs de la Republique', find themselves
in
> a deeper crisis than any other European country.
>
> Suddenly, these critics seem to have stumbled on the magic cure for our
> troubles in the form of the French principle of integration, in reality a
> euphemism for cultural and social assimilation. But a look at Paris's
> banlieux, with their ghettos, rising levels of social deprivation,
> unemployment and crime would be enough to condemn this model of
integration,
> rather than recommend it for emulation. To this fact testify the recent
> riots across France's suburbs.
>
> That Europe incorporates in its midst a multitude of cultures is
undeniable.
> But cultural pluralism does not simply refer to the phenomenon of cultural
> diversity.
>
> It points to the existence of many which are equal in the public arena.
The
> presence of a multitude of communities in itself is not enough. The
> important thing is whether they are treated as equals by the state.
>
> This is plainly not the case in Europe where ethnic minorities are more
> likely to live in poor housing, some of which unfit for human habitation,
to
> suffer health problems, lag behind in education and experience
unemployment
> than their white counterparts.
>
> In many European countries such as France, Muslims, the largest of the
> continent's religious minorities, remain unrepresented in any political
> institution, forced to exist outside the public sphere altogether. Culture
> and ethnicity are now the basis of stratification. Religious and ethnic
> minorities are Europe's new underclass.
>
> The issue of the Muslim minority's integration has recently been the
subject
> of a public debate characterised with much tension and reductionism. It
> would be difficult to find fault with the notion of integration if it
meant
> greater openness on the part of the Muslim minority to its cultural
> environment, or the need to acquire the necessary linguistic tools to make
> such communication possible.
>
> But the openness of cultures and ways of life is a mutual, not a one sided
> affair. It places a greater responsibility on the majority culture, being
> more dominant in terms of power and its structures, to reach out to its
> surrounding cultural minorities.
>
> Last year, a You GovPoll for the Commission of Racial Equality in Britain
> revealed that 83% of white Britons have no friends who are practising
> Muslims and that 94% say that they do not have any friends from outside
> their white communities.
>
> The vast presence of grossly inaccurate stereotypes of Muslims is further
> proof that the majority is living in isolation from other minority groups
> and needs to integrate better within today's racially and culturally
diverse
> European society.
>
> Denouncing multiculturalism has become a gate to reviving the tradition of
> cultural essentialism, with its belief in the superiority of European
> culture and myths of the white man's burden and his civilising mission.
>
> In this context, the intensely rich and complex Islamic culture, which had
> fostered some of the most cosmopolitan and open societies in history, in
> Baghdad, Damascus, Cordoba, or Istanbul, has found itself reduced to a
> narrow set of vulgar stereotypes.
>
> These range from the subordination of women and arranged marriage to
> fanaticism and religious despotism. Such arguments bespeak much ignorance
> and prejudice.
>
> Above all, they overlook the fact that all cultures are subject to
different
> modes of interpretation, and that no culture is homogenous or absolute. To
> reduce the Islamic culture to these phenomena is akin to identifying
> 'Britishness' with Victorian military expansion and the British massacres
of
> natives in Kenya, Sudan, and Malawi, or seeing Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo Bay
> and the burning of the corpses of so- called enemy combatants as
> representative of American culture.
>
> Some liberals are particularly fond of the following question: How, they
> ask, is it possible to be tolerant with the intolerant? But with the
recent
> assaults on civil liberties and the drive to police the public sphere and
> encroach into the private realm of the citizen in Europe and the US, this
> inherently flawed question has been reversed.
>
> What we need to be asking is: to what extent are those who preach
liberalism
> really liberal? How far are those who purport to be tolerant really
> tolerant? Can we still claim to live in an open society?
>
> [Soumaya Ghannoushi is a researcher in the history of ideas at the School
of
> Oriental & African Studies, University of London.]
>
> The opinions expressed here are the author's and do not necessarily
reflect
> the editorial position or have the endorsement of Aljazeera.
>
> Aljazeera
>
>
http://english.aljazeera.net/NR/exeres/79DEB84A-927C-4A79-9C07-B3AC256CBCD6.htm
>
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