Chapter 6

An Adversary Culture

Jus soli and jus sanguinis, assimilation and integration—The illusion of diversity—Islam as a hyper-identity—Dual loyalty—Humiliation and Islamophobia—Muslims and U.S. blacks

People’s loyalties do not necessarily shift along with their citizenships—or even with their outward behavior. “The immigration population was not rooted in this country,” Enoch Powell insisted in 1968. “It still belonged to the communities back home, both west and east.…For the vast majority [of immigrants] it has literally been transportation within a community settling across the globe into—it happens to have been Britain. It might have been anywhere else.” For Powell, the mass movement of foreigners into Europe was more like a colonization than an immigration. His view was not admissible in polite company by the 1990s. At that point, the former Tory party chairman Norman Tebbit suggested a milder, more easygoing way of judging the allegiances of newcomers: how they behaved, or how they felt in their hearts, when their ancestral country’s team played England in cricket. “Which side do they cheer for?” Tebbit asked. “It’s an interesting test. Are you still harking back to where you came from, or where you are? And I think we’ve got real problems in that regard.”

Tebbit’s mischievous remark drew accusations of unreasonableness that made his point. The problem with the “Tebbit test” was that so many immigrants—and even children of immigrants—failed it. In the Dutch town of Osdorp, heavily settled by Moroccans, a crowd of locals subjected a bartender to “howls of abuse” when he tried to set the television to the Dutch-Czech World Cup qualifying match rather than the Moroccan-Tunisian one. On October 6, 2001, a month after the attacks on the World Trade Center, the French and Algerian national soccer teams met in a “friendship match” at the Stade de France, north of Paris. Thousands of French Arab youths whistled the French team and the “Marseillaise,” the French national anthem. (Whistling is the way European fans boo.) Hundreds stormed the field, forcing the stoppage of the game. “Hooting the Marseillaise isn’t a crime, or even a misdemeanor,” one journalist at the daily Libération wrote preemptively. “To hold it against the French and French-Algerian immigrant youths would be to question their full status as citizens.” Under the prevailing political understanding, the Tebbit test asked too much of immigrants.

Jus soli and jus sanguinis, assimilation and integration

For much of the period after the Second World War, it had been relatively easy to become a European citizen. Britain, to the fury of Powell and other opponents of immigration, dissolved an entire empire of more than half a billion people without enunciating clear citizenship criteria. The Nationality Act of 1948 sought to do this, by creating a category of noncitizen subjects, but a loophole allowed entry to the British mainland for all those “who hold a UK passport or a passport issued by the Government of the United Kingdom.” Since colonial passports had been issued by the UK, too, the law opened the gates to Britain for those who understood how to manipulate it.

There were two basic regimes of citizenship in Europe. Under jus soli (“right of soil”), which was favored in France, not to mention the United States, all those born on national territory were automatically citizens, no matter where their parents came from. Under jus sanguinis (“right of blood”), traditional to Germany, they were not. You got citizenship if—and in most cases only if—your parents were Germans. So those born to Algerians in France could call themselves French, but the German-born children of Turks were not German by law.

Jus sanguinis was not as illiberal as it looked; it had had its origins in the geographical scattering and semi-feudal political organization of the German lands until the nineteenth century, not in any modern racial doctrines. In yesterday’s Germany, jus sanguinis had been more liberal—it meant that you were first and foremost the child of your parents, not the property of the prince on whose domains you happened to have been born. But in postwar Europe, jus sanguinis was a butt of liberal scorn. Notoriously, in 1998, Germany sought to deport Muhlis Ari, a serially violent fourteen-year-old noncitizen (he was called “Mehmet” in the interest of protecting his anonymity) back to Turkey. When Ari’s lawyers and relatives were able to show he knew little of Turkey or Turkish, it was inevitable he would be allowed to stay. Jus sanguinis was on its way out.

The arguments for replacing jus sanguinis with jus soli were not just principled. They were also practical, and even cynical. For some champions of jus soli, minimizing obstacles to valuable EU citizenships was a good in itself. For many immigrants, the equal rights obtained under jus soli were a route to the special privileges of jus sanguinis. They were able to pick and choose between the two regimes. On the formal, legalistic, and impersonal “modern” grounds of having been long resident, or born, on a given country’s soil, an immigrant, or child of immigrants, was accorded citizenship. Then, on the solemn, mystical, clannish, premodern grounds of “blood,” he could petition for rights of residence (to be followed, eventually, by citizenship) for his foreign relatives.

One of the first measures passed by the government of Gerhard Schröder after it came to power in 1998 was a citizenship reform that largely converted German law to jus soli. It established that, starting in 2009, German-born children of foreigners could (and must) decide at age eighteen whether they wished to be citizens of Germany or of their countries of origin. Having millions of “foreigners” on national territory was both a bureaucratic headache and a political liability. Re-classifying foreigners as natives looked like a simple way to “solve” a number of problems, assuming voters didn’t notice. But, of course, they noticed. Within weeks of the passing of the new citizenship law, Schröder’s Social Democratic party suffered a string of crippling losses in Bundesrat elections, all of them centered on the citizenship issue, from which (as of this writing, a decade later) it has never fully recovered.

The largest wholesale grant of citizenship in recent history—Spanish prime minister Zapatero’s massive amnesty to 700,000 illegal immigrants in 2005—left a similar aftermath. In the Spanish case, the hostility was directed not at the government but at its beneficiaries. A year after the amnesty, polls showed that Spanish Muslims had a relatively high opinion of their relations with non-Muslim Westerners. Almost half of Muslims (49 percent) were happy about how they got along with native Spaniards, versus 23 percent who were not. That was a rosier attitude than Muslims held toward their non-Muslim fellow citizens in Britain (23 percent positive, 62 percent negative), Germany (29–60), or France (41–58). But Spanish non-Muslims were suddenly more hostile than other European natives to their country’s Muslims. Only 23 percent of Spaniards thought they and their Muslim neighbors got on well, and 83 percent associated Islam with fanaticism.

The tension between jus soli and jus sanguinis arose only at times of heavy immigration. Otherwise, the regime under which foreigners became citizens was no big deal. A person born on, say, French soil got French citizenship. He would live his life as “Frenchly” as someone who was French by ancestry. He would assimilate into France and into French culture and become French. What else was he going to do? Before the age of mass immigration, assimilation was an imperative, because not assimilating meant ostracism, loneliness, and nonparticipation in the economy. If the need to assimilate was never spelled out legally, this was only because it was too obvious to have to be.

Just as there were two models for becoming European according to the letter of the law (i.e., citizenship), there were two models of becoming European according to the spirit of the law (i.e., assimilation). There was a French model of assimilation, which held that immigrants should become French in their cultural loyalties. And there was a more multicultural British model, which held that one could keep one’s culture as long as one obeyed the law of the land. In the age of massive, heavily Muslim migration, neither had a particularly good record of keeping the peace or producing jobs for ethnic minorities. Whether the French or the British model was in vogue among policy makers depended on which country had suffered rioting less recently. Eventually, decisive evidence emerged—in the form of terrorism, gang violence, and mass mobilizations against free speech—that Britain had the direst problem assimilating immigrants of any country in Europe. But by that time, Britain’s model, which had the advantage of requiring the least investment of effort by its political leaders, had mostly triumphed. Increasingly, naturalized immigrants were asserting the right to “integrate”—basically, to live in Europe as foreigners—rather than to assimilate.

Politicians acquiesced in this understanding, even the most reputedly right-wing and intolerant among them, as if integration were a new, improved version of assimilation. That the word integration had been borrowed from the U.S. civil rights struggle in the first place is another indication that Europe was dealing with an intractable problem (like race in America) rather than managing a process of transition (like immigration in America). Göran Johansson, an old-school Swedish labor leader who had become mayor of Gothenburg, was known for shooting from the hip about how immigration was transforming his city. But even he said, “I don’t like assimilation; I like integration. Both Sweden and immigrants must change.” Asked to clarify what he meant by integration, Johansson said: “I don’t care if you respect our culture. You just have to obey the law.”

But of course you have to obey the law! That’s what makes it the law. To demand that immigrants must obey the law is to demand exactly nothing from them.

The result was that Europe filled up with excellent, virtuous, law-abiding people whose ideas of excellence and virtue had nothing at all to do with Europe. Sarfraz Manzoor, an English columnist of Pakistani background, writes,

My generation and the generation after me are still wrestling with the question of where our allegiance lies, and this is after a lifetime of having lived immersed in British culture. The men who dream of moving from Lahore to Leicester, the women who pray that an arranged marriage will transport them from Bangladesh to Brick Lane, are not coming because they have any affinity with what might loosely be described as British values. They seek to come for the simple reason that it is better to live here than where they came from. That is an entirely honorable and understandable reason. But it is ludicrous to suggest that the only impact this has on our country is economic.

The idea that nothing, not even loyalty, would be required of immigrants, so long as they didn’t subvert the laws of the country, came up constantly in one form or another—again, even among so-called hard-liners. Jürgen Rüttgers, the minister-president of North Rhine-Westphalia, had earned the reputation as one of Europe’s arch-xenophobes for remarks like the one about Indians mentioned in chapter 3, and warned that there was no evidence of multicultural societies’ ever having worked anywhere in the world. Yet he, too, said, “Integration is not assimilation. You don’t have to give up your religion, but you must obey our basic values.”

Rita Verdonk, the former Dutch minister of immigration, who in the years since the 2004 killing of Theo van Gogh has been thought the most implacably anti-immigrant cabinet-level politician in Europe, was particularly insistent that integration, not assimilation, was the Dutch way. “Assimilation means you lose the identity of your country of origin,” she said. “Our policy is: You must learn the Dutch language, follow our norms and values and obey the law.” Only one prominent mainstream politician of the past decade has dissented publicly from this view: the conservative ex-leftist German interior minister Otto Schily, who said, “The best form of integration is assimilation.”

The illusion of diversity

Whenever Europeans worried about the long-term assimilability of immigrants, it was Muslims they worried about most. Sometimes it was Muslims they worried about exclusively. In Denmark, where the right-wing Danish People’s Party (DF) had frightened the ruling coalition into passing Europe’s strictest laws against immigration, the DF leadership was at pains to convey that it did not consider all immigrants problematic. “They are no problem—totally integrated,” said the priest and DF parliamentarian Jesper Langballe of the many Tamils who had settled in his own parish in Jutland. “The problem is, you can’t integrate large numbers of Muslims in a country that has a cultural base that is Christian.” Rikke Hvilshøj, the country’s integration minister at the time, said that this was not an unusual view. Denmark had received large immigrant flows from Hungary in 1956 and Poland in 1968, not to mention an unusually big contingent of Vietnamese boat people in the late 1970s and early 1980s. “When Danes speak of immigrants today,” she said, “it is not Hungarians or Vietnamese they are talking about.”

The view of the European man-in-the-street (of 88 percent of Germans, for instance) was that Muslims “want to remain distinct”—but nowhere was that opinion reflected in government policy. The official view was that Muslims were much the same as any other immigrant group, and while Muslims had admittedly shown a reluctance to embrace European culture thus far, inexorable historical processes were at work. Over the long term, Muslims could no more constitute a culture apart than immigrants in previous centuries had, according to political leaders, and the reason was Muslim diversity. Not only is Islam a varied spectrum of beliefs and cultures—Arab and non-Arab, Sunni and Shia, traditional and modern—but that spectrum is further refracted by Islam’s sudden entry into Europe. In what sense do English-speaking Pakistanis share a culture with Italian-speaking Moroccans or German-speaking Turks? To speak of “the Muslims” was an ignorant stereotype, an optical illusion. It was what the French would call an amalgame.

Certainly diversity among Muslims is greater than it looks. Neighborhoods that outsiders perceive as “Pakistani” may be Pakistani and Bengali, and the Pakistanis in it may be divided between people who think of themselves as Punjabis and others who are Mirpuris. A single Parisian neighborhood made up of Algerians who emigrated in the 1960s (Ménilmontant, for example) might be divided between Arabs and Berbers. A Rhineland neighborhood made up of Turks who arrived in the 1960s (Marxloh, for instance) will almost certainly be split between religious Sunnis and Alevites, as well as between ethnic Turks and Kurds. Knowledgeable about this diversity, many Muslims grow impatient with being lumped together as an undifferentiated mass. “What do you mean, ’Islam’?” one German social worker asked a journalist at Der Stern. “There’s no such thing as single, unique Islam.” The French sociologist Dounia Bouzar wrote a book called “Mister Islam” Doesn’t Exist. But for all its pleasing glibness, this harping on diversity is misguided. It is like saying that, because a Volvo is different from a Volkswagen, there’s no such thing as a car. While diversity certainly exists among Muslim groups, its importance has been overstated.

There is a reason that diversity became such a treasured myth among well-meaning Europeans: A utopia could be built on it. If Islam can exist in so many forms, they asked, why not a European form, which would graft onto the religion not just a loyalty to Muslims’ new countries of citizenship but also a respect for constitutional rights known to be anathema in almost every part of the Muslim world? The late French scholar of Islam Jacques Berque first raised the idea of replacing Islam in France with an Islam of France in the late 1980s, and since then the idea, along with the catchphrase, has become popular among bureaucrats and intellectuals throughout Europe. Stefano Allievi, probably the leading Italian sociologist of Islam, wrote of younger generations in which “Islam in Italy is becoming Italian Islam.” Creating a “German Islam” out of a bunch of German Muslims is the explicit goal of the Islamkonferenz launched by interior minister Wolfgang Schäuble in 2006.

What has actually happened in most countries in Europe is the opposite—a partial embrace of the national identity of the new country has been followed by a withdrawal to the religious identity of the old. This shift is more pronounced among younger generations. In Berque’s own France, the country that has devoted the most resources to domesticating Islam, young people of Muslim descent think of themselves as Muslim before they think of themselves as French. Asked what element characterizes them best, about a third of Muslim students answered that it was their religion, versus fewer than 5 percent of native French children who said the same. The leftist journalist Alain Gresh notes that the expression “second generation” was never used for previous generations of young French people whose parents happened to be Italian and Polish. This could be a failure of the French traditions of citoyenneté—it is more likely a sign that, however strong those traditions may be, the attachment of this generation to its ancestral traditions is stronger.

The situation is similar in Britain. In early 2007, the think tank Policy Exchange released a troubling study. It found that nearly a third (31 percent) of British Muslims thought they had more in common with Muslims in other countries than with their fellow citizens. Only half referred to Britain as “my country.” The sense of belonging to Britain was higher among those over 45 (55 percent) than among those 18 to 24 (45 percent). Military enlistment offers another clue to how “British” young British Muslims feel. In February 2007, British authorities uncovered a plot hatched by local Muslims in Birmingham to kidnap a British Muslim soldier and torture him to death on a video to be disseminated over the Internet. It emerged that the targeted soldier was one of only 330 Muslims in the British armed forces, a number that not even dogged recruiting efforts have sufficed to raise. Britain’s Muslims were joining the military at roughly one-twentieth the rate of other Britons.

In theory, Germany has a better chance of forming the kind of national Islam that European governments claim to want, not because of any particular wisdom in its policies but because of the orientation of the Turkish culture out of which most of its immigrants came. “People look with pride on their own history of modernization since Atatürk,” wrote the journalist Jörg Lau, “and see themselves, for the most part, as already part of Europe and the West.” This is not an indication that Turks are more willing to adapt to Germany than other immigrant groups are to their respective new countries, only that they have less need to adapt.

One way to get a sense of German Turks’ deepest allegiances is to look at their choices about burial. All Muslim organizations in Germany have burial funds (Bestattungsfonds) to which community members subscribe. Muslim burial has generally meant burial in the subscriber’s country of origin. According to a study by the Center for Turkey Studies in 2000, only 5 percent of Turks could see themselves being buried in Germany. The fact that 68 percent favor the establishment of Muslim cemeteries in Europe—which would allow burial in shrouds rather than coffins, among other adjustments—may be an optimistic sign. But it indicates that the price of a more “European” Islam will be a more Islamic Europe. When asked whether there is “a special, German form of Islam,” 68 percent of German Turks say there is not. They are evenly split on the question of whether the laws of Islam are even compatible with the rules of German society—52 percent say they are, while 46 percent say they are not.

Certainly, European-ness would enter the cultural lives of Muslims who live there. How could it not? Any people who have been in a given country for fifty years will show certain cultural signs of their sojourn. These signs can be the reflection of something profound, or they can be mere superficialities. That most British imperialists could tell you what pukka and sahib meant did not make them Indian. Here, as in their insistence that immigrants “obey the law,” Europeans are taking something they assume to be inevitable and framing it as the fulfillment of a demand. The official bodies out of which national Islam was supposed to be built—from France’s CFCM to Britain’s quasi-autonomous Muslim Association of Britain—were misconceived. Certainly they could accept national funds. But they could not create national Islams. Islam de France, deutscher Islam, islam italiano… these were slogans, answers to a question that Islam does not ask.

Islam as a hyper-identity

Islam has ever been understood as a mighty identity, shaping every aspect of a believer’s life and reducing lesser allegiances to unimportance. Ernest Renan wrote in 1883 that certain habits inculcated by the Muslim faith “are so strong that all differences of race and nationality disappear before the fact of conversion to Islam. The Berber, the Sudanese, the Circassian, the Malay, the Egyptian, the Nubian, once they have become Muslim, are no longer Berbers, Sudanese, Egyptians, etc.—they are Muslims.” This, indeed, is the view not just of Islam’s detractors but of its adherents, especially when they are trying to present Islam as a source of brotherhood that can serve as an antidote to Western racism or nationalism. Malcolm X, on his pilgrimage to Mecca in 1964, wrote:

For the past week, I have been utterly speechless and spellbound by the graciousness I see displayed all around me by people of all colors.… America needs to understand Islam, because this is the one religion that erases from its society the race problem. Throughout my travels in the Muslim world, I have met, talked to, and even eaten with people who in America would have been considered “white”—but the “white” attitude was removed from their minds by the religion of Islam. I have never before seen sincere and true brotherhood practiced by all colors together, irrespective of their color.…Perhaps if white Americans could accept the Oneness of God, then perhaps, too, they could accept in reality the Oneness of Man—and cease to measure, and hinder, and harm others in terms of their “differences” in color.

Inayat Bunglawala, a prominent activist with the Muslim Council of Britain, gave a repentant—but dishearteningly vivid—account of his joining a Muslim rally in Hyde Park in 1989, in support of the Ayatollah Khomeini’s fatwa calling for the murder of British novelist Salman Rushdie:

It was an amazing day. There was an increasing realisation that by giving greater importance to our Islamic identity we could transcend and overcome the divides among us. We may have Pakistani, Bengali, Gujarati, Arab, Turkish backgrounds, but this was less important than what brought us together: we were British Muslims. And so Rushdie’s novel became, unwittingly no doubt, the catalyst for the forging of a more confident Islamic identity.

As for the fatwa itself, Bunglawala recalls that it left him “elated.”

Whether or not Renan, Malcolm X, and the young Inayat Bunglawala are right that Islam trumps all social, cultural, and national differences, conditions are ripe for the various Muslim communities of Europe to coalesce in a unified identity. The United States offers the best example of how, in an age of mass immigration, sub-identities get melded into larger ones. “Hispanic” identity was largely a fictional category when federal census takers invented it in the 1970s. “Hispanic” was a linguistic, not a sociological, term. It was useful as a proxy for northbound immigration flows, but there was no such thing as a “Hispanic” person. Spanish speakers themselves complained that the “Hispanic” category did not respect the difference between, say, a white Cuban pianist and an Indian cowboy from Mexico. But affirmative action and Spanish-language marketing and television combined to turn this abstract identity into a real one. Today there really is such a thing as a Hispanic (or Latino) identity, made up of Chilean-Americans and Mexican-Americans competing for the same bilingual marketing jobs at corporations in New York, of Puerto Ricans and Bolivians watching the same shows on Univisión, and of new migrants working in industries—such as landscaping and restaurants—where Spanish is a lingua franca.

In Europe, formerly distinct communities’ interests have started to converge into a larger Muslim culture. In most immigrant housing projects, satellite dishes run up the buildings like buttons, picking up the news from home. This would seem to throw into reverse television’s historic role as an engine of immigrant assimilation, keeping open lines of communication from the old country. But in other ways, television does indeed assimilate immigrants. It is just that it assimilates them into something other than traditional European culture. It assimilates them into globalized Islam. The Muslim scholar Yusuf Qaradawi’s weekly fatwa show on al-Jazeera, for instance, is watched all over Europe.

Just because Europe is a main audience of this new, online Islamic culture does not mean that that culture will be pro-European. It may mean the opposite. Muslim websites are no less marked by slapdash verification and an incendiary political idiom than their counterparts in the non-Muslim world. One of the paradoxes of the Internet is that this most modern of media has brought new power to premodern habits of discourse: rumor, gossip, urban myths, old wives’ tales. A lot of young Palestinians in Denmark, most of them refugees from the civil war in Lebanon, believe the welfare payments they accept in Denmark put them in no position of indebtedness toward the Danish state, because the money has been effectively stolen from families like their own. “They say, ’The money comes from the United Nations,” recalls one integration expert in Copenhagen. “‘They send it to Denmark, and Denmark takes half. That’s why I’ll never be loyal to the Danes.’” More than half (56 percent) of British Muslims do not believe Arabs committed the atrocities of September 11, 2001, versus 17 percent who do.

European Muslims often wind up locked in the ancient and present-day grievances of their homelands—and other people’s homelands. Extremists who recruit volunteers for jihad abroad have often done so by using videos, with stirring musical accompaniment, that show Muslims mistreated, humiliated, wounded, and killed in various trouble spots; one friend of the four 7/7 suicide bombers told the Wall Street Journal, “They were aware that we Muslims are suffering the most in the world, be it Iraq, Afghanistan or Palestine.”

That Muslims suffer the most is the focal point of an increasing number of European Muslims’ identity. The day after the unspeakable violence in the London Underground in July 2005, Imran Waheed of the radical group Hizb ut-Tahrir insisted, “We have far greater experience as victims of terror than as perpetrators of terror.” Who is the “we” that he is referring to here? It is not, by any stretch of the imagination, Britons. He added that the British Muslim community’s reaction to Britain’s participation in wars in Afghanistan and the Middle East had until then been “remarkably restrained.”

Dual loyalty

Empathy among Muslims creates a big potential problem that does not exist with other immigrations. Imagine that the West, at the height of the Cold War, had received a mass inflow of immigrants from Communist countries who were ambivalent about which side they supported. Something similar is taking place now. European countries have lately been at war with Muslim forces in Iraq, Afghanistan, the Balkans, and Africa; and this is leaving aside countries of European culture, such as the United States and Israel, that are fighting similar battles. The late Harvard political scientist Samuel Huntington devoted much of his 1996 book The Clash of Civilizations to Islam’s “bloody borders.” This may be a controversial observation, but it is an observation—it is not something Huntington dreamed up. As of this writing, Muslim countries or groups are either at war or in a hostile truce with every civilization that Islam abuts, from Nigeria to Xinjiang.

The problem that European Muslims’ solidarity creates, at least potentially, is dual loyalty. Two years into the Iraq war, French authorities had already identified seven French Muslims killed fighting for the insurgency there, a “British brigade” of 150 anti-British Britons was also in the field, and there were recruitment networks set up in Belgium to send further soldiers.

In the case of Omar Khan Sharif and Asif Mohammed Hanif, dual loyalty was not just a potential problem but a clear and present danger. Sharif was born in Derby, grew up there in a red-brick semidetached house, spent two years at a £10,000-a-year preparatory school, and studied at Kingston University. Hanif, while Pakistani born, was no less rooted in English life. Yet the two absorbed a lot of Islamic fundamentalism from their TV sets and computer screens. In 2003, they traveled to a Tel Aviv discotheque in their very British pressed shirts and chinos and murdered several people with suicide bombs. Their Britishness, or at least their British passports, were essential to their crimes. The pair entered Israel from Jordan at a crossing point where Europeans face laxer scrutiny than visitors from the Muslim world.

One student who met Hanif and Sharif in Damascus speculated that they hoped to escape “the soulless wastelands of modernity.” There is nothing un-British or un-European about that. A strain of adventure tourism that seeks and wreaks violence in the service of ideologies both noble and sadistic runs through European history from the Crusades to the Spanish Civil War. These travelers have fulfilled an impulse that Lord Byron described in the “Stanzas” he wrote in November 1820, shortly before his own departure to fight against the Ottoman Empire in Greece:

When a man hath no freedom to fight for at home,
Let him combat for that of his neighbours;
Let him think of the glories of Greece and of Rome,
And get knock’d on the head for his labours.

To do good to mankind is the chivalrous plan,
And is always as nobly requited;
Then battle for freedom wherever you can,
And, if not shot or hang’d, you’ll get knighted.

Omar Abdullah, spokesman for the radical group al-Muhajiroun, said much the same thing in his own hard-line way. He excused the Derby suicide bombers by saying: “British men go off to join the Israeli army and when they die nobody makes anything of it.”

Abdullah has a point in theory. Loyalty to two countries is always potentially problematic. Britons who joined an Israeli militia during Israel’s war for independence in British-mandate Palestine would rightly have had their loyalty questioned. But as far as today’s world is concerned, Abdullah’s point is a disingenuous one. British men do not join the Israeli army for the purpose of killing foreign civilians or making war on Britain, and those are precisely the reasons for which certain Muslim radicals fight abroad. “I know people who went to Iraq to fight off the aggression,” a Syrian-trained exile from Birmingham told a British reporter. “I support them because Iraq is a Muslim country that is being violated by America and Britain.” That is what separates today’s adventure-seeking European Islamists from their Byronic forebears.

But where terrorism is not involved, dual loyalty can be a vague, dangerous, and constitutionally corrosive thing to allege. Are radical political opinions enough to justify a charge of disloyalty? Surely not. How about allegiance to some radical group? Depends on the group and its aims.

Such questions are complicated by subventions that the mostly conservative Gulf states pay to build up the institutions of European Islam, often with the complicity of European countries. Saudi Arabia, where conservative Wahhabism predominates, pays vast sums for building mosques and other institutions. The Saudis have contributed £100 million to a controversial project to build the largest mosque in Europe in East London in time for the 2012 Olympics. In France, the UOIF, an umbrella group of doctrinaire Muslim youth organizations, gets a quarter of its annual budget from Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Kuwait, and other foreign donors. Stockholm’s Great Mosque was long financed by a sheikh from the United Arab Emirates.

Europeans face a trade-off. On the one hand, the Gulf states’ brand of Islam can be seen as anti-Western, as contributing to the radicalization of European Muslim populations. French Islamologists say that the extent of Saudi support in Europe is greatly underestimated, since a lot of the other governments that putatively support French mosques—such as Algeria, which funds the Great Mosque of Paris—use money passed through from the Saudis. But foreign funding is not a bad thing in every respect. In both Spain and the Netherlands, some dogged foes of fundamentalism support foreign subventions on the grounds that it is easier to pressure, say, the king of Morocco, than a charismatic underground imam who draws his support from unknown sources, whether criminal gangs or religious fanatics.

More complicated cases arise with nonstate organizations that explicitly indoctrinate their members against any loyalty other than that toward the organization itself. Hizb ut-Tahrir, the radical offshoot of the Muslim Brotherhood founded in Jordan in 1953, aims at the restoration of the Muslim caliphate, which was abolished along with the Ottoman Empire in 1924. Its members take a solemn oath to “carry out even those decisions of the party leaders that I find objectionable.” Yet, since Hizb ut-Tahrir does not explicitly authorize assaults on European states, European countries have differed on how to address it, just as they differed on how to address membership in the Communist Party half a century ago. Russia and Germany ban Hizb ut-Tahrir (both due to alleged anti-Semitism); the Netherlands, Denmark, and Britain have discussed banning it; but most permit it to operate legally.

Hizb ut-Tahrir is not the only group that remains inside the letter of the Western law while straying far outside its spirit. The Salafist (fundamentalist) as-Soennah mosque in The Hague, under the influence of the Syrian-born imam Fawaz Jneid, does not promote violence, but it does promote a distance between its members and Western institutions. Several women of the Hofstad network, the group out of which Theo van Gogh’s killer came, asked the imam if they had his permission to testify in a Dutch court of law in the Hofstad case. (He granted it.)

Humiliation and Islamophobia

Europeans asserted that they were bending over backward to accommodate Islam, and they were. For the first time in modern history, European societies were taking pains to allow residents—and, increasingly, citizens—to lead their entire lives in a foreign culture. Mostly this separation was achieved through private initiatives. An Arab immigrant to Germany, for instance, could “assimilate” into the “Arab part” of his new, multicultural country, into the “ethnic colonies” Rauf Ceylan wrote of. At the Saudi-sponsored King Fahd Academy in Bonn, students’ weekly curriculum consisted of twelve hours of religion, six hours of Arabic, and one hour of German.

But public authorities approved—and even funded—similarly separatist facilities. Mohammed Bouyeri, Theo van Gogh’s killer, demanded shuttle-bus service to his publicly funded youth clubhouse. He insisted that municipal authorities renovate his parents’ flat in line with Islamic custom. Just months before he killed Van Gogh, Bouyeri had slashed a policeman’s neck with a knife—and received a twelve-week sentence for it. The largesse, nonjudgmentalism, and leniency of European governments bred contempt, and a temptation, wrote the journalist Ian Buruma, to “milk the state.”

Yet despite this private and public largesse, accusations have multiplied that Europe is biased and prejudiced against Muslims, and even “Islamophobic.” Immigrants often proclaimed their disappointment with Europe, and even a sense that they had been “had.” Reckoning integration in Sweden “a complete failure,” Massoud Kamali, an influential Iranian-born professor of ethnic studies at Uppsala, talked in 2005 of the high hopes many immigrants had brought: “Many of us saw Sweden as the homeland of tolerance, solidarity and democracy, based on the image of Sweden abroad.” Yet, he said, the foreign-born found that the longer they lived in Sweden, the more foreign they felt.

As Hans Magnus Enzensberger has noted, this rise in rancor is part of a paradox of liberal progress. The fairer, the more egalitarian, the less racist society becomes, the more humiliating failure in it is felt to be. People become more “disappointable,” more desperate for scapegoats and all-encompassing alibis. This happens in small ways (when egos get damaged) and in large (when cultures lose prestige). And as more Europeans began to question multiculturalism, another kind of disappointment rose up among immigrants. Europe’s welcome to them felt like a bait-and-switch, a bargain broken. Part of the attractiveness of settling in Europe in the first place had been the understanding that Europeans would accept foreigners as they were. And Europe had done just that. But if foreigners remained as they were, if they kept their non-European identity, they would get only halting access to the economy, the civilization, the institutions that they had come to Europe for in the first place.

The transition from an industrial to a service economy, which has “humanized” the workplace for many people, has also created new opportunities for humiliation, envy, and ethnic resentment. It was often lamented in the past that factory jobs were unfulfilling or, to use the Marxist term, alienating. But just for that reason, an industrial economy—and perhaps only an industrial economy—could absorb people from different cultures without automatically provoking dangerous cultural conflict. What was essentially human about a factory worker was simply not at stake in the workplace. If you were a Muslim and your co-worker was a Christian, it didn’t matter—both of you turned lathes the same way. Today’s Western service economy, by contrast, involves a lot of self-expression, bought servility, and even intimacy; it is organized around sensual and other pleasures. An immigrant family living in Germany in 1975 would have been proud to have its daughter working at a big international corporation like Siemens. Would the same family be proud, decades later, to have a granddaughter working at a big international corporation like Hooters?

If we return to Huntington’s observation about the frictions between Islam and every single culture with which it is in contact, or if we consider the penury, servitude, violence, and mediocrity of Muslim societies worldwide…how do we explain it? Either there is a major problem with Islam that must be addressed by Muslims themselves, or a wide variety of non-Muslim cultures has, by incredible coincidence, developed exactly the same unfair malevolence toward Islam. Naturally, this last is attractive to activist immigrants and their defenders. It is what they are referring to when they speak of Islamophobia.

It is tempting to look at Islamophobia as a translation into the European idiom of American-style political correctness. In this view, Islam is simply the latest category, after gender, sexual preference, age, and so forth, added to the prim way that Americans invented to talk about their race problem during the civil rights era. But Islamophobia is a more labile term than that. It encompasses misconduct toward Muslims, racism, fear of Muslim radicalism, and political opposition to certain Islamist political tendencies. Those who accuse others of Islamophobia often want to have their cake and eat it. Any European reluctance to embrace Islamic immigration gets called Islamophobia. So does any suggestion that immigrants or their children adapt to European ways.

Some Europeans condescendingly assume that those who embrace their Islamic identity are just seeking consolation for their poor education or low job status, but that is wrong. “On the contrary,” found a German study released in 2007, “Muslims living in areas with a lower unemployment rate seem to display a higher sense of identity.” Nor was the problem that immigrant Muslims were reluctant to “give up” their traditions. Muslim traditions exercised a strong pull even on the European-born children whose families had already given them up. Something drew ethnic Muslims to return to their cultural origins—even those whose families had been in Europe so long that their “origins” might be little more than a parody, a hobby, an affectation, a romantic dream.

The old identities didn’t seem to go away. They were always ready to be tapped into at any time by second- or third-generation Muslims somehow discontent with European culture. Europe was full of Muslim “community leaders” who, while of Muslim background, had learned their Arabic not over the kitchen table but at the university. On one hand, it seemed shameful to view their acquisition of a foreign language with any more suspicion than one would direct toward any other European doing the same. On the other hand, it was hard not to wonder whether they were learning that foreign language in hopes of becoming something other than European. Mohammed Sidique Khan, the mastermind of the 7/7 bomb plot, spoke in a thick accent typical of his part of Yorkshire and played soccer with a lot of native English “mates” who called him “Sid.” His problem was not that he had “failed to assimilate”—it was that he had chosen to dis-assimilate.

Khan was making an individual choice to seek his “roots.” But a sense of alienation from wider European culture does not always arise this way. In some families, the sense of belonging not to one’s country but to one’s religion is inculcated early. One investigation of schools by the French ministry of education found:

Many French and even second-generation French students of North African origin, who make up the majority in certain schools, live as if they are foreign to the national community. They reply to anything you say to them with two categories: “the French” and “us.” Where once they claimed an Arab identity (which is not, by the way, always self-evident for North Africans), today they increasingly claim a “Muslim” identity. This is an indoctrination that begins as early as primary school, certain teachers claim. Many schoolchildren, if you ask them what their nationality is, will reply, “Muslim.” If you inform them that they are French, as we did in a junior high school in the Paris suburbs, they reply that that is impossible, because they’re Muslims!

Thus did Muslim immigration diverge from earlier immigrations. Newly acquired national allegiances were negotiable, revocable, provisional. Whether this was due to the timeless nature of Islam or to the changing world of the twenty-first century, Europe was not dealing with an ordinary immigration problem at all, but with an adversary culture.

Muslims and U.S. blacks

We have already remarked that the European experience of Muslim immigration has less in common with the American experience of immigration (largely a success) than with the American experience of race (an enduring problem, with all successes attained only at very steep costs). It is not so much that the living conditions of Muslims resemble those of inner-city U.S. blacks in the late twentieth century—although they sometimes do, with drugs, crime, rioting, and dead-end school systems creating problems that look insoluble. It is also that their cultural self-understanding has more in common with American blacks than with immigrants. Black culture could be called an “adversary culture”—a culture built on distrust toward the dominant one, and tending to hold oppositional views on almost all political questions.

An adversary culture is not necessarily a “sick” or a “failed” culture, as some critics would have it. In fact, American black culture is a gloriously robust culture by two important measures. First, it has remained intact through the cyclone of globalization, even surviving its own enrichment (in contrast to, say, the culture of contemporary Ireland, whose natives abandoned their traditions as soon as they could buy their way out of them). Second, its cultural products have swept the world.

Nowhere has U.S. black culture evoked more emulation and empathy than among European Muslims. One Turkish rapper, a fan of Dr. Dre, Eminem, and 50 Cent, said he felt “a certain commonality” with black Americans. “In America it’s called slavery,” he said. “Here it’s called Gastarbeiter.” By the time of the French riots in 2005, in which arsonists in €200 basketball shoes and sideways New York Yankees caps communicated with the television cameras in gestures copied off of rap videos, these gestures and this garb had become part of what the American cultural historian Mark Lilla called “a universal culture of the wretched of the earth.”

But for all its remarkable internal coherence and its vast cultural influence, black America remains the poorest of America’s subcultures, and has been subordinated for centuries. Blacks have been a cultural problem for the United States, but not a cultural threat to it. Before the days of the Internet, it was natural to view European Muslims, in each individual country, as a subculture even less influential than American blacks—exiled, rootless, divided amongst itself, and infinitesimally small. Today they are none of those things. A fast-shrinking population of several hundred million Europeans lives north of the Mediterranean, while a fast-growing population of several hundred million lives south of it, with a desire to take up residence in Europe that seems unslakeable. What is more, a certain part of it is dedicated to Europe’s destruction by armed violence. This part may be small, but the London and Madrid bombings show that it is very difficult to determine satisfactorily how small. In an age of global communications Islam does not look like a “sub” -culture in any sense of the word. There are 1.2 billion Muslims, bound together by the Internet in a global ummah, or nation of believers. In most cases this is a pro forma kind of belonging, but in some it involves a fervid kind of loyalty.

Since Muslims make up roughly half of the “new European” population, they could come to constitute a dominant culture among immigrants as a whole, even those who do not profess the Muslim faith. They could be a Leitkultur, to use the German idea of a “leading culture” in a different context. Latin Americans provided a similar Leitkultur to American protest marchers in the 1980s. Whether they were protesting the Ku Klux Klan or nuclear power, they would chant, “¡El pueblo! / ¡Unido! / ¡Jamás será vencido!”—in a language borrowed from another cause, understood neither by the marchers nor the people they were defending nor the people they were addressing.

From a similar fascination with ghettoized Muslim communities, there has developed an idiom useful for rallying the disgruntled. One can see it in the successes of Islamist proselytizers among non-Muslim convicts. One can also see it at the level of gangs. Almost the entire wave of attacks on Jews that began in France in 2002 was instigated by beurs (French Muslims of North African descent)—but in many cases African and Caribbean neighbors of the organizers joined them as accomplices. The Muslim-led gang of two dozen self-described “barbarians” who used acid, knives, and lighter fluid to torture to death the Jewish cell-phone salesman Ilan Halimi over three weeks in 2006 was a multicultural mix of recent immigrants from Africa and Asia, as well as several French-born minorities. What is developing resembles a system of cujus regio ejus religio (“Whose rule, his religion”) at the level of a cell block or street gang or elevator bank.