Chapter 8
Rules for Sex
Sexual freedom as a nonnegotiable European demand—Virginity and violence—Islam or custom?—The appeal of sharia—Arranged marriages—The Danish marriage law—Controversies over the headscarf—The French veil law—Compulsory liberation
Muslims in Europe arrive from (or are reared by parents from) cultures where women are strictly subordinated to their husbands and, more generally, to men. Sometimes this subordination is justified religiously, sometimes not, but in the Muslim world it is a near-universal sociological fact. Newcomers to Europe land in a society intent on proclaiming the equality of the sexes. That is a shock. To many Muslim males it is also a fraud. They claim that European society actually oppresses them, and they have a point. European bosses and bouncers, teachers and police, are petrified of Muslim men, whom they associate with delinquency, crime, and bad school grades. Women find it easier to enter the corporate world, hang around in public spaces, and gain admission to nightclubs. Educational discrepancies are big and growing. In the Netherlands, there are slightly more native women than men studying law; among non-Western immigrants and their offspring, however, women outnumber men in law schools almost two to one. Marriages in which the wife works as executive secretary to the owner of a law firm or assistant to a top surgeon, while the husband drives a cab or collects unemployment, are not uncommon.
Sexual freedom as a nonnegotiable European demand
Most European leaders, like most American leaders, proclaim that the sexes are equal and identical. But there is a difference. The United States is considerably more tolerant of women who choose not to work, or who want to live in domestic arrangements of the kind that were commonplace fifty years ago. In much of Europe, certainly in the minds of the northern European ruling class, such wiggle room is associated with backsliding and cultural surrender. The occupation of housewife exists neither as an aspiration nor even as an intellectual category. In Sweden in 2005, the feminist essayist Nina Björk sparked a national debate when she had the temerity to suggest, in an op-ed in the national newspaper Dagens Nyheter, that children might be better off being raised by their own parents than in state-subsidized, one-size-fits-all child care. The Dutch film that instructs immigrant would-be citizens on their responsibilities insists that: “In the Netherlands, the aim is that everyone works, both men and women, so each has his or her income. This applies to women with children, too.” The two-income household is not an option, as it would be in the United States—it is an aim.
Adapting to European styles of sexuality and gender relations is the only nonnegotiable demand that Europe makes of its immigrants. So tightly are ideas about feminism bound to assimilation that Sweden has a cabinet member (Burundi-born Nyamko Sabuni, at the time of this writing) who serves as “minister of integration and gender equality,” as if those two briefs were just different names for the same thing. Europeans may be reluctant to proclaim any preference for their own high culture and cuisine over foreign ones, eager to give way on freedom of speech when it hurts Muslim sensibilities, and willing to tar as extremist or fascist anyone who holds that Islam poses an especial danger of terrorism. Sex is different. It is the litmus test according to which assimilation—and even membership in the national community—is judged. It is the one area where Europeans retain both a deep suspicion of Muslim ways and a confidence in their own institutions that is free of self-doubt.
What is more, the suspicion falls directly and uneuphemistically on Islam the religion, and not any epiphenomenon, such as “poverty” or “segregation” or “tradition.” In Great Britain—the European country where the attitudes of Muslims and non-Muslims toward women are closest—60 percent of natives consider Muslims “disrespectful” to women. The mistrust is mutual in all countries. If you ask Spanish non-Muslims whether Muslims are “respectful of women,” they reply “no,” by 83 percent to 12. If you ask Spanish Muslims whether non-Muslims respect women, they reply “no,” by nearly identical measures (82 percent to 13). Of the traditionalist Muslim view that women who wear revealing clothing are inviting sexual aggression, the Egyptian-Dutch feminist Nahed Selim writes: “A great number of Dutch Muslims are probably in full agreement with this sentiment, even if, for understandable reasons, they would never say so in public.”
The collision of feminism and Muslim immigration creates a man problem. To many Muslim men, it is not obvious that the Western system of rights for women is superior on its merits. Humiliated by a reversal of the traditional economic relations between men and women, panicked to see their women free of their control in a rich and hedonistic society, they are liable to look nostalgically on the traditions of the old country, where sexual conduct is more closely monitored by communities. This does not go just for immigrant men but for their European-born sons, who may blame Western feminism for the low status, the gelding, of their fathers. Men take refuge in spaces that they can control: housing projects, social clubs, and especially mosques. Mosques are male institutions in most places in the world, just as churches tend to be female ones. Among Algerians in France, for instance, about 15 percent of men attend services, versus 6 percent of women. As Muslim institutions proliferate—however moderate or public-spirited they may be—an alternative model of gender relations proliferates with them.
Virginity and violence
Alongside each culture’s rhetoric of women’s rights is an idea that the rival culture’s values are a threat to young women’s virtue. For many immigrants, virtue takes the traditional form of chastity; for many Westerners, it takes the newer form of sexual autonomy. The two are often incompatible. “Female circumcision” (mutilation or removal of the clitoris in childhood) and infibulation (stitching the vagina shut) are customs common in East African Muslim countries such as Somalia, Sudan, and, to a lesser extent, Egypt. Although the practices are generally justified with reference to Muslim ideas of purity, most scholars don’t believe there is anything specific to the Koran or sharia that requires them. Certainly genital mutilation is rare in most of the Muslim world.
Whatever their justification in their countries of origin, they can have no place in a sexual culture built on autonomy. You might assume that one of those models—either the chastity model or the autonomy model—would have to go. Not necessarily. European history is full of instances where public sexual mores coexist with very different private ones. A study by Amsterdam’s Free University found that among some East African immigrant groups, genital mutilation is widespread—although it is usually carried out on visits to the old country, in order to avoid criminal prosecution. Such practices are defended ferociously. The Antwerp senator Mimount Bousakla has received threats of violence for her own attempts to stamp out genital mutilation in Belgium.
The course of the genital-mutilation controversy in Sweden shows that integrating big populations from markedly different cultures can mean trading rights to get social peace. Nyamko Sabuni, understandably alarmed over reports of genital mutilation, called for nationally supervised gynecological inspections of little girls. It was rejected by Muslims and non-Muslims alike as an invasion of privacy. Which, of course, it was. One can applaud the seriousness with which she takes the problem, but one must also recognize the damage that her approach does to the country’s constitutional order. Fifty years ago, if a politician had suggested that parents be required to subject their young daughters to an intimate, government-monitored strip search, the public would have reeled in horror. Today, the emergency of genital mutilation makes such practices seem defensible, if not yet feasible.
Middle Eastern mores, stringently applied, are incompatible with Western ones, whether Christian or secular. But they are famously compatible with Western science and technology. Strategically, this mix has given us the hybrid ideology of Islamist terrorism. Economically, it has given us the shopping mall culture of the Gulf States. Culturally, it has turned many of Europe’s housing projects into jazzed-up, Internet-savvy versions of traditional Muslim villages, where a girl’s virginity is her most prized asset. Muslim parents sometimes request “certifications of virginity” from their daughters’ gynecologists. In Holland, repair of broken hymens was often covered by national insurance until the ministry of health blocked it in May 2004. A small scandal erupted in Britain in 2007 upon the discovery that the National Health Service had paid for dozens of “hymen replacement operations” over the previous two years. Britain’s Daily Mail interviewed one doctor who specialized in such operations, including pre-wedding ones in which “a membrane is constructed, sometimes including a capsule of an artificial blood-like substance.” This hybrid culture, this technologically advanced Puritanism, really is something alternative and new. It is in the most literal sense an advance for “diversity,” although you are unlikely to hear it extolled as such.
There is a lot to be said for placing a high value on chastity and virginity. It can further dignity, responsibility, and self-respect. What is outrageous about surgeries meant to “restore” virginity is not that they are prudish. It is that they are unpleasant, hypocritical, and sometimes paid for with public funds. Beyond that, provided they are freely elected, it is hard to say why they should offend us more than a vasectomy does. Or more than the various lifts, grafts, tucks, and piercings that Westerners undergo in order to live up to their own society’s reasonable or unreasonable sexual expectations, or (what amounts to the same thing) to fend off their own reasonable or unreasonable self-loathing.
Still, you don’t have to be a feminist or a libertine to understand that, on an anthropological level, an obsession with virginity can do something less pleasant. The most frequent criticism is that, human drives being what they are, it is hard in practice for people to remain celibate until marriage and that, when the flesh is weak, it is women, not men, who are held culpable. But in a sexist subculture, that is only one of a woman’s worries. Male-dominated societies lay down codes of virginity not although they are hard to live up to but because they are hard to live up to. Such codes create a category of “sluts”—women who can be used sexually with a clear conscience because they have trespassed society’s laws and thereby forfeited society’s respect. And where families, police, and other social institutions are weak, what results is a sexual reign of terror.
Samira Bellil, an Algerian-born resident of the really tough Paris suburb of Seine-St-Denis, spent her short life (she died of cancer in 2004) bringing to public attention the practice of tournantes, or gang rapes, carried out in a number of French housing projects. Bellil had been raped several times, starting at the age of fourteen, by gangs led by a single particularly enterprising local youth. When several of Bellil’s friends told her that he had victimized them, too, she made the decision to go to the police and press charges against him. At that point, her parents disowned her.
The vaguer and the more arbitrary the sexual code being enforced, the better it suits predatory men. In 2002, Sohane Benziane, a young Berber woman living near Paris, was taken by a gang to an abandoned basement where a local caïd (or gang leader) named Jamal Derrar, who had hoped to have sex with her but wasn’t having much luck, poured gasoline on her and burned her alive. Derrar, who described Benziane as his “fiancée,” convinced himself that she had embarrassed the community through some breach of propriety that existed mostly in his own head. This was the episode that led the Algerian-French anti-racist activist Fadela Amara (later France’s secretary of state for urban affairs) to found the grassroots organization Ni Putes Ni Soumises (“Neither whores nor submissives”).
So-called “honor killings,” the most serious form of sexual intimidation, are concentrated in Kurdish and, to a lesser extent, Pakistani communities. Brothers murder their sisters (or fathers their daughters) for some trespass against sexual propriety—usually either wearing Western clothing or dating Western men. There were forty-five such murders in Germany alone in the first half of the decade, according to a 2005 study by the Federal Criminal Investigation Agency. In Berlin, Hatun Sürücü “dishonored” her family by dating a German and raising a child on her own. Her spectacular killing by several of her brothers in broad daylight in early 2005 was one of a half-dozen honor killings that year in Berlin alone.
Fadime Sahindal, a Kurdish immigrant to Sweden, created a national outrage when she spoke in the Riksdag in 2001 about how she had been stalked across the country by her father and brothers when it was discovered she had fallen in love with a Swedish boy:
All of a sudden, I had been transformed from a nice Kurdish girl into a slut. I decided to break with my family and move to Sundsvall. My brother found me and threatened me. The situation got worse and worse. The reason that my brother came was that he was a minor and wouldn’t be punished as severely by the law.
Using minors for enforcement is a common pattern in honor-related violence, including Hatun Sürücü’s murder. Kurdish families may be too confused by Western culture to grant their women autonomy, Sahindal implied, but they are quite savvy enough to understand that Western penal codes give juveniles virtual impunity even for crimes as serious as attempted murder. A restraining order was placed on Sahindal’s father. But eight weeks later he ambushed her on a visit to her mother in Uppsala and shot her dead.
Islam or custom?
In sharp contrast to, say, urban rioting or anti-American or anti-Israeli demonstrations, Muslim violence against women elicits no calls for an “understanding” of the circumstances that give rise to it. Roger Cohen, a sensitive and nuanced writer about European immigration, writes of honor killings: “An authentic culture is one thing, trampling on fundamental human rights like the equality of men and women quite another.” That Kurdish culture can be violent and sexist does not make it inauthentic. Nor is the equality of men and women “fundamental”—in fact, in a global perspective, it is rather peculiar. It is the attainment of one strand of Western social thought that begins in the nineteenth century.
It takes very few acts of violence to threaten that attainment for an entire community of Muslim women. It will be many years before the murder of Fadime Sahindal is not in the back of the mind of a lot of Kurdish women in Sweden. Acts such as the burning of Sohane Benziane do more than terrorize and kill. Such acts make law. They assert sovereignty over a certain part of European territory for a different sexual regime. What is the nature of that regime? Is it, in fact, Islam that is being promulgated when women are shot, burned, and mutilated? Or is that just an after-the-fact excuse for thuggery?
The question is hard to answer. The subordination of women is certainly a part of most Islamic cultures. Female circumcision and the disciplinary violence of honor killing both arise out of specific traditions in East Africa and eastern Anatolia that are Muslim. Yet we should not confuse the misogyny and lawbreaking of certain Muslims with conservative Islam as a whole, still less with radical Islam. Conservative Muslims in the West have often taken the lead in rooting out cultural practices that secular Westerners find most abhorrent. Hassan Moussa of the Swedish Imam Council has been in the forefront of efforts to prevent female circumcision. In Duisburg, a campaign against traditional Turkish cousin marriage was led by Yasemin Yadigaroglu, a devout, hijab-wearing Muslim, who called it “a misrepresentation of Islam.”
The most politicized Muslims, the radicals or Islamists, do not always have a predictable relationship to gender relations—they can be either traditional or modern, either egalitarian or sexist. The young women of the Hofstad network, the group out of which Theo van Gogh’s killer came, told the Dutch investigative journalist Janny Groen that radicalism for them was an escape from tradition. “They are going to lessons in mosques where they are taught about the ‘pure’ Islam of 1400 years ago,” Groen writes. “Men and women are biologically different, they are told, but were equal in those times. They learn, in a frank way, about their sexual rights. For those girls ‘pure Islam’ seems to liberate them from oppressive partners.” They have even found a loophole in Islamic law that allows them to partake, however casuistically, of the ambient promiscuity of Dutch society—informally polygamous “marriages” that last from five days to a couple of months.
The British journalist Shiv Malik found the same thing among British radicals. “One of the biggest factors that has helped the growth of British Islamic radicalism is marriage,” he wrote. “Islamism’s most important tenet is that Muslims should not be divided by race or nationalism—that all Muslims are one. It therefore can offer an Islamic route out of having to marry your cousin.” Western hedonism is an object of scorn for a lot of Muslim radicals—but a desire to escape traditional households and have more sex can in some cases be an incentive for young Muslims to radicalize.
The appeal of sharia
“Taken one by one,” writes the French Islam expert Olivier Roy, “the elements (the veil, halal) that seem incompatible between Islam and the West actually are not, even on the woman question.” But taken one by one, the pieces of a gun are harmless. Europeans sense that the special dangers to assimilation that Islam poses have something to do with the way everything fits together—with the comprehensiveness of Islam’s alternative system, the collection of holy laws known as sharia. Even if people can be liberated from oppressive moral conventions, they cannot be liberated from their need for moral conventions altogether. “Individual conscience” most often means the freedom to choose among such conventions, combined with the integrity to choose well. It is human nature to gravitate toward conventions that are confidently asserted and tested by time.
Sharia meets that description. It is, of course, a variable thing. For Europeans, sharia is a frightening tabloid specter: lopping off people’s hands for theft, as occurs in Saudi Arabia; stoning adulteresses to death, as has been the practice in Iran since the Khomeini revolution of 1979. Sharia is that, of course. But it is also a pedestrian, and frequently admirable, European reality. There are halal butchers across the continent. There are sharia-conforming stock funds (such as those offered by Deutsche Bank) for Muslims who don’t want to invest in alcohol, tobacco, pork, or gambling. (Many of these outperformed the market in 2008.) There are imams and scholars who arbitrate divorce proceedings. The crucial question is whether sharia will continue to be a private and voluntary matter (in the way of, say, kosher practices) or whether it will receive some kind of recognition from the state.
Europe is tending in the latter direction. In 2008, the archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, gave a talk about religion and British law before the Royal Courts of Justice. In an interview about the speech, he noted, “We already have in this country a number of situations in which the internal law of religious communities is recognised by the law of the land.” He was talking, on the one hand, about conscientious objection and, on the other, about the recourse Orthodox Jews have to rabbinical courts in adjudicating marriages and divorces. So in his lecture he suggested, gingerly, “a delegation of certain legal functions to the religious courts of a community.”
A predictable drama ensued. Stage one: There was an uproar in the tabloids over the idea that the archbishop had backed sharia. (“Victory for Terrorism,” “Arch Enemy,” and “Bish Bosh: What a Load of Tosh” were some of the headlines that ran in the Sun.) Stage two: An equally strident defense of the archbishop was made by activist Muslims who now inferred that Jews were favored—or at least treated better than Muslims were—under British law. Stage three: Archbishop Williams and the “thoughtful” part of the press argued that the archbishop’s subtle points had been misunderstood and distorted by a coarse public.
But in this case, the tabloids were more clear-eyed than the archbishop’s defenders. In fact, those rabbinical courts, Battei Din (“houses of justice”), which have existed in Britain since the eighteenth century, are recognized only as a form of binding arbitration, of the sort that companies can submit to in business dealings. The decisions they ratify are not part of the “law of the land,” except to the extent that they involve contracts. Similar arrangements are available to Muslims if they wish them. That being the case, what new accommodations for Muslims could Williams be arguing for at such length? He did, in fact, seem to be arguing for community jurisdiction over believers (albeit with the state as a decider of last resort), and not simply for any individual’s right to enter into contracts of binding arbitration.
The tabloid-reading public is not off-base to fear the introduction of sharia law—as law—in certain European communities. In Britain, 37 percent of Muslims between sixteen and twenty-four want the introduction of sharia law, and 37 percent favor executing Muslims who renounce Islam. In Ireland, a majority of Muslims (57 percent) wish for Ireland to become an Islamic state. These attitudes are consistent with a dislocated people taking refuge in nostalgia. They are also consistent with a people patiently conquering Europe’s cities, street by street. In late 2006, the Dutch justice minister, Piet-Hein Donner, said in an interview, “If two-thirds of all Dutch people should want to introduce sharia tomorrow, then surely that would be possible? Surely there could be no objection under the law? And it would be a shame to say: ’You can’t do that.’ The majority is what counts. That is the very essence of democracy” He is right, of course. It is not the essence of liberalism, but it is the essence of democracy. It is unlikely that two-thirds of Dutch people will want sharia any time soon. But it is probable that two-thirds of certain smaller, heavily immigrant communities want it now. There is a liberal case to be made against these communities, but there is not a democratic case against them.
Some aspects of sharia that touch on sex are hard to regulate, once democracy has opted for sexual liberation. Maybe this seems paradoxical but it is not. The acceptance of polygamy, for instance, would seem to be a logical consequence of the attack on “morals” legislation carried out over the last half century, from the overturning of the British ban on Lady Chatterley’s Lover in 1960 to France’s PACS and other civil-union laws enacted after the 1990s. What all such reforms have in common is that they make sexual morality a matter of individual conscience. The right they give people is the right to organize their interpersonal affairs on a contractual basis, with no intervention from the state, and no recognition of time-honored social norms. Once the state can no longer insist that marriage involve a commitment to a member of the opposite sex, there are no grounds (other than superstition) for insisting that marriage be limited to one person rather than several.
Polygamy, traditional in some Muslim cultures, has seldom been a flashpoint of public opinion. Not even the potential cost of caring, through the welfare state, for extra foreign-born spouses has riled Europeans particularly. In 1991, the Dutch liberal politician Frits Bolkestein made a speech in Groningen in which he tried to establish the principle that there could be no family reunification immigration on the basis of polygamous marriage. He was rebuked by the JOVD, the youth organization of his own party, and attacked by others for fomenting “anti-Islamism.” In February 2008, the British Department for Work and Pensions issued guidelines giving recognition (and some benefits) to additional spouses. “Where there is a valid polygamous marriage the claimant and one spouse will be paid the couple rate,” the guidelines ran. “The amount payable for each additional spouse is presently £33.65.”
Where polygamy has become contentious, it has been over issues other than sexual morality and money. Most observers believe there are tens of thousands of polygamous families in France, many of them of West African origin. In the wake of the riots in the country’s banlieues in November 2005, two French politicians of the ruling UMP party, labor minister Gérard Larcher and party leader Bernard Accoyer, sought to blame polygamy. But just how polygamy was supposed to be at fault was unclear—it had something to do with cramped living spaces. One got the impression there was an ulterior goal in bringing marriage into the discussion, and there was.
Arranged marriages
In a lot of European countries, marriage is not just an aspect of the immigration problem; it is the immigration problem. When Germany’s guest worker program was abruptly halted during the economic crisis of 1973, large-scale immigration from Turkey scarcely abated. For years, political asylum was easy for Turks to obtain, owing to political assassinations, military coups, and the violent Kurdish nationalist movement in eastern Anatolia. Since getting overwhelmed by refugees during the Balkan wars of the 1990s, Germany, like most of its neighbors, has steadily tightened its criteria for political asylum.
But one avenue into Europe has remained wide open—because it cannot be closed without compromising the rights of natives. Half of ethnically Turkish German citizens seek their spouses in Turkey, according to the interior ministry. For years, about 25,000 people a year, two-thirds of them women, have successfully applied at consulates in Turkey to form families in Germany. That means, since the mid-1980s, half a million imported spouses—fresh nuclei around whom brothers, sisters, parents, and children can later make their own legal claims to immigrate under family reunification criteria. “Chain migration,” as it is called, ensures exponential growth of minority populations, even if the borders are completely closed to illegal immigrants. The Turkish population in Germany multiplies not once in a life cycle but twice—at childbirth and at marriage.
The situation is similar in every country in Europe. In France, the number of foreign spouses rose from 23,000 in 1990 to more than 60,000 in 2004 and family-related immigration now accounts for 78 percent of permanent legal immigration. In Denmark, the vast majority of first-, second-, and third-generation Turks and Pakistanis take their spouses from the home country; some studies have shown the rate for Turks to be over 90 percent. In the Bradford District Race Review, published after Britain was hit by a wave of race riots in the summer of 2001, Sir Herman (later Lord) Ouseley warned that “50% of the marriages that take place in the Asian community result in an intake of new residents who are unable to communicate in the English language, which limits their participation in mainstream social and educational activities.” Fully 60 percent of Pakistani and Bangladeshi marriages are to spouses born abroad, a major factor in the roughly 50 percent growth of the Pakistani population of Manchester, Birmingham, and Bradford over the 1990s. Six decades into the mass immigration from the Indian subcontinent, three-quarters of Bengali children aged 0–4 have mothers born in Bangladesh.
Why should large numbers of marriage migrants be a problem? If the migrants were assimilating, they wouldn’t be. But the marriages themselves are evidence of a collective choice against assimilation. As the demographers David Coleman and Sergei Scherbov note, marriage migration in Britain “has increased pro rata with the growth of the young age-groups of the Asian ethnic minority populations.” That a preference for marrying foreigners should increase the longer an ethnic group is in a European country is a dismal surprise. It indicates that an “ethnic minority” is waiting patiently not until it is welcome enough to assimilate, but until it is strong enough to separate.
One can well ask whether this choice for separation is being made by immigrants or by natives. In 2000, the German Youth Institute reported that 53 percent of Turkish women from 16 to 29 would not consider marrying a German “under any circumstances.” But the feeling is mutual. A survey taken in the late 1990s found a majority of Germans agreeing it would be “unpleasant” to have a Turkish relative. Among UK Muslims, it appears to be the newcomers who are taking the lead in advancing segregation. The researchers Tariq Modood and Richard Berthoud have shown that only 1 percent of British Bangladeshis and Pakistanis have white partners, versus 20 percent of Afro-Caribbeans.
Marriages among traditional Muslims are seldom Western-style love matches. The Turkish ones in Germany are often arranged by parents. A 2003 study by Germany’s Federal Ministry of Family Affairs found that a quarter of Turkish women in Germany hadn’t even known their partners before they married. The rural Anatolian practice of marrying relatives, usually first cousins, is frequent. It accounts, according to the Center for Turkey Studies at the University of Duisburg-Essen, for between a sixth and a quarter of binational pairings.
These marriages bring Anatolian practices, many of which Europeans hold in contempt, into the heart of Germany. Domestic intimidation—wife beating—is prevalent in a lot of Muslim cultures. Its causes can be questioned, but not its extent. Gülgün Teyhani, who works at a battered women’s shelter in Duisburg, reckoned that of the eighty-six women her house took in in 2006, sixty had a migrant background, and fifty-one of them spoke Turkish. Doctors in Northern England have seen a high number of Pakistani women admitted to hospitals with faces permanently marred by “chip-pan accidents.” Some of these women don’t have a chip pan (what Americans would call a deep-fat fryer) in the house. Scotland Yard suspects they have been punished for some trespass against sexual morality or spousal authority.
A more difficult question is whether these marriages are freely chosen or contracted under compulsion. A 2002 Berlin Senate report documented hundreds of complaints of “forced” marriage. But what constitutes a forced marriage is really in the eye of the beholder. In Turkish culture, for instance, people tend to discuss liberty in terms of the family rather than in terms of the individual. Most Western cultures were sympathetic to this idea of liberty until a very few decades ago. If you embrace this idea of liberty, then Turkish-style betrothals are merely the kind of consultation you would expect in a close family. They don’t involve matchmakers or extra-familial institutions.
Obviously there are culture clashes among immigrant generations. A village-oriented father may settle on some Anatolian village elder as the right match for an Italian-born daughter who is in grad school in Ireland. But not all daughters object to arranged marriages. Nor, necessarily, should they. The track record of these family-arranged marriages in creating durable relationships compares quite favorably—even in Europe—with the record of more individualistic European marriages. The closer one gets to European culture, the farther one gets from family and its raison d’être, children. In North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany’s most populous state, 80 percent of Turks aged twenty-five to thirty-four are married; their average marriage age is twenty-one for women and twenty-four for men. Among non-Turks, only 32 percent of twenty-five- to thirty-four-year-olds are married; the average marriage age is twenty-nine for women and thirty-two for men. Germans have one of the lowest fertility rates in the history of the world—1.36 children per woman, according to 2004 figures. While it is hard to find precise figures for Turks in Germany, the rate is widely agreed to be higher. The rate in Turkey itself is almost twice as high, at 2.4 children per woman. If a good chance of middle-aged childlessness and elderly solitude is the price of assimilation, it is for many Turks an exorbitant one.
German interior minister Wolfgang Schäuble is not inclined to see coercion in these arrangements. “Forced marriages are illegal,” he said in 2007. “They’re assaults on human rights. They don’t meet the minimum demands of a free society. But arranged marriage—that’s a complicated area.” Schäuble admits, though, that the tendency of Turks to bring spouses from abroad is a “main reason why integration isn’t improving with the passing generations.” The hundreds of thousands of new families that have formed through immigration are families in which the children’s first language is more likely to be Turkish than German. You frequently hear stories from schoolteachers about a child of guest workers who was a star pupil in the 1970s but whose own children, although born in Germany, struggle to learn German in grade school. After half a century of immigration, every new generation of Turks is still, to a large extent, a first generation.
The Danish marriage law
Naturally, Europeans see arranged marriage not just as a demographic problem but as a slap in the face, an expression of contempt. Muslims, after having been welcomed into European societies, now turn around and assert that there is no one in their new country worthy of committing to and making a life with. It is not only the European natives who are found wanting—so are the Muslims contaminated with Western habits. To find a “real” man or woman, one must travel to Diyarbakir or Tetuan. According to a study done by the Center for Turkey Studies, young Turkish women and men brought up in Germany view their fellow Turkish Germans of the opposite sex as “distant from their own culture, or ‘degenerate.’” Where traditional young women start families and assimilated ones have trouble finding mates, the next generation is brought up—almost by definition—by those who are least assimilated themselves.
Now let us recall Marcello Peras insistence that any migration from Place A to Place B implies the superiority of the latter’s culture, and consider what an empty platitude it is. The marital behavior of immigrants and their children (not to mention the entire history of colonization) shows that you can migrate to a place while being hostile to it, or at least while holding it in no special regard. Yes, immigrants “just want a better life,” as the cliché goes. But they don’t necessarily want a European life. They may want a Third World life at a European standard of living. They may want to use the cosmopolitanism made possible by the Western rule of law to secure citizenship for their nonfeminist brides and their pre-Enlightenment ways. These marriages are no weaker than European ones, and may indeed be stronger. They could, for that very reason, corrode European social institutions. Virtually every shade of native European opinion, from feminist to nationalist, wishes that they be stopped. But in a society with the rule of law, where even the German interior minister admits that these are marriage compacts entered into freely, how can that be done?
Certain countries in Europe have managed to place sharp restrictions on those who marry foreigners. In each case, it has meant damage to the country’s constitution and has exacted a high price from natives, in the form of both rights and convenience. In the wake of the Van Gogh killing in 2004, the Netherlands imposed mandatory civics examinations and language tests on those seeking to marry Dutch citizens. Both parties to a marriage involving a non-EU citizen had to be over twenty-one. (Studies show that the lower the age of marriage, the greater the tendency to have an arranged marriage.) The German government has followed suit: In 2007, it raised the minimum age of foreign-born spouses to eighteen.
But it was Denmark that went furthest. Under the terms of its Aliens Act, extended and made more stringent under the influence of the anti-immigrant Danish People’s Party (DF) over the last two decades, Denmark’s marriage regime requires a combination of testing, waiting, and exclusion, strictly enforced. Citizens under the age of twenty-four who marry non-EU spouses are not allowed, except in special cases, even to reside in the country. The Danish experiment has been, on its own narrow terms, a stunning success. In 2002, 62.7 percent of marriages by Danes of non-Western background were to foreigners; by 2005, that figure had fallen to 37.9 percent.
What makes the measure defensible against EU human rights laws is that it is race-, religion-, and ethnicity-blind. It achieves this race blindness by stripping rights wantonly from all citizens, rather than targeting the problem it seeks to address. “It has had bizarre consequences for people who would never expect to clash with immigration authorities,” says Tøger Seidenfaden, editor of the daily Politiken, which ran a long campaign against the legislation. “The legislation is the same for a Dane as for a foreigner,” boasts integration minister Rikke Hvilshøj. It does, however, make one constitutional innovation that affects different ethnic groups differently: the tillknytningskrav, a measure of one’s “connection” to Denmark. Citizens can override the measure once they have twenty-eight years of “connection” (which basically means citizenship) to Denmark. A native-born twenty-two-year-old will be able to bring his foreign-born wife to live in Copenhagen in three years, because by then she will have three years of citizenship and he will have twenty-five. But a twenty-year-old who only became a Danish citizen two years ago will have to wait a good long time before he and his wife are welcome. And once that principle has been established, a lot of the sentimental talk about immigration is revealed as either a polite fiction or a cynical imposture. It turns out that, all cant to the contrary, newly naturalized twenty-year-old Mohammed is not “just as Danish as you and I.” He may be eventually. But for now he and his Danish passport are on watch. “We just have to say: It’s necessary,” says Hvilshøj. “I hope someday we don’t need it.”
Denmark has managed to stem the implantation of Muslim culture on its territory by making believe that its worries are over rash marriages in early youth, not over Islam or immigration. European publics are beginning not just to accept but to demand that their governments shade the truth, or at least conceal the intent of the laws they pass. Something similar happened when Europeans grew desperate to stop the spreading use of the Muslim headscarf.
Controversies over the headscarf
Since modesty is enjoined on women in the Koran and Sunna, all Muslim cultures have historically had some form of “veil,” or head covering. This can be a loose scarf, of the sort worn in Turkey. More conservative women wear the hijab, which covers all the hair. The niqab, which reveals only the eyes, is what you see on women in Saudi Arabia, along with the big, black abaya, to cover the body. The notorious burqa, common in Afghanistan when the Taliban were in power, covers absolutely everything.
We have noted that Europeans didn’t think much about the religion of immigrants in the first years after their arrival. As far as women were concerned, they had no reason to. Most daughters of even devout immigrants—in fact, most immigrants—were quickly “emancipated” into a less restraining style of dress. But once Muslims began to feel at home in Europe, this assimilation went into reverse. In the 1980s, women of Muslim background, including ones from non-veil-wearing cultures and families, began to take up the veil. France saw a wave of headscarf controversies starting in 1989, when two girls returned from a summer visit to relatives in Morocco insistent on wearing their headscarves to school in the Paris suburb of Creil. Throughout the 1990s in France, the issue kept getting opened, settled, and reopened through a series of bans, rules, waivers, overturnings, and decrees.
Who adjudicates such matters, and on what basis? In 1985, when Muslim schoolgirls refused to remove their headscarves in the Dutch town of Alphen aan de Rijn, a civil servant asked the late Jan Brugman, an Arabic professor at Leiden University, whether the Koran explicitly commanded that girls wear cover. He answered—defensibly enough—no. But he was not asked about other sources of religious law, and no one’s answer can settle what is basically a political debate. Most Muslims, even those who oppose the headscarf, consider it a religious expression, and are unlikely to be dissuaded from this view by a Koranic scholar.
Westerners, by contrast, have been happy to sound off giddily on what the Koran does and does not say about the veil and other Muslim religious behavior, and on what Muslims need and need not do. Even Bel Mooney, the agony aunt of the Times of London, resorted to scriptural exegesis when she got a letter from a divorcée who had converted to Islam and was wondering how far things were going to go with her new friend, a guy named Hassan. “If he was simply biding his time to be sure of his feelings,” Mooney advised, “he would be acting in a manner approved by the Koran—which does not encourage leading ladies on: ’Do not make troth with them secretly unless you speak honourable words.”
Eventually the veil turned from a nuisance into a menace. In the aftermath of the second intifada in Israel in 2000, and of the attacks on the World Trade Center the following year, French people began to notice that their secondary schools—at least those in Arab areas—had become hotbeds of anti-Semitism and other intimidation and violence. In 2002, Emmanuel Brenner (a pseudonym of the historian Georges Bensoussan) assembled a two-hundred-page book, The Lost Territories of the Republic, recounting dozens of incidents in which students directed ethnic slurs at their teachers and poured loud ridicule on lectures about the Holocaust. The book reportedly made a deep impression on French president Jacques Chirac. That these incidents coincided with the rise of veil wearing in schools made the veil, at least in European eyes, a symbol not just of Muslim identity but also of truculent Islamism.
European natives understood the veil as a banner of solidarity with a violent international political movement. They sought a way to stop young women from wearing it. But in free societies that permit free expression, there are no neutral grounds for banning a particular scrap of clothing. Other grounds had to be found. One promising avenue was to point to the security hazards of letting people go around with their heads covered. There is some precedent for this. For centuries, Italy has had laws against the wearing of masks and disguises (travisamento) in public, and they had been invoked as recently as the 1970s in prosecuting the leftist Red Brigades. Spain, for similar reasons, forbids motorcycle messengers from entering certain offices with their helmets on. Both countries invoked their disguise laws in controversies over the veil. It was not an outlandish thing to worry about. In 2006, Mustaf Jama, the most wanted criminal in Britain at the time, who had been accused of killing a policewoman in the course of a robbery, was able to escape from the country on a commercial flight to Somalia by disguising himself in his sister’s niqab. (In late 2007 he was arrested in Africa and deported back to Britain.)
But generally, when they complained about the “dangers” of veiling, politicians were talking about dangers to something more abstract: Europe’s feminist order. They heard the stories of sexual violence in Muslim-controlled housing projects. They looked at places like Rosengård in Sweden, where even the women from non-veil-wearing cultures take up the veil. This looked like a contagion of either intimidation or peer pressure, although it could just as easily be viewed as a matter of privacy. Since equality of women is such a bedrock, nonnegotiable principle of modern European societies, the veil was most often interpreted as a political challenge, a symbolic rejection of Western ways.
In England, a 2007 study showed that slightly more than half of Muslims in Britain (53 percent) would prefer that women wear the veil. But that number disguises an overwhelming turn toward tradition on the part of younger generations. Only 28 percent of those over fifty-five prefer the veil, while 74 percent of those aged eighteen to twenty-four do. Most UK polling about religious practice reveals a similar hardening of views among younger respondents. Almost a third of British Muslims believe that converting to another religion “is forbidden and punishable by death.” But that breaks down to 19 percent of those over fifty-five and 36 percent of those eighteen to twenty-four.
Those numbers were recorded shortly after a young woman named Aishah Azmi was fired from her position as a schoolteacher in Dewsbury for insisting on teaching in her niqab. Although a local court backed her firing, it ordered the school to pay her £1,100 in damages for the hostile environment it had created. British prime minister Tony Blair backed the school’s ouster of Azmi. “It is a mark of separation,” he said of niqab wearing, “and that is why it makes other people from outside the community feel uncomfortable. No one wants to say that people don’t have the right to do it.” Actually Blair was wrong on both counts—98 percent of Britons, if the rampaging tabloid the Daily Express was to be believed, did think the niqab ought to be banned. And what, specifically, was wrong with a “mark of separation”? It would not have been out of place for devout Muslims to ask what the prime minister thought the periwigs people wore in the House of Lords were.
Jack Straw, who at that point had just left his post as Britain’s foreign secretary, also warned that the veil was becoming a “visible statement of separation and difference.” That was an alarming reversal. Straw had built his political career in the increasingly Muslim and increasingly segregated city of Blackburn, where U.S. national security adviser Condoleezza Rice was met with such hostility on a visit in 2006 that the public appearances she was scheduled to make with Straw had to be canceled. Throughout his political career, Straw had been an optimistic and enthusiastic supporter of multiculturalism.
Now, in the twilight of his political career, he granted that, well, yes, there were reasons to worry. This was a pattern in matters concerning Islam—politicians seemed to express their true feelings only on the verge of retirement, or afterwards. The outspoken former cabinet member George Walden wrote that he, too, would keep his counsel under today’s circumstances:
I’d be so alarmed by the situation I’d do everything possible to suggest it was under control. It’s up to politicians to play mood music in a crisis, and up to the people to understand that there’s little else governments can do. The last thing they can say is that we face a threat to which we can see no end because it’s based on a fundamental clash of cultures. On the IRA we told the truth; on the Islamic problem, we lie.
Britain’s leaders were not asserting values. They were fighting a disquieting social development with ad hoc measures, and then casting about for values after the fact. The real basis for acting against the veil was that British society was becoming slightly more Muslim every day, and did not want to be. No one could say this. Every argument had to be made from neutral principles. Trevor Phillips, the head of the British Council on Racial Equality, complained, at the height of the controversy over the veil, “What should have been a proper conversation between all kinds of British people seems to have turned into a trial of one particular community, and that cannot be right.” So what was Britain supposed to do, then? Have a discussion based on the false premise that all its citizens had fallen into the habit of wearing separatist religious garb?
Apparently. That is what France did.
The French veil law
To return to a matter discussed in the last chapter, France was the only country that made a coherent constitutional case against the veil. It succeeded only because France has a constitution unique in Europe for its enmity toward—or, to put things mildly, its distrust of—religion. In 1905 laws were passed to discipline the Catholic Church, which at the time controlled primary schools, influenced politics through its assets, and had recently exposed France to international disgrace through the role it played in the Dreyfus Affair, in which a Jewish army captain was framed on espionage charges. Church and state were separated by means of laïcité, which is difficult to translate. It differs from the Anglo-American tradition in that it seeks less to neutralize public authorities in matters of religion than to neutralize religious bodies in matters of public life.
In December 2003 a twenty-member commission headed by a politician and immigration expert, Bernard Stasi, completed a five-month study hailed by President Chirac as a way of bringing laïcité up to date in a multicultural society. The commission recommended banning conspicuous religious symbols—not just headscarves but also yarmulkes and large crosses—from public schools and other institutions. In the interests of neutrality, it seemed, every infringement that disproportionately affected Muslim practice had to be balanced by some compensatory restrictions on the majority culture—even if those restrictions were bogus and pro forma. The ban on yarmulkes and “large crosses” was meant only to disguise the singling out of Islam. Most people understood this. The social scientist Farhad Khosrokhavar correctly wrote on the marrow of the report: “It is common knowledge that what is aimed at is Islam, especially the headscarf. The rest is trivia.”
Again: Over the long term, the price of managing immigration is paid by the broader society in the form of rights. Jews attending violent public schools may have considered the loss of the right to wear a yarmulke a small price to pay for some sign of state action against the Islamization of institutions. As for Christians, they were largely unaffected, since the crosses they wear on necklaces are generally small. (No one, in fact, could ever figure out what was meant by a “large cross.”) The non-Muslim public understood that this was the best deal it was likely to get.
The French veil laws were as disingenuous as the Danish marriage laws, and they worked for the same reason: huge majorities of the non-Muslim society insisted on them. As the headscarf ban was being debated at Christmas 2003, thousands of veiled women marched in Paris, and Muslim leaders—from the activist writer and scholar Tariq Ramadan to the anti-Semitic Alsatian rabble-rouser Mohammed Ennacer Latrèche—warned of worse to come, once it went into effect. But once France’s resolve became clear, the marches fizzled out, and they were attended by only a handful of cranks. On the first day of school in the autumn of 2005, only 12 students arrived veiled, as compared to 639 the previous fall. Chirac ordered that the hundredth anniversary of the 1905 laïcité law be celebrated as quietly as possible.
Compulsory liberation
It would be easier to share Straw’s view that there is something illegitimate per se about a woman’s separating herself from the gaze of the public if the alternative model of comportment were not so often based on racy advertisements, reality TV, and (at least in this decade) a vogue for exposed navels and jeans that cinch halfway down the bum crack. More eloquently than any other Westerner, Ayaan Hirsi Ali has made the case for the superiority of the Western conception of women’s rights over the Muslim one. It is not lost on Muslims, however, that she has done so from Amsterdam, a city that, whatever its other glories, is known to the world as a place where young women sit naked in shop windows waiting for men to pay them for sex. Whether an anything-goes sex industry is caused by feminism or simply correlated with it, it has traditionally been considered a more serious kind of exploitation than choosing to wear—or even being made to wear—a scrap of cloth. “Liberation” can place its own constraints on women’s freedom.
Today, very few non-Muslim politicians in Europe see the matter this way. Some policy makers are uneasy about signs of family breakdown—the 43 percent nationwide illegitimacy rate in Britain, for instance—but those who connect their unease to misgivings about sexual liberation (Christine Boutin in France, Ann Widdecombe in England, to name two examples) are more often ridiculed than rallied behind. Public approval of sexual liberation appears almost compulsory. Europeans can conceive of no reason why any individual might want to preserve his chastity or modesty. Consider the pitiless remark of Jacques Chirac, at the height of the veil debate, that “nothing can justify a patient’s refusing on principle to be treated by a doctor of the opposite sex.”
Or consider the informational video Dutch authorities show to would-be citizens. Most European citizenship instruction seeks to ensure that newcomers know enough of the language to get by and enough of the political system to exercise their rights—Germany’s, for instance, requires 600 hours of language training and 30 hours of history. But the Dutch naturalization packet also insists that immigrants be able to handle the country’s moral peculiarities. It is centered on a video that includes gays expressing affection in public and bare-breasted women at the beach. (An expurgated version is offered for those applicants who live in countries where possession of the video would violate the law.) Wolfgang Schäuble, Germany’s interior minister, has defended the Dutch film and would not mind having something similar for his own country. “Someone who doesn’t want to see these kinds of things shouldn’t move to a country where they’re reality,” he says.
To Muslims, the Western unwillingness to even hear the case for bodily modesty could be a radicalizing force. Tahar Ben Jelloun, a Moroccan-French novelist whose views on such matters are moderate, sees Europe’s relative hedonism as a cause of veiling. In an article called “Moroccans and the Reasons for the Veil,” he wrote: “Some Islamism has entered Morocco via emigrants from Belgium and Holland. For fear of losing their daughters, fathers make them cover themselves.” A Turkish-born Dane who works at a hard-line fundamentalist school in Copenhagen recalls that, before he turned to devout Islam, his main interest was disco. That interest had a lot to do with his desire to live in Europe in the first place. “I read a novel about a man from Switzerland,” he says. “I wanted to be like him. He had so much appetite.”
Beneath its bold assertions of liberation, Europe is badly divided. Its relationship to its own post-religious morality is ambivalent. As in a television beer advertisement, the product (in this case “European values”) gets so tangled up with hedonic promises that you can’t see where the product lets off and your titillation picks up. Michel Houellebecq, in some ways the most libertine of modern novelists, argues in his Whatever (1994) that a world in which sexual pleasure is made a preeminent good is not a world in which people are brought closer together. It is a world in which the gap between haves and have-nots is magnified along a new dimension. Because it is attentive to such pitfalls, Islam—especially in its preachiest and most conservative form—can appear like a real enrichment, and not just to Muslims.
The British parliamentarian Denis MacShane warns that the Islamist intellectual Tariq Ramadan “repudiates core European principles that developed from Galileo to gay marriages.” But it does no good to label brand-new gender and sexual arrangements as “core European principles.” They may be core principles someday, when they have stood the test of time. Right now they are innovations, carefully sheltered from parliamentary accountability by human rights laws. What secular Europeans call “Islam” is a set of values that Dante and Erasmus would recognize as theirs; the collection of three-year-old rights they call “core European principles” is a set of values that would leave Dante and Erasmus bewildered.
When Europeans assert their “values” against Islam, what are they asserting—a religious heritage? A philosophical heritage? A morality? A lifestyle? Clearly they do not know. In one of her more rabid tirades against Islam, the late Italian polemicist Oriana Fallaci threatened war against any Islamic terrorist who harmed a list of Florentine landmarks starting with the cathedral of Santa Maria del Fiore and the Baptistery that stands nearby. Is she defending cathedrals as tourist attractions? (If so, she has a very weak hand to play against a 1,300-year-old religion.) Or is she defending them as houses of worship? (If so, she has broken with most of the Europeans who worry about Islam, because what is at stake for them is Islam’s threat to liberation from religion.)
It is not even clear that the beneficiaries of sexual liberation will fight in its defense. The journalist Henryk Broder of Der Spiegel notes the behavior of participants in the various erotic parades and sex festivals that have become a mark of contemporary Germany. At the Carnival of Cultures in Berlin, the marchers are happy to accuse Joachim Meisner, the cardinal of Cologne, of being an inquisitor, or to depict German chancellor Angela Merkel being buggered by George W Bush. But they stress their sensitivity to Muslim concerns about the parade, and there are no sex jokes about leaders who have been considerably less hospitable to sexual liberation, such as Iran’s Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.
Islam is not a particularly prudish religion; in fact, most religions are less prudish than Europe’s traditional Christianity, both Catholic and Protestant. As the demographer David Coleman notes, the easygoing sexual order that is part of the “second demographic transition” is a late European development, but it is not late to other cultures. “Divorce and easy re-marriage (for men) is traditional in some polygamous African societies,” Coleman has written, “[as well as] in Islam and in traditional Japan, while cohabitation and extramarital birth were institutionalised in Latin America and the Caribbean, and to some extent among U.S. blacks, for a century before the ‘first’ demographic transition arose.”
There are grounds for believing that Muslims are closer to assimilating into post-religious European sexual and family life than we thought. In the Netherlands in the first half of this decade, divorces increased by 46 percent among Moroccans and by 42 percent among Turks. There are Muslim feminists and Muslim gays, of course, and even conservative Muslims often live cheek by jowl with the most modern sexual stuff Europe has to offer. The hard-line mosque in Munich is across the street from a lap-dancing establishment. Many heavily gay neighborhoods are also heavily Muslim neighborhoods. “Gays are attracted to cultural diversity. There is a good local culture of tolerance,” says Ilda Corti of The Gate, an urban regeneration project in Turin’s heavily Muslim Porta Palazzo neighborhood. Sankt Georg in Hamburg is a neighborhood with a similar mix.
Maybe. But gay-Muslim comity is more likely transitional and illusory. Both gays and Muslims inhabit those neighborhoods as subcultures—as a result of their relationship to the dominant culture, not as a result of their relationship to each other. A New York Times report on a Turkish nightclub in Kreuzberg that has a monthly gay night did not exactly reveal a confident community. One twenty-two-year-old Turk demanded anonymity “out of fear that he would be ostracized or worse if his family found out about his sexual orientation.” A twenty-one-year-old Arab would not give his name on the grounds that “my brothers would kill me.” There are still yawning gaps between Muslim and non-Muslim sentiment on gays. In France, Muslims are twice as likely to disapprove of homosexuality as non-Muslims.
Like the system of separation of church and state, our present sexual morality was forged in opposition to Christianity, not in opposition to religion in general. The West’s new, “loose” sexual morality is ordered more around male prerogatives than around female ones. It may fit traditional Muslim thinking better than it fits traditional Western thinking. If the besetting sexual failure of Christianity is prudery, the besetting sexual failure of Islam is sexism. Traditional Islam is only partially at odds with present-day sexual practice, not totally at odds, the way Christianity is.