The Many Faces Of Islam

In Glasgow, a Turkish Kurd refugee is seeking compensation from the Home Office, claiming a decision to force him to stay in the city — where he and his family have been the victims of racist attacks — breaches his human rights. In Paris, a young Algerian woman is suing her employer for unlawful dismissal after she was fired for refusing to adjust her headscarf. Europe is home to some 12.5 million Muslims who suffer high unemployment — and, since Sept. 11 — growing mistrust from non-Muslims. One sign of the tension came when the French government tried to create a representative council for French Islam. French Muslim organizations were set to choose their representatives last June, but Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy canceled the elections. The reason: the vote would have given the majority to the Union of French Islamic Organizations (UOIF), a federation representing the majority of France’s 1,500 mosques. The UOIF is allied with the Muslim Brotherhood — the most powerful opposition force in Egyptian politics — which supports the right of Muslim women to wear headscarves in public schools, something France won’t allow. Europe has a long way to go before Islam is just another faith. But a young generation of Muslims is speaking out — against racism, Islamophobia and Islam’s own rigidities. Here are four of this generation’s most compelling voices.

THE ACTIVIST Dyab Abou Jahjah,
31, Belgium
The Belgian government picked a fight with the wrong man. Lebanese-born political activist Dyab Abou Jahjah is charismatic, good-looking, articulate and brash — and he may have a point. Prime Minister Guy Verhofstadt accused Abou Jahjah and his Arab European League of inciting the street riots in Antwerp that followed the murder last month of 27-year-old Moroccan schoolteacher Mohammed Achrak by a 66-year-old mentally ill Belgian man. But Abou Jahjah turned Verhofstadt’s allegations into a trial of Belgian attitudes toward the country’s 400,000 Muslims. Are Muslims second-class citizens? What will the government do to fight rising racial tension? And why do many second-generation Muslim Belgians still not feel at home?

The situation is especially dire in Antwerp, where unemployment in many immigrant communities hovers around 30%. Under the slogan “Our People First,” the far-right Vlaams Blok (Flemish Bloc) garnered one-third of the vote in the last municipal elections in October 2000. Abou Jahjah gives Belgium’s Muslims a radical voice to counter the Blok. He showed up at the scene of Achrak’s murder barely 30 minutes after the crime; what happened next is in dispute. Abou Jahjah claims he tried to calm angry Muslims, who rioted for two nights. The police arrested him, saying he was responsible for the fighting, but an Antwerp court ruled last week that there was insufficient evidence to hold him.

Two days after his release, Abou Jahjah relaxes in the downtown Antwerp apartment of his lieutenant, 26-year-old Ahmed Azzuz. In jeans, navy blue sweater and socks, he looks like a graduate student taking a study break. He says he dreams of a pan-European coalition of Arab Muslims with the power to force European governments to reckon with Islamic communities. “We have three basic demands,” he says. “Bilingual education for Arab-speaking kids, hiring quotas that protect Muslims, and the right to keep our cultural customs. For example, there should be laws that prevent discrimination against women who wear the veil.”

Abou Jahjah founded the Arab European League two years ago; it now claims close to 1,000 members across Europe. He is not anti-American; in fact, he admires anti-discrimination laws in the U.S. “America’s race laws are more advanced than here,” he says. “I have relatives in Detroit and they are Arab-Americans but they feel American. I don’t feel European. Europe needs to make its concept of citizenship inclusive to all cultures and religions. I’m a practicing Muslim but I’m not a freak. I’m not a fundamentalist.”

According to immigration records, Abou Jahjah arrived in Belgium from Lebanon in 1991 as an asylum seeker. On his application form, he claimed that he had belonged to Hizballah and was fleeing after a dispute with militia leaders. “That was a lie,” he says now. “I was a 19-year-old boy and I had to make up a story so I could get asylum. I emigrated because I wanted a better life.” During the 1990s, he studied international politics at university in Louvain-la-Neuve and settled in Antwerp, doing odd jobs for immigrant organizations and trade unions. He’s currently unemployed, but says he’s working on a doctoral thesis.

Among some parts of Belgian society, he’s one of the country’s most hated men. “He should be thrown in jail for good,” says Philippe Schaffer, a mechanic who runs a garage around the corner from where Achrak was killed. Civil-rights activist or self-interested agitator? Abou Jahjah may be a little bit of both. But Belgians shouldn’t expect him to quiet down anytime soon — he’s running for Parliament in June. — By JOHN MILLER/Antwerp

THE THINKER

Shaker Assem,
38, Germany
The six policemen who woke shaker Assem and his family early on the morning of Nov. 12 were polite and respectful. “Maybe they knocked a little too loudly on the door, but otherwise they were very professional,” he says. The surprise visit to Assem’s Duisberg flat was one of a score of searches carried out across Germany that morning, as police raided homes and offices belonging to members of Hizb ut-Tahrir (Islamic Liberation Party), a 50-year-old pan-Islamic political organization that seeks to establish a modern version of the caliphate that ruled parts of the Arab world from Muhammad’s death until 1924, when Turkey’s Kemal Atatürk officially laid it to rest.

The police visited Assem, Hizb ut-Tahrir’s “representative member” in Germany, as part of their investigation of the group. They took away documents and computer discs, but Assem was not arrested. German authorities are worried that the group’s anticapitalist and anti-American rhetoric could incite terrorism, though no one has accused Hizb ut-Tahrir of violence. “We’ve been watching them for years,” says a German intelligence official. “What concerns us is that they’ve got a lot of support among extremists at universities, although they also appear to be nonviolent.”

Assem admits that Hizb ut-Tahrir’s goals are incompatible with European political institutions, but insists the organization has no intention of making trouble. “People who say there is a conflict between Shari’a and Christianity don’t understand Shari’a,” he says. “But people who say there is a conflict between Shari’a and Western democracy are right.”

The problem in Assem’s view is that “all men are not created equal, and democracy eventually lets the fortunate over-run the less fortunate.” So Hizb ut-Tahrir members don’t vote or run for office in secular elections, but have no plans for revolution. “This is a different system here, and our members respect that,” he says. “The idea of a caliphate is only now beginning to take hold in the Arab world. Europe won’t come around until our example is there to follow.”

The caliphate would operate under Shari’a law, the system of ethical and legal conduct derived from the Koran and the teachings of the Prophet. Assem says the economic principles of Shari’a would ensure a fairer distribution of wealth. Shari’a prohibits interest payments on loans, for example (see next article), which Hizb ut-Tahrir claims prevents exploitation, while the ban on free-flowing currency would protect countries like Indonesia from the destabilizing effects of globalization. “Shari’a presents a logical framework for sustainable development,” says Assem. “It’s not utopian like socialism, and it isn’t all about exploitation and profit like capitalism. It’s all-encompassing. The more you learn, the more sense it makes.”

In the social realm, Assem grants that Shari’a is more restrictive than Western norms and lifestyles. “Women are to be admired, not used for cigarette advertisements,” he says. But he blames later traditions not derived from Shari’a for the extreme subjugation of women in the Islamic world — and his wife, Sana, agrees.

Though the U.S. bears the brunt of the criticism in the party magazine, explizit , Assem argues that Hizb ut-Tahrir doesn’t blame the Americans for everything that goes wrong in the Islamic world. “Our message is that America has an exploitative value system,” Assem explains, “but we should blame ourselves for losing our way and leaving ourselves vulnerable to this kind of exploitation.” As for terrorism, he thinks Sept. 11 “gave the secular governments of the Islamic world carte blanche to crack down on Islamists. It also gave Bush a pretext to grab Afghanistan and its access to the Caspian Sea.”

Assem was drawn to Hizb ut-Tahrir 16 years ago, as a 22-year-old lost soul in Vienna. “I’d grown up in Egypt, where my father was from, and then moved to Austria, where my mother is from,” he says. “I didn’t really fit in with a lot of the Austrians I met, but I couldn’t feel comfortable with those guys you see at European mosques either — the ones with the long beards and robes but nothing going on upstairs.”

After a brief flirtation with Scientology, he re-embraced Islam just as someone told him about Hizb ut-Tahrir. The Hizb ut-Tahrir members “were educated and self-sufficient and open to the world around them,” Assem recalls. “It wasn’t all about beards and robes and prayer, but about logic.”

For him, the economics of Shari’a is its biggest selling point, but adds that you can’t buy into the economic theory without accepting the caliphate as well. “Islam can fill the vacuum left by the collapse of socialism,” he says. “But we also recognize that the caliphate can only be implemented if people want it.” Assem believes Europeans will join the caliphate, but only once they see its advantages. And he admits that day is a long way off. — By STEVE ZWICK/Duisberg

THE CRITIC

Ayaan Hirsi Ali,
33, the Netherlands
Islam is “an extremely backward religion,” according to an important new voice on the Dutch political scene. These words clearly echo those of slain right-wing leader Pim Fortuyn, who also used the word backward in reference to Islam. But the speaker today is Ayaan Hirsi Ali, a Somali refugee and former Muslim who’s a sure bet to become an M.P. for the liberal VVD party in January’s elections. “Millions of Muslim women all over the world are oppressed in the name of Islam,” she says from VVD party headquarters in the Hague, as her bodyguards wait outside. The bodyguards are needed because Hirsi Ali has been threatened by Islamic fundamentalists ever since she first openly criticized Islam on a local TV station in March. After death threats in October, she went into hiding in the U.S., returning two weeks ago.

It wasn’t the first time Hirsi Ali fled persecution. The daughter of a leading Somali opposition leader, she was born just a few weeks after the coup by Mohammed Siad Barre in 1969 and was forced into exile with her family when she was 10. She was brought up as a traditional Muslim girl in Kenya, although her father was progressive enough to insist that his daughter receive an education. At 22, confronted with an arranged marriage to a distant cousin in Canada (“I was repelled by his comment that I would bear him six sons,” she says), she decided to escape to the Netherlands.

Right from the start she felt pressure to conform from the Somali community in the Netherlands. But she resisted. “I wanted to be part of Dutch society, to be financially independent, take off my headscarf and drink alcohol,” she says. In the spring of this year she finally admitted to herself that she was no longer a Muslim, and she started speaking out. But she quickly found herself caught in a cultural divide. “As a liberal society, the Dutch are against the oppression of the individual,” she says. “But when it comes to ethnic minorities, multiculturalism dictates that we have to respect practices in other cultures that oppress the individual.” Last week her book, De Zoontjesfabriek (The Son Factory), which presents her views on women, Islam and integration, was published.

Hirsi Ali’s adoption of the VVD marks a very public defection from the Labor Party, for whom she worked as a political scientist. Her departure was prompted by the “politically correct” taboos that dominate progressive left-wing circles when it comes to tackling the oppression of Muslim women. But her critics see Hirsi Ali as a political opportunist who’s using her newfound fame to ease her way into politics. Hirsi Ali denies it. “I was not looking for a cause, but all of a sudden I am in the middle of one,” she says. “I was asked to take part in a TV discussion to mark international women’s day and was shocked that the Moroccan woman on the show would not accept that Islam oppresses women. I couldn’t believe it. After all, Roman Catholics criticize the Pope. Why can’t Muslims be critical about their faith?

“It’s possible for a woman to be emancipated and be a Muslim if she sticks to Islam as a spiritual belief,” she continues. “But I reject the Koran when it says girls must stay home and that it is right to beat women if they disobey their husbands. We have been led to believe that we have to preserve cultural practices that clash with Western norms.” To change that, Hirsi Ali would scrap the subsidies given to Muslim organizations in the Netherlands, ban Islamic schools and include empowerment classes in the compulsory integration courses that all immigrants must follow.

“Living in the Netherlands has made it possible for me to realize that men and women are equal,” Hirsi Ali says, “and given me the opportunity to take advantage of higher education. But it also made me ask why more Muslim women here are not doing the same.” — By ABI DARUVALLA/The Hague

THE CONVERT

Anne Sofie Roald,
48, Sweden
Most angry young students join marches or sign petitions. Anne Sofie Roald took the veil. When she discovered Islam at the University of Oslo in the early ’80s, the faith seemed to offer all that she sought — fellowship, moral grounding, even ideological compatibility. “I was thinking about how the First World was exploiting the Third World,” she says. As she read the works of such anti-Western thinkers as Sayyid Qutb, “I saw my ideas,” though she now admits the writings are “apologetic literature” for a brand of Islam more radical than her own. She ventured into Oslo’s Muslim community, and the believers, most of them Pakistani, embraced her. “I asked questions, they gave answers,” she says. “They even gave me keys to their flats. It was strange. Norwegians are more distant.”

Now an associate professor of migration and ethnic relations at Sweden’s Malmö University, Roald has seen attitudes toward her faith shift from indifference to begrudging tolerance mixed with mostly quiet disdain. “Scandinavians want to be inclusive, but it’s difficult,” she says, especially after Sept. 11. Thanks in part to Osama bin Laden, Roald and other Muslims unfairly bear what she calls “guilt by association.”

She often feels the judgment of others the instant they see her headscarf. “When I became a Muslim, I didn’t know you were supposed to wear the hijab. Most Muslims in Norway didn’t,” Roald recalls. “I thought people just wore it when it was windy.” After a friend prodded her to study the subject more closely, she concluded that she ought to veil. This external sign of faith seemed harder for her nominally Lutheran family to accept than her new beliefs. Even today, “my mother feels I am singling myself out,” she says. “She’s embarrassed.”

But Roald is not. As a convert, she says, she is so self-conscious about other issues, such as doubts about her objectivity as a researcher on religion, that she doesn’t worry about people’s views on sartorial matters. Though she deems Norway and Sweden “maybe the best places for Muslims to live” in the West, the mood has changed. Islam has become more politicized. As Palestinian militant groups, for example, have added religious overtones to battle cries that were once mostly secular and nationalistic, “people have started holding all Muslims responsible for what those fighters did — and what Sudan did and what bin Laden did,” Roald says. Some Muslims have reacted by retreating into the safety of “the idea of us vs. them.”

At the office, where she’s studying the role of religious minorities in the modern nation-state, she feels as if she has to “work four times as hard to show my credibility because people are only perceived as objective if they think like the majority.” Since Sept. 11, she has also seen more public criticism of Islam. Following a talk Roald gave recently at Gothenburg University, she recalls an audience member saying: “‘Islam is the root of all the evil in the world.’ He wasn’t rational, but nobody in the audience responded. They just sat there.”

How do you make sure that people don’t just sit there any more? She points to the media — “The more they are critical, the more the people will be too” — and to government. She believes programs like language lessons should be bolstered to help “people to feel a part of society.” But Muslims have to do their bit too. Roald broke off ties with non-Muslim friends after her conversion. “I regret it,” she says. “The only way for Muslims to succeed in this society is to be part of it” — her Palestinian-born husband is a local councilor in Malmö.

Hopes also rest on the next generation. Roald’s three teenage children mix comfortably with both Muslims and non-Muslims. “They have the religious way of Islam and the Norwegian view of society, which means I give them space and freedom.” It surprises some non-Muslims that these home truths transcend sectarian lines, she says. “None of us want our children to be druggies. Most don’t want our girls sleeping with boys when they are 15.” We just have to lift our own veils — of stereotype and preconception — to see. — By JEFF CHU