America’s Muslims are very diverse, largely middle class and mostly mainstream; they are much less alienated than European Muslims, and many of them decidedly American in their views and attitudes. Yet, a majority of Muslim Americans , according to the Pew Research Center, say that life in the U.S. after the 9/11 terrorist attacks has become more difficult for them, and most are convinced that the government ‘"singles out" Muslims for monitoring. In the 14 years since the September attacks, Muslim Americans had to face a new disturbing reality; that Muslims born in the United States had turned against their country and engaged in acts of terror against America at home.
France has a long, complicated and precarious history with the Muslim world and with its mostly Arab Muslim immigrants and their descendants. It is home to Europe’s largest Muslim population of about 5 million people. Socially and culturally they are diverse, but divided between those who are observant and lean towards resisting what they see as imposed assimilation, including rejecting the state’s attempts at creating "national Islam" to guard against negative influences from the transnational Muslim Ummah and those who have accepted France’s ethos, that is the country’s core beliefs and values including its unique concept of secularism, or Laïcité,perceived by many as anti-clerical, or even anti-religion, with its strict prohibition on the clergy and religion influencing public life. Laïcitéin that sense is different from American secularism, which is simply the separation of church and state, without creating enmity between them.
The integration of the diverse Muslim communities in European societies has been a very contentious issue in the anxiety-filled debates about immigration in Western Europe in recent decades. There are the obvious socio-economic impediments; for instance, in France unemployment among Muslim citizens is twice that of the wider population, along with lower educational levels, particularly among women. The other impediments to integration center around cultural clashes, exaggerated perceptions about the reluctance of Muslim communities to embrace the national identity, and the ethos of their new homelands, and restrictions on outward expression of religiosity. It is ironic that majorities of European Muslims, including in France, feel strongly or fairly that they do belong to their country of residence, while majorities of Germans, French, Spaniards and British believe that the Muslims who live with them resist integration and cling to a parallel existence.
Questioning the loyalty of European Muslims, the marginalization and segregation of some Muslim communities by necessity or choice, and the increased identification of Islam with terrorism, particularly since the 9/11 attacks, explains in part the phenomenon of re-Islamization of youth. They are searching for a transcendent identity that distinguishes them also from their immigrant parents, who wanted however vaguely or awkwardly to belong to their new homelands.
The fathers were strangers in alien lands; most of them had to cope with a foreign language, an unfamiliar political culture and different habits, customs and traditions. They had to lie low, and on the whole they shunned politics, and were mainly interested in improving their economic lot and educating their children. Like all immigrants, they stoically endured discrimination and prejudice, and worked hard to survive and to be accepted. The children however, while growing up knew only the universe in which they were born, and when they were confronted with systemic, societal and cultural impediments that prevented them to be full citizens in the country of their birth, they either rebelled, or drifted to the margin of society and led parallel lives. Some sought answers and solace in the world their parents left. And given the geographic proximity of Europe to the heart of the Muslim world in the Middle East and Africa, it was natural for the children of immigrants to reconnect with the lost world of their fathers through the new waves of immigrants who were this time more politicized, and less willing to let go completely of their ancestral lands. And it was so easy to do so on the Internet.
These young resentful Muslims reject the minority stigma, despise their countries of birth (a phenomenon we see on the extreme left and right of the political spectrum in Western countries), in part because their parents who rebuilt Europe after World War II or died in its wars were kept marginalized. Some of these politically and culturally unmoored Muslim youth can easily become susceptible to radicalization at the hands of firebrand imams, some of them from abroad, who turn their mosques to centers for recruiting Jihadists.
This is the fateful crossroad where itinerant imams from the outside (who bring with them all the convulsions of their societies, including the resentment of real and imagined, present or past Western transgressions) meet the native would-be radical. It is as if many Europeans are saying: “The descendants of the rejects of empire, those once colonized and kept outside the gates, are now inside the walls, still alien and angry and we don’t want them and they don’t want to be like us.” It is bewildering to think that the alienation of these young Muslim Europeans persists even in societies in which multiculturalism reigns supreme such as the Netherland and the United Kingdom, and where they benefit from generous welfare systems. It was painfully ironic that Mohammed Bouyeri, Theo van Gogh’s assassin, was at the time collecting unemployment. Most of these terrorist attacks in Europe and the U.S. since 9/11 have been organized and/or carried out by individuals who may be alienated and marginalized politically, but not necessarily disenfranchised economically.
Most European societies, particularly in France, are still struggling along with their Muslim communities to reconcile the centrality of Islam to a fairly significant number of Muslims, most importantly among the youth, with the core values of mainly homogenous nation-states. In France, the Laïcité was used to justify the 2004 landmark law prohibiting the outward display of religious symbols in public schools. Although the law ostensibly bans Christian and Jewish symbols, it was seen as a measure to ban Muslim girls from wearing hijab, the headscarf. Other restrictions were imposed in the name of preserving the liberal values and norms of European democracies, particularly those pertaining to gender equality. Bans were imposed in France and Belgium against wearing a burqaor a niqaba face-covering headwear in public, a measure that affects the lives of a tiny minority of women. Immigrants to Denmark are required to sign a "contract" that commits them to respect some of the core values of the country, such as individual freedoms and gender equality. Most of these measures enjoy widespread popular approval, thus contributing to the sense of alienation many Muslims in Europe feel.
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The story of Muslims in America is quite different. Muslim Americans feel more at home than their European coreligionists, because of America’s polity, history and demography. As a heterogeneous and large nation of refugees, The U.S. has been more welcoming to Muslim immigrants than Europe. Unlike France, constitutionally it is impossible to impose restriction on outward displays of religiosity, such as banning the wearing of hijab and most Americans will not approve of such a ban. President Obama, in his speech to the Muslim world from Cairo in 2009, criticized those Western countries that impede Muslim citizens from practicing religion as they see fit, by dictating what a Muslim woman should wear. “We can't disguise hostility towards any religion behind the pretense of liberalism,” he said. I wonder if Obama would continue to cling to his expansive notion of political correctness, now that we know that Tashfeen Malik, who accompanied her husband on that expeditionary killing spree in San Bernardino, lived for more than a year in the U.S. hiding her face behind a niqab, and keeping her face (with whatever expression on it) disguised behind a mask while she was pulling the trigger. The Europeans argue that the burqaand the niqabshould be banned because they could constitute a security risk. The Americans have sought, perhaps somewhat naively, to welcome them in the spirit of religious freedom. And yet there are danger signs, seen especially in the comments of Trump—which only seem to win him more support—that this tolerance has limits.
Like the Muslims of Europe, American Muslims are relatively newcomers; and if anything they are probably more diverse; that is why there is no one portrait for Muslim Americans. In the second half of the 19th century tens of thousands of Arabic-speaking immigrants from the Levant began arriving in the United States seeking economic opportunities and fleeing religious and political discrimination. The absolute majority of them were Christians, along with small numbers of Muslim Arabs. With subsequent waves, the numbers of Muslim Arab immigrants increased. In the 1960s; large blocks of Muslim immigrants began to arrive from the greater Middle East and North Africa, Iran, South Asia and sub-Sahara Africa. That is why America’s Muslims are today a heavily immigrant population, with the largest group coming from the Arab countries of the Middle East and North Africa, representing 41 percent of foreign-born U.S. Muslims, according to the Pew Research Center.
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Hisham Melhem is a columnist for Al Arabiya and Washington Correspondent for the Lebanese newspaper Annahar. http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2015/12/muslim-children-isis-america-and-europe-213420#ixzz3trCgLppM