Latest Updates: european muslims RSS
-
thabet
-
thabet
A member of the Swiss political party that pushed for the minaret ban is a convert to Islam:
Streich has left the SVP, made his conversion to Islam public, and has denounced the SVP’s anti-Muslim campaign as a witch hunt.
-
johnpi
Bulls***, calculated to inflame: Hijabis are attacking free-spirited blond girls in Berlin schools, according to this article appearing in some European media outlets.
Speculation, mind reading and fantasy about the motives of the alleged attackers made it into print:
The victims are blond Polish girls since they’re Catholic and yet very liberal, and therefore embody everything that the headscarf-girls reject. Steffens says the reason for the conflict is often envy. The girls are banned from many things in their own strict religious upbringing at home, but in school they see other girls who are allowed more. They get jealous and want to beat up the children from more liberal families.
Or as George Bush said, “They hate us for our freedoms.”
I don’t doubt that there may be tension and occasional violent incidents arising from any number of reasons, and that needs to be condemned and put to a stop. But the rest of this sounds like somebody overlaid a script to get some political mileage out of it.
-
buzz
Are European societies anti-Islam? That’s a question more people are asking in the wake of Switzerland’s referendum to ban the building of minarets in the Alpine country. Almost 6 out of 10 Swiss voters supported the ban — charges of racism be damned. France passed a law in 2004 that bans young women from wearing Islamic headscarves in public schools, and has now joined the Netherlands in debating a ban on full-body coverings like a burqa. And Muslims in multicultural Britain have also repeatedly accused officials there of talking down to them with urges to drop clothes that ‘form a barrier’ between them and mainstream society.
But while these controversies attract attention, there are also efforts to work out solutions to living with religious differences in Europe. Take a recent book by French anthropologists Dounia and Lylia Bouzar, Is There Room for Allah in the Workplace? The book offers legal guidelines on how work-religion conflicts might be examined, as well as practical suggestions on resolving them. “Paradoxically, as the question of the visibility of religious practice crops up regularly in the media, it remains a total haze in the professional world,” the book notes.
-
johnpi
Stephen Colbert interviews Christopher Caldwell about what Thabet has called his ‘Eurabian fantasy.’
Caldwell calls for French imams to be ‘Frenchifried.’ Colbert hears ‘french fried.’
-
johnpi
Spate of terrorism arrests not connected, analysts say.
In the past week, U.S. officials have announced charges in five terrorism probes in five states. It is a confluence of cases unlike anything the country has seen since the September 11, 2001, attacks.
But CNN’s national security analyst Peter Bergen and law enforcement analyst Mike Brooks say not to read too much into it — the rush of arrests is a coincidence.
“These are things that are happening completely independently,” Bergen said.
Brooks agreed, calling it a “happenstance.”
Most everything else in the story has already been bloged/linked here at TI, with the possible exception of an indictment against a Brooklyn man for conspiracy to commit murder abroad and for support of foreign terrorists. The man wanted to join al Shabaab in Somalia and “take up arms against perceived enemies of Islam.”
There’s also this observation about the men arrested:
While the five probes do not appear linked, they do involve suspects of a similar “socio-economic profile,” said Bergen.
“The profiles of the people… generally speaking is much closer to what we see among European Muslims,” he said. “They tend to be less well integrated” into mainstream society, and in many cases have faced economic difficulties and unemployment, Bergen said.
If there is a link among the suspects, Bergen said, “it’s a feeling of exclusion from the American dream.”
-
thabet
The Bosnian mufti is in the news again. This time he is reported as saying sharia should be ‘incorporated into the Bosnian constitution’, although the Adnkronos International (AKI) report doesn’t actually quote his words.
I can’t reconcile the simplistic presentation in the report above with the other public statements of the mufti, such as this 2004 interview with Qantara, a German magazine which focuses on Islam-West relations:
But now these values are no longer tied to western civilization, they are values that others accept and claim for themselves. What is happening now actually represents a crisis of western civilization, which obviously does not want to share these values with others.
In the same interview he criticised tribal tendencies of movements like the Taliban for failing to understand the ‘universiality of Islam’; said Muslims citizens in the West can also be patriotic; and criticised Saudi funding of mosques and Islamic learning in Western Europe.
Given this, I find it difficult to believe the mufti was advocating a constitutional arrangement similar to Saudi or Iran as implied by the AKI report.
-
razib, murtad fitri
taking off on thabet’s post, British Muslims: the new Victorians. checking *the world values survey* it does not seem that the liberalism of french muslims can be explained by differences between the source countries. more later. re: the morality data, doing a log-transformation of the data you can predict 25% of the variance in muslim attitudes by host country attitudes on any given topic.
i will try and do more rigorous comparisons to host countries as well as seeing % who are immigrants and residential segregation matter. it seems that the french model of assimilation has been more powerful than the german and british models of de facto and de jure & de facto multiculturalism in assimilating toward national norms.
-
thabet
Tom Heneghan at FaithWorld has a post on the case of a French Muslim standing trial, who is reported to have said Ramadan as an excuse to delay his trial.
The post links to an interview with the Archbishop of Paris, who mentions court practices in Muslim countries (they work through Ramadan).
But why? What do the court practices of Egypt during Ramadan have to do with French court practices?
There seems to be some kind of dissonance when it comes to issues like this: on the one hand Muslims living in the UK, France, etc. should conform to the cultural norms of their countries* and not of their ‘ancestral’ homelands. Yet you will see commentators and politicians invoking practices of these very same Muslim countries.
“They do it in Saudi!”
Either the man standing trial, in France, is allowed to make an appeal for a delay to trial (for whatever reason and as long as it is done within the framework of French law); or he is not. The court in France will decide either way (and the court said he can).
It shouldn’t matter what Egyptians (or Saudis, Pakistanis, Iranians, Tunisians, Turks, etc) do.
*And this is, in general, a perfectly reasonable demand.
-
thabet
Germany’s main Muslim organisations have cut their links to Germany’s only professor of Islam, saying he has had published articles which contradicted “fundamentals of Islamic teaching”.
-
thabet
-
thabet
The Swiss government opposes the proposal to ban the construction of minarets in the country.
-
thabet
Cologne’s city council has “voted in favor of building Germany’s largest mosque”. The mosque had been opposed, primarily, by far-right groups.
-
thabet
The state’s role in defining ‘religion’:
The Muslim had turned to the court since he claimed his freedom of religion was being affected. Earlier the Committee for Equal Treatment had agreed with him. The judge agreed with the Rotterdam municipality that somebody who daily receives customers at the social services may not refuse shaking hands.
-
razib, murtad fitri
Islam on Campus: A survey of UK student opinions.
i recommend jumping to the survey data on page 100. n = 632 for muslim students. you can read these data as glass half-full or half-empty depending on your normative framework.
“What should happen to a person who decides to leave Islam?”
They should be punished in accordance with Shari’ah Law 6%
They should be encouraged to rethink their decision by Muslim elders and people that care about them 45%
Nothing should happen to them – it’s their own choice 36%
Not sure 12%Of the 6% of total respondents who advocated punishing apostates in accordance with Sharia, half (50%) said that they understood this to mean apostates should be killed, a third (34%) said this was not their understanding and 16% were unsure. 3% of Muslim students polled, therefore, felt that apostasy is punishable by death.
if 1 out of 33 british muslim students believe i should killed shouldn’t it be expected that i feel a bit of islamophobia (quite literally?)???
H/T rod dreher.
-
thabet
Muslims in Europe: the Jewish pre-WWII analogy is flawed. If you really want to scour history, see the Catholic experience in Britain (e.g. Test Act) and Germany (e.g. Kulturkampf). Catholics were accused of pretty much the same as Muslims: loyalty to a necessarily hostile and foreign religion, adhering to a backward religion, living in squalor and acts of terrorism. While Jews were also accused of this (e.g. Eastern European Jews living in east London which now dominated by Bangladeshi Muslims), they were also accused of being internationalist, rootless etc. (right-wing critics of what is labelled “left-multiculturalism” are following in this tradition…).
I am sure if someone wanted to, they could draw parallels between Locke’s ‘concern’ over atheists and Catholics to present day ‘concerns’ about Muslims.
Further reading: Razib’s citation below and “Varieties of anti-religious imagination” at the Immanent Frame, Robert Winder’s Bloody Foreigners.
