t’s a
bitterly cold night (December 2005) and the centre of Dortmund is
deserted. On weekdays, says our
taxi driver, everything closes by 10 o’clock. It is not easy to find a
place to eat. Eventually, he drops us at the Cava restaurant in
Lindemannstrabe. Just one couple punctuates the ultra-chic of this
post-modern bistro. We sit near them and order our food. Dortmund,
Germany, is the first port of call on my journey through the industrial
heartland of northern Europe. After the terrorist attacks in London and
the riots in the French suburbs, I want to assess the racial divide, the
fear and the loathing that permeate so much of our European continent.
Christoph Simmons is an insurance broker in his forties;
his girlfriend, Baneta Lisiecka, is a Polish immigrant. They invite us to
join them for a night out in their "green metropolis". We drive in
Christoph’s sports car to Limette, "the only pub in Dortmund open till 6
a.m.". Dortmund is a multicultural city integrated into the global
economy, explains Christoph; this former mining town is now a thriving
base for high-tech research. "Our immigrant communities are well
integrated," he says. Greeks, Italians, Spaniards, Poles live in
proverbial perfect harmony with Germans. There is only one problem: the
Turks – "they don’t integrate". Baneta thinks they are "mostly criminals"
and she is afraid of them. Christoph also says: "They are conservative;
their women cover their heads. The Koran tells them to murder Christians."
Has he ever met a Turk, I ask. "No," he says. "They stick together and
never come into our pubs." I talk to other people in Limette. Jasmine, a
Catholic from Corsica, sums up the overall feeling. "I don’t like Turks. I
don’t know why. I just don’t like them."
And yet I discover that these open manifestations of
racism do not seem to be reciprocated by German Turks. At the Orhan
Narghile Grill Cafe in the Turkish part of Dortmund I meet Suniye Ozdemir,
a single mother born in Germany. "I don’t know," she says with genuine
amazement, "why the Germans hate us so much. I don’t know why they are
scared of the Turkish people. Maybe they’re jealous. Maybe they’re afraid
we will steal their jobs." She introduces me to a group of girls from the
Helmholtz Grammar School. Aged between 16 and 18, these girls are
confident and articulate, and they speak good English. They want to become
professionals and to succeed. Gulsum, who wears a hijab, says they
experience racism every day – at school from their teachers, on the bus,
on the streets. Her friend, who does not wear a hijab, says: "We
were born in Germany and we are Germans. We stick together for protection,
to avoid hostility."
Throughout my journey, from Germany to the Netherlands,
onwards to Belgium and finally into France – the object of much recent
attention – I meet people all too ready to describe Muslims in the colours
of darkness. Islamophobia is not a British disease: it is a common, if
diverse, European phenomenon. It is the singular rock against which the
tide of European liberalism crashes.
There are common themes but also subtle differences in the
way each nation’s history influences its people’s present attitude to
immigrant communities. Much of this is rooted in the various colonial
histories. Germany came late to nationalism and colonialism and caught a
bad case of both. In the 1880s it scrambled briefly and brutally for
colonies to prove its importance as a nation. The roots of its ethnic
problems lie deeper, however, in its history and cultural psyche. Many of
the erstwhile principalities and tiny statelets that formed Germany were
part of Charlemagne’s Holy Roman Empire, a unity forged under siege and in
reaction to the perceived threat of Muslim civilisation. The Germans
embraced the Crusades with great vigour: the first, infamously, commenced
at home with pogroms against the Jews. The crusading motif is as important
to the German self-image as it ever was: the hatred of Turks I heard was
often expressed in crusading language – even if couched in liberal terms.
Germany’s present ethnic-minority population is the legacy
of its wartime military alliance with Turkey. Under the gastarbeiter
(guest worker) policy, the Turks were good enough to be imported en masse
to rebuild war-torn Germany but not good enough to be given German
nationality. They existed outside the ambit of German identity. It was the
continuation of racial purity in another form. Now that they are issued
with national identity cards, now that Germany has liberalised, is the
concept of what it is to be German, I wondered, still a matter of ein
Volk – one people, the Nazi notion of racial purity?
"I am afraid it is," says Wolfram Richter, professor of
economics at the University of Dortmund. There are many factors why the
Turks are hated, Richter says. He cites social factors such as Turks
shopping only in Turkish shops, cultural factors such as their women
covering themselves, language problems such as the older generation of
Turks still not speaking German. They are seen as disloyal. Then there is
the "Anatolia bride syndrome": German Turks tend to go back to Anatolia to
get married and bring their wives to Germany. But the overall factor in
the fear and loathing of Turks, Richter says, is old-fashioned racism. "I
am afraid we have not learnt from our history. My main fear is that what
we did to Jews we may now do to Muslims. The next holocaust would be
against Muslims."
Across the border into the Netherlands and to Eindhoven, a
lively cultural city with a young population, where fear of Muslims is
equally evident. There are fewer than 5,000 Muslims in Eindhoven and they
are all hidden away in the Woensel district. But try to get a taxi driver
to take you there. Kim de Peuyssenaece, our driver, is adamant: "It’s a
dangerous area where you could get killed," she says. She has a Moroccan
boyfriend, whose picture she displays on her mobile phone, yet she
dismisses Moroccans as "mostly criminals" who are "ruining our country".
She drops us in front of a Moroccan bar next to the new clinically
structured red-light district, a kind of John Lewis-meets-porn. Inside the
Safrak Bar and Cafe the atmosphere is thick with smoke. Old men sit
playing backgammon, chequers and dominoes. "We are not part of the Dutch
community," says the bar owner, a tall aggressive Moroccan who does not
want to give his name. "They don’t treat us with respect and dignity. They
think we’re separate. So we are separate."
That the Dutch see Muslims as a separate community is not
all that surprising. Holland has a brutal colonial history just as long as
Britain’s and the jewel in its crown was the most populous Muslim nation
on earth: Indonesia. The Islamist insurgency in Aceh is a legacy of the
people’s long war with the Dutch, a war the colonisers never won and never
ended. Slavery and compulsory labour on Dutch plantations under-pinned a
strict system of separating the rulers from those they ruled. The Dutch
were interested in categorising and neatly arranging the Otherness of
those they ruled, the better to maintain their separateness and
dependence. Colonial policy now reverberates at home.
In another part of Eindhoven we meet Jamal Tushi, an IT
consultant in his thirties. "They treat us like colonial subjects," he
says. "For them, all Muslims are terrorists." Tushi was born and bred in
Eindhoven and speaks perfect Dutch yet finds it hard to get work. "If you
are a young Moroccan, forget the idea of getting a job," he says. During
job interviews, the much acclaimed Dutch liberalism evaporates. "They want
to know what kind of Muslim you are. Do you pray? Do you go to the
mosque?"
Dutch liberalism was meant only for the Dutch. Today it
extends to prostitution and drugs but not to Muslim immigrants. It’s like
the "ethical policy" Holland developed for its colonies. The policy was
about Dutch superiority; it had little to do with the reality of life for
the people they ruled and made little difference to their condition. The
colonies served the metropolis, regardless of how they were spoken of and
discussed. The language of ethics was always about the colonising "Us" and
not the colonised "Them", just as all discussion about multiculturalism in
Holland is at base about what kind of country "We" are, now that we have
let "Them" in. Inclusion, then or now, was not the point. Dutch liberalism
is about how good and open "We" are – not an open negotiation about what
liberalism means to and for minority communities.
We take the train to Antwerp. Belgium is an interesting
case of multiculturalism, split as it is between the
Dutch/Flemish-speaking Flemings and French-speaking Walloons. There is
also a religious divide, between Catholics and Protestants. In 1994 a
revised constitution introduced devolution in an attempt to tackle the
long-standing division between the communities, recognising three
provinces and language groups. However, dealing with its own fractures of
multiculturalism does not mean opening up to immigrant minority
communities.
In downtown Antwerp we come across Noor Huda and her
friend Fatimah Zanuti. Huda, in her early twenties, is a medical
technician at a hospital in the city. "Multiculturalism in Belgium is
meant for the Belgians," she says. "We are not considered Belgian." Huda
was born in Antwerp, as were her parents. "But being a third generation
Belgian is not relevant. We are still colonial subjects." Racism and
hatred of Muslims are so endemic in Belgium, she says, that "you have to
constantly guard what you say. We are always afraid to speak our mind. You
do not have the right to say what you want to say."
The barriers in Belgium, as elsewhere in Europe, are born
of colonial history and attitudes. And Belgium has one of the most vicious
and inhuman of all colonial histories. Conrad’s Heart of Darkness
and its picture of Kurtz in his stockade surrounded by severed heads is
based on reality, not the allegory or metaphor of fiction. In Belgian
colonies such as the Congo, the natives were a problem – and the problem
was that they were not working hard enough, not producing enough rubber
for the metropolis. So armed police would invade villages, round up women
and children, imprison them and murder groups of them until the required
amount of rubber had been delivered by the men.
Armed police are much in evidence at the police station in
Lange Nieuwstraat. An officer wastes no time in pointing out that Muslims
are a problem. "It’s a one-way street," he says. "We are waiting for them
to come towards us the way they should and we want them to." But should
you not also be moving towards them, I ask. "No," he replies without
hesitation. "We are not a problem. Islam is the problem. Anything is
possible where Islam is concerned." He expects a riot to take place,
sooner or later.
A riot, or rather a series of riots, did take place in
Lille, the last stop on our journey. A northern industrial town in France,
Lille experienced some of the worst of the recent unrest. Emmanuel Peronne,
a fashion designer from the suburb of Roubaix, has no doubt what caused
the riots. "It’s economic injustice and inequalities that successive
generations of Moroccan and Algerian Muslims have suffered in employment,
housing and educational opportunities, as well as downright racism at the
hands of French society," he says. "They have no means to survive. It is
all about survival." Roubaix, scene of the most violent uprising, is a
dilapidated holding area. "They call us immigrés," says an angry
halal butcher. "But we were born here. We have no standing in the ideals
of ‘liberté, égalité, fraternité’."
Indeed. The ethos of the French revolution was never meant
to be pluralistic. Its essential proposition was based on totalitarian
uniformity – the scourge it unleashed as the ideological under-pinning of
modernity and European nationalism. It was also the bedrock of French
colonialism, which created parallel universes: the superior French and the
inferior others. Assimilation into Frenchness and indirect rule over
difference were the twin tracks of French colonialism. So, officially,
because France recognises only Frenchness it claims to be colour-blind and
non-racist yet it is both highly racist and attuned to a colour bar.
In Lille as much as in Paris and elsewhere in France,
there is a neat parallel that demonstrates the continuity of the colonial
ethic. In North Africa, where most of the French immigrants come from, the
medinas, ancient cities with a Muslim culture, were encircled in their
separateness. The medinas were seen as chaotic, confused and not fit for
modernity – the physical representation of what the French thought of the
medinas’ inhabitants and their culture. Around these old indigestible
cores were built modern cities on the French model, where the colonisers
lived and from which they dominated. Today Lille has its own traditional
core, a bounded city whose limits are jealously guarded. Around this
inviolate core circle the depressing banlieues: modern slums of the
grey, inhospitable and inhuman hutches built to house the indigestible
population of migrant workers. The rationale of the colony is neatly
reversed and brought home to the metropolis. It is a metaphor for all that
has not changed.
Throughout our journey we were surprised at how openly
prejudiced people were against Muslims. Each country has its own
extreme-right party led by figures such as Jean-Marie Le Pen in France or
Pim Fortuyn who was assassinated in Holland in 2002. In Belgium, the
draconian right is represented by the Vlaams Blok, a Flemish nationalist
party founded in 1977. Philippe Van der Sande, its spokesman in Antwerp,
declares that "immigrants do not adapt. They don’t want to learn the
language. They are not interested in our culture but just winning easy
money." Well, we would expect him to say that. Yet the people we spoke to
were ordinary citizens who saw themselves as liberals and enlightened
individuals.
European liberalism today may be a consequence of
decolonisation. But it seems more like a denial of uncomfortable
unanalysed traits than a genuine overcoming of the past. Europe is
post-colonial but ambivalent. Even among individuals with more relaxed
attitudes to interracial relationships, racism is unashamed and upfront.
In practice, now as in the past, such relationships make little difference
because they require subordination of the partner who is from an ethnic
minority. Indeed, they can work to increase the sense of superiority and
separation. It means less emphasis on race but more on culture as the
quintessential dividing line.
Everywhere I went, the thought that the nation might
change in the process of accommodating its minorities was conspicuous by
its absence. Minorities are fine as menial workers, a subordinate class.
It is when minorities seek to be upwardly mobile, to live the modern
liberal dispensation in their own distinctive way as self-assured equal
members of the national debate – and that was the desire of all the young
Muslims I met – that the problems start and latent prejudice comes to the
fore.
The central mosque in Lille is located in the Wazemmes area. It is a
rather unremarkable structure: three houses seem to have been knocked
together and a dwarf dome and minaret added rather crudely. The mosque
also serves as the first Muslim school in France. It is named after
Averroes, the great 12th century Spanish rationalist philosopher and
humanist. It is a pity that Europe appropriated his rationalism but
jettisoned his pluralistic humanism. Ibn Rushd, to use his Muslim name,
would demand that the established order that calls itself honourable and
ethical, liberal and tolerant, offer an appropriate explanation to those
whom it continues to discriminate against, dehumanise and demean.
(Ziauddin Sardar is the author of numerous books and a
well known writer, broadcaster and critic.)
(Courtesy: New Statesman; December 5, 2005.)