New Statesman – The next holocaust

Posted on December 4th, 2005 by .
Categories: Multiculti Issues.

New Statesman – The next holocaust

Cover story
Ziauddin Sardar
Monday 5th December 2005

Islamophobia is not a uniquely British disease: across Europe, liberals openly express prejudice against Muslims. Do new pogroms beckon? Ziauddin Sardar reports from Germany, the Netherlands, Belgium and France.

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.

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 underpinned 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.

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.

Sardar’s story is interesting and certainly worthwile reading. The comparison with the holocaust will probably blown up in his face. That is not appreciated around here as other people like liberal politician Dijkstal and historian Mak already noticed. He does not tackle the issue of what Islamophobia actually is. A new word for racism and anti-semitism? In the way he writes about it the native Europeans are blamed for everything and everything is put into an islamophobia framework. He does not question the fact that is islamophobia. There could be other factors in play here. Nevertheless he points to some real grievances of Muslims. One might say the should do some soul searching themselves, and that might be true, but that does not mean the non-Muslims should not do the same.

Read the whole article of Ziauddin Sardar: (more…)

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