When cultures clash in a climate of fear by Ian Buruma:
Immigrants, sometimes from the old colonies, are the pious ones now. They still have the religious fervour which the host countries have rejected.
This can cause problems. Think of the Muslims in Britain, burning effigies of Salman Rushdie, and calling for his death. Or think of the difficulties in France of integrating veiled Muslim girls into the secular education system. Think of the young people born in Europe, who are forced to marry people from villages thousands of miles away, and the fate of some who refuse.
The tendency of our political elites has been to dodge these issues. On the left, even raising them meant you might be branded as a racist, while some on the right would like the rest of us to emulate the stricter ways of immigrant parents. The Rushdie case, for example, was an occasion for some conservatives to call for tighter blasphemy laws.
The clearest instance of this is the Dutch populist, Pim Fortuyn, who wants to halt immigration, especially from Muslim countries, because immigrants, in his view, are a menace to the liberal values of Dutch society. Here, then, for the first time, we have a rightwinger denouncing immigrants for their bigotry.
The current success of rightwing scaremongering should at least force us to confront the problems of immigration. Islamism is a serious issue, because it allows confused youths to identify with a worldwide brotherhood, with its own ethics and goals. It gives them something to believe in. And one of the reasons some do so readily is that modern, secular, liberal society has little to offer in its place. The whole point of our disenchanted society is that we have more or less banished faith. This does not cause widespread anguish among the mainstream of young Europeans, but for people who feel trapped between conservative immigrant parents and a bewildering society in which they feel barely accepted, it can.
Liberal pieties about freedom and prosperity don’t get us very far. For freedom is something that aspiring Islamists, who have already tried discos and drugs, often seek to escape. And prosperity throws out no moral or social anchors either. To say that we should all return to an enchanted world of church and hierarchy is not the answer I would seek. And a conscription army which could conceivably help to integrate people from all races and creeds no longer exists. So there is no easy answer, but we should at least recognise that immigration can produce severe cultural tensions. If we don’t, we hand the debate over to the demagogues. And we all know what can happen then.
{ 0 comments… add one now }