Islam, Islamism and Islamophobia in Europe

Delivered at Council of Europe 24.6.10 

Islam, Islamism and Islamophobia in Europe

I welcome the fact that, in the context of political extremism, this report draws a distinction between religion on the one hand and the manipulation of religious beliefs for political reasons on the other. Indeed, there are many praiseworthy aspects to the report. It astutely pinpoints the dual wrongs of both Islamism, as a terrorist and anti-democratic force, and Islamophobia, as a form of secular and religious bigotry.

However, it also suffers from a significant blind spot: the report has remarkably little to say about how and why European liberalism threatens the values and beliefs of orthodox Muslims of good will, and by extension all believers of good will whether they by Muslim, Jew or Christian. This threat is an important motivating factor in the rise of fringe religions fundamentalism. Just as importantly, it is a source of great anxiety and despondence to a great number of believers of good will who see their sincerely held beliefs about sexuality, religion and the sacredness of all human life routinely mocked in the overwhelmingly liberal media. When the report does comment on the threat it assumes that European liberalism has no case to answer and it is the responsibility of ‘religious backwardness’ to conform to the prevailing liberal ideology.

It is true that human rights and democracy are at the heart of the contemporary European project. Both principles are compatible with the main monotheistic religions. As a subset of democracy secularism means the separation of religion and state for the sake of protecting both. Secularism in this context does not entail the segregation of religion and the state; if it did it would be open to the state in particular to suppress the religious voice. But this report in places contends that secularism is more than a subset of democracy and is in fact the third pillar of the European project. As the third pillar it assumes the mantle of the prevailing European philosophy to the exclusion of competing philosophies, such as the various religious philosophies. If this is the case then the promotion of secularism to the position of the predominant European philosophy contradicts the claim by procedural secularism, i.e. secularism as a subset of democracy, that the state shall remain neutral as to the veracity of religion, agnosticism and atheism.

It is with alarm that I read in the report that a Muslim who seeks to incorporate the precepts of Islam into the political and social order is an Islamist. Perhaps that particular passage suffers from a lack of context, but surely a Muslim of good will has every right to work towards bringing about a society based upon the dignity of the person, the importance of family, the search for justice etc – all of which are part of the Islamic philosophy. A distinction should have been made here between illegitimate interpretations of Islam, or Islamic values which may clash with the philosophy of human rights, on the one hand and the more generally accepted view of the content of Islam on the other. It must be born in mind that the concept of dignity upon which human rights is founded is a specifically Judeo-Christian doctrine – surely it is worth incorporating into the social and political orders, even if it is a religious doctrine?

The report is quick to criticise what it perceives to be flaws in the theologies of various religions when it criticises Islam, Judaism and Catholicism (though not Christianity per se) for their teaching on the nature of priesthood and religious office (para. 50). Although it rightly asserts that ‘[c]riticising a religious orientation is not an act of discrimination against its followers, but part of freedom of expression in a democratic society’, I do wonder whether the report would draw the same conclusions about sexual orientation broadly construed and gay and lesbian people. Because according to secularism as a subset of democracy it should be perfectly legitimate for a Muslim to offer a fair minded criticism of the liberalist view of sexuality, including the morality of sexual promiscuity and homosexual acts, without being censured for it. However, according to secularism as the self-proclaimed European philosophy, or secularism with a capital ‘S’, a Muslim should in fact be censured for daring to question the morality of liberalism’s sacred dogmas.

Hence, the question of how Europe accommodates Muslims depends to some extent at least on how do we interpret secularism: with a small or with a capital ‘s’?