Islam and Social Democrats: Integrating Europe’s Muslim Minorities - by Jonathan Laurence

The Niqab (Al-Ahzab 33:59)

The first serious divergences between Muslims and the left in Europe began with the fatwa issued by Iranian Ayatollah Khomeini against Salman Rushdie in 1989 and religious demands to censor his novel, The Satanic Verses. The split widened later that year, when France began to restrict the wearing of girls’ headscarves in schools.

Until then, parties on the left had embraced the mostly working-class minority as a natural ally. Migrants from Muslim majority countries first began settling permanently in Western Europe in the 1970s and ’80s. The unexpected transformation of receiving countries into “immigration societies” provoked nationalist and racist reactions on the right, while parties on the left appeared the likely beneficiary of the influx of future voters.

As right-wing rhetoric about Islam becomes increasingly toxic, there is political space on the left for a more robust and liberal defense of Muslims’ religious rights. With demographic projections showing continued growth of the Muslim population in Western Europe before leveling off at 25 to 30 million people (or 7–8 percent of the population) in 2030, political parties have no choice but to look upon Muslim voters as Benjamin Disraeli was said to view the nineteenth century working classes: like angels imprisoned in a block of marble. If Muslims’ religious identity isn’t welcome on the left, then Muslims for whom practicing Islam is an important part of their lives will try to carve out a tolerant space elsewhere—whether by retreating from broader European societies or forming new identity-based parties.

If left-wing parties want to appeal to this electorate over the long term, it is crucial they discover the meaning of state neutrality in the complex institutional settings of European nation-states. The Princeton philosopher Kwame Anthony Appiah recently wrote that countering extremism requires “an alliance of those of all faiths and none who can live with and tolerate cultural difference against those, wherever they live and whatever their religion, who cannot.” This basic plaidoyer to get on the right side of that battle for toleration is still necessary, and still too uncommon. Paradoxically, in order to keep religion out of politics and to overcome the boundaries of Muslim community, the left needs to take an active, engaged role in shaping the contours of this minority’s religious interactions with state and society.

Timothy Garton Ash’s “liberal pentagram” (inclusion, clarity, consistency, firmness, and liberality) provides the kind of ambitious but critical policy framework needed to encourage different faith communities to arrive at the same indispensable conclusion: the law of the land is the law. This cannot happen unless the institutions that deal with religion engage with Muslim religious organizations and leadership—including the least progressive groups—to create analogous ties to those the state already maintains with all other major faith communities.

This will require acknowledging that long-term progressive goals may supersede short-term progressive values: a headscarf ban in public school classrooms might seem like great political theory to some, but what if the parents of girls most in need of “integration” simply send them to segregated schools as a result? And if gender-segregated swimming hours at the local municipal pool are generally granted to women who want to swim alone, what business is it of the state whether they do that for “feminist” or “Islamist” reasons?

Rather than defending liberal order, left parties have become so worried about losing votes that they feel compelled to cater to populist temptations about Islam and immigration more generally. Even British Labour leader Ed Miliband recently returned to the old saw that “migrant workers” are an inherent threat: “It’s not prejudiced when people worry about immigration. It’s understandable. And we were wrong in the past when we dismissed people’s concerns.” However concerned politicians may be about losing the Muslim vote, they are more worried about the potential wrath of anti-Muslim voters in their own ranks.

This may be the reason parties on the left have tried hard to emphasize non-religious collective identities. But when the left “bets against God,” as the Italian intellectual Giancarlo Bosetti has put it, it simplifies everything as a battle for power between the secular state and religious authorities—and forgoes potential alliances with faith communities that share common moral, economic, and social ground.

Without the basic integration of Muslim religious communities into existing state-religion structures, the religion issue will remain a grievance that unites this minority in feeling Muslim—regardless of how religious they are otherwise—in response to the hysteria over halal, hijabs, minarets, and niqabs. If the parties of the left don’t want to lose voters to new religious formations, they must create the conditions for people of faith to feel more comfortable in national institutions. There is room for more complex answers than those offered so far.

Read more: Islam and Social Democrats: Integrating Europe’s Muslim Minorities | Dissent Magazine