Europe's identity crisis
A growing Muslim minority is challenging Europe's view of itself
So do Europeans facing powerful trends, not just in culture and faith but also in underlying demographics and economics. Old Europe's population is aging, which causes its unfilled jobs and underground economy to attract unemployed young people from the Mideast and North Africa. Immigrants often join an underclass of young, European-born Muslims filling the mosques even as attendance falls at Christian churches. The building of new mosques with traditional minarets is on the rise, from 77 in 2002 to an estimated 141 in 2003 in Germany alone. A bishop emeritus of Germany's Independent Lutherans told one news service, with only a touch of melodrama, that "I fear that we are approaching a situation resembling the tragic fate of Christianity in northern Africa in Islam's early days."
Turkey's EU membership talks have brought into sharp focus that nearly one third of Europeans will be over the age of 65 by the year 2050, while Turkey's predominantly youthful population, now 70 million, will grow to nearly 100 million. "When you talk about the debate on Turkey's EU membership, it immediately becomes a talk about head-scarf issues and building mosques," says Cem Ozdemir, a German of Turkish origin who serves on the European Parliament's Foreign Affairs Committee. The underlying issues, he says, are "the unsolved problems of immigration and integration."
It doesn't help that the western Europeans grappling with these developments are overwhelmingly unreligious. "There is a popular theory in Europe that the less religious you are, the more enlightened, the more democratic you are," says Ozdemir. In Germany, where the chancellor and five of his cabinet members chose to drop the "so help me God" portion of their respective oaths of office, only 3 percent of Protestants routinely attend church on Sundays. In England, Anglicans are now a minority. And in France, there are only 25,000 Roman Catholic priests--most past retirement age--in a country that is home to the largest Muslim population in Europe (5 million in a population of 60 million).
As this population continues to grow into a political force--if Turkey joins the EU, Muslims could account for 1 in 5 Europeans by 2050--the question becomes whether Islam is compatible with the Continent's secular democracies. Kadriye Aydin, a 34-year-old family and immigration lawyer born and raised in Germany, says her Muslim faith and democratic ideals coexist. Many Europeans, she says, "do not understand that it is possible to combine both identities, to be both a Muslim and a European who believes in democracy."
These days, though, European television is packed with exposes of the anti-West preachings by radical Muslim figures, from the Turkish imam caught urging those assembled in a Bavarian prayer room to "take advantage of democracy to further our cause" to another Berlin-based imam filmed asserting that Germans were smelly sinners who would go to hell. Faced with deportation, the imam apologized for "my personal inability to adequately explain some things to the Muslim community without denigrating other cultures and religions."
Deception? Such incidents fuel fears that Muslim immigrants are exploiting liberal western values to spread religious radicalism, says Valerie Amiraux, a political scientist specializing in Islam in secular society at the National Center for Scientific Research in Amiens, France. What's more, she says, "after the days of Theo van Gogh, there was a sense that giving a place to multiculturalism may lead to violence and political disorder." Following that murder, parliamentarians in the traditionally liberal Netherlands began calling for mandatory Dutch classes in light of reports that half of Muslims in the Netherlands don't speak the language. Politicians are crafting initiatives to limit low-income housing for new immigrants and restrict the arrival of mail-order Muslim brides from the Middle East. Germany likewise is considering measures to force imams to preach in German.
advertisement
