Brothers All. But With the Muslims, for Francis, All Is More Complicated

Sandro Magister explains the problems with Francis's one world, one religion outlook.

From Settimo Cielo

By Sandro Magister

Fraternal dialogue among all the religions and doors open to immigrants of any faith. These are the two main avenues of the religious geopolitics of the pontificate of Jorge Mario Bergoglio.

The first was put to the test with the pope's trip to Iraq, from March 5 to 8. And it had its culminating moments in the visit of Francis to Shiite grand ayatollah Al-Sistani and in the meeting in Ur between “the sons of Abraham” (see photo).

But in Ur the Jews were missing, due to a veto by the Muslim regimes of Baghdad and Tehran. And in spite of this, in the Arab countries, in Iran, in Turkey, the judgments on the Pope's trip have been predominantly negative, for reasons linked both to the historical opposition between Sunnis and Shiites and to the division in the Sunni camp between the movement of Al-Azhar and of the Muslim Brotherhood, and in the Shiite camp between Khomeini's theocracy and Al-Sistani's “quietism,” with Francis accused of having taken sides with one against the other.

An extensively developed formulation of these criticisms can be read, in English translation, in this essay by Professor Ozcam Hidir of Sabahattin Zaim University in Istanbul, a specialist in Islam and relations with Judaism and Christianity:

But the second main avenue of Francis’s religious geopolitics, that of welcoming and integrating immigrants, especially those of Muslim faith in Europe, is also in serious difficulty.

The sore point is not so much welcome, of which Francis is a tireless preacher, but integration, which is largely lacking or failed, due to mistaken policies and ahead of that to a distorted understanding of the real sensitivities and expectations of Muslim immigrants in Europe, not to mention the total absence of their (not even attempted) evangelization.

A keen analysis of this failed integration - also based on field research - has been published by an Egyptian Muslim scholar, Wael Farouq, in the latest issue of “Vita e Pensiero,” the magazine of the Catholic University of Milan.

Farouq is a professor of Arabic language and culture at this university, but he has also taught at New York University and the American University in Cairo. In 2017 Settimo Cielo highlighted his outspoken denunciation of the essential link between Islamic terrorism and “a specific doctrine” of Islam itself:

> It Took a Muslim To Say What For Pope and Bishops Is Taboo

Also at the end of this other article of his - which is reproduced here in its essential passages - Farouq reiterates the link between terrorism and “the sacred texts of Islam.” But the bulk of his analysis is precisely on the question of integration, far from being resolved for the reasons that he identifies and explains.

His turn.

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MUSLIMS IN EUROPE. IT TAKES MORE THAN BANNING THE VEIL

by Wael Farouq

In Arab-Islamic societies, modernity has established a complex relationship with tradition. These have managed to adapt to each other and at the same time to submit to each other. […] Examples are lifestyles, opinions, and public behaviors that cannot be described as either traditional or modern, but are a distorted mixture of both. In summary, it can be said that modernity has developed the rigid and irrational elements of tradition, while tradition has developed the formal, non-authentic aspects of modernity. [...]

Some of the responsibility also falls, however, on the failures of the European integration models, evident today in the existence, in all the metropolises of Europe, of “parallel societies” in which Muslim immigrants live; the result perhaps of what Benedict XVI described as “negative pluralism,” according to which dialogue and coexistence require the overcoming of the differences and disparities that distinguish one culture from another. [...]

France, for example, bans the display of religious symbols in public spaces. The problem here is integration by “subtraction”: in order to fight against the exclusion of the different, one chooses to exclude the difference. But when religious experience is one of the most important elements of identity, the exclusion of the difference becomes in fact the exclusion of the person, and it will be adaptation or isolation within one's own religious community, not interaction, that will mark the relationship of immigrants with society. [...]

The questions that Muslim immigrants in Europe put to themselves about the relationship between their faith and Western culture, together with the consequent answers, constitute what is technically called “fatwa” and are now publicly available on many websites that, in Europe, have taken the place of the Islamic religious authorities. In my book “Conflicting Arab Identities. Language, Tradition and Modernity” (Milan-Baghdad, Muta, 2018) I have analyzed a sample of about a thousand questions asked by European Muslims, investigating how the complex interaction between tradition and modernity in action in the Arab-Islamic world has been transported to the Western context.

The most important finding of this study is that the concerns and hopes of Muslims in Europe are far from the topics normally in the spotlight of the mass media, for example the veil, religious symbols in public space, or the construction of mosques. These issues attract marginal interest among Muslims residing in Europe, an even more significant result when one considers that those who call for a “fatwa” are the most religious of them.

What really interests European Muslims is the relationship with others, Muslim and non-Muslim. This latter topic constitutes 45 percent of the questions. These are all personal questions, which concern individuals and rarely touch on public matters. If we add the questions about acts of worship - that is, about the personal relationship with God - the percentage rises to 63 percent. This leads to the conclusion that these Muslims are primarily concerned with how to fit into European societies as individuals, not as a religious community or minority. The most religious Muslims of Europe - those who take the trouble to call for a fatwā - try to adapt to society, they do not try to oppose it by forming an antagonistic camp, nor do they seem inclined to withdraw into their religious community.

However, also clearly delineated is the […] aforementioned mixture of rigid tradition and distorted modernity. The main driver of these Muslims’ questions is the fear of breaking the “rules” and committing sin. It seems that Muslims no longer worry about knowing what is good and what is bad, because there are the “rules”: following them exempts one from asking dangerous questions that could lead one astray from religion. [...]

The contradictions of fake Arab-Islamic modernity, therefore, become even more complex in the case of Muslim immigrants in Europe, where they have to deal with a crisis of identity and of the production of meaning equal in acuity to that in their own societies of origin. [...]

How, then, is Islamic terrorism to be interpreted in the light of these considerations? In reality, one notes that two types of Muslims are always involved in terrorist attacks: those who are integrated and those who are not. In the attack in Vienna on November 2 2020 there was the bomber, but there were also three Muslims, two Turks and a Palestinian, who helped the police and saved the life of a policeman. Among the victims of the “Charlie Hebdo” massacre was also a Muslim policeman.

The latest attacks in France and Austria, like many other attacks in recent years, have been carried out by jihadists already known to the police who had taken part in programs of deradicalization and reintegration into society. But these programs have failed with most jihadists, and it is impossible for them to succeed, unless Europe abandons the suicidal political tendency of ignoring the real causes of this type of terrorism, that is, the underlying religious ideology: in other words, the interpretation that jihadists make of the sacred texts of Islam, propagated in full freedom by preachers and associations (who condemn violence and are not involved in it). The problem lies not in the hand holding the knife, but in the ideological discourse that provides it with the motivation and justification to use it to murder others.