Muslims and the idea of Europe

What kind of identity, then, does Europe represent to Europeans? An empirical response would base itself on comprehensive research into literature, popular media, parliamentary debates, and local interviews.

4. Philip Gleason points out that the first edition of the International Encypf/i clopedia of the Social Sciences, published in 1930-1935, carried no entry under that/"^ term, and that one appeared only in the 1968 edition. See “Identifying Identity: A^ Semantic History,” The Journal of American History, vol. 69, no. 4,1983. centuries trying to drive the Turks out of a Europe they threatened to overwhelm. Turkish membership would dilute the E.C.’s Europeanness,’ says one German diplomat.”⁵

Clearly neither the genocide practiced by the Nazi state nor its at­tempt to overwhelm Europe have led to feelings in Western Europe that would cast doubt on where Germany belongs. I do not make this state­ment in a polemical spirit. On the contrary, I affirm that given the idea of Europe that exists, such violence does not dilute Germany’s Europeanness because violence is—among other things—a complicated moral language. Far from being threatened by internal violence, European solidarity is strengthened by it.

Let me explain: Tony Judt powerfully argues that the idea of Europe stands as a convenient suppressor of collective memories of the widespread collaboration with Nazi crimes in East and West alike, as well as of mass brutalities and civil cruelties for which all states were directly or indirectly responsible.⁶ His account has nothing to say, however, about violence per­petrated in this period by Europeans outside Europe—in colonial Africa, say, or in the Middle East.

Historically, it was not Europe that the Turks threatened but Chris­tendom, since Europe was not then distinct from Christendom. "For diplomats and men of affairs,” writes Denys Hay, “the intrusion of the

5. Time, October 19,1992, p. 31.

6. Tony Judt, “The Past Is Another Country. Myth and Memory in Postwar Europe,” Daedalus, vol. 121, no. 4,1992.

Turk was a feet which could not be ignored and the practical acceptance of a Moslem state into the field of diplomacy might well have produced an early rejection of Christendom in the field of international rela­tions.... The language of diplomacy maintained the established termi­nology: ‘the common enemy, the Christian republic, the Christian world, the provinces of Christendom’ are found in the phraseology of a large number of sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century treaties. A similar at­titude is to be found in the treatises of the international lawyers down to, and even beyond, Grotius.

Richard Tuck has traced some of the debates in the sixteenth and sev­enteenth centuries about the possibility of Christian sovereigns making binding treaties with infidels. He cites the Protestant theologian Peter Martyr who condemned the treaty between the king of France and the Turks as unlawful. Hugo Grotius, however, rejected Martyr’s thesis that Christians could not enter into treaties with infidels because the latter lacked morality; instead, he maintained that infidels were neighbors and so should be the object of protection and love—as our Lord commanded. (According to Tuck, this argument was not unconnected with the fact that Grotius supported the Dutch move to establish trading treaties with the sultan of Johore in the East Indies at the expense of the Portuguese.) But to the lawfulness of treaties with infidels Grotius added new grounds for the lawfulness of wars against them by virtue of the right to punish those who violated the law of nature. “The idea that foreign rulers can punish tyrants, cannibals, pirates, those who kill settlers, and those who are inhu­man to their parents neatly legitimated a great deal of European action against native peoples around the world.... The central reason why Grotius had developed his argument in this direction was, I think, that the Dutch had begun to change the character of their activity in the non­European world since his earlier works, and in particular had begun to an­nex territory.”^[105] Thus alliances could be made with, the Turks on the grounds that they were human beings, but alliance does not mean solidar­ity. On the contrary, many of their customs and practices constituted vio­lations of natural law, and set them outside the pale of Christendom.

In the contemporary European" suspicion-of Turkey, Christian his­tory, enshrined in the tradition of international law, is being re-invoked in secular language as the foundation of an ancient identity.

Consider another example: the 1995 interview with Tadeusz Ma- zowiecki on the subject of his principled resignation as the UN Special Rapporteur for the Commission on Human Rights in the Balkans. At one point the interviewers, Bernard Osser and Patrick Saint-Exupery,⁹ pose the following question: “You are Polish and Christian. Is it strange to hear yourself defending Bosnians, many of whom are Muslims?” Some readers might wonder how it is that two French intellectuals, heirs to the secular Enlightenment, can formulate such a question in Europe today. But of course the aim of this leading question is to elicit the plea for tolerance that the interviewers know will be forthcoming. So I find it more significant that Mazowiecki expresses no surprise at the question itself. Instead, he re­sponds as expected by urging tolerance. He assures his interviewers that the war in Bosnia is not a religious one, and that Bosnian Muslims are not a danger to Europe. “It bodes ill for us,” he warns, “if, at the end of the twentieth century, Europe is still incapable of coexistence with a Muslim community.”

Mazowiecki’s assumption (accepted without comment by his French interlocutors) is that Bosnian Muslims may be in Europe but are not of it—and it is precisely for this reason that they should be accorded tolera­tion. Even though they may not have migrated to Europe from Asia (in­deed they are not racially distinguishable from other whites in Europe), and even though they may have adjusted to secular political institutions (insofar as this can be said of Balkan societies)¹⁰ they cannot claim a Euro-

9. B. Osser and P. de Saint-Exupery, “The UN’s Failure: An Interview with Tadeusz Mazowiecki,” New York Review of Books, vol. XLII, no. 14, Sep­tember 21, 1995.

10. “In its historical practice,” writes Francois Thual, “Caucasian, Balkan, Greek, and Slav Orthodox Christianity has never known secularism based on the separation of Church and State” (“Dans le monde orthodoxie, la religion sacralise la nation, et la nation protege la religion,” LeMonde, January 20,1998, p.

Muslims as a “Religious Minority” in Europe 165 peanness—as the inhabitants of Christian Europe can. It is precisely be­cause Muslims are external to the essence of Europe that “coexistence” can be envisaged between "us” and “them.”

For both liberals and the extreme right the representation of “Eu­rope” takes the form of a narrative, one of whose effects is to exclude Islam. I don’t mean by this that both sides are equally hostile toward Muslims liv­ing in Europe.^[CVI] Nor do I assume that Muslim immigrants are in no way responsible for their practical predicament. I mean only that for liberals no less than for the extreme right, the narrative of Europe points to the idea of an unchangeable essence, and the argument between them concerns the kind of “toleration” that that essence calls for.

Islam and the narrative of Europe

Europe, we often read, is not merely a continent, but a civilization. The word “civilization” is no longer as fashionable in the West as it was at the turn of the nineteenth century, but it appears to be returning. Some still object that the term “civilization” should not be applied to Europe, while insisting that there is something that Europeans share. Thus Michael Wintie: “To talk in terms of a quintessential or single European culture, civilization, or identity leads quickly to unsustainable generalization, and to all manner of heady and evidently false claims for one’s own continent. Nonetheless, if the triumphalism can be left to one side there is a long his­tory of shared influences and experiences, a heritage, which has not touched all parts of Europe or all Europeans equally, and which is therefore hard and perhaps dangerous to define in single sentences or even para-

graphs, but which is felt and experienced in varying ways and degrees by those whose home is Europe, and which is recognized—whether approvingly or disapprovingly—by many from outside.”^[107]

The key influences on European experience, Wintie continues, are the Roman Empire, Christianity, the Enlightenment, and industrializa­tion.

Raymond Williams notes that the word “civilization” is used today in three senses: (i) a single universal development (as in “human civiliza­tion”); (2) the collective character of a people or a period that is different from and incommensurable with others (as in “the civilization of the Re­naissance in Italy”); ^nd (3). the culture of a particular population, which is rankable as higher or. lower than another, and perhaps also capable of fur­ther development.^{[108] [109] Although Williams does not say so, the three senses together articulate the essence of “European civilization”: it aspires to a universal '(because “human”) status; it claims to be distinctive (it defines modernity as opposed to tradition); and it is, by quantifiable criteria, un­doubtedly the most advanced—and knows itself to be so to the extent that it now ijicludes: North-America. Taken together these senses require a nar­rative definition of "Europe.”}

The two journalistic examples I cited earlier both assume a historical definition of Europe as a civilization. But they do so in ways that are largely implicit. Hugh Trevor-Roper’s The Rise of Christian Europe¹'¹ is one of many academic texts that expresses the essence of European identity ex­plicitly by means of a historical narrative. Trevor-Ropers book is interest­ing because it defines European civilization—and therefore European identity—as a narrative, or at least as the beginning of one whose proper ending is aireddy familiar. Like other texts with which it may be compared, it presents a twofold notion of history: the history of “the idea of Europe” and of “European history.”¹⁵ It also has an interesting historical location. It appeared in 1965, when British decolonization was more or less complete, and when the flood of non-European immigrants from the former colonies was stemmed by legislation—passed amidst charges of betrayal of its prin­ciples—by the Labour government. At the time a new role for Britain in its postimperial phase was being vigorously debated, in all sections of the political spectrum. The option of “joining Europe” politically was kn im­portant part of that debate.

When Trevor-Roper speaks of “European history” he does not mean narratives about the inhabitants of the European continent, which is why there is nothing in his book about Byzantium and Eastern Europe, or about northwestern Europe (other than brief references to the; Viking’s de­structiveness), or about Jews (other than as victims), or about Muslim Spain (other than as an intrusive presence). “European history” is the nar­ration of an identity many still derive from “European (or Western) civi­lization”—a narrative that seeks to represent homogeneous space and lin­ear time. ! "

What is the essence of that civilizational identity? Trevor-Roper re­minds his readers tpat most of its ideas and many of its; techniques entered European civi|i£atioh from outside. The things that belong to European civilization, thetefore, are those that were taken up and creatively worked on by “Europe.” Productive elaboration becomes an essential characteris­tic of Europe as a civilization. This view makes sense, I would suggest, in the context of a particular Enlightenment theory about property first pro­pounded by John Locke. Locke argued that a person’s right to property comes from the mixing of labor with the common things of this world. “God gave the world to men in common, but since He gave it them for their benefit and the greatest conveniencies of life they were capable to draw from it, it cannot be supposed He meant it should always remain common and uncultivated. He gave it to the use of the industrious and ra­tional (and labor was to be his title to it); not to the fancy or covetousness

15. For example, D. Hay, Europe: The Emergence of an Idea, Edinburgh: Ed­inburgh University Press, 1957; J.-B. Duroselle, L’idde d’Europe dans I’histoire, Paris: Denoel, 1963; R.H. Foerster, Europa: Geschichte einer politischen Idee, Munich: Nymphenburger, 1967; K. Wilson and J,. Van der Dussen, eds., The History of the Idea of Europe, London: Routledge, 1995.

of the quarrelsome and contentious.”¹⁶ Applied to whole peoples, prop­erty was “European” to the extent that Europeans appropriated, culti­vated, and then lawfully passed it on to generations of Europeans as their own inheritance.

“European history” thus becomes a history of continuously produc­tive actions defining as well as defined by law. Property is central to that story not only in the sense familiar to political economy and jurisprudence, but in the sense of the particular character, nature, or essence of a person or thing. It is a story that can be narrated in terms of improvement and ac­cumulation, in which the industrial revolution is merely one (albeit cen­tral) moment. According to this conception, “European civilization” is simply the sum of properties, all those material and moral acts that define European identity.

It follows from this view of Europe that real Europeans acquire their individual identities from the character of their civilization. Without that civilizational essence, individuals living within Europe are unstable and ambiguous. That is why not all inhabitants of the European continent are “really” or “fully” European. Russians are clearly marginal. Until just after World War II, European Jews were marginal too, but since that break the emerging discourse of a “Judeo-Christian tradition” has signaled a new in­tegration of their status into Europe.¹⁷ Completely external to “European history” is medieval Spain. Although Spain is now defined geographically as part of Europe, Arab Spain from the seventh to the fourteenth centuries is seen as being outside “Europe,” in spite of the numerous intimate con­nections and exchanges in the Iberian peninsula during that period be­tween Muslims, Christians, and Jews.

There is a problem for any historian constructing a categorical boundary for “European civilization” because the populations designated by the label “Islam” are, in great measure, the cultural heirs of the Hellenic world—the very world in which “Europe” claims to have its roots. “Islamic civilization” must therefore be denied a vital link to the properties that de­fine so much of what is essential to “Europe” if a civilizational difference is to be postulated between them. There appear to be two moves by which this is done. First, by denying that it has an essence of its own, “Islam” can

16. J. Locke, Two Treatises of Civil Government, Book II, Chapter V, para­graph 34; emphasis added.

17. Of course anti-Semitism has not disappeared in Europe. But no one who aspires to respectability can now afford to be known publicly as an anti-Semite.

Muslims as a “Religious Minority” in Europe 169 be represented as a carrier civilization that helped to bring important ele­ments into Europe from outside, material and intellectual elements that were only contingently connected to Islam.¹⁸ Then, to this carrier civiliza­tion is attributed an essence: an ingrained hostility to all non-Muslims, That attribution constitutes Islam as Europe’s primary alter. This alleged antagonism to Christians then becomes crucial- to the formation of Euro­pean identity. In this, as in other historical narratives of Europe, this op­positional role gives “Islam” a quasi-civilizatiorial identity.¹⁹ Ohe aspect of the identity of Islamic civilization is that it represents an early attempt to destroy Europe’s civilization from outside; another is that it signifies the corrupting moral environment that Europe must continuously struggle to overcome from within.²⁰

This construction of civilizational difference is not exclusive in any simple sense. The de-essentialization of Islam is paradigmatic for all think­ing about the assimilation of non-European, peoples to, European civiliza­tion. The idea that people’s historical experience is^:inessential to them, that it can be shed at will, makes it possible to argue more'strongly for the En­lightenment’s claim to universality: Muslims, as members of the abstract category “humans,” can be assimilated or (as some recent- theorists have put it) “translated” into a global ("European”) civilization once they have divested themselves of what many of them regard (mistakenly) as essential to themselves. The belief that human beings can be separated from their histories and traditions makes it possible to urge a Europeanization of the

¹, i

18. “The Arabs themselves... had little ofthejr dum to offer.... But as car­riers, their services to Europe were enormous” (Trevor-Roper, p. 141).

19. In Trevor-Ropers picturesque language: “Out of this union [of ecclesias­

tical and feudal power], would come, in due time, the combined spiritual and ma­terial counter-attack of the enslaved West against its Moslem exploiters: the Cru­sades” (ibid., p. too).,

20. Hence, Trevor-Roper’s account of the European Crusaders who estab­lished a principality in Jerusalem from the end of the eleventh centitry to the end of the twelfth: “The Christian kingdom of Jerusalem continued for less than a century. The Christian virtues, such as they were, evaporated in the East. The Christian dynasties ran out.... [T]he sons—or rather the successors, for there was a dearth of sons—settled down to a life of luxurious co-existence in which feudal bonds were rotted and oriental tastes indulged” (ibid., p. 104). By “Christ­ian” Trevor-Roper refers of course only to those who originated in “Europe,” be­cause the Middle East at the time was largely inhabited by indigenous Christians who were major contributors to “Islamic civilization.”

Islamic world. And by the same logic, it underlies the belief that the as­similation to Europe’s civilization of Muslim immigrants who are—for good or for ill—already in European states is necessary and desirable.

The motive of “European history” in this representation is thè story of Europe’s active power to reconstruct the world (within Europe and be­yond) in its own Faustian image.^[110] Europe’s colonial past is not merely an epoch of overseas power that is now decisively over. It is the beginning of an irreversible global transformation that remains an intrinsic part of “Eu­ropean experience,” and is part of the reason that Europe has become what it is today. It is not possible for Europe to be represented without evoking this history and the way in which its active power has continually con­structed its. own exclusive boundary—and transgressed it.