by MARCIA PALLY

Muslims in Europe. To be honest, I feel uncomfortable writing about them. A century ago we would have been talking about Jews in Europe, or Poles in Germany. This analogy is rejected on the grounds that the Jews or Poles were not blowing up planes and trains, as militants who claim to be acting in the name of Islam are today. But the xenophobic writings of a century ago about Europe’s Jews and the Polish show old and layered prejudices where these groups were considered as threatening to European culture and security as Islamists are at present.

Non-Muslim Europeans are indeed trying to understand the relatively new Muslims in their midst while defending the very tolerant, democratic principles that were threatened by the fascist discourse that developed toward Jews, Poles, and many others. The right-wing Dutch politician, Pym Fortune, objected to recent Muslim immigration into Holland on just this sort of defense. But it’s not clear why Europeans think these principles are so vulnerable. Is democracy so unappealing or unuseful to Muslims in Europe?

The present European discourse about Muslims on one hand comes from the fear that the theocratic conditions found in Saudi Arabia, Iran or among the Taliban are in fact the project of Europe’s Muslims—a project from which non-Muslim Europeans wish to protect modern liberal democracy. But it comes also from conditions and assumptions that run deep in European history. I say this because the situation of Muslims in the US is rather different, pointing to ways in which these two western areas differ. To begin, some comparisons. In both income and college graduation levels, Muslim Americans match US national norms. Only 2 percent of Muslims in the US are low-income, compared to 18 percent of Muslims in Germany and France, 22 percent in Britain and 23 percent in Spain.

In Germany, the “Turkish” (a synonym for Muslim) unemployment rate is 25.2 percent, more than twice the national average. In Britain, which supposedly has greater integration of its 1.6 million Muslim immigrants (3 percent of the population), roughly 25 percent are engaged in the economy, 20 percent own their homes, and 30 percent “are described as people with no qualifications”. Compared to the economic and social isolation of Europe’s Muslims, the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life found last year that most Muslim Americans say “their communities are excellent or good places to live” and report that a large proportion of their closest friends are non-Muslims. Seventy-one percent say people can succeed in the US if they work at it; 63 percent report no conflict between religious devotion and living in a modern society. According to Ibrahim Hooper, of the Council on American-Islamic Relations, “America gives people the unique opportunity to leave cultural, historical baggage behind.”

Though 53 percent of US Muslims reported that being a Muslim in America had become more difficult since 9/11, most found this to be the fault of the government, not their neighbors. Seventy-three percent said they had never experienced discrimination in the US. Eighty-five percent of Muslims said suicide bombing is rarely or never justified; only 1 percent said violence to defend Islam was “often” permissible. Significantly higher percentages of Europe’s Muslims believe suicide bombings in the defense of Islam are “often” or “sometimes” justified. A frequent explanation for America’s sanguine situation is that Muslims in America assimilate. But they do not; they remain visible and devout, wearing headscarves, building mosques, and establishing eateries with halal meat. What Muslims do in America is not assimilate, but participate in the economic, political, and educational life of the country, as other immigrant groups have done.

This works well in the US, it’s argued, because of immigrant self-selection: only the most educated Muslims immigrate, as poor social services allow only the best prepared to survive. Yet this fails to explain why alienation and at times violence are features even of Britain’s educated Muslims. And poor Muslims in America fail to express sympathy with suicide bombers or alienation from American society. A second self-selection argument is made about these poor: only those eager for the uncushioned but open possibilities of American life immigrate to the US. Yet this doesn’t explain why these poorer immigrants remain visibly religious; wanting to succeed US-style, they should be quick to “assimilate”.

What we are looking for are the conditions that explain why Muslim Americans do well in the US while remaining devout, even after 9/11. Why can Muslim Americans participate without assimilating? One reason can be found in the traditional deal of mutual obligation: America offers relatively porous economic, political and educational arenas that allow immigrant participation, and immigrants in turn must participate to survive and contribute to the country. A failure on either side would break the deal. That is, despite the discrimination and poverty that immigrants initially suffer — and these should not be minimized — barriers to economic participation have been relatively low.

Additionally, America offers a pluralistic, not secular, public sphere — a civil society not with no religion but with many. Religious groups are not privatized but are community-based, visible and active as the bases for institutions, publications, and symbols. One example of this public visibility is the Muslim prayer group that has met every Friday in the Capitol Building in Washington DC for 10 years, uninterrupted by 9/11. Together, the pluralistic public sphere and participatory economy have allowed Muslim immigrants to get into the stream of American life while retaining their religious practice. This civil society emerged from three peculiarities in American history: the frontier and size of the US, the immigrant experience itself, and ironically American evangelicalism. Though associated today with social conservativism and the Republican Party, evangelicalism was radically liberal and America’s dominant religion from the colonial era through World War I.