Democracy, Islam and the politics of belonging

Zakaria Hamidi is surprised at how many "Dutch people" have come along to the first public debate in Rotterdam organised by New Horizon, a newly-launched platform for discussion focusing on Islam in the Netherlands. Over 800 of us are packed in serried rows into a big conference hall in Erasmus University on a Friday night, mid-January, awaiting the arrival of "two men who have dedicated a lot of time, energy and heart to analysing the problems of disharmony between Muslims and non-Muslims, beginning with Belgium and France, but always aiming for European solutions – solutions for the world at large," in the words of the young chairwoman. It has taken Zakaria a year to bring his speakers together, and 200 people have already had to be turned away.

Both men have a considerable following, and on the surface seem to disagree about almost everything. Lebanese-born Dyab Abou Jahjah, president of the Arab European League (AEL) has been called the Belgian Malcolm X, while the young philosopher, Tariq Ramadan, as he will remind us tonight, has often been referred to as "the preacher of the banlieues". So our chair's closing remark that, "maybe by the end of the night, we will find out that both men would however like to join forces … in helping Muslims to freedom and peace," does little to dent the hopes of those who came wanting to hear a good row.

Dyab Abou Jahjah rises to agree with "80% of what he has just heard", adding amicably that nobody will be surprised if he concentrates on the areas in which he disagrees. He immediately reformulates the opening question. Why should Muslims be so concerned about whether they fit into Europe? When citizens in the Netherlands, Belgium or France can see that these countries do not live up to their own constitutions, or EU or international conventions on human rights, "shouldn't we be changing them? My question is, is Europe as it stands today, compatible with democracy?" Put it this way, and of course some people are going to accuse you of an activism which is in bad faith, and an incitement to hostility. But why are these so-called democracies so unwilling to listen? The answer, Dyab Abou Jahjah suggests, is because Muslims in these societies are ethnically in a numerical minority; they are a minority as immigrants or the children of immigrants; and, even if you discount these aspects, due to the inequalities, exclusion and discrimination they suffer, they are in a minority of citizens who really criticise the democratic credentials of European countries, and who want to see profound change, "people who believe that a democracy cannot really be a democracy if it relies on a certain concentration of power and capital, and an international agenda focused on imperialism, colonialism and on being the lackey of the United States of America."

Once again, there is enthusiastic applause as Abou Jahjah concludes that what follows from this is a stark choice – between forgetting the forms of oppression and exploitation which brought you or your family to Europe in the first place, or aligning yourself with the oppressed and standing up for their rights as well as your own. This is not a question of some kind of nostalgia for your origins, or divided loyalty, it is matter of knowing where you stand on key issues of power in the world.

From this perspective, Tariq Ramadan's encouragement to Muslims to "feel at home" is "creeping assimilation". The comment about "Egypt being a memory" has particularly grated with Abou Jahjah, he explains afterwards. "The Third world is as real a presence today as Europe is, and tomorrow it will be oppressed and pushed into dictatorship and violence and all that follows from that. Tell me that you don't need to be Egyptian to struggle on behalf of the Egyptian people: I agree with you. But if you are, you have even more motivation. You don't say, 'I bailed out of there, but as a European of course I will look afresh at your grievances!'"

The passionate debate that follows these opening provocations has some interesting twists. Ramadan is completely opposed to Islamic schools or affirmative action where these might add to segregation from society: Abou Jahjah applauds both as tactical options, regarding recourse to such schools as understandable where mainstream education is dysfunctional and the state forbids girls to wear the hijab. Abou Jahjah has founded Belgium's Muslim Democratic Party: Ramadan thinks that Islamic political parties are the very worst way to organise oneself.

At one point, frustrated with the difficulty of capturing their differences, Abou Jahjah, who has been building a branch of the AEL in France, implies that "the preacher" is too keen to lecture the French rioters on their "responsibilities". He for one would like to put it on the record that he saluted not their violence – "they are using a traditionally French form of direct action, perfectly proportionate to the provocation they have suffered" – but their resistance. It is a rhetorical gesture and it certainly turns up the heat. Ramadan is adamant that his practical, grassroots credentials are as solid as Abou Jahjah's, and accuses him in turn of whipping up emotional support through protest because he too is "a politician", willing to deploy the populist and publicist methods that Ramadan abjures. This accusation of "emotionality" touches a raw nerve. Abou Jahjah, "gets enough of that thrown at him back in Antwerp!" As far as he is concerned, those French youngsters have advanced their cause far better than they would have done listening to Ramadan on "how a good Muslim should behave!" Ramadan accuses Abou Jahjah of "disrespect", and the audience begins to settle into something like the carnival atmosphere of a Wimbledon final.

Some have been trying to work out what these differences amount to for themselves. A man at the back proposes contrasting constituencies: Abou Jahjah speaks for "angry immigrants who feel socially excluded, while Ramadan's supporters want to canalise their anger into a more positive channel". A woman suggests that they look to the civil rights movement of the USA. Here was a similar dual and complementary approach, for "it was when they got afraid of Malcolm X that they started talking to Martin Luther King. Couldn't that work for these two strategies?"

After-reckoning

Two years ago, Tariq Ramadan was looking forward to his new teaching job at Notre Dame University, only to be denied a US visa (something he is contesting in the courts). What he wanted to talk about when we met later in London, however, is a rebuff on a larger scale: the dangerous emergence of an "ideology of fear" in Europe and elsewhere, no longer espoused by the far right alone. "My main concern is with those others who normalise their discourse and offer as common parlance an ideology that plays exactly the same role as one based on ideas, except that it is devoid of ideas or rationality and built out of emotions: a binary vision of Us and Them, virtual walls between us, Bush saying that he is the only one who can protect people against terrorism, Muslims feeling targeted. So we all feel ourselves to be victims and this throws us apart. We cannot build bridges or come together, or resist the primacy of a specific, dominant economy – because we are totally divided in the socio-political field. This is against a broader background of the everyday reality of racism, discrimination, ghettoisation."

Against this dangerous tendency, he sees another trajectory, one tantalisingly close in a Europe where large Muslim populations, in Britain, France and Germany at least, are reaching the stage where they feel "at home". He calls this the "integration of intimacy", when people are ready to make a commitment and to give something back to their societies. "This can be a virtuous circle. When you give something, you are not asked, 'Where do you come from?'" Fifteen years ago Ramadan began his work of convincing Muslim leaders that it was necessary to return to the scriptural sources and begin a European reformation of their own. "We still have this victim mentality which blames 'the Other' and which thinks of ourselves as minorities who need protection, rather than as people who can stand up actively for themselves in our societies. But things have been moving very fast on this front in the last few years, and we are coming forward with new answers and new perceptions."

For the last five years he has been building the European Muslim Network, bringing together men and women community leaders from eighteen countries, including Bosnia, Albania, Kosovo, Bulgaria, Turkey, Holland, "and it works very well. They are spreading these ideas of citizenship which we share." At the same time, he has been talking frankly to governments about the need to encourage a "critical belonging" in their Muslim communities. And now, no doubt due to the Madrid bombing, French riots and 7 July 2005 attacks in London, they are listening to him: an invitation onto the Task Force, set up in the wake of the latter by the British Government, is only one of numerous invitations he has received.

What he says to those governments runs something like this: "You cannot decide for the people who their leaders are … Mediators have to be working credibly from within communities trying to help people, and government too has to be sincere in its agenda. It has to ask itself, "do we just want people to follow someone who is following us? Or are we willing to facilitate a process towards autonomy? It is only if they choose the latter that those mediators will have any credibility." That is usually the sticking point: because "governments like control".

There are two golden rules. First, don't impose; facilitate these communities in what they want to do. Some areas simply require mutual recognition that there is a common interest in spreading a better understanding of who you are and where you live. In others, politicians tend to "Islamicise" problems rather than face up to deep socio-economic challenges: "It is very difficult sometimes, since many who experience these problems are under social pressures and are all too ready to essentialise their experience – that is the kind of background they come from. But we need a deconstructive approach which can distinguish the different challenges, whilst recognising that they are also related in quite specific ways."

Rule number two is that governments have to accept criticism. Being critical of your own society is a good sign of European-style "belonging". The problem, as Ramadan sees it, is that far too few non-Muslim European citizens are willing to accept that their Muslim counterparts have the same right. "All of a sudden you get a great deal of mistrust and muttering about double loyalties." This is where the ideology of fear reappears. "In this sphere of citizenship, we are beginning to hear today some of the allegations hurled at the Jews in the 1930s in Europe, who were also accused of 'double-talk, double loyalty, fifth column'."

Enter Abou Jahjah and his diaspora. Nothing could seem much more self-defeating to Ramadan than Abou Jahjah's stance. "He is constructing something self-protective out of this diasporic connection … nurturing that sentiment, which you can sense feeds into another victim mentality. I am totally opposed to this idea that you are not really here, but that you are part of something which is somewhere else." Fitting so obligingly into the "fifth column" fantasy, "that would be the worst kind of mistake!"

But in concentrating on diaspora rather than citizenship, Ramadan may be neglecting the AEL's strengths. Two years ago, the organisation survived a challenge from its then strong Islamist wing. The rejection of theocracies in its new vision statement prompted their walk-out. Islam, of course, remains part of the symbolic and cultural identity of many AEL members, but this in itself has no theological or political repercussions. The AEL clearly declares itself a multi-confessional campaign for democracy. It continues its energetic fight against Islamophobia, but this is from a democratic and an anti-racist, not a theological vantage point.

The same programme envisages democracy developing in what Abou Jahjah describes as a "radical leftwing" direction, as the "prevention of any and every kind of concentration of power". The AEL has been looking for new allies who share their critique of liberal democracy. Again, this is no mere defensive stance. It is clear that such open-ended discussions have a highly motivating impact on the lives of the young men and women who rush around in Abou Jahjah's company. Take, for example, his interest in ideological oppression. "Look at theocratic authoritarianism in Islam, where an exclusive group takes to itself the power to issue fatwas over and above society. This concentration of knowledge is as antipathetic to a healthy democracy as any concentration of capital."

Moreover, the sheer cheek and political humour of Abou Jahjah's stance is hard to reconcile with any "victim mentality". Placed in the context of the highly charged stand-off between the minority immigrant population and the majority in Antwerp, let alone the far right, Abou Jahjah's fondness for bringing issues out in the open and "challenging the boundaries of society", his talent for media moments and soundbites, and his pride in his movement, have a bravura all their own.