Brussels 2016: Fall-Out For Europe’s Muslims

By Iftikhar H. Malik

01 April, 2016
Countercurrents.org

World’s Muslims including millions in Europe are as shocked and saddened with the latest terrorist attacks in Belgium as everybody else. Their voices may not be audible on world media but within the family circles, on social networks, professional bodies and across the mainstream news outlets there is a constant outburst of agony and anger. A vast majority of these Muslims believe that their creed has been hijacked by some of their co-religionists who are neither qualified in Islamic teachings nor are justified in using these brutal means, but instead are only exacerbating everybody's predicament. Suicide bombings or killing people en masse through violent methods began in Lebanon before moving on to Palestine until Afghanistan and Iraq became the centre points before Pakistan and Syria overtook them. In more recent time, this kind of brutal violence featuring self-flagellation and mass murders of civilians has become almost a norm in West Asia with Syria turned into a cauldron where internal, regional and external perpetrators converge seeking a greater pound of innocent flesh. These conflicts, as seen in the case of Algeria during the 1990s and Libya in recent times, have their ramifications for the people inhabiting those regions as well as the EU nations. There is a growing awareness among thoughtful Muslims that some sections of angry young men from the second and third generations have juxtaposed their personal issues of identity and alienation with the macro Muslim grievances and as a consequence have begun mounting intermittent attacks on 'soft targets'. Here Paris, Ankara, Istanbul, Peshawar and now Brussels ironically provide the case studies of spectacular manifestation of this violence, committed in the name of Islam by targeting civilians, which, in return has earned these militants miles of media coverage but insidious notoriety for world's Muslims. In addition, these events show major gaps in intelligence gathering besides failure of security-centred official policies that seem to have further alienated many younger Muslims--already on the margins. Thus Muslim in general and Europe's in particular find themselves in a nutcracker situation with no immediate respite in sight.

Since 9/11, well-known academics such as Bernard Lewis, interpreted these attacks through a rather blatantly critical reading of Islamic history where Muslims were seen as the frequent perpetrators of violence, further aggravated by their irreverence towards self-criticism facilitated by some inherent receptivity towards violence a la Assassins. The Assassins were a group of cultists, who guided by ‘The Old Man from the Mountain’, would depute rather deranged and even stoned fanatics to kill Muslim notables in Persia, Mesopotamia and the Levant. The cult, like today’s Al-Qaeda and ISIS, flourished in its mountainous hideouts; featured all the characteristics of secret societies, and grew on violence until the Mongols destroyed it in the mid-Thirteenth century. Other observers such as Paul Berman saw in militant versions of political Islam a reincarnation of totalitarian fascism, whereas discretionary think tanks led by obsessive individuals such as Daniel Pipes, Pamela Geller, Robert Spencer or media pundits such as Oriana Fallaci reverberated the Neo-Conservative vision of a ‘new’ Middle East shorn of any visible Muslim factor. Following 7/7, and eager to justify his support for the invasion of Iraq, Tony Blair blamed a unique kind of Islamic ideology for spawning violence, since the prime minister would never assume the responsibility for an unlawful and even daredevil interventionism.

The co-optation of some British and other EU Muslims by the ISIS with their numbers often exaggerated in public pronouncements, especially in the wake of invasion of Libya and support for certain opposition groups in Syria, provided the backdrop for a new raft of Muslim-specific policies across the EU. The securitisation of socio-educational trajectories with overzealous vigilance over possible and even imagined cases of radicalisation among younger Muslims has certainly impacted community relationship besides affecting a whole generation of Muslim youth. While Muslim political and even economic integration in the United Kingdom, despite severalexeptionalised trajectories and censorial views of multiculturalism, has been quite visible, in countries like France emphasis on monnationalist identity over and above class and creed has not been helpful. The class-based chasms in French society despite official avowal for assimilation have often disallowed cultural and economic mobility for Benelux-based French citizens of Maghreb and African origins, who, in some cases, ended up assuming militancy to assert themselves. The ISIS and its savvy usage of social media, often run by younger European Muslims who can identify with the young and the restless, have further egged on this alienation.

London, Madrid, Paris and now Brussels underline the fact that collective violence has no borders and, in addition, it is no more just a preserve of the state-led institutions. These violent events, like those in Turkey, West Africa, the Middle East, Sinjiang, Afghanistan and Pakistan, equally highlight theirtrans-territorial impact, where other than their immediate victims, many other societal clusters are put on the receiving end for no crime of their own. As a follow-up of each such atrocity, ultra-nationalist groups presumptuously banking on a so-called majoritarianism, accuse all Muslims of sharing a collective thinking and even sympathy for the perpetrators. Other than increased physical and verbal abuse of Muslims, especially of scarved women or elderly figures, the entire communities, as per such opinion groups and inquisitional media, become the suspects, or “enemy from within”. This kind of juxtaposition, instead of singling out violent perpetrators as sickindividuals and maniac criminals, orientalises all Muslims as potential culprits. Even more than sheer violence or desecration of mosques, the institutional racism receives a fillip, since many otherwise qualified Muslim professionals, routinely end up hitting hopelessly against subtle glass ceilings. Muslim vertical and horizontal progress and social integration have often been viciously dented by these blockades. While several innocent lives have been lost in Brussels on a terrible Tuesday morning leaving many close ones in grievous mourning and in a state of irreparable loss, Muslims per se find themselves even in a more vulnerable situation. While most of them empathise with the loss of human lives everywhere, yet concurrently, they are apprehensive about the future gravity of themselves having been caught between the proverbial devil and the deep sea. Marginalisation of vast sections of Europe’s Muslim communities owing to a pervasive sense of fear, retaliation and increased official vigilance is in nobody’s interest and, on the contrary, will only help the perpetrators who desire to deepen the communal chasms. On the one hand, we cannot diminish the need for public vigilance, while, simultaneously, we need to take the community along by reaching out to its sensitive, well-meaning and energetic elements. Here, Muslim media, mosques, family structures and certainly the institutional hierarchies have to assume fresher and dynamic steps to help Muslim majorities become stake holders rather than turning into suspects, or mere onlookers. Most Muslims know that the perpetrators are often the criminal elements that, for their own retribution, seek radical laybys and in the process may undertake extreme and brutal means to ventilate their own personal frustrations. Apart from issues related with identity and of generational nature, a recourse to proactive and non-coercive policies—both domestic and external—will certainly go a long way in deterring some younger Muslims from self-flagellation and its attendant human costs.

Iftikhar H. Malik, an author of several works on modern political and intellectual history of Islam, is a professor of history at Bath Spa University.