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| Volume XI, Spring 2004, Number 1 |
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| ABSTRACT: Muslims Pluralize the West, Resist Assimilation |
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| Mustafa Malik |
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Mr. Malik, a Washington journalist, is researching the evolution of Muslim communities in North America and Western Europe.
Protestantism, said Max Weber, sparked modernity. Over time, Catholics and Jews also modernized and assimilated with Protestants in Western societies. What about Western Muslims? They're unlikely to assimilate, despite the modernization and secularization of Western Muslim youths.
A study of Muslim cultural patterns in North America and Western Europe indicates that history has handed 20 million Western Muslims the job of pluralizing a monocultural "Roman Europe" and speeding the pluralization of Western civilization generally.
Ethnically diverse as they are, Western Muslims belong to the global Islamic fraternity, the umma, and they cherish their umma ties even as they remain loyal to their nation-states. Their umma solidarity is being strengthened by the worldwide Islamic reawakening. Many Muslims "view the Muslim world's economic backwardness and military impotence as temporary, and the current Islamic resurgence as the precursor to the revival of Islamic civilization." They value Western institutions of freedom and wealth creation but are repelled by the "pernicious effects" of Western modernity: anomie, rapacity, consumerism, family breakdown, promiscuity, and so on. These vices reinforce their attachment to Islamic values of justice, charity, kinship and the umma spirit.
The times, too, favor the growth of a discrete Muslim niche in the West. One reason earlier immigrants assimilated into Western national mainstreams was the lack of facilities to nurture their inherited cultures. Today Muslim communities in the West are constantly receiving cultural adrenaline from the vast Islamic heartland through the Internet, e-mail, TV, radio, newspapers, the telephone and jet flights.
Furthermore, the persistence of a distinctive Muslim culture is almost guaranteed by an enduring Western phenomenon: color consciousness. Racial affinity is the main reason the children of Catholic and Ashkenazi Jewish immigrants assimilated into white Western societies. Racial discrepancy has led other minorities to stick with their own cultural idiom. In the United States, Africans and native Americans haven't assimilated into the mainstream (marriages between blacks and non-Hispanic whites is less than 2 percent) after 300 years. Likewise, Muslim assimilation into the white mainstream is unlikely because of, among other factors, most Muslims' non-white racial origins.
Nevertheless, Western Muslims are "integrating" into host societies in a pluralist relationship. They're participating in mainstream social and economic activities while nurturing their distinctive culture. The pace of their integration has been uneven. It has been faster in "multicultural" United States, Canada, Britain and the Netherlands. In parts of Europe, especially Western Europe's historically monocultural core, it is much slower. Germany, Italy, France and Spain became a Christian monochrome through anti-Jewish and anti-Muslim pogroms only to turn into a liberal monochrome with the anti-Christian revolt of the Enlightenment.
But as liberalism runs out of steam and native populations dwindle, the core countries of the continent are constrained to integrate their fast-growing Muslim communities. Islam resumes the pluralization of the region 500 years after the Spanish reconquista stamped out the Moorish Islamic civilization to homogenize the creed of Western Europe. Less dramatically but as surely, Islam is helping to transform Western civilization as a whole into a multicultural melange.
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