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Is Islam Compatible with Western Ideas?
By Christopher Walker

Once a small European country noted mainly for tulips and cheese, Holland - with its population of 940,000 Muslims - has recently moved to the heart of the increasingly violent struggle between Islam and the West. The cause was the shocking murder of Theo van Gogh, an outspoken film director and descendant of the famous painter Vincent van Gogh, who was brutally shot and stabbed in a busy Amsterdam street in revenge for “Submission” - a powerful documentary film he made about the allegedly barbaric treatment meted out in the name of religion to millions of Muslim women.

   Among other images offensive to Islamic hardliners were those portraying naked Muslim women with Koranic verses written on their bare skin. At the age of 47, the portly Van Gogh was one of the country’s most provocative critics of Muslim fundamentalists, who relished describing them in public using an epithet referring to bestiality with a goat. His killing by a second generation Dutchman of Moroccan origin raised fundamental questions about how conservative Islam is going to fit into Europe as a whole, let alone one of its most tolerant liberal societies.

Symbolically, it took place on the atmospheric streets of the canal city of Amsterdam, one of the most easy-going in the Western world where hashish cafes are commonplace, scantily-dressed prostitutes beckon openly from the brightly-lit windows of legalised roadside brothels and free, often intemperate, speech is the sine qua non of political life. The dangers posed for the social fabric across the continent were illustrated when the murder prompted more than twenty arson attacks and reprisals against churches and mosques. More disturbingly, other critics of Islamic fanatics, such as Ayaan Hirsi Ali, a member of the Dutch Parliament who described the prophet Mohammed as a “pervert” and a “tyrant”, were subjected to repeated death threats.

As the hatred and threat of reprisal and counter-reprisal spread, Belgian senator Mimount Bousaka, 32, herself of North African origin, received a police guard after calls from Islamic extremists threatening to “ritually slaughter” her.
Dutch Prime Minister Peter Balkende voiced the fears of most ordinary citizens when he demanded that European governments work harder to integrate ethnic minorities. “The strong reactions and counter-reactions after the death of Van Gogh show that there is tension in our society,” he warned. Jan Collins, a book-keeper from the central Dutch town of Gorinchem, one of an angry crowd attending Van Gogh’s funeral, said: “there is a kind of Muslim fascism emerging here.” Another of the mourners was more blunt. “Now, it is war,” he told reporters. A less dramatic but equally significant sign of the escalating tension between Islam and the West that is emerging as the most explosive issue of the 21st century came in the results of a poll conducted in the United States by an independent firm at the request of the Council on American-Islamic relations.

The results provided a timely and chilling reminder of the grim reality that underlies the gloomy forecasts that have predominated since the 11 September terrorist attacks in the United States in 2001, and was first underscored as far back as 1993 by Samuel Huntington in his essay in the magazine Foreign Affairs, predicting that the differences between Islam and the West would lead to nothing less than a “clash of civilisations.”

   The US survey, randomly conducted among 1,000 Americans, revealed disturbing levels of intolerance. It found that around 29% of Americans strongly or somewhat agree that Muslims teach their children to hate. Some 27% believe that they value life less than other people. And 29% believed that there was some kind of worldwide Muslim conspiracy “to change the American way of life”.
            The findings echo the view already expressed forcibly by Princeton Professor Bernard Lewis in his seminal work The Crisis of Islam in which he argued: “Most Muslims are not fundamentalists, and most fundamentalists are not terrorists, but most present-day terrorists are Muslims and proudly identify themselves as such.” Among the 12 million Muslims living in Europe - out of the estimated total of 1.2 billion worldwide - the growing ill-feeling between Islam and the West has been demonstrated by moves in France (four million Muslims), Germany (2.5m Muslims) and Britain (1.5m Muslims) for imams, or prayer leaders, in mosques to show command of the respective native language. But moves to reduce tensions and limit the chances of mosques becoming terrorist training schools have been hamstrung by the problem of deciding who exactly is qualified to train the pool of modern and moderate clerics that Western governments are hoping will lead change.

   “We are forming a cadre of imams who speak French and can relate to the young Muslims of France,” boasted Dalil Boubakeur, director of the main mosque of Paris and president of a French nationwide Islamic council sanctioned by the state.
But both the mosque and an adjoining school are financed by the Algerian government which makes them deeply suspect in the minds of many independent experts. “It is not a real school,” claimed Olivier Roy, one of France’s most respected Islamic scholars, “It is just a tool of Boubakeur’s power.”
            Most observers have identified blinkered Islamic views on the role of women, its antiquated approach to market economics and alleged hostility to the concept of democracy (especially the model favoured by the US and Britain) as being the major reasons, in addition to widespread abhorrence of Muslim terrorism, for the distrust or open hatred of so many in the West towards the Muslim community in general.
            On the Islamic side, deep resentment at perceived unfair and totally unbalanced US support for Israel in the long-running Palestinian conflict has been reinforced by bitter ill-feeling at the behaviour of US, and to a lesser extent UK, troops in Iraq. This has been driven home by the new found popularity of Arabic satellite TV channels such as Al Jazeera.
            As Chris Patten, the former Foreign Affairs Commissioner of the European Union told the Centre for Islamic Studies at Oxford University, where he is now chancellor: “The Arab world does not mind American and European values, but it cannot stand American policies and, by extension, the same policies when embraced or tolerated by Europeans.”
            Jacques Chirac, the French President known for his pro-Arab views went further in a bid to prevent the Western-Islamic split from worsening by warning against US-led attempts to hasten the spread of democracy in the tinderbox of the Middle East.
            “Although our memory is sometimes short,” he declared in a speech aimed at preventing US interventionism in any more Muslim states, “the peoples submitted to the West’s domination in the past have not forgotten and are quick to see a resurgence of imperialism and colonialism in our actions.”

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