[IP] The Moor's Last Laugh WSJ
The Moor's Last Laugh
By FOUAD AJAMI
March 22, 2004; Page A18
In the legend of Moorish Spain, the last Muslim king of Granada, Boabdil,
surrendered the keys to his city on January 2, 1492, and on one of its
hills, paused for a final glance at his lost dominion. The place would
henceforth be known as El Ultimo Suspiro del Moro -- "the Moor's Last
Sigh." Boabdil's mother is said to have taunted him, and to have told him
to "weep like a woman for the land he could not defend as a man." An Arab
poet of our own era gave voice to a historical lament when he wrote that as
he walked the streets of Granada, he searched his pockets for the keys to
its houses. Al Andalus -- Andalusia -- would become a deep wound, a
reminder of dominions gained by Islam and then squandered. No wonder Muslim
chroniclers added "May Allah return it to Islam," as they told and retold
Granada's fate.
The Balkans aside, modern Islam would develop as a religion of Afro-Asia.
True, the Ottomans would contest the Eastern Mediterranean. But their
challenge was turned back. Turkey succumbed to a European pretension but
would never be European. Europe's victory over Islam appeared definitive.
Even those Muslims in the Balkans touched by Ottoman culture became a
marked community, left behind by the Ottoman retreat from Europe like
"seaweed on dry land."
* * *
Yet Boabdil's revenge came. It stole upon Europe. Demography -- the aging
of Europe on the one hand and, on the other, a vast bloat of people in the
Middle East and North Africa -- did Boabdil's job for him. Spurred by
economic growth in the '60s, which created the need for foreign laborers, a
Muslim migration to Europe began. Today, 15 million Muslims make their home
in the European Union.
The earliest migrants were eager to hunker down in this new and (at first)
alien world. They took Europe on its own terms, and lived with the initial
myth of migration that their sojourn would be temporary. But for the
overwhelming majority, Algiers and Casablanca and Beirut and Anatolia
became irretrievable places. In time, there would be slaughter and upheaval
in Lebanon and Iran, sectarian warfare in Syria, and a long era of sorrow
and bloodshed in Algeria, just across the sea from Marseilles. Economic
destitution would cut a swath of misery through the lands whence they came.
Birth rates worked their way like a wrecking ball: It became impossible to
transmit culture and civility and the old familiar world to the young.
Migration became the only safety valve.
In the '80s, terrible civil wars were fought in Arab and Islamic countries
-- with privilege on one side, militant wrath on the other. The despots and
the military caste in Algeria and Tunisia and Syria and Egypt won that
struggle. Their defeated opponents took to the road: From Hamburg and
London and Copenhagen, the battle was now joined. If accounts were to be
settled with rulers back home, the work of subversion would be done from
Europe. Muslim Brotherhoods sprouted all over the Continent. There were
welfare subsidies in the new surroundings, money, constitutional
protections and rules of asylum to fight the old struggle.
"The whole Arab world was dangerous for me. I went to London." The words
are those of an Egyptian Islamist, Yasser Sirri. In London, Sirri runs an
Islamic "observation center" and agitates against the despotism of Hosni
Mubarak. But Sirri, a man of 40, is wanted back home. Three sentences have
been rendered against him in absentia: One condemns him to 25 years of hard
labor for smuggling armed terrorists into Egypt; the second to 15 years for
aiding Islamic dissidents; and the third to death for plotting to
assassinate a prime minister. Sirri had fled Egypt to Yemen. But trouble
trailed him there, so he moved to the Sudan, but it was no better. He
turned up in London -- there, he would have liberties, and the protections
of a liberal culture. There would be no extradition for him, no return to
the summary justice of Cairo.
Sirri was not working in a vacuum. The geography of Islam -- and of the
Islamic imagination -- has shifted in recent years. The faith has become
portable. Muslims who fled their countries brought Islam with them. Men
came into bilad al kufr (the lands of unbelief), but a new breed of
Islamists radicalized the faith there, in the midst of the kafir (unbeliever).
The new lands were owed scant loyalty, if any, and political-religious
radicals savored the space afforded them by Western civil society. But they
resented the logic of assimilation. They denied their sisters and daughters
the right to mix with "strangers." You would have thought that the
pluralism and tumult of this open European world would spawn a version of
the faith to match it. But precisely the opposite happened. In bilad al
kufr, the faith became sharpened for battle. We know that life in Hamburg
-- and the kind of Islam that Hamburg made possible -- was decisive in the
evolution of Mohammed Atta, who led the "death pilots" of Sept. 11. It was
in Hamburg where he conceived a hatred of modernity and of women and of the
"McEgypt" that the Mubarak regime had brought into being. And it was in
Hamburg, too, that a young "party boy" from a secular family in Lebanon
underwent the transformation that would take him from an elite Catholic
prep school in Beirut to the controls of a plane on Sept. 11, and its
tragic end near the fields of Shanksville, Penn. In its economic
deterioration, the Arab world is without cities where young Muslims of
different lands can meet. A function that Beirut once provided for an older
elite had been undone. European cities now provide that kind of opportunity.
Satellite TV has been crucial in the making of this new radicalism.
Preachers take to the air, and reach Muslims wherever they are. From the
safety of Western cities, they counsel belligerence and inveigh against
assimilation. They forbid shaking hands with women examiners at
universities. They warn against offering greetings to "infidels" on their
religious holidays, or serving in the armies and police of the new lands.
"A Muslim has no nationality except his belief," wrote an intellectual
godfather of radical Islamism, the Egyptian Sayyid Qutb, who was executed
by Nasser in 1966. While on a visit to Saudi Arabia in 2002, I listened to
a caller from Stockholm as he bared his concerns to an immensely popular
preacher. He made Qutb's point: We may carry their nationalities, he said,
but we belong to our own religion.
Radical Islamism's adherents are unapologetic. What is laicite (secularism)
to the Muslims in France and their militant leaders? It is but the code of
a debauched society that wishes to impose on Islam's children -- its young
women in particular -- the ways of an infidel culture. What loyalty, at any
rate, is owed France? The wrath of France's Muslim youth in the banlieues
(suburbs) is seen as revenge on France for its colonial wars. France
colonized Algeria in the 1830s; Algerians, along with Tunisians and
Moroccans, return the favor in our own time.
France grants its troubled Muslim suburbs everything and nothing. It leaves
them to their own devices, and grants them an unstated power over its
foreign policy decisions on Islamic and Middle Eastern matters; but it
makes no room for them in the mainstream of its life. Trouble has come even
to placid Belgium. In Antwerp, Dyab Abu Jahjah, a young Lebanese, only 32,
has stepped forth to "empower" the Muslims of that country. Assimilation,
he says, is but "cultural rape." He came to Belgium in 1991, and he owns up
to inventing a story about persecution back home; it was a "low political
trick," he says, and in the nature of things. The constitution of Belgium
recognizes Dutch, French, and German as official languages. Abu Jahjah
insists that Arabic be added, too.
Europe's leaders know Europe's dilemmas. In ways both intended and
subliminal, the escape into anti-Americanism is an attempt at false bonding
with the peoples of Islam. Give the Arabs -- and the Muslim communities
implanted in Europe -- anti-Americanism, give them an identification with
the Palestinians, and you shall be spared their wrath. Beat the drums of
opposition to America's war in Iraq, and the furies of this radical
Islamism will pass you by. This is seen as a way around the troubles. But
there is no exit that way. It is true that Spain supported the American
campaign in Iraq, but that aside, Spain's identification with Arab aims has
a long history. Of all the larger countries of the EU, Spain has been most
sympathetic to Palestinian claims. It was only in 1986 that Spain
recognized Israel and established diplomatic ties. With the sole exception
of Greece, Spain has shown the deepest reserve toward Israel. Yet this
history offered no shelter from the bombers of March 11.
* * *
Whatever political architecture Europe seeks, it will have to be built in
proximity to the Other World, just across the Straits of Gibraltar and in
the grip of terminal crisis. There is no prospect that the rulers of Arab
lands will offer their people a decent social contract, or the
opportunities for freedom. It is a sad fact that the Arab peoples no longer
make claims on their rulers. Instead the "drifters," such as the embittered
terrorists who blew into Madrid, now seek satisfaction almost solely in
foreign lands.
You can't agitate against Mubarak in Cairo, but you can do it from the
safety of Finsbury Park in London. The ferocity of the debate in the Arab
world about France's decision to limit Islamic headgear in public schools
is a measure of this displaced rage. Spain may attribute the cruelty
visited on it to its association with America's expedition into Iraq. But
the truth is darker. Jacques Chirac may believe that he has spared France
Spain's terror by sitting out the Iraq war. But he is deluded. The
Islamists do not make fine distinctions in the bilad al kufr.
Europe is host to a war between order and its enemies, fuelled by
demography: 40% of the Arab world is under 14. Demographers tell us that
the fertility replacement rate is 2.1 children per woman. Europe is
frightfully below this level; in Germany it is 1.3, Italy 1.2, Spain 1.1,
France 1.7 (this higher rate is a factor of its Muslim population).
Fertility rates in the Islamic world are altogether different: they are 3.2
in Algeria, 3.4 in Egypt and Morocco, 5.2 in Iraq and 6.1 in Saudi Arabia.
This is Europe's neighborhood, and its contemporary fate. You can tell the
neighbors across the Straits, (and within the gates of Europe) that you
share their dread of Pax Americana. But nemesis is near.
Five centuries ago, the Castilians took Granada from Boabdil. They were a
hardy breed of sheep-herders driven by a Malthusian logic, outgrowing their
grazing lands, pushing southward -- and into the New World from Seville --
to answer Castile's needs. Today there is great turmoil in Islamic lands,
and a Malthusian crisis. Were it only true that those in harm's way in
Europe are solely the friends of the Americans. The New World is a demon of
this Islamism, it is true. But that old border between Europe and Islam has
furies all its own.
Mr. Ajami, a professor at Johns Hopkins, is the author of "The Dream Palace
of the Arabs" (Vintage, 1999).
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