Should Muslims Integrate into the West? Part One

Uriya Shavit
Middle East Quarterly
Fall 2007
http://www.meforum.org/article/1761

The veil has become the center of a European fight over how to balance expressions of Muslim identity with the Western idea of citizenship.[1] How can states achieve a balance between republicanism and minority rights? Can majorities in liberal, Western nation-states, force a dress code upon minorities? While Muslim societies have debated various garments and coverings for women through the twentieth century,[2] the issues are broader. Often, Muslim commentators in the West couch their arguments in the Western discourse of the balance between individual rights and public interest.[3] However, the personal freedom versus integration debate is only one context of the polemic; another is the dichotomy between two types of nationality and between two sources of legitimacy. Here, Muslim scholarship on migration sheds more light than Western political theory.

Immigration to Expand the Muslim Nation
Muslim jurists since the ninth century have considered Muslim residence in non-Muslim societies to be dangerous. Not only might residence abroad weaken faith and practice, they argued, but migration to non-Muslim areas might also strengthen non-Muslims in their wars against Islam. However, the pronouncement was not absolute. Some scholars legitimized living among the infidels so long as Muslims living outside Islamic lands had no alternative, were helpful to the Muslim cause, and were able to practice their religion. Here the Islamic concept of nationhood comes into play. While Muhammad established a nation with territorial dimensions, to belong to it, one only had to become Muslim in faith and practice. Thus, throughout the Middle Ages, Muslims who lived under Christian rule could still be considered part of the Muslim nation.[4]
Throughout the Ottoman period, contacts between Muslim societies and the West were largely limited to trade, diplomacy, and occasional pilgrimage. While migration from Islamic lands to Western countries became more common after the nineteenth century, it was only when the European demand for manual labor grew after World War II that the phenomenon grew in earnest.

Renewed migration led Muslim jurists to reexamine religious attitudes toward Muslims living in non-Muslim societies. For the past thirty years, some jurists have sought to define the identity and duties of these emigrants. Through new institutions dedicated to migration and, more recently, using the Internet and satellite television, they both publish literature dedicated to the subject and answer queries from Muslims in the West, a process that facilitates a center-periphery relationship. Most influential among them is Yusuf al-Qaradawi, the Egyptian-born and Qatar-based Sunni jurist who heads the European Council for Fatwa and Research, a body established in London on March 29, 1997, to address in uniformity questions relating to Muslim migration.[5] He also hosts a weekly question-and-answer program on Al-Jazeera, watched by millions of Muslim immigrants, and heads the supervising committee of IslamOnline.net, one of the world's largest Muslim Internet portals, which claims to receive a million hits daily.[6]

Regardless of sect, legal school, nationality, or political status, Muslim jurists from Arab countries have reached similar conclusions as to the proper status and role of Muslim emigrants to the West. To ban or ignore mass Muslim migration to the West would only alienate immigrants, they found. Muslim jurists concentrated instead on constructing a legal-religious framework to maintain emigrants' Muslim identities while using the diaspora in the service of Islam.

Their judgment called upon Muslim immigrants in the West to place religious identity above national and ethnic identities and to promote the interests of a global Muslim nation. The jurists' consensus involved five points: First, a greater Islamic nation exists of which Muslims are members wherever they live. Second, while living in a non-Muslim society is undesirable, it might be legal on an individual basis if the immigrant acts as a model Muslim. Third, it is the duty of a Muslim in the West to reaffirm his religious identity and to distance himself from anything contrary to Islam. Hence, he should help establish and patronize mosques, Muslim schools, cultural centers, and shops. Fourth, Muslims in the West should champion the cause of the Muslim nation in the political as well as the religious sphere, for there should be no distinction between the two. Lastly, Muslims in the West should spread Islam in the declining, spiritual void of Western societies.

Such a consensus developed for several reasons. The political atmosphere proved fertile ground for renewed religiosity. The decline of pan-Arabism in the 1970s and the Islamic Revolution in Iran at the end of that decade suggested that political Islam rather than pan-Arabism could appeal not only to Muslims in the Middle East but also to Muslims in the West.