Anders Behring Breivik, the killer responsible for the bombing and mass shooting in Norway, has been roundly and widely condemned – for his delusions, his smirk, even his characterisation of Malta’s Nationalist Party. However, I have not come across any dismissal of his fear of a Muslim takeover of Europe. Could it be that many Europeans think he may have a point?

Not that that makes them his accomplices. However, the reaction “He’s bonkers, of course, but he does have a bit of a point” is widely found in the face of right-wing extremists, including our home-grown variety. I suspect there are many in Malta too who condemn the violence but share the cultural anxiety.

In itself, it is not psychotic. It has been promoted – on YouTube and in print – by American neo-cons who, having got Iraq and the Middle East disastrously wrong, moved on to predicting that Europe might become an Islamic Euro-Arabia. But being politically delusional doesn’t require locking up. It calls for freedom from the conceptual straitjacket that makes such thinking plausible.

The recent book by Sami Zubaida, Beyond Islam: A New Understanding Of The Middle East (IB Tauris) is excellent medicine. It argues that culture is best understood as fusion, even when in the service of an argument for “cultural purity”. European and Middle Eastern arguments about the “authentic” identities of East and West usually mirror each other because they live off each other. Mr Zubaida, however, argues that the history, culture and politics of the Middle East just do not fit the idea that there is such a thing as “Islamic civilisation”, hived off on its own, standing apart from the rest of the world.

Mr Zubaida is a distinguished political scientist and sociologist of the Middle East. Not quite incidentally, even in the days before internet culinary guides took off, he was famous for always having in his pocket a list of the best restaurants in the city where the Middle East Studies conference was taking place – faxed recommendations by denizens of that city. The essays in this new book bring together the knowledge of both the scholar and the man of refinement: the worldliness, not just the world, of the Middle East.

It takes the scholar to point out just how historically recent much of what is claimed to be “Islamic” actually is – whether the claimant is an Islamist or a liberal reformer. Beginning with “Islamic finance”, Mr Zubaida argues, “Islamic” is often a “spray-on” label to justify innovations or existing practices. And why is it sprayed so liberally? Because in the Middle East, as elsewhere, secularisation – that is, the separation of religion from other areas of life, not necessarily the weakening of belief – is an ongoing process. We must learn to see such appeals to religion – even in a state like Iran –as a secular ideology of nationalism (of which Mr Zubaida is very critical).

For such analysis to be conducted well, however, the scholar must direct his attention to the sensuous pleasures of living in society and their ties to power and economic status. A look at the pleasures and praises sung of alcohol, sexuality (including homosexuality) and spaces such as coffee shops and the public baths, show how much cultures in the Middle East owed to cosmopolitan exchange with the West and Far East.

The region would literally not have been the same without the melange of ethnicities, languages and religions. One of the mistakes in fearing a Muslim takeover of Europe is that it assumes that Muslims share a single identity. In fact, they themselves often have a background of cultural diversity, of multiple identities, which is compounded, among younger European Muslims, by their frequent rejection of their parents’ cultural style. “Second- and third-generation members of Muslim groups in Europe are largely acculturated to the host societies.”

A second mistake is not to recognise that European fears of Islam actually stem from a history of similarity. Europeans fear politico-religious conflicts – book bans, heretic stalking, etc. – precisely because such things featured in their own history and they fear their return. But the fact that Europeans consider such historic problems overcome indicates that the issue is not religion per se but, rather, kinds of religiosity.

Mr Zubaida focuses a lot of his attention on showing how such arguments feature in the Middle East itself and what explains them. The point he underlines is that in saying that “Islamic civilisation” inhabits an alternative cultural universe is actually to take sides – with the cultural chauvinists, against those Middle Easterners who want to participate in a cosmopolitan modernity.

A Maltese reading this book might be struck by a particular irony. Few societies illustrate Mr Zubaida’s major points as strikingly as Malta. Its language and urbane modern history, circling ports, argue for the idea of culture as fusion. The fact that until WWII the greater part of Maltese migration was to cities in northern Africa shows a cultural ease of movement. Fear of Muslims is partly based on a very recent history of politico-religious conflict.

The reaction to such observations is often to affirm that they show “we are, deep-down, Arabs/Muslims”. It shows nothing of the sort. Other European groups settled in the Middle East and North Africa with cultural ease: Greeks, Italians, French, Armenians...

So, no, Mr

Breivik did not have even a bit of a point about Islam. The sooner we realise the phobia is culturally mad, the better.

ranierfsadni@europe.com