The Muslim diaspora in the EU consists of roughly 16 million people (out of 508 million). France and Germany lead the way with about five million each. Britain hosts about three million. The Netherlands, Spain and Italy each have about 800,000. The Scandinavian countries account for about 400,000.
I argued in an article over a year ago that Europe was not about to be engulfed by Muslims, nor was our way of life under threat, though many people may find Muslim customs and practice alien: for example, the wearing of the hijab by women, the ultra-conservative treatment of women and sharia law.
But in a secular society, religious freedom, I maintained, was one of the fundamental pillars of all western democracies. In a free society we sometimes had to accept that other people’s choices would be different from our own. But this should not be a cause for fear or hatred. Muslims in general were not “the enemy within,” as some viewed them.
I have had cause to change my mind. This is not simply because of the gratuitously brutal events in Paris and Belgium over the last year, or the existential threats of terrorism being made by hundreds of jihadist fighters from Daesh (so-called Islamic State) and any number of other Islamist terrorist groups uncomfortably close on our door-step.
No, what has given me pause for further thought is a documentary television programme a month ago (What British Muslims Really Think) by Trevor Phillips, a black Briton who was until a few years ago the head of the Equality and Human Rights Commission in the United Kingdom.
“Our findings will shock many people,” were his opening words. “Everyone who has pinned their hopes on the rise of reforming and liberal British Muslim voices are in for a disappointment. These voices are nowhere near as numerous as they need to be to make an impact”.
The statistics which the programme then put forward proved Phillips’ dire description of the situation beyond doubt. 52 per cent of Britain’s three million Muslims think homosexuality should be illegal. 39 per cent think a woman should always obey her husband. 18 per cent sympathise with people who take part in violence against those who mock the Prophet.
More striking even than those unenlightened answers – to which, I suspect many Maltese might give similar replies – four per cent (which equates to over 100,000 Muslims) confirmed they “have sympathy for people who take part in suicide bombings to fight injustice”. Moreover, if any of them knew someone involved in supporting terrorism in Syria, just one in three would report it to the police. But the frightening corollary is that the other two million would remain silent.
While it might be tempting when faced by statistics of this nature for liberals like me to question the basis on which the survey was compiled, it is much harder to do so in this case because its methodology was clearly so thorough.
It was conducted face to face, by people of the Muslim religion. And when it came to the really difficult and tricky questions – about terrorism – a blank envelope was provided for the answer, so that respondents felt freer to say what they really thought. There can therefore be little doubt about the validity of the opinions expressed.
Malta’s apparent reluctance to tackle diversity means that we risk sleepwalking into a situation where unresolved tensions cause unease and threaten to erupt into nativist, anti-immigrant sentiment
Although my views a year ago were clearly more open-minded, there was little I could disagree with in this brave and honest programme. My belief then that there were moderate and reforming voices who speak for the vast majority of Muslims and that the kind of answers obtained by the survey emanated from sheer blind prejudice – as we see displayed so often in similar surveys of Maltese – has taken a severe knock.
I have had to concede that the truth just doesn’t seem to accord with those earlier sentiments. Through this programme, albeit based on a survey conducted in one European country – whose circumstances may be different from other EU countries, though I doubt it – I have come face to face with Muslim reality.
Most Muslims in Britain are young and are more likely than their non-Muslim peers to be jobless. Many have lost touch with the lands of their parents, however, they feel shunned by their country of adoption or birth. It is understandable that young Muslims should turn to Islam as a badge of identity.
While I can still accept that many Muslims in Europe feel a sense of exclusion and inferiority, it is shocking to learn that their sense of alienation is so deep-seated as to lead so many of them to become fellow-travellers with terrorists, as the answers to the survey in Britain clearly indicate.
What the programme What British Muslims Really Think has highlighted is that many Muslims have suffered such a feeling of dissention that it has tipped them towards violence or, at the very least, an acceptability of violence in their name.
With about 6,000 Muslims in Malta, just over one per cent of the population, about 150 of them Maltese-born, it is a subject about which we should be concerned. While it remains unacceptable under any circumstances for otherwise perfectly reasonable and respectable people to get into paroxysms of racist hatred, it is clearly right that we should be more focussed on the full integration into Maltese society of Muslims living here.
To deduce from the United Kingdom survey, and what is happening in Europe and the Middle East, that all Muslims are to blame – and that they are to be feared, despised and removed from Europe, including Malta – would be not only unfair, but also irrational and wrong-headed.
The lesson I take away from the inconvenient truth revealed by What British Muslims Really Think is the need for vigilance in Malta and elsewhere, as well as a realisation that even second- and third-generation Muslims can remain alienated from the values they are meant to espouse and the society in which they live.
It follows that our borders need to be more secure. The checks by the police on Muslims arriving in Malta should be more robust. The need to step up our intelligence-sharing with American, British and European allies to fill the capability gaps in our own security service remains crucial.
But there is overridingly a need for greater efforts at integration of those Muslims already here. France has just announced the establishment of regional “integration and citizenship centres” staffed by social workers, psychoanalysts and teachers responsible for countering Islamist propaganda.
While, clearly, the scale of the problem in Malta does not even begin to compare with that of France, it does underline the need for us also to ensure the fullest integration – not separation – of those Muslims already living here.
Malta’s apparent reluctance to tackle diversity means that we risk sleepwalking into a situation where unresolved tensions cause unease and threaten to erupt into nativist, anti-immigrant sentiment.
The government has said it is committed to creating an integrated and more cohesive society that includes asylum seekers and migrants of all colours and creeds. Its paramount objective should be to take positive steps to integrate all communities in Malta, including Muslims, around a common set of European values.