Is the Arab world Europe's nemesis, asks Dyab Abou Jahjah* -- or its last hope? Belgium is not usually a joyful place on a September afternoon. The sky starts to retrieve its usual clouds, and the parks look less and less green. As well as the weather, most people -- especially in our Arab community -- are suffering from post-vacation depression. School is starting up again. Instead of enjoying the relaxed pace of a village in the Atlas or Rif, as they have for most of the summer, people have to run again to make a living. Returning to September-cloudy Belgium after a long summer vacation is enough to wipe the smile from one's face. Yet by these standards, 11 September 2001 was an exceptional day in every sense. Against the natural order of things, in the Arab Ghetto in Brussels, people were smiling. They were out in the streets, exchanging glances with each other as they walked. Even total strangers would nod at one another; there was something different in the air that day. All that joyful display, because on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean, a number of planes had crashed into buildings killing some 3000 people. Isn't it sick, one might wonder, that such a tragic event could ever be perceived this way? Once someone told me that the toughest meeting a person might ever have to make is with himself. And it was indeed very difficult for us to realise that we are capable of experiencing a feeling of satisfaction at such atrocity. It was very disturbing indeed. We started wondering, "What's wrong with us?" But faced with this question, almost everybody answered: "Look how low they have brought us. They have been killing us, humiliating us and oppressing us for so long, that we have lost a part of our humanity -- that part which cherishes human life unconditionally." We tried to understand our reactions. Why didn't we mourn the dead? Why didn't we feel as terrified as the rest of the world? Well, maybe because no one had mourned our dead. No one stood for even one second of silence for the million (some say two million) Iraqi children slaughtered (albeit very cleanly) by the American- British embargo. They taught us, by killing us over and over again, that human life is so cheap, that thousands and thousands of us torn to shreds by their "smart" bombs are nothing but "collateral damage" -- regrettable, but acceptable. So one day we saw them being slaughtered, and we found ourselves thinking and talking just like them. We caught ourselves feeling that all these innocent civilians in the planes and at the WTC were just regrettable, collateral damage. Click to view caption 11 September did not make Arab-Europeans aware of the suffering of others. It simply reminded them of the long suffering of their own people, suffering that still continues despite immigration, a suffering inflicted by the hands of that month's newly inaugurated victims. "What goes around comes around," they would say. America had it coming. But 11 September also meant a new era for many Arabs and Muslims living abroad. It meant that the anti- Islamic sentiment which is inherent in European culture, but that had been marginalised by the politically-correct mainstream, could now manifest itself again. As a result, it is today no longer unacceptable to explicitly attack Muslims, to describe them as a "threat", and their religion as an evil mediaeval dogma. The discourse that once characterised far-right extremist movements has begun to take over not only the streets, but also the pages of newspapers and the corridors of parliament. Europe did not need 11 September to be Islamophobic; but it needed it to turn Islamophobia into a political agenda. The fact that the famous Hamburg cell staffed by Mohamed Atta and his friends operated out of Germany was all the justification the European nations needed to pour more resources into policing their Arab communities. So now we are an infiltrated community. Our mosques are watched, our club houses monitored and our phones bugged. In Germany, Arabs are even classified into four categories -- A, B, C, and D -- ranging from activist, to somebody who just prays on Friday in the mosque. For the A category (the activists), millions of euros are invested in almost permanent monitoring. But that's normal for Germans -- categorising people. In other countries, the situation is no better. In Belgium, Arabs are pushed into apologising for their presence on every possible level. Saying that you are a Muslim is almost a crime, unless you immediately add your condemnation of what happened in New York, condemn fundamentalism and also condemn a million other things, ranging from terrorism to female circumcision. If you do not attach this ten-page-long apologia to the statement of your faith, you will very likely be linked to Bin Laden or accused of belonging to a dormant cell of Al-Qa'eda. The hunt for terrorist groups has sometimes reminded us of McCarthyism and the witch hunt for communists: the same blind hysteria, the same confused criteria, and the same religious zeal. Europe may still be a democracy for most of its people, but for Muslims it has become a police state -- a permissive police state, but a police state nonetheless. When we look back at the events of last year on the European level and wonder what has changed for Arab Europeans, we realise that, far beyond the growing racism, and far beyond the growing harassment and the criminalisation of Islam, far beyond the tough policing measures against them, Arab Europeans have become more Arab and less European -- not because they decided on this, but because Europe has forced them into a corner. The attitude of Europe towards their identity and its most important components -- Islam and Arabism -- has not driven them away from that identity, but has rather made them reaffirm it, first to themselves and then to their European neighours. A new generation of Arab-Muslims is no longer prepared to put up with living as second-rank citizens. Somehow, they have regained their sense of pride. Pro-Palestinian demonstrations have erupted everywhere in Europe; Brussels and Amsterdam have seen tens of thousands of mainly Arab youths marching through their streets in support of Palestinian resistance. No one cared any longer that they would be labelled "activists". Nobody cared about the pictures taken by state security agents at demonstrations. Pro-Palestinian action has become the channel through which young Arabs have discovered political action, and redefined their priorities. Through these actions, they have started telling their European compatriots: We too have our war on terrorism -- Israeli terrorism. We too are citizens here. We have our own agenda and we will prove it. Why did they do that? Why did they not feel obliged to be docile and defensive, as their parents and the majority of first- generation immigrants did? Is it because they were maybe secretly proud of what happened on 11 September 2001? Is it because they were maybe secretly proud that the only people to deal such a blow to the United States on its own territory in the whole of its history were Arabs, like them? Or is it just because they realised that they have to make a stand, if they did not want to be overrun by a stampede of modern-day knights of the far right -- men like Pim Fortuyn in Holland and France's Jean-Marie Le Pen, who seek to make domestic capital out of Mr Bush's international crusade? One thing is sure: there is a new sense of pride out there among Arab Europeans, and a strong new awareness of their identity as Arabs and as Muslims. Their heroes now are second-generation Arabs, people born and raised in Europe. According to the word on the streets, this is a trend that is here to stay. In her book on 11 September, the Italian writer Oriana Fallacci wrote that Arabs are reproducing like rats in order to invade Europe and the West, and that their religion, Islam, should be forbidden. In Belgian newspapers, some respected writers defended her comments as acceptable, as forming part of an "honest" Western approach to Islam. If this is the voice of Western civilisation, then that civilisation has now reached a level of decadence unparalleled in its history. If so, maybe Arab-Europeans will not only save themselves by rediscovering their identity and defending it with success on European soil. Maybe they will also save Europe from sinking deeper into this quagmire of obscurantism and hatred, just as many hundreds of years ago their ancestors helped a new Europe to emerge from the long dark night of its mediaeval soul. * The writer is president of the Arab European League, Belgium. Related articles: 9/11 Supplement -- 12 - 18 September 2002 9-11 - WAR COVERAGE -- Archives
