Is Europe in the grip of a new wave of Islamophobia? Gihan Shahine investigates It was not something she did or said. Rather, it was just the way she looked and her manner of dress that cost her her life. Veiled Egyptian pharmacist Marwa El-Sherbini was innocently playing with her three-year-old son in a park in Dresden in Germany when a Russian-German man suddenly called her "a terrorist" among other things. El-Sherbini called the police and took the matter to court, where she ended up being fatally stabbed by the same man as she prepared to give evidence. El-Sherbini's husband was also stabbed as he tried to protect her, and he was then shot and critically wounded by a police officer who reportedly mistook him for the attacker. While El-Sherbini's killer was sentenced to life imprisonment on 11 November by a German court, anger at her murder has not only swept the Muslim world, but has also opened a whole Pandora's box of questions about whether Europe as a whole is in the grip of a new wave of Islamophobia. El-Sherbini's murder, albeit tragic, may yet be seen by some Muslims and by more sober voices as being perhaps an "isolated" incident committed by a lone racist wolf. But it remains questionable whether other incidents can all be dismissed in the same way. Only a few months ago, Ali Mohamed, the imam of a mosque in California, was burnt to death when his house was set on fire after he was harassed for being a "Muslim terrorist". Elsewhere, the Al-Azhar envoy to the Islamic Centre in London, Mohamed El-Salamoni, was beaten by an attacker only six months after starting his mission, eventually losing his sight. Such incidents explain why the murder of Marwa El-Sherbini has widely been seen as further proof of Western prejudice against Islam. The recent wave of hate crimes committed against Muslims has also raised Muslim anxieties over whether such Western Islamophobia has now taken on a new and more bloody form. The question of whether these hate crimes should be seen in the context of Islamophobia, or just the result of xenophobia, has also been an issue of heated debate. Are Muslims faring worse than any other minority group living on the European continent? If studies are anything to go by, Muslims may perhaps be suffering the most. A study conducted in December 2006 by the Vienna-based European Monitoring Centre on Racism and Xenophobia stated bluntly that "Islamophobia is on the rise across Europe, where many Muslims are menaced and misunderstood -- some on a daily basis." The centre, which tracks ethnic and religious bias across the 27-country European Union, said that "Muslims routinely suffered problems ranging from physical attacks to discrimination in the job and housing markets." The centre also listed hundreds of cases of violence and threats against Muslims in Europe since 2004, such as vandalism of mosques and Islamic centres, abuse against women wearing Islamic headscarves, and attacks, such as one by a gang carrying baseball bats emblazoned with swastikas and racist slogans that targeted a Somali family in Denmark. Meanwhile, according to the report, Muslim representation in European national parliaments is still low, with only two practicing Muslim members of parliament in Britain, one in Germany and none in France. According to Mahmoud Khalil, a professor at Cairo University's Faculty of Information, "Muslim minorities living in the West suffer more than any other religion for one simple reason: that there is no international umbrella providing protection for all the Muslims in the world, similar to the one that was once provided by the historic Islamic rule of the Caliphate." Muslims seem to be left to fend for themselves, since international organisations are usually not able to provide assistance. "Christian minorities living in Muslim-majority countries, by contrast, would immediately have the protection of the Vatican and of the world as a whole should a crime against a Christian be committed like that carried out against El-Sherbini," Khalil said. "The Jewish community in Muslim-majority countries like Morocco similarly enjoys all its civil rights, and it has the support of the West and the US." Moreover, the Western media has often been blamed for playing a key role in encouraging anti- Muslim sentiments. The fact that the lawyer of El-Sherbini's murderer bluntly stated that his client was under the influence of biased media coverage that tends to portray Muslims as terrorists when he committed the crime has further called the objectivity of the Western media into question. In a recent article entitled "The shameful Islamophobia at the heart of Britain's press" that appeared in the British Independent newspaper, journalist Peter Oborne quoted a study by the Cardiff School of Journalism that examined reporting of Muslim issues. "The team analysed some 974 stories and found that approximately two-thirds of all 'news hooks' for stories about Muslims involved either terrorism (some 36 percent of stories); religious issues such as Sharia law, highlighting cultural differences between British Muslims and others (22 percent); or Muslim extremism, concerning figures such as Abu Hamza," Oborne wrote. "These stories all portrayed Muslims as a source of trouble. By contrast only 5 percent of stories were based on problems facing British Muslims." Khalil also says that bias in the Western media increased after the 9/11 attacks on New York and Washington, but that such bias had long been a feature of the Western media. "The Western media has been biased at least since the October War in 1973 when the Arabs were portrayed as using oil as a weapon to pressure the US into abandoning its support for Israel," Khalil noted. The fact that the abduction of workers from the American embassy in Tehran during the Islamic Revolution in 1979 is still commemorated in the Western media today is also an example of how the media tries to ignite public sentiment against Muslims, Khalil said. Such negative images of Muslims seem to have influenced mainstream Western mindsets. According to a recent poll published by the American network ABC news, 14 per cent of European Union citizens admitted to being "intolerant" of minorities, while another 25 per cent said that they were "ambivalent" towards them. "While Germany saw a 40 percent increase in reported racist crimes last year, and the London- based Islamic Human Rights Commission has recorded a 13-fold increase in backlash complaints in Britain since the 9/11 attacks, such figures are difficult to collate in countries like France, where the ethnic origins of complainants are not recorded," the ABC news poll said. Moreover, the London-based Runnymede Charity published a report entitled "Islamophobia: A Challenge for Us All" in 1997, updated in 2004, which found that "Muslims were seen as the 'other' and as lacking in the values held by western cultures." Islam was also regarded by many as a violent, terrorist religion, seen as not able to live up to Western values. Even more alarmingly, the report found that many Westerners took such misconceptions about Islam as a pretext to justify "discriminatory practices against Muslims and their seclusion from mainstream society." The report concluded that among Europeans "anti-Muslim hostility is seen as natural or normal." For the prominent Egyptian novelist Alaa El-Aswani such findings are perhaps unsurprising. Anti-Muslim sentiments have been on the rise in Europe as a result of the rising popularity of the extreme right in many European countries, El-Aswani said, and the fact that most Europeans know little or nothing about the true teachings of Islam, supposing that many mosques and Islamic organisations in Europe are in the grip of extremist trends, has further compounded the problem, he said. "The sometimes extreme tone and rhetoric the imams of some mosques in Europe tend to adopt conveys a wrong image of Islam and one that also goes against the secular values of the West," El-Aswani said. Portraying the niqab (full veil) as a religious obligation for women, when the majority of Islamic scholars insist that it is not, may alarm many Westerners, for example, not so much because of the way it looks, but rather because of the message of the seclusion of women that it conveys. "This example, and the fact that the mainstream Western media often attempts to portray Muslims as terrorists, has made many Western people, who know little or nothing about Islam, fear a Muslim neighbour or colleague as being perhaps a potential threat," El-Aswani said. The current "Stop the minaret" campaign in Switzerland is a further example of how Islamophobia has been penetrating deep into Western mindsets. More than 100,000 Swiss people have reportedly signed a petition in support of the right-wing Swiss People's Party's demands for a ban on the construction of minarets in Switzerland. Only four minarets presently dot the sky of Switzerland, and these are not even used for the call to Muslim prayer. The anti-minaret campaigners, however, have claimed that minarets are dangerous because they represent a "symbol of Islamic power" and may amount to an "ideological intrusion" into the Swiss way of life. El-Aswani was among the first to publicise the Swiss campaign in Egypt, and efforts are being exerted to stop the campaign. Yet, the fact that such a campaign could take place even in a multi-cultural country like Switzerland, where no Islamist terror attacks have ever occurred, could be read as being symptomatic of a rising tide of Islamophobia in Europe as a whole, El-Aswani said. However, Dalia Mogahed, director of the US- based Gallup Centre for Muslim Studies and a member of US President Obama's Advisory Council on Faith-Based and Neighbourhood Partnerships, contends that Islamophobia has actually either been stable or on the decline in recent years. Mogahed speculates that "crimes against Muslims may just be getting greater attention than before," and she adds that Western stereotyping of veiled or bearded Muslims as "terrorists" may also be changing, pointing to "President Obama's positive reference to the hijab several times in his Cairo speech" as testimony. Mogahed is among those moderate Muslim voices who tend to explain El-Sherbini's murder as being "a symptom of a deeper problem of prejudice in Germany," rather than a problem in the West as a whole, or an indication that prejudice against Islam is taking on a new and more dangerous form. Yet, the idea that Europe is in danger from Muslims and others has nevertheless entered public debate on the continent, with many arguing that as a result western Europe, which has been acclaimed for its toleration of minority groups since World War II, is no longer as tolerant as it has been. As Leela Jacinto of ABC News put it, "across western Europe, immigrant and civil-rights experts say that a xenophobic, anti-immigrant, anti-Muslim wave appears to be gripping a region once famed for its tolerance." "German politicians warn that 'Germanism' is being subsumed by people of Turkish origin, who make up a little over 2 percent of the population. French supporters of a hijab ban believe headscarves on schoolgirls pose a risk to the French ideal of laïcité, or secularism. And in Denmark, controversial new rules that strip children of immigrants of their right to automatic citizenship are drawing criticism from human- rights groups, who say they are a breach of citizenship rights, as well as the right to a family life," Jacinto wrote. And many agree with Khalil that Muslims are being particularly targeted in this xenophobic wave. According to online Huffington Post columnist Firas Al-Atraqchi, "given the racism many Muslims endure in Europe, the murder of an Egyptian woman because she wore a hijab should not be dismissed as the act of a lone man who many are now calling insane." "This is not just a state of xenophobia that is gripping Europe. It is part of a clearly anti- Muslim wave that is now rising to bloody heights," Khalil said. "Muslims used to suffer just from insults and discrimination. But now we are seeing them being killed because of their identity as Muslims, something that may develop into genocide in the future if we keep on ignoring it." Khalil's pessimistic outlook finds support in a recent spate of books that portray Europe's 53 million Muslims as a "demographic time bomb" that needs to be "defused immediately". Reviewing such books in the British newspaper The Guardian last August, columnist Pankaj Mishra quoted a number of prominent European and American politicians and journalists who think that Europe is about to be "overrun" by Muslims, who yet do not account for more than three or four per cent of the EU's total population of 493 million. "Of course minorities can shape countries," wrote Christopher Caldwell, an American columnist at London's Financial Times, whom the British newspaper The Observer recently described as being a "bracing, clear-eyed analyst of European pieties". "Muslims are already conquering Europe's cities, street by street," Caldwell wrote, with right-wing British historian Niall Ferguson similarly claiming that "a youthful Muslim society to the south and east of the Mediterranean is poised to colonise -- the term is not too strong -- a senescent Europe," according to Mishra's review. Indian analyst Hassan Suroor compares the alarmist tone running through these books, which "tend to portray Muslims in the darkest possible colours," to the "things once written about European Jews." The solution such books put forward to save Europe from becoming a potential "Eurabia" is to "keep Muslims out of Europe, and, if necessary, to throw them out. Some of the suggestions on how to deal with the Muslim 'problem' amount to ethnic cleansing" Suroor warns. For Suroor, many recent incidents have been symptomatic of Islamophobia, and he lists "a British minister, Jim Fitzpatrick, walks out of a Muslim constituent's wedding protesting against segregation of male and female guests; a prominent moderate Muslim scholar, Tariq Ramadan, is hounded out of not one but two separate jobs for hosting a show on an Iranian television channel; aggressive right-wing campaigners in Switzerland demand the removal of minarets from all mosques; and French President Nicolas Sarkozy calls for a ban on wearing the burqa in public." The cartoons that appeared in a Danish newspaper in 2006 depicting the Prophet Mohamed wearing a turban-shaped bomb, and the previous ban on the wearing of Muslim headscarves in French public schools, have also been seen as evidence of European prejudice against Islam. Suroor concludes that while it would be "foolish to conflate incidents which may be no more than just local difficulties and blow them up into an anti-Muslim conspiracy," it would be equally foolish to deny that such incidents are evidence of the prejudice that Muslims face across Europe. For his part, Khalil rejects claims that Muslims are "conquering Europe", when in fact Muslim populations do not amount to more than a tiny fraction of the population as a whole. "The figures are no more than a pretext," Khalil said, arguing that the campaign of which such claims are a part is "a war on Islam. Western intellectuals admit that this is an age of religious conflict, and many of the wars that have broken out over the past century were religiously motivated. What Muslims now face in the West is the cultural heritage of the spirit that once led to the Crusades." However, other Muslim voices call upon European Muslim populations not to see themselves as victims. Carla Amina Baghajati, a spokeswoman for Austria's Islamic community, has warned Muslims about making Islamophobia into a "general issue", for example. "We have to create a climate that makes it possible to overcome prejudice and racism without showing Muslims as victims," she explained to the International Herald Tribune recently. In the same vein, Nesrine Malek warned in a recent Guardian column commenting on El-Sherbini's death that "Muslims (me included) constantly protest that the actions of a few extremists should not be allowed to denigrate Islam and its adherents as a whole -- but this is exactly what they [Muslims] are doing themselves in connection with Europeans and the actions of Axel W. [El-Sherbini's murderer]." There is a big step from the prejudice that Muslims face in Europe "to the image of comprehensive, conspiratorial, institutional discrimination against Muslims in Europe that is gaining ground in Arab countries and spurring calls for the severance of diplomatic relations and boycotting of products," Malek wrote. Yet, Khalil contends that "admitting the Western hatred for Islam is the first step on the way to countering it. This does not mean we are at war with the West. It just means that we need to diagnose the disease in order to be able to cure it." Khalil suggests that an international organisation should be established with representation from all Muslim countries in order to protect Muslims living in the West. For El-Aswani, by contrast, more effort should be channelled into educating Westerners about Islam. Western Muslims should also do their bit, he said, by giving a good example and integrating into Western cultures. However, whether Muslims will be able to integrate positively, or just to "retreat into passive resentment", will also "depend on how quickly and readily their 'hosts' -- ordinary Europeans as well as governments -- make them feel at home," Mishra wrote.
