Dec. 16, 2005
 
COMMENTARY: The Future Islamic Europe
 
By Peter Elsworth
The Providence Journal
 
Given that Europe could become predominantly Islamic by the end of the century, the riots that recently spread across France again raise the question: Why have Muslim immigrants had such a problem integrating into European culture?
 
A key reason may be that Europe has far less of a tradition of immigration than the United States, where immigration is central to the national identity.
 
The Muslims who went to Europe to fill out the workforce after World War II -- mostly Pakistanis and Bangladeshis in Britain, Algerians and Moroccans in France and the Netherlands, and Turks in Germany -- had no place in the history of those nations. Indeed, the only references to the Islamic world in their children's European schools were the Crusades and the historic antipathy between Christianity and Islam.
 
Whereas the first generation of Muslim immigrants in Europe may have been happy to have work and stay close to their roots, many of the second- and third-generation immigrants have little sense of identity with their forebears' roots -- while at the same time feeling economically, politically and socially excluded from the European countries where they were born.
 
With unemployment high in Europe's Muslim ghettos, the younger people's frustration and resentment are compounded by a sense of humiliation. Many of them have thus turned to Islam as a source of identity, and their piety contrasts starkly with the European culture, which is highly secular.
 
In Britain, for example, it is estimated that more Muslims attend their mosques than Christians go to church -- even though Muslims make up only 3 percent of the population! Whereas their parents, adhering to their own cultures, may have accepted Europe's secularism, the second and third generations see it as evidence of Western decadence. (Ironically, it is tolerant secularism that has partly allowed the growth of Muslim militancy. For example, the second-generation Dutch-Moroccan who murdered filmmaker Theo van Gogh was living on Dutch unemployment benefits.)
 
It is hard to over-emphasize how intractable the problem has become. With some 15 million to 20 million Muslims now living in Europe, it is too late to turn attitudes around overnight. It is one thing for politicians and clerics to seek moderation; it is another for embittered young Muslims, some of whom are petty criminals from urban and suburban slums, to rally round the establishment when militant leaders offer delinquency in the name of religion.
 
Certainly, the London bombings this year and the Madrid bombings and the killing of van Gogh last year -- to say nothing of the recent riots in France -- are changing attitudes across Europe, with the growth of a number of right-wing nationalist political parties. But it may be too late to take a hard line to preserve the status quo. Given the high birth rate among the Muslims in Europe -- three times that of the mainstream populations, by some estimates -- the continent could become predominantly Muslim by the end of this century.
 
An astonishing thought, to be sure. But if history teaches us anything, it is that the kind of political stability the world experienced with the Cold War balance of power does not last forever.
 
Peter Elsworth, a former editor for Reuters and The New York Times and a native of England, is an editor at The Providence (RI) Journal.
 
Distributed by Scripps Howard News Service, www.shns.com.