NOT WANTING THE GUESTS BUT NEEDING THE WORKERS:

Strangers in the Land: a review of REFLECTIONS ON THE REVOLUTION IN EUROPE: Immigration, Islam, and the West By Christopher Caldwell (FOUAD AJAMI, NY Times Book Review)

The native populations in Western Europe hadn’t voted to have the Turks and the Moroccans in Amsterdam, the Kurds in Sweden, the Arabs in London and the Pakistanis and Indians in Bradford and West Yorkshire. The post-World War II economic boom, and labor shortages, brought the immigrants, and they put down roots in their surroundings. [...]

“The guest is sacred, but he may not tarry,” Hans Magnus Enzensberger writes in a set of remarks that Caldwell cites with approval. Many of Europe’s “guests” have overstayed their welcome. They live on the seam: the old world of Islam is irretrievable and can no longer contain their lives; the new world of modernity is not fully theirs. They agitate against the secular civilization of the West, but they are drawn to its glamour and its success.

In the way of exiles, once on safe ground they tell stories about the old lands. The telling speaks of Damascus as bathed with light, and the sea by Tunis and Algiers and Agadir as a piece of singular beauty. In its original habitat, there could be an honest reckoning with Islam. Men and women could wrestle with the limits it places on them; they would weigh, in that timeless manner, the balance between fidelity to the faith and the yearning for freedom. But it isn’t easy in Amsterdam or Stockholm. There, the faith is identity, and the faith is complete and sharpened like a weapon.

It wasn’t always so. Little more than four decades ago, when I left Lebanon for the United States, I, and others like me, accepted the rupture in our lives. I knew there would be no imams and no mosques awaiting me in the New World. I was not traveling in quest of all that. I was in my late teens, I accepted the “differentness” of the new country. News of Lebanon rarely reached me, air travel was infrequent and costly, I lost years of my family’s life. I needed no tales of the old country.

Nowadays, air travel is commonplace, satellite television channels from Dubai and Qatar reach the immigrants in their new countries, preachers and prayer leaders are on the move, carrying a portable version of the faith. We are to celebrate this new movement of peoples, even as it strips nations of what is unique to them. It goes by the name of globalization. It makes those who oppose it seem like nativists at odds with the new order of things.

The secularism and multiculturalism of Europe constitutes an explicit renunciation of civilization. It is the assertion that the people within geopolitical boundaries need share no values. This both makes it impossible for them to assimilate Islamic immigrants--having nothing to assimilate them to--and leaves them no basis for rejecting those immigrants other than ethnicity. After all, an ideology that requires that every way of life be tolerated doesn't then get to pick and choose.

Posted by Orrin Judd at August 1, 2009 7:41 AM