Are the French riots "Muslim" riots?

There is no unanimity among Western commentators on exactly where Islam fits into the riots of the last two weeks in Paris and elsewhere in France. Tony Blankley of the Washington Times writes that the riots are indeed specifically Muslim in character:

Even when the current violence subsides ... it will not be the end of the story. A new benchmark of the possible will have been established. The flaccid and timorous response of the French government will only increase the radicalizing Muslim elements' contempt for Western cultural weakness. As Paul Belien, writing from Brussels this weekend observed: "It is not anger that is driving the insurgents to take it out on the secularized welfare states of Old Europe. It is hatred. Hatred caused not by injustice suffered, but stemming from a sense of superiority. The "youths" do not blame the French, they despise them."

On the other hand, journalist Souheila Al-Jadda puts the problem in conventional terms of Western liberal tradition:

If France wants to avoid paying for past mistakes in a wider European intifada — similar unrest has been reported in Germany and Belgium — its leaders must do more to provide immigrant citizens greater equality in terms of job opportunities, civil liberties and education. They must acknowledge the frustrations of the youth and genuinely implement sweeping reforms to improve social conditions for minorities. Finally, they must not forget the slogan of their country's own revolution, which represents the founding principles of the French republic, "Liberty, equality, fraternity," for all.

My take is closer to Ms. Al-Jadda's than Mr. Blankley's, whose analysis is best seen as predictive rather than explanatory. The rioters are almost exclusively Muslim, true, but their motives for rioting are not Islamist. Not this time. But Islamist agitators are certainly encouraged by the violence and are already active in winning converts.

Whence the rioters?

Austin Bay explains succinctly:

Migrants from France's former Muslim colonies initially came to France seeking jobs, often the jobs the French no longer deigned to do. The immigrants stayed. Whether the immigrants wanted to assimilate (of course many do, some do not), assimilation has not occurred. Now, France's "Muslim neighborhoods" and "African neighborhoods" exist as permanent "cultural islands," scarred by high unemployment and bitter resentment. These are the "quartiers sensible" -- the sensitive neighborhoods.

Back in August 2002, Theodore Dalrymple explained the breakdown of French law and social contract for which today's riots may be seen as the result, not the cause. With all the news of the thousands of cars burned by rioters,

Reported crime in France has risen from 600,000 annually in 1959 to 4 million today [2002], while the population has grown by less than 20 percent (and many think today’s crime number is an underestimate by at least a half). In 2000, one crime was reported for every sixth inhabitant of Paris, and the rate has increased by at least 10 percent a year for the last five years. Reported cases of arson in France have increased 2,500 percent in seven years, from 1,168 in 1993 to 29,192 in 2000; robbery with violence rose by 15.8 percent between 1999 and 2000, and 44.5 percent since 1996 (itself no golden age).

The increases came almost exclusively "from the public housing projects that encircle and increasingly besiege every French city or town of any size, Paris especially."

A kind of anti-society has grown up in them—a population that derives the meaning of its life from the hatred it bears for the other, “official,” society in France. This alienation, this gulf of mistrust—greater than any I have encountered anywhere else in the world, including in the black townships of South Africa during the apartheid years—is written on the faces of the young men, most of them permanently unemployed, who hang out in the pocked and potholed open spaces between their logements. When you approach to speak to them, their immobile faces betray not a flicker of recognition of your shared humanity; they make no gesture to smooth social intercourse. If you are not one of them, you are against them. Their hatred of official France manifests itself in many ways that scar everything around them.

Setting fire to cars and anything else is no new thing:

There are burned-out and eviscerated carcasses of cars everywhere. Fire is now fashionable in the cités: in Les Tarterets, residents had torched and looted every store—with the exceptions of one government-subsidized supermarket and a pharmacy.

Remember, Dalrymple was writing three years ago. These ghettoes are of France's own making. The African zones were built to house the hundreds of thousands of north and west African immigrants whom France brought in for labor between 30-40 years ago. But these immigrants - the parents and grandparents of today's rioters - did not assimilate into French culture. Most of them wanted to become French citizens in every sense of the word, but they were deliberately kept physically isolated. Then the economic boom that brought them to France collapsed at the same time France passionately embraced full-scale socialism and labor controls. The durable unemployment rate in France is 10 percent, a rate that would cause an American political party badly to lose the next election. But that rate is deceptive because among the 20s and under demographic, the rate is much higher. Among the second- or third-generation immigrant populations, says Dalrymple, "long-term unemployment among the young is so rife there that it is the normal state of being."

[A]lready culturally distinct from the bulk of the population, they feel themselves vilely discriminated against. Having been enclosed in a physical ghetto, they respond by building a cultural and psychological ghetto for themselves. They are of France, but not French.

This social and cultural religious environment is fertile soil for Islamist recruiters. And Mr. Dalrymple explained that, too.

[I]magine yourself a youth in Les Tarterets or Les Musiciens, intellectually alert but not well educated, believing yourself to be despised because of your origins by the larger society that you were born into, permanently condemned to unemployment by the system that contemptuously feeds and clothes you, and surrounded by a contemptible nihilistic culture of despair, violence, and crime. Is it not possible that you would seek a doctrine that would simultaneously explain your predicament, justify your wrath, point the way toward your revenge, and guarantee your salvation, especially if you were imprisoned? Would you not seek a “worthwhile” direction for the energy, hatred, and violence seething within you, a direction that would enable you to do evil in the name of ultimate good? It would require only a relatively few of like mind to cause havoc. Islamist proselytism flourishes in the prisons of France ... .

Islamists are determined that all of human existence be brought under the sway of Islam (as they define Islam, of course). While we rightly continue to worry about and guard against deadly attacks against us by al Qaeda, the long-term menace of Islamism is not jihadism. Jihadists, because they are overtly military in nature, can be effectively (though not always easily) defeated with our own military. Jihadists attack with hammer blows. Remove the hammer and its wielders and construct strong enough shields and the blows and their effects will be reduced.

But Islamism is like a fog that enfolds itself within and around, over and through a society. Western countries have a long tradition of religious freedom, but this freedom is predicated on the presumption that religious freedom will not threaten the political nature and autonomy of the state. This is true even in Europe, where the "separation of church and state" took a very long time and no little blood to be gained. It is not complete there, of course; France is still officially a Catholic country, for example. But on the whole, Europe's countries do not rely on religion to order their polity or the political orientations of their citizens.

The entry of large Muslim populations into this system, whether entry by immigration or conversion, is a deep challenge to Westernism's survival. It simply remains to be seen whether Islam itself can be politically pluralist in countries where it holds sway. Islamism, of course, does not even pretend to pluralism.

European Islamists have long demanded religious-legal autonomy for Muslims. Tony Blankley documented the Islamist-separatist demands they are making:

[L]ook what a typical radical Muslim leader, Dyab Abou Jahjah, the leader of the Brussels-based Arab European League says: "We reject integration when it leads to assimilation. I don't believe in a host country. We are at home here and whatever we consider our culture to be also belongs to our chosen country. I'm in my country, not the country of the Westerners." Or consider the statement of a German radical Islamist that I recounted in my book (based on a National Public Radio news story broadcast): "Germany is an Islamic country. Islam is in the home, in schools. Germans will be outnumbered. We [Muslims] will say what we want. We'll live how we want. It's outrageous that Germans demand we speak their language. Our children will have our language, our laws, our culture."

An NPR story reported that "an imam at a Berlin mosque was secretly filmed calling Germans "unbelievers" who "can only burn in hell."

Muslims make up about 4 percent of the German population, but their influence on German society is growing. For example, a German Muslim group won a court battle to impose its own Islamic teaching in Berlin's public schools.

Simply put, the dictates of the Quran cannot be reconciled with the social mores and liberties of Western society. Hence, Muslims living in the West are faced with basically three choices.

(1) Embrace secularism. They can ignore some of the Quranic particulars and accept secularism as the norm. But this makes Islam and their Muslim identity a matter for the mosque, while Islam formally claims dominion over the entire of a person's life, not just private beliefs;

(2) Accommodationism. They can make the best accommodation they can, adhering to Islamic requirements as best as possible and interacting with secualr society as little as possible, or

(3) Separatism. they can demand their country allow autonomous or mostly autonomous Islamic communities, ruiled mostly or exclusively by Islamic law.

The first option makes a Muslim apostate in practice if not in attitude. Because Islam is a religion in which practice is paramount, this option would be automatically repulsive to a Muslim who wished to remain true. Moreover, apostasy is perhaps the worst sin a Muslim can commit. Islam usually defines apostasy as actual conversion to another religion, but it's worth noting in the present context that Islamists and especially jihadists don't shrink from calling apostate those whose Islamic practice is not strict enough. Since jihadists show a willing propensity to murder apostate Muslims, including Muslims whom most Muslims consider faithful, embracing state and social secularism can be literally life risking.

Accommodation was, of course, how Jews lived for centuries in eastern Europe and in some places in the west. Ironically, Jews in Germany lived more like non-Jews than Jews did in any other European country. In most every way, the victims of 1938's Kristallnacht were Germans who happened to be Jews, not Jews who happened to live in Germany.

Accommodationism would appear to be an option for Muslims in Europe. But it is not. Accommodationism depends on two things, neither of which pertains for Muslims in Europe. First, Muslims who wish to accommodate (or assimilate) would have to enjoy good prospects for economic success and social mobility. That is almost entirely absent in France and much of the rest of Europe. Second, Islam would have to have "theological space" for faithful living as a minority in a non-Muslim society. But Islam has no such space.

The audio file at this NPR page about Islam and Europe is worth listening to. It makes the point that Muslims in Europe are living as a minority in a secular society, something that Muslims have never done before.

There is nothing in Islam that instructs Muslims how to do that. From Mohammed's day until now, Islam has always assumed that it would rule the societies in which it existed. Indeed, correct Muslim living actually depends on living among a Muslim ummah.

So separatism becomes almost the default choice. An example is last summer's case in Germany:

The deeply religious Muslim parents of the 11-year-old student were trying to prevent their son from attending swimming classes, where he would mix with girls in bathing suits. They filed a complaint in a Düsseldorf court against school officials. But the court rejected their case, saying that religious beliefs are not a reason to prevent children from attending swimming classes and said that the boy must attend them in the future.

As Muslim populations grow in number, separatism will increase. The trend will be accelerated by the fact that, just as in the Parisian cites, Islamism is on the rise among Europe's Muslims not in the first generation of Muslim immigrants, but among their children and especially grandchildren. And converts from the host countries. NPR reported in 2003,

"What they share is a sense of exclusion," says NPR Senior European Correspondent Sylvia Poggioli. The children of those immigrants present a different challenge: many second- and third-generation Muslims born to secular European societies are re-examining both their identity as children of another land, and their religious beliefs.

This is the most serious challenge of Islamism: that over the decades to come, Islamist separatists become a numerical, hence political majority. Then several European countries would become officially Islamic. Is that realistically possible? Mark Steyn wrote in the Telegraph that the French riots are "an early skirmish in the Eurabian civil war."

If the insurgents emerge emboldened, what next? In five years' time, there will be even more of them, and even less resolve on the part of the French state. That, in turn, is likely to accelerate the demographic decline. Europe could face a continent-wide version of the "white flight" phenomenon seen in crime-ridden American cities during the 1970s, as Danes and Dutch scram to America, Australia or anywhere else that will have them.

There is a civil war going on, but despite the violence in France, it is mostly not a violent civil war. Nor is it entirely accurate to describe the struggle as one for hearts and minds. More than that, it is a struggle for our souls, and such struggles are always the most enduring of all.