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If the ‘clash of civilizations’ in the Huntingtonian sense of the word, exists at all between Western civilization and Islam, its primary scene is undoubtedly Europe. This is because there is a significant number of Muslim minorities living in Europe, with their proportions ever increasing, and because over the recent period we have witnessed a series of conflicts between the Muslim minorities and the ‘native’ population of the recipient countries. Many hold the view that in Europe there is a real ‘war of cultures’, a ‘Kulturkampf’ going on. Even Gilles Kepel and Bassam Tibi, otherwise quite realistic analysts, believe that ‘Europe has become a battle-ground’.

Even though we should not mean it in the sense of a concrete battle-ground, it is definitely an ‘ideological’ one, centred round the rather complex issue of ‘Islam in Europe’ and the ‘di­cho­­tomy’ of multiculturalism vs. ‘integration’, which have served as bones of contention for heated debates for a long time. The debate has numerous participants: learned scholars, politi­cians, intellectuals, journalists and different Muslim personalities, each one using their own kind of discourse.

The already marked presence of Islam in Europe and its becoming quite clearly ‘visible’ raises a very important question, considering the fact that Islam occupies here a lasting minority position, unlike in the Islamic world. The question to be answered is this: Is there a special ‘Europeanized Islam’ or ‘Euro-Islam’, characteristically different from mainstream Islam, or is it only justi­fied to speak about the presence of Islam in Europe? Putting it another way; Euro­(pean) Islam or Islam in Europe? On top of that, those emphasizing the con­flicts be­tween the European ‘native’ population and Muslim minorities con­sider the latter, with few excep­tions, as a unified, homogeneous, usually radical bloc, the same way they are treating Islam itself as a unified bloc. But there is no such thing as unified Islam, the bloc of Muslim minori­ties in Europe is fragmented by lines of fracture. Similarly to several other questions, there is no unified ‘Islam’ or ‘Muslim’ opinion as to what Islam in Europe should be like.

Regarding the relationship between immigrant Muslims and ‘native’ European population, there are two intellectual trends, or, we might call them ‘schools’, totally different, practically contradicting one another. One of them, based on Huntington’s paradigm of ‘a clash of civilizations’, in fact presumes a war between democratic Europe and its 15-25 million Mus­lims ‘imported’ from ‘intolerably’ anti-democratic countries. Many experts trace it back to the irreconcilable contradictions between values, such as e.g. individualism ‘ranked above the tribe and the community’ characteristic of the Jewish-Christian civilization vs. the ‘group interest’ represented by Muslims, above all the interest of ‘the group named Muslims’. The ‘Dar­wini­an struggle for life’ between ‘hyper-tolerant Europeans and hyper-aggressive Mus­lims’ might lead to the annihilation of European culture.

The other school does not accept the former one, since it does not take into account those immigrant Muslim masses that already have democratic attitudes that have already become European, and cannot automatically be put in a row with the jihadists. This opinion holds that the dividing line runs within the Islamic world and it is between Islamic fundamentalists and the moderates standing opposite them. The most optimistic are of the view that this situation offers Europe an excellent chance to help distract Islam from jihadism and contribute to the long-awaited Islamic enlightenment.

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Euro(pean)-islam-or-islam-in-europe

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2014.07.10.