Topic: Concepts of Co-Existence and Community

Panel 2

Mike Moore
Right we’re going to give these other four minutes and then we’re going to start, ready or not, which is a little offensive to our speakers. But here’s the thing: Our keynote speaker is restricted to 10 minutes. The other contributors will come in at about five minutes. Then there might be time at the end for a conversation and comments to be made. I think these conferences are at their best when we get off script and get on to a conversation. Free speech is a great thing, a noble thing, but even that can be abused. So I will try and be an immoderate moderator and keep folk to the time limits. I also thought that if I keep speaking that might encourage some people who are outside to come in. This is maybe as good as it gets, James. I know that the contributions are printed off and distributed, if that’s any comfort to you. If I speak any longer, those who are here will want to leave, so I think I should hand it over to you for your contribution on Concepts of Co-Existence and Community.
James J. Zogby
I actually want to begin by thanking the organisers for an invitation to participate in what I think is a critical conversation. Especially after the bombings in London the issue became very clear to us that there are problems within our societies in the West that need to be addressed and, I think, need to be understood. I was engaged in a number of discussions about the differences between the situation of Arabs and Muslims in America and what lessons there are available from that experience to the situation in Europe. And I want to address them. I speak to you – and I should say this from the outset – I speak to you in two capacities: One, I’m a scholar and a student of the history of my community. I know its history. I’ve polled the community. I know it’s demographics and I am, after all, an Arab American. But I also speak to you as a practitioner and an activist. For more than 30 years, I’ve led the fight in America against exclusion – we were politically excluded – against discrimination and against threats to our civil liberties. My lifework has been gaining political empowerment for Arab Americans. I’m a critic of American policy, but I also know what my country does right. And that’s what I want to speak to you about today. Because I believe that there are fundamental differences between the Arab and broader Muslim immigrant experience in Europe and that of the Arab-American and Muslim communities in the United States. First and foremost, America itself is different, both in concept and reality. Becoming American is a process that has brought countless immigrant groupings into the US mainstream. Becoming American is not the possession of a single ethnic group nor does any ethnic group define America. Within a generation, diverse ethnic and religious communities from every corner of the globe have been transformed into what we call Americans. Now, problems remain to be sure, and intolerant bigots periodically rear their heads, but, as American history demonstrates, the pressures of incorporation and absorption are decisive. Becoming American means more than obtaining a passport and a set of legal rights. It means adopting a new identity and absorbing a shared sense of history. This is important to understand because, while problems remain with the generation that is immigrant, first generation and second generation born in America assimilate. They intermarry and they are Americans. I am not an Arab in America. I am an Arab-American. By a strange alchemy of sorts I become transformed in the process. I’m not an exile. I’m not a separate community tolerated in America. It’s my country damn it, and I am part of it. And I insist on the rights inherent in that American identity. At the same time that every new group becomes part of America, America itself and the concept of American becomes expanded and transformed. And this is important to understand. It’s the way we teach our history. When I was a child in school learning about the pioneers, I was one of them. When I was a child learning about George Washington in the War of Independence, I was part of that war. And it goes to the extent whereby each ethnic immigrant and religious community then seeks a way to incorporate itself into the origins and the story of the origins of the county so that, for example, we now know of early Arab immigrants who were part of the revolutionary war experience or Muslims who were part of the Civil War fighting on either side, etc. I’m recalling an experience where I sat in the Oval Office at the Whitehouse with President Clinton and other ethnic leaders as he was talking about his One America effort to heal America’s racial divide. Each of us were telling the story of our communities in very emotional ways – discrimination we’d encountered or exclusion or even lynchings of Italians in the South – people didn’t know it – or the persecution of Italians and Germans in World War II – people didn’t know the story. But at the end of it all, we became American. And as President Clinton reflected on it, he said, “You know, this collective story is the American story. It’s the flaws, the blemishes, it’s also the greatness of the country that we incorporate, transform and become better in the process. Because of this unique experience, America, I think, has to be understood in a different way. The country, by absorbing these immigrants, becomes transformed, as I noted, and the complex mosaic of America becomes even more complex. Religions and ethnic organisations abound and, as each new group comes in, it finds the table set, if you will, by groups that have come earlier that create the conditions for greater diversity and greater acceptance into the country. Historically, two pressures are at work in America. There is nativism, to be sure. There is exclusion, to be sure. We’ve seen it across the board. Some fail to recognise the Statue of Liberty faces out welcoming new people and they want to close the door. But at the end of the day, in each period of our history when nativists have reared their head, ultimately popular majorities swing back and push the country in the direction of acceptance and tolerance. After 9/11, for example, Arab-Americans and American Muslims felt threatened by a backlash. My life was threatened a number of times, but there are people in jail today for having threatened my life, because support was immediately forthcoming. The president spoke. A huge majority of Americans spoke out as well. Coalitions were formed defending our rights. Even when law enforcement overextended itself, other factors in law enforcement came forward and said, “You cannot do this. It’s not our way.” Today, I believe Arab-Americans and American Muslims are better respected, better protected and in many ways better recognised as communities. It became the measure of patriotism to defend Arab-Americans and American Muslims after 9/11. On the same note, it’s important recognising the earlier contribution made by Arab-Americans to the newer immigrants who are coming to the country. We have formed strong organisations. We have provided social services. We have paved the way for the more recent immigrants, many of whom are Muslim, so that they find their way in America. Now there is a notion, among some that there is a kind of Muslim exceptionalism. That, well, Christian Arabs could find their way in America but Muslims can’t. Simply not true. Our polling data does not indicate that at all. Muslim Americans born in America have the same intermarriage rate as Christian Arab-Americans. 97% of Muslim adults contribute to charities that are non-Muslim, would vote for candidates who are non-Muslim, live in neighbourhoods that are mixed and are not (inarticulate). We don’t live in ghettoes. The tragic reality of America is that ghettoes do exist, but the ghettoes that exist and the underclass that exists pre-exists, predates our immigration to America. Tragically, America has a problem of an underclass. It’s black, it’s Hispanic, and our immigrants from the Middle East and South Asia have come to America and, like every other immigrant group that’s come – and I say tragically and unfortunately – ends up skipping in line ahead of that pre-existing underclass of African-Americans and Hispanic-Americans. And so the road to economic progress in America is simply paved with the hard work of ethnic immigrants who have come and succeeded. There are those who suggest, for example, that the reason why Arab and Muslim Americans do better than their counterparts in Europe is because it was poorer immigrants who came to Europe than those who came to America. Simply not true. I give you the example of the Yemenis, who came as farm workers in California only 25 years ago. They were working in the dirtiest and poorest paid jobs in the country and today they dominate the small business market in California and several other communities around the country. They have been able to use their entrepreneurial skills to rise very quickly in less than 20 years, out of the farm fields and into small business enterprise and their kids are now in universities across the country. We do not remain in the lower socio-economic strata because we find that opportunities for enterprise abound. Within a few decades every one of the immigrant communities that have come have worked their way into that kind of process toward incorporation into America. None of this should suggest that we don’t face discrimination, that we don’t share deep frustrations with American foreign policy and have real concerns with threats to our civil liberties. The difference is that, because we’re Americans, we voice concern with these policies as citizens not as aliens. I was in a debate after 7/7 with some young Muslims in Britain and was struck by the fact that they kept referring to the “Blair regime.” I don’t like George Bush. I didn’t vote for George Bush. He’s not my president and I don’t agree with him on much, but he is my president. He is the president of the American people and I will oppose his policies, but as a citizen of America I oppose his policies. And I think that therein lies some of the difference. Our generation born in America sees themselves and knows themselves to be participants in a democracy. We don’t see ourselves as alien outsiders to the process and therefore talk about the government as if it were some foreign government. Our generation born in America assimilate and wear American clothes. They don’t go in the other direction. After 7/7, for example, it was amazing how the Department of Homeland Security and the Department of Justice reached out and brought us in to regular meetings that we have been having since 9/11, but we continued then even more intensively on how could we work more closely together. The Democratic Party leadership invited us in. The Republican Party leadership invited us in. The Senate invited us in to a meeting with the Senate and then included more senators than usually gather on the floor to have a debate on an issue. They wanted to talk. They wanted to learn. The FBI has formed a committee of Arab-Americans and Muslim Americans to advise it on working with the community. There is an association of Arab-Americans in the military. There is an association of Arab-Americans and Muslim Americans in police departments across the country. The fact is that we are not on the margins. The extremists in our country are on the margins. Arab-Americans and American Muslims are not. We’ve learned to deal with the extremists. We’ve learned to ostracise their elements from our community. 9/11 simply made our resolve all the more intense. We’ve done this. We’ve done it and not been silenced as political constituencies, sharply critical of the policies of our government, but nevertheless we do it as citizens. It’s tribute, I think, to the viability and self-confidence and openness of the American process. And I think that therein lies the difference. Thank you.
Mike Moore
Well, thank you very much. We started 20 minutes late. We’ve lost time. The most difficult thing in politics is to make a short speech of five minutes. Anybody can talk for two hours. It takes a real professional to hone an argument up to capture it in five minutes. So, I am turning to a real professional – a former prime minister of Canada, who will show us how it’s done. Kim, in five minutes…
Kim Campbell
You’ll notice how Michael has manipulated the inherent competitiveness among politicians, setting a standard that I hope I don’t fail to meet. I’ll be very brief if I can. Simply picking up from Jim’s excellent address, Canada has a slightly different model. Canada and the United States as well as the Dominions, particularly Canada and the United States, are countries built on immigration, so we have had to think a lot about the concepts of community and of coexistence within our own countries. Canada, in fact, per capita takes many more immigrants than the United States. We take about 1% of our population every year. When I was a young girl, many of the immigrants were from Western Europe. In fact, in the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries, 80% of the people living in Canada had been born in Britain. Three of those were grandparents of mine. So the origins of Canadian immigrants have changed dramatically, particularly since World War II, and therefore the challenge of integrating immigrants has grown great since one can’t even assume that there will be Western European languages that perhaps have a greater affinity to English, and there are colour bars, etc. that rear their heads. But let me just say that the Canadian model of coexistence and creating community has been a little different from the American. We talk about the “Canadian mosaic“ rather than the “melting pot.” I think in 1985 or ’81, Nathan Glaser and Daniel Moynihan edited a book called Ethnicity, in which in their opening essay, they speculated on why ethnicity had remained such a salient factor in both Western and at that time Communist Bloc politics, notwithstanding that both ideological foundations anticipated the disappearance of ethnic identities. And their argument was that, certainly in the United States, ethnic groups were very useful in countries that were dispensing goodies, because they were large enough to have some impact on public policy but small enough so that each member could get some portion of the benefit. Classes, they argued were too big for this, but that was why ethnic groups made good lobbying groups. But also they pointed out that, even in the concept of a melting society, not everybody is equally meltable. If you came to a society that was dominated by White Anglo-Saxon Protestants, it was easier to melt as a Polish Catholic than to melt as somebody of colour or as somebody of a much different religion. And so they argued that the idea of the melting pot was good, but that not everyone is equally meltable, depending on how different they are from the dominant standard. The Canadian constitution also has, as an interpretative principle, the recognition of the multi-cultural heritage of Canadians and that, for example, was the provision that was used to strike down laws prohibiting Sunday shopping. In other words, where the court argued that the laws had to be interpreted in the light of the fact that not all Canadians were White Anglo-Saxon Protestants, as was the majority of the group that, in fact, founded English-speaking Canada or white, French-speaking Catholics, as was the other founding group, not to mention our aboriginal people. Canada has done some interesting and creative things to try and draw our diverse immigrants into the mainstream. Canada is a constitutional monarchy. The Queen’s powers are exercised by the Governor General, who is a distinguished Canadian appointed for a term of five years. And each province has a Lieutenant Governor, who serves the same purposes at the provincial government level. Canadian governments have for some time now used that role as a way of broadening the mainstream. The Governor General who was my Governor General when I was Prime Minister was the first Canadian of Ukrainian origin to be Governor General of Canada. Recently, the Governor General who just retired was a woman born in Hong Kong. There was a Hong-Kong-born Lieutenant Governor in British Colombia. There was a black Lieutenant Governor in Ontario. There have been a number of women. There have been native Indians. There have been Métis. So that position, which is one of great distinction and which embodies the ceremonial representative quality of our state, has been invested in people of different backgrounds in order to paint the picture of a Canada that is, in fact, a multi-cultural, multi-ethnic, many-hued country. It is also interesting, I think, in comparison with the United States that in Canada, and I think we are more like New Zealand in this way, that a major national ceremony without significant representation and participation of first nations, of native Canadians, would be unthinkable. That is an integral part of how we publicly manifest who we are as Canadians. Now does that mean we don’t have racism and discrimination? No it doesn’t. We are a society that deals with these challenges like any other. But it is a slightly different approach from the melting pot approach taken in the United States. I would argue that much of the racism is found in cities. Certainly, the public-opinion research in Canada shows that Vancouver and Toronto have a fair amount of racism because they are the cities; they are the major centres, for receiving immigrant communities. And racism is very much linked to perceptions of crime. And again where you have groups who come into a society and have a difficult time adjusting and do meet discrimination, you often get a vicious circle in that they are young people who become alienated. They gravitate towards crime or social unruliness, and this reinforces the sense of others, that these are people not playing by the rules. And I would argue that the sense of playing by the rules is one of the most important factors that lead the broader Canadian population to be welcoming of new immigrants. Finally, I would say one of the interesting things about Canada and the United States is that Canada is a much less religious country than the United States. It used to be just the opposite. Canadians were more churchgoing. But it is very much reversed – that Canadians are much less formally religious. But I would argue that there is a very powerful public ethic in Canada. I, as a product of the Scottish enlightenment, reject wholeheartedly the view that religion is the foundation of morality. I think you are often hard pressed to have morality in the face of religion, because I think religion is very much based on power. And, although there are many wonderful teachings in organised religions, I think it is quite wrong to say that they are the basis of morality. I believe, as the thinkers of the Scottish enlightenment, that the foundation of morality is fellow feeling. Somebody was speaking last night – Mr Sasakawa – was talking about the golden rule: “Do unto others as you would have others do unto you” and the version of that that appeared in President Havel’s Christmas card. I think that capacity for empathy and fellow feeling is by far the more important foundation of morality, and I think you find that in Canada. I think Canadians have a public healthcare system because they believe it is absolutely unconscionable for anyone to be impoverished by illness. It is not your fault. Whatever problems we have with this system, it is a part of what I would call the Canadian ethical value. What that means also is that, because we are a less formally religious country, I think we find it easier to tolerate religious diversity. It is something that is … and this is a change in our history because it used to be a very Christian country, dramatically Catholic in Quebec, dramatically Protestant in most parts of English-speaking Canada. That is much less the case. And I think that is both an effect of immigration, I think, an effect of modernisation, and also a cause of making it possible for us to integrate more people into our society. And I think I will end at that, which is simply to say that the country’s of North America, particularly the two that I know well – Canada and the United States – have two quite different approaches to integrating very diverse populations and perhaps the difference that we find most from Europe, which is facing big struggles now, is that we always assume that those who came to our shores, would become – at least, certainly by the mid-20th century. I don’t want to paint us in too fair a colour – but by mid-20th century it was always assumed that those who landed on our shore would become citizens, would become part of our country. The notion of guest workers or people who were just passing through was not part of our concept. Therefore, whether we liked it or not, we had to force ourselves to overcome the fear of the other and begin to define our national identity, as I said, as many-hued, many-faced and of many different origins.
Mike Moore
Thank you very much for that contribution. I’ve served on a commission on migration that gave a report to the UN last week and the Canadian example is very interesting. Canada is one of the few countries in the world where the minister of immigration can be under pressure in the parliament and under pressure from public opinion because he or she failed to get enough migrants. In most of our societies, the minister is under pressure for bringing too many people in. So, as much as I hate to say it, there’s a lot we can learn from Canada. Now we have a contribution from the Deputy Minister who serves in the Prime Minister’s office in Israel – Michael, you five minutes, please
Michael Melchior
Thank you very much. As I was until this morning under the impression that I was speaking in the first panel, I’ll try to combine the two without that, of course, meaning that this will add to the five minutes and become ten minutes. God forbid! I would like to say something first on the issue here very much combined with what Ms Campbell said here before about the mosaic. We created an organisation in Israel called Mozaika, which is exactly this concept, and I think it’s relevant also for Israeli society. As you know it’s also a society of immigrants from many countries and also a society with a considerable Israeli-Palestinian, mostly Muslim, population. I’m talking about now inside the borders of 1967, where we have a population of 20% Israeli-Palestinian Arabs, out of whom 16.5% are Muslim and the rest are Christian or Druses, and we have very intensive civil society work, which is going on now these days, of integration and fighting any kinds of discriminations, which exist in our society, and redefining the kind of what I believe should be the model of a debate on what exactly should be the Israeli model. I believe it should be a model of autonomous communities with full not only personal rights and liberties but also with cultural and religious rights and liberties, which will I hope create a kind of model mosaic, which – especially in the day when we will have peace also with our neighbours and have borders, which both we and our neighbours need, and will have that kind of respect – it will be of course much easier to build on this inside Israeli society. One of the conflicts, which is coming up and which is today very central in my society and our society in Israel, is again the religious-secular split, which is not only a cultural identity conflict, but also has to do with the issues of foreign policy and internal policy and relations to our neighbours, as it has with our neighbours in the same way. And it’s becoming more and more dominant in these years. It’s interesting some of us participated a couple of weeks ago in the Clinton Global Forum. And I was there and had the honour of being on the panel together with Madeleine Albright, and she said all the things which I thought I was going to say, which was quite interesting. She said that she had been wrong the whole way through eight years as Secretary of State, where she thought that religion belonged only to the private realm or to the realm of communities and not to the public realm. The issue, of course, is – as I have been trying to say this for many years – that the force of religion, the manipulation of religion, the dark forces, which are in religions – I say this also as an orthodox rabbi – the potential of the slippery slope down to hell is there in all religion. And they are there. Those forces are there. And if, as policymakers, both inside our community and also between our societies, we don’t become inclusive towards the moderate elements, which I believe are the dominant elements in all the big religions, if we don’t include them, if we don’t take them as part of the peacemaking process, of the legitimacy of the other, of the civilisations, of the dialogue, education first of all, culture… If we don’t become inclusive, then the chances that the totalitarian forces – the terrorist who says I’m a terrorist therefore I am – will be the dominant forces, which we again through media and other ways reinforce and empower, and all the moderate forces will be put aside. I’m saying this after a long experience now of intensive, not only dialoguing, but working intensely or finding new methods together with Muslim leaders all over the Middle East – combined Jewish, Christian and Muslim leaders – not only going to international conferences and saying niceties about how our religion is all about peace and then going back home and killing each other, but putting up practical programmes and goals for how we can change our reality, and it can only be changed if there is an inclusiveness towards the cultural religious element. This is, for my part from my analysis, the main failure of the Oslo process – that it was not inclusive towards this element, that the people-to-people work was all people who were talking to the converted – the leftwing of Israeli society with the leftwing of Palestinian society. It was icing – nice and beautiful and I participated in much of it and you always feel good – and it made no impact and no change whatsoever. And nobody in the international community or amongst many of our own opinion makers really wants to touch this issue. Because it’s complicated, it’s multifaceted, there are no guaranteed results and therefore we just ignore it and think that it disappears when unfortunately things don’t always disappear just because you ignore them. And we have to realise that we are today in a situation where those who want to turn the Israeli-Arab conflict, both inside our societies and between our societies, into an aspect of the overall clash between the civilisations, they are having a very fruitful ground, because there is no serious investment, thought, work, human investment in creating the alternative. The good news is that there are people there that we have created together with leaders in many of the Arab countries, together with the Palestinian religious leadership and the Jewish Israeli leadership. We have created some new models of dialogue and education in working with schools and reinterpreting or finding the real interpretations of holy texts dealing with the issues of holy (inarticulate). There is a beginning of a will to do something serious about this. And, as most of the people in the Middle East define themselves as people who are religious and traditional and look towards religion as their main source of identification legitimisation, you cannot keep on going and think that you can ignore this. So Madeleine Albright’s new book, which I hope you will all be reading when it comes out, called The Mighty and the Almighty, will be I think a model for what I hope will be a new kind of inclusiveness so that we don’t have the totalitarian elements of all of our civilisations, which will take over maybe inside ourselves – these totalitarian elements exist inside everyone of us – but that we can reinforce and invest and really think about how not only a dialogue can be created, which is important for two people who live so close and know absolutely nothing about each other, which is a major flaw because it gives a good breed to all the misconceptions and stereotypes and the things, which unfortunately some of them have a good basis also, and that we can create something else. And we can create, not only a dialogue, but a joint cooperation on the major issues which are on our table and I know of nowhere better than to begin with this in an atmosphere of what we started in the Alexandria summit meeting, which we had three years ago, where all the top leaders of the Holy Land came together in a total commitment that we will not let religion anymore be manipulated to the purpose of destructing what God has created: first of all, human beings. And with this joint commitment I think that we have a basis for doing our work and creating a much better century. Thank you.
Mike Moore
Very good, thank you. We’re lucky now to have a senator from the Czech Republic. Karel, five minutes.
Karel Schwarzenberg
Ladies and gentlemen, we were just introduced to the situation in the New World, which of course with few exceptions is characterised by a society, which was created by immigrants. In Europe, the problem is another one. If you look on Europe as a continent, one could say it’s a continent composed of minorities. Whatever is your name, we are all minor nations, different religions spread around the continent, and hardly anyone can say he’s a definite majority. Of course, there are two aspects. One is the traditional spectrum of living together between different ethnic groups, religious groups and so on. And, of course, then we the problem which has risen after World War II, especially in the last 30 years when we have quite different minorities; migrants from the Caribbean, from North Africa, from Turkey and so on, which are of course a bit differently structured and that is the cause of many problems. Not that the European nations would have been so perfect in the past to live really well with the minorities. Especially the history of the 19th and 20th century is more or less a proof how after centuries of living together one more or less successfully tries to kill, exterminate or chase away the minority you have living inside your own nation. Nevertheless, if we look at it with a cool eye, from a historic point of view, we have to consider one thing. A nation like a state, too, is nothing eternal. Like everything human, it comes and goes. And only in the 19th century and the first half of the 20th century did people start to think that the nation is an eternal God-given thing. It isn’t. It’s a human work, which develops, rises, fades, dies out, disappears or sometimes appears again. And that is what we should have in mind looking at this problem. And of course in Europe there were places of tolerance and respect, and places where it was always very difficult. A very interesting proof I had a fortnight ago when I was in Afghanistan and there were elections there and we duly watched how they went. That was very interesting. And then with the eight of us was a very efficient girl, a lady from Poland. And some of my shared colleagues approached her, the Polish, presuming naturally that she was Catholic. She said, “No, No, I’m Muslim.” And I had to explain to all my colleagues that for centuries, actually for many centuries, there is a Muslim minority in Poland, which always considered itself Polish, was always Muslim and was respected by the surroundings and they lived together and one of them is now – out of her double experience of living in Poland and Europe since centuries, and being Muslim – bringing her experience to Afghanistan. And if we could look at the history of minorities in Europe, we have to realise one thing: As a rule just the difference of ethnic origin, just the difference of religion, just the difference of language isn’t reason enough to become explosive. It may cause problems in history, in the past and even in the last decades, but which were possible to solve. Really a kind of nitro-glycerine in the inter-relationship came only when there was a national or religious conflict, or both of them or different, was added a social dimension. Whenever you see especially bloody conflict, the worst in the world, you realise that one of the groups considered itself, by right or not, – it’s not the theme of this panel – to be the underdogs and the others considered themselves naturally superior. And, if the material conditions worsened, that led to the worst conflict. So if it’s a social problem alone, you can somehow work it. If it’s a national or religious problem alone, one can work with it. A combination of the two or three, as it was, for instance, in Bosnia, that is a really terrible situation, which is very hard to solve. We had of course in Europe ghettoes too. But it was not a rule. The word ghetto itself, as you know, comes from Venice and it was a Jewish quarter of Venice, which first had a wall around it. And then this expression, and to have a wall around the Jewish quarter, spread in the Middle Ages throughout Europe. But that was more a specialty of the Jewish minority in different European nations. There were European nations who in the past expelled their Jewish minorities, sometimes killed them too. And they were torrential. But in many places all over Europe these ghettoes existed. But there were numberless minorities where ghettoes never really did exist but we have to realise they are appearing in a new appearance, not in the strict way of the old ghetto – behind a wall or a town of its own – but in more or less the New World sense and that is – again throughout especially Central-Eastern Europe – the ghettoisation of our Roma minorities, which originally were normal or half-normal people, and in the 20th century different regimes, if they didn’t try to kill them, they at least tried to force them to give up their nomadic way of life and to force them into the modern industrial process. It led exactly to the same result like with the black and Puerto Rican communities of the United States. The ghettoes with exactly all the same problems and results developed out of it. That means that again the prejudices of our dear phobias is not in the ethnicum, it’s in the way a minority is treated, which leads to a ghetto, and with all the same results of a ghetto, which are as a rule tragic as for these inside as bad for these outside the ghetto. I do think that some of the experience of Europe with our old minorities should be much more applied to the experience with new minorities. One tends to see them in Europe in a different way, but basically there are very similar social problems and the only solution to it is something what was mentioned already in the morning: mutual respect. Not tolerance, but really mutual respect. That respect requires two things. One, we shouldn’t force and ask for assimilation. A more or less homogenous group has a right to live more or less according to its own ideas and lifestyle according to the traditional way if they wish to. And, on the other side, the liberty of assimilation. That means that we must give the new minorities as to the old, whenever they wish to assimilate – in various ways and in various grades – this way has to be open to them. That’s the only way how we can prevent producing, at least, new conflicts. Because only if we respect people as they are and not respect them in the way we wish they would be – but if we respect them in the way they are, they feel respected, too. And so I emphasize, we shouldn’t enforce - by different laws, prescriptions, how they should be dressed or behave and so on, - enforce the assimilation and on the way to prevent the ghettoisation, when the group itself forces its own member out of the majority society. So it’s respect – which means, of course, liberty on both ways. I’m afraid I have spoken already too long. I hope it’s not too much over five minutes. Thank you so much.
Mike Moore
Thank you, Senator. You remind us that we’re all each other’s neighbours. I was just thinking of a quote – I think from 1939 – of Neville Chamberlain, who said, “Czechoslovakia is a distant land of which we know very little.” Now we’re blessed to have the viewpoint of an Egyptian friend, Professor Abu-Zayd, please five minutes.
Nasr Hamid Abu-Zayd
I would like to start with trying to catch some aspect which I think is absent from the discussion. People co-exist, but they are unable to co-live together and part of the problem is the problem of identity. When identity is a crisis, people are unable to live together. When identity is constructed in a way of looking to the other as another – absolutely another identity – then we have a problem. And I think we are living in this problem of identity in the whole world. It’s not a crisis of Muslims; it’s a crisis of the old nation. There are so many questions about the European identity. Well, in the discussion about if there is a unified European culture with its multiplicity of languages, what of the European identity? Is the European identity open to Turkey, for example? Why yes and why no, if the answer is yes or the answer is no? So we have to deconstruct the concept of exclusive identity. Who I am and who you are. Well who am I if I ask myself this question? I am an Egyptian, yes. I am an Arab, yes. I am a Muslim, yes. I am an African. But as Hassan reminded me that I am an African, which is true. But in what sense am I a Muslim? In what sense am I Egyptian? In what sense am I an Arab? So should we look for something like the hyphenated identity like the American identity – Arab-American, Italian-American, Japanese-American? They are a definition that brings together so many elements of identity. This is very, very important, because I was about to talk to you about people who were happily living together – well, not happily 100% – but almost happily living together in Spain, in Andalusia, from the 8th century to the 15th century. People from Judaism, Christianity and Islam and people from no religion – pagan religion – who were living together. And they produced a very, very rich culture in terms of philosophy, theology, literature. And this culture was handed down to Europe in the Dark Ages of Europe. This was an example, but where identity at that time was not a very important demand. The Arabs identified themselves as Arabs, not as Muslims. Well, whatever the reasons for this identity crisis, there is some historical reasons for this identity crisis. I’ll just give you an anecdote. A Dutch boy in a Dutch school returned back to his family in the month of Ramadan. And he just announced to the family that he made a decision to make Ramadan. And they asked him why. He said, “Because I’m a Muslim.” And they asked him, “Why are you a Muslim?” He said, “Because I’m Egyptian.” His father is Egyptian, but not a Muslim, a Copt Egyptian – a Christian Egyptian. Where did this child get this identity? From the school, because he is from inter-marriage, he was treated in the school as a Muslim. Therefore he internalised this identity and tried to act according to this identity. Identity, nowadays, is a crisis, a problem. I would say that it is a poison. And we need to reconstruct or deconstruct this identity in order to open up. What is the problem of young Muslims in Europe? And let me answer from my observation and from my discussion with some young Muslims. I am a teacher. I do nothing but teaching, and doing research and publishing books. The discussion is this: Moroccans, for example, young Moroccans don’t belong to Morocco any more. This is the third generation. They know about Morocco, they visit Morocco, but they don’t feel they belong there. This is not the country they would like to live in. They don’t belong to Holland as well, although they have been in Dutch schools. So there is an absent feeling of belonging. And, when you lose this feeling of belonging, you have to hold on to something that is untouchable and invulnerable. And here comes religion. Here comes Islam as an identity. For a boy – maybe he never attended a Muslim school in his life. And this is the story of the boy who killed van Gogh. We have to be very aware of this crisis of identity. How it has now become a crisis for the third generation in Europe. It is not only Islam, as we would understand it or as scholars would understand Islam, but Islam as it is presented – the Islam of power. And the Islam of power is the Islam of terrorism. So some of them at least can identify themselves with the heroes, and with the discussion – the occasion was very, very remarkable. It was November and the Erasmus Foundation had decided to give three prizes to three Muslim scholars. The celebration was in Amsterdam two days after the assassination of van Gogh. So this again, Europe – the enlightened Europe – celebrating three Muslim thinkers: one from Iran, one from Syria and one from Morocco. And, in the meantime, a Moroccan-background Dutch boy killed a Dutch artist. The question of identity as it became a crisis that should be in the heart of our concerns nowadays… I myself feel I am a citizen of the world. I’m Egyptian. I still hold an Egyptian passport. I’m living in Holland. I have been in Japan for five years. So I cannot really identify myself in a very simple way. But anyway, considering myself as citizen of the world, I belong to this world with its absolutes down I felt deeply, emotionally and sentimentally hurt when I hear someone anywhere saying “our values,” “our cultures,” – Talking about the Muslim world: “They would like to destroy our values.” And I question them: “This is not your values. This is the human values. The human values that accumulated from very early, from the Spartacus revolution until Nelson Mandela.” So all cultures have contributed to what we think of now as the Western values. It is the human values and we need to readdress these values as human values. The time is over, thank you …
Mike Moore
Thank you. Extremely good. It’s a tragedy; we have only five minutes for our gifted speakers. We now have the ambassador of the Netherlands to the Czech Republic – Ambassador...
Ida van Veldhuizen-Rothenbücher
Thank you very much, Mr Chairman. I would also like to thank Professor Nasr Hamid Abu-Zayd for his introduction about the identity. I promised you, Mr Chairman, that I would try to be crisp and clear and even break the five-minute mark downstairs, so three very short remarks in staccato from my side about the co-existence and community and, as Professor Hamid Abu-Zayd already said, in the Netherlands it is now nearly a year since Theo van Gogh was assassinated and well everybody also in the Netherlands but outside the Netherlands is asking him or herself “Why in the Netherlands?” – a country so much known for its tolerance and freedom of religion. Since then, we have started in the Netherlands in a discussion. We made already some programmes, and I would like to share with you the basic points of this discussion. And there are three elements, all of them connected with each other. The first element is the freedom. The freedom to express your opinion, a cornerstone of not only the Netherlands, but I think of all democracies and legal order. And in the Netherlands, it’s a fundamental human right in the constitution. The protection of the freedom means now in the Netherlands no tolerance for forms of threat and force by persons or groups directed towards those fundamental rights. In our society, although it sounds like an open door, but it is not, especially not in the Netherlands, there should be room for persons with different opinions, different views, different religions and different lifestyles. And we again in the Netherlands are very much aware of that, and especially, especially, I think the difference between the day of the assassination of Van Gogh – before that time, we took all those elements for granted. Therefore I mentioned them. But afterwards, now we are aware of the fact that we have to discuss about it, to talk about it. And it’s about especially the element of our tolerance. The second point is security. To be able to implement and enjoy freedom, measures have to be taken if the secure environment of peaceful living together is threatened. Measures for the terrorism threat as well as for intolerant reactions to that. That’s also an important point. What we call “protecting tolerance from intolerance.” And this is not only a national problem, but a border-crossing problem. Asking for more European and international cooperation and which – and I think this is also an element which up to now did not come into the discussion – sometimes means now that we have to endure limitations in the field of our personal privacy and we should be aware of that. Also that point is very vivid topic in the discussion in the Netherlands. Then the last element: the third element is the permanent dialogue. A dialogue amongst the citizens – and I stress the citizens – on respect for human rights, the necessity to integrate, taking care – also an important point – that young people don’t turn to radicalism. And it has been mentioned already by James Zogby that citizenship is more than holding a passport only. True citizenship calls for an active contribution of the society one is part of, again based on respect and tolerance for other persons. An exchange of views via such a dialogue is necessary and also – and it has been mentioned by Mr Ghassan Salame this morning – also the willingness and readiness to have your own opinion sometimes changed if necessary, or part of it. Careful choice of the words –and I think that is also now a very important point in the Netherlands – the careful choice of the use of a few words even if you have the freedom of expression to maintain that dialogue – not to talk about each other but with each other. We must try to find and maintain the right balance between this freedom on the one hand and the responsibility on the other hand. In this permanent dialogue based on respect and tolerance there should be room to agree to disagree without violent acts and threats of terrorism. That dialogue is now in the Netherlands introduced by new programmes for immigrants living in the Netherlands already and new persons coming from abroad. And also to create new institutions, new places where people with different backgrounds can start dialogues and learn from each other and – very importantly – about each other. My last – very personal remark – Mr Chairman – is let us not forget in this discussion, but also in the schools, to integrate the youth in this discussion, because some of them will be the leaders of tomorrow, but certainly all of them will have to be responsible citizens of tomorrow. Thank you so much.
Mike Moore
Finally, we have Mai Yamani from the Royal Institute of International Affairs.
Mai Yamani
Ladies and gentlemen, Islam has changed. What it means to be an Arab also has changed, swept by Islamism and globalisation. There is a real struggle going on over defining people’s identities, as Professor Abu-Zayd has just said. Islam has undergone turbulent fragmentation and self-questioning. So Arabs almost naturally feel themselves besieged and look for ways of escape. But to quote Einstein, “We can’t solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them.” Arab or Islamic identity is in reality suffocated and inflamed by incompetent dictators, who have cloaked themselves in the veil of Islam to cover their fear and lack of legitimacy. I would like to offer my experience as an Arab Muslim on an intellectual mission to reveal and defend the idea of vibrant diversity within the Arab world, a diversity that is under constant threat of suppression. Perhaps it will be illuminating if I offer myself as a case study. I see my identity as an Arab Muslim, Saudi-Iraqi woman of Yemeni origin, born in Cairo and brought up in Mecca, the capital of the Hijaz, which is today Saudi Arabia. My life was changed, as I began my studies in social anthropology at Oxford University 30 years ago. Although I originate from Mecca, once the melting pot of the Muslim world, the ethnic and sectarian diversity has been increasingly suppressed by the Saudi Wahabi rulers. This repression of Mecca stood in stark contrast with my Oxford experience. At Oxford, and in the world of ideas, I encountered a deeper awareness and understanding of cosmopolitan cultures. As intellectuals, we celebrate our differences. As I began my scholarly career, Saudi Arabia intensified its religious dogma in the late 1970s. School curricula became heavily Islam. Radio and television programmes carried more Wahabi Islamic messages and members of the official committee of the ordering of the good and the forbidding of the evil – the Matawah a sort of a KGB – were unleashed on citizens with renewed vigour. They patrolled the streets of the kingdom searching for sin. Sins were never hard to find. Ideas of Arab renaissance were waning and in their place a new wave of Islamic assertiveness and defensiveness was not only growing in Arab countries but spilling dangerously to the outside world. At King Abdul Aziz University, I was the first Saudi Arabian woman to lecture, of course to women, in the women’s section of the university. I arrived with overflowing enthusiasm to introduce ideas of respect and cultural diversity. I provided the books myself. Although so many of my female students responded to these exciting, exotic concepts, official censorship was stifling and the compulsory veil became heavier and heavier, both physically and emotionally. So I returned to Oxford in search of academic freedom and the opportunity to study my own background without fear of censorship. After completing my D.Phil., I continued research in Saudi Arabia. The more I researched, the more I established connections with the country’s minorities – the Shia in the Eastern Province, who are alienated and discriminated against, the Hijazis whose cultural identity is suppressed. The books that I wrote – Changed Identities: the Challenge of the New Generation in Saudi Arabia, and Cradle of Islam: the Hijazi Quest for an Arabian Identity – breached the official lines of censorship. My books became banned and so was I. So I’m an example of how academics and politics came into confrontation, but the study and search goes on. My mission of defending cultural dignity and freedom of expression continues. Only when Arab communities adopt this as their mission will it stop feeling besieged and gain the self-confidence to participate as full members of our globalised world. That is our choice. That is our only hope. Thank you.
Mike Moore
Don’t you get the feeling that we are just beginning a useful conversation and dialogue? And now we have to stop. I’m enormously disappointed. I think the contributions are extremely good and we were just beginning to get there, to raise the questions of what do you do with a society, where you have new family members of your country, who despise the very societies they live in. This is the problem of some of our European friends. And then, of course, what do we do in the ancient societies that seem to have allowed history to bypass them and are regressing. And, as they regress, there is always compounding regression and aggression. And I do want to pay tribute to the panellists. I do want to recommend to the organisers that we should do this again, but find a way of allowing more conversation and more dialogue, which means next time they need to get a better chairperson. Having said that, we’re on time to finish. Thank you very much colleagues.