Salafists battling for Europe

Finally finished Gilles Kepel's The War for Muslim Minds (skipping one chapter in the middle, which I may or may not return to). The final chapter of the book is titled "The Battle for Europe", about which the author says, referring to the March 11, 2004 train bombings in Spain: '...with events in Madrid in Spring 2004, Europe emerged as the primary battlefield on which the future of global Islam will be decided'.

I would like to include here an excerpt from this chapter that talks about two ways in which many Muslims in Europe are being radicalized. For me, what was striking here is not so much what the author says, which I was already more or less aware of, but that I can think of people who fit into one or the other of the two categories of 'young people at the opposite extreme' and it was almost refreshing (for lack of a better word) to see them classified so plainly.

'A more negative reading of the future would focus on young people at the opposite extreme, whose rigid Islamic identity leads them to reject cultural integration into the European environment and to embrace cultural separatism. Some - a minority - will pass from voluntary secession into violence, expressing social resentment through hatred that they justify on religious grounds. Others, more numerous, will be satisfied to turn inward, to closed communities, or to dream of emigrating from the land of unbelief back to the land of Islam. Both of these separatist attitudes have their roots in the salafist teachings of some Saudi Arabian preachers.

The first group - adherents of jihad - condemn not only the "impious" regimes of the West but also the "apostate" ruling family in Riyadh. Many of them left the outskirts of Lyon, Paris, Roubaix, or Birmingham for a time to gain experience in camps of Pakistan, Bosnia, Chechnya, or Georgia, awaiting the right moment to accelerate the Islamization of Europe, as called for in Bin Laden's declarations and Zawahiri's reasoning. In the meantime, they gather with other young sympathizers and look at videos or DVDs of armed jihadists, veterans of war who left their neighborhoods as ragged children and returned as weathered combatants, bearded, crowned in glory, and guaranteed a place in Paradise. These heroes bypassed unemployment, identity crises, and even drug addiction by going off to fight the infidels in one of the frontlines between Dar al-Kufr (the land of unbelief) and Dar al-Islam.

The second group of separatists - also highly influenced by salafism - is explicitly nonviolent and pietistic. Jihadist zealots contemptuously dub it "sheikhist," because its partisans obediently follow the injunctions of Saudi sheikhs who show no hostility to the Riyadh regime. These sheikhs offer instant legal opinions (fatwas) on the behavior of devout Muslims wherever they may happen to be, accessible through telephone numbers and email addresses posted on salafist websites. Opposed to violence - which they combat relentlessly with Quranic verses, Prophetic sayings, and rulings of apostasy - these salafists nevertheless adhere to a version of Islam that imposes complete cultural separation from the West.
...
Hostile to participation in any associations or institutions in the land of unbelief, pietistc salafis carefully mark the borders of the territory where the re-Islamization they control takes place. They are similar, in that respect, to certain ultra-Orthodox Jews, such as the Hasidim one might meet in Jerusalem's Mea Shearim neighborhood (or in Brooklyn, for that matter). Both groups preserve their identity through isolation in a ghetto, set off by invisible markers...
On rare occasions when salafists expose themselves to the public media, their discourse arouses such outrage that it can trigger reprisals...'

A recent example here in Canada of this last phenomenon was the media exposure received by Aly Hindy, imam at the Salaheddin Islamic Centre in Toronto, described by the Globe and Mail as 'Leaning: Sunni fundamentalist'. (UW members might recognize the name of Mohammed Elmasry in this article.)

It appears from Kepel's writing about Europe that the situation and the above distinctions are markedly more pronounced there than here in Canada, but I thought it worth the time I spent typing this post to share a portion of what he says.

I may be accused by some of airing Muslims' dirty laundry with this post, but I should think that we have had worse examples of that happen all around the world in recent years, and I say that with more sadness than cynicism.