German Left Stands up to anti-Muslim Fascists;
Clashes in Cologne
3,000 progressives in Cologne clashed Saturday with far rightwing protesters trying to stop the building of a mosque. There are about 3.3 million Muslims in Germany, about 4 percent of the population. The Jewish population of the US is 2%, so this would be as though American rightwingers tried to stop a synagogue from being built. The far right said they were upholding the 'Western values and Christian traditions' as the heritage of Europe.
Isn't that where we came in? That sort of blinkered thinking, whereby Europe just has one master tradition, is not only wrong, it led to genocide. Europe has been multicultural. It has been pagan and Jewish, Christian and Muslim. Muslim Spain was some 800 years of European history (more if the history of the Moriscos is taken into account). Muslims were for some time in Sicily, Sardinia and southern Italy. Muslims of Serbia, Albania, Bulgaria and Greece were 600 more centuries, in the eastern reaches of the continent (There were Muslim villages even in Hungary and Poland). The Ottoman Empire was in important respects a European empire, even though it stretched deeply into the Middle East as well. If anything Istanbul was more intertwined with Europe than was Kiev and the Ukraine, or St. Petersberg & Russia. It is no accident that even today, Turkey is in NATO.
For that matter, why reify Europe? When was Egypt not a source of grain for 'Europe'? When were not her ports dominated by Europeans? Did the French in Algeria not declare it 'European soil'? Why is the Right so fickle? Either Algerians are European or they are not. Is it only when they are firmly under the jackboot that they count as such?
I am proud of my German cousins for making a stand against this ugly recrudescence of religious bigotry and racism (the mayor of Cologne rightly used the latter word).
posted by Juan Cole @ 9/21/2008 12:10:00 AM
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Religious bigotry is also promoted by Wahabbists. Once again the largest mosque in the UK has been found propagating hate speech against non-Muslims and selling racist literature. See UK Channel 4's Undercover Mosque & Undercover Mosque Revisited.
Organised religion always seems to provide a fertile breeding ground for fanaticism. This isn't by any means a phenomenon confined to Islam.
Dear Professor Cole
I applaud and echo your support of the people who opposed the resurgent fascists in Koln yesterday. Unfortunately their views are not uncommon in Europe. A friend mentioned to me that it is said in Austria that “they survived two invasions by the Turks but are unlikely to survive the third”. I wonder if ,in a spirit of experimenaion, I might offer a contrary view of European history that may show some influence of Toynbee.
I suspect that European History should be seen as a study of a dynamic system.
The three underlying dynamic cycles seem to be
1 The oscillation of Teutonic expansion to the East which is balanced by the successive waves of invasion from Russia, the Steppes, and the plains of central Asia.
2 the oscillation of invasion of the Balkans across the Hellespont and up the Danube Valley from Asia Minor and Persia which generally seems to peter out in front of the walls of Vienna.
3 the oscillation of successive invasions of Iberia by the tribes of North Africa which reached Tours in France until checked by Charles Martel followed by the Reconquista of Spain after the battle of Covadonga and the successive invasions of Tunisia, Algeria and Morocco by France and Spain.
The Reconquista was accompanied by an imposition of religious and intellectual orthodoxy enforced by the Inquisition which eliminated the intellectual splendour of the Kingdom of Cordoba where the beginnings of the recovery of Western Knowledge and Philosophy were laid through the interchange of the knowledge from Bait al Hikma.
The emphasis on extirpation of Heresy spread to the Austrian Court of the Holy Roman Emperor in Prague and later in Vienna.
The Crusades were an expression of this idea both across the Mediterranean and into the Pagan lands of Lithuania and beyond by the Teutonic Knights
After the second siege of Vienna the wars of Prince Eugen in the Balkans were characterised as being against adherents of the Muslim religion probably exacerbated by the unity of political and religious authority of the Caliphate.
After the end of the Third European Civil War, (if you count the Thirty Years War as the first with the other two occurring in the 20th century, which spread around the world) the Empire of Charlemagne was re-established in a small inoffensive city in the disputed territories between France and Spain not far from Charlemagne’s original capital.
As that small Coal and Steel trading union has grown to exceed the size and complexity of the Empire of Charlemagne the conflict between national identities which are a relic of the results of the First European Civil war at the Treaties of Westphalia are starting to tear the union apart under the influence of the three great dynamic cycles within the context of economic and political globalisation.
The concept of extending the EU as a virtual state or a market state as described by Phil Bobbitt south and east of the Mediterranean and beyond the Urals requires a rethink of the underlying narrative of imposition of orthodoxy and the extirpation of heresy.
Luckily we will be spared the ministrations of the US in this debate. Sbigniew Brzezinsky is uncannily accurate in his predictions made in 2003 or 4 about the future of Eurasia and it must be galling for him to see his recommendations ignored by the latest group of Crusaders to march towards Jerusalem whose actions have squandered their moment of opportunity.
The parallels with the Fourth Crusade to Constantinople are too obvious to be worth expanding on.
Just as the result of the Crusade against the Albigensians was the establishment of the Kingdom of France within what is recognisably France today so we can only hope that a new form of state emerges in our Common European Home. We trust that the modern Inquisition of the Department of Homeland Security and its emphasis on orthodoxy of thought, opinion and origin will be swept away after whatever disaster befalls the forces in the Kingdom of Baghdad. Inevitably catastrophe befalls Crusaders at some new Horns of Hattin or Gandemak or Little Big Horn, or even on Wall Street, letting them leave bases and castles like Krac de Chevaliers like some modern day statue of Ozymandias.
My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!"
Nothing beside remains: round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare,
The lone and level sands stretch far away
Isn't that where we came in? That sort of blinkered thinking, whereby Europe just has one master tradition, is not only wrong, it led to genocide. Europe has been multicultural. It has been pagan and Jewish, Christian and Muslim. Muslim Spain was some 800 years of European history (more if the history of the Moriscos is taken into account).
Muslims were for some time in Sicily, Sardinia and southern Italy. Muslims of Serbia, Albania, Bulgaria and Greece were 600 more centuries, in the eastern reaches of the continent (There were Muslim villages even in Hungary and Poland). The Ottoman Empire was in important respects a European empire, even though it stretched deeply into the Middle East as well. If anything Istanbul was more intertwined with Europe than was Kiev and the Ukraine, or St. Petersberg & Russia. It is no accident that even today, Turkey is in NATO.
For that matter, why reify Europe? When was Egypt not a source of grain for 'Europe'? When were not her ports dominated by Europeans? Did the French in Algeria not declare it 'European soil'? Why is the Right so fickle? Either Algerians are European or they are not. Is it only when they are firmly under the jackboot that they count as such?
Frankly, professor Cole, it's not to the American to tell us Europeans who we are and you are wrong on this count. Europe has built itself fighting against the Muslims. Muslims presence in Sicily didn't last much more than two centuries, took place about 10 centuries ago and didn't leave much traces. Our ties with Istambul were to the Bizantine empire (which is at the origine of the Orthodox church now established in Greece and in East Europe and Russia. Apart of during the crusades, Europe has fought the Muslims at two points of contacts around the Medeterranean sea : in Spain she has fought the Omeyades and the Abassydes of Al'Andalous, who reached their maximal extension around the 10th Century. By 1236, they were confined in the extreme south of Spain arond Granada and became vassals of the Catholic Kings; they were definitively expelled from Spain between 1609 and 1614, at a time when the US didn't even exist. The French with Charles Martel kicked them out even earlier, during the 8th century. East Europe fighted against the Ottomans much in the same way. They won a decisive battle in Vienna in 1529 and continued the fight untill the defeat of the Ottomans and the treaty of Karlowitz in 1699. Did the US already exist at that time ? The Europeans have been fighting against the Muslims for more than a half dozen of centuries, you can't cancel that. The inclusion of the Turks in the NATO was an American choice. The Americans did also pressure the EU to accept Turkey in the EU, but this encounters a lot of resistance in the European opinion, who view Christian identity as a part of the European identity (along with laicity aka the separation of religion and state). In fact, there are essays of the American Enterprise think tank advising the US to push to a continual extension of EU members in order to keep it weak and divided. The US also pushed strongly for an immediate reunification of the two Germanies and it came too earlier, thus lefting many parts of East Germany economically weak and disavantaged. There is a resurgence of right wing radical nationalists in that part of Germany and it is a inquieting consequence of this rushed reunification.
The US is a melting pot, but you can't apply this model to Europe. Europe shows a great cultural diversity in a small territory, which is always a source of astonishment for the Americans, but untill the recent migration trends due to globalization our societies were much more homogeneous than what you assume. We are becoming a destination of world immigration trends, the new eldorado for those thriving to make a better living in the disadvantaged south hemisphere, but we manage it in a very different way than the US, although I wish were were more open.
So tell us that there are many common myths shared between Islam and Christianism, that we have many prophets in common (this is mostly ignored), tell us that Judaism, Christianism and Islam are the only monoteism in the world and that their traditions derives from the same origin, that they are the only "religions du livre": that would already be a great progress, since untill now, Islam was only viewed as a competitor and the worst of all, since they are monoteist as well, so they don't leave place for another "god", unlike hinduism and other religions. Show us the convergence between Muslims and Christian and show us the differnces, because it's what makes the world interesting and life less monotonous. Tell us about the benefits and the necessity of tolerance and help us end prejudices and preconceived ideas, but don't tell us who we are, we know it already and don't need the Americans to tell us what to do.
As for the jewish genocide, Europe has recognized its errors and learned from it. I wish it were the case of the Americans too. When did you pay compensations to the Vietnamese for what you did ? What about the atomic bomb in Japan, which wasn't even needed for the Japanese were already about to capitulate ? and what are you doing now to the Iraqis ? The Americans need to be tried for their war crimes in a Nuremberger like trial.
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