Post-Islamophobia: How Cultural Integration Can Prevent Terrorism and Build Peace

The Swiss are usually characterized as among the most hospitable people in the world, especially when it comes to keeping foreign coffers secretly safe. Just as this last image was recently called into question when the U.S. received confidential financial information from the Swiss bank UBS, so now its hospitality is coming under closer scrutiny with a civil rights fiasco  to which only two other current events can compare.

The Swiss far-right has just won a referendum declaring the construction of any minarets (the often ornate top-shaped steeples of many Mosques), to be illegal— surprising as many natives as pundits. As may be expected, Amnesty International was as quick to condemn the results as were other far-right European officials to commend it. Perhaps ironically, the liberal-democratic principles at stake were touted most loudly by Sheik Mohammed Saleh Shedeed in a Times interview:

My message to the Swiss government is that if it's about banning minarets and not other places of worship, then it's unfair. My message to the Swiss People's Party is that you have the right to express your point of view, but let Muslims express theirs.

But no one yet has proposed a constructive alternative. Putting this openly discriminatory referendum and its results in perspective offers one such prospect.

Freedom of speech was the flag under which the Danish cartoonist depicted the Muslim Prophet Mohammed in 2005, a sacrilege according the Koran. and was defended. The protests those pictures flared around the Muslim world and among Danish Muslims is a sure sign that religious or cultural defamation can be an effective trigger for terrorism. Secularism was the banner under which French authorities have for several years debated and denied Muslim girls the right to wear their headscarves at school, again a trigger-like reaction for protests and perhaps more both within France and without. It is in this wider European context that the minaret debacle can be better understood, and hopefully diffused before the prohibition to build Islamic-style buildings becomes the spark that blows up European-style ones.

Facile as it may be to trace similar such acts on Europeans’ part back to the Nazis, doing so here serves a double purpose: “never again” has for the far-right in Switzerland, Europe and America become “hooray, the good ole days are back,” if only with a different victim. Their failure to see their own consciences as such is a sure sign of how deeply their convictions run, and how difficult they are to divert. Yet if the Holocaust and today’s terrorist attacks teach us anything, it is that we are all their victims in some way, as preventative and retaliatory action absorbs affairs of state. Abusing freedom of speech and secularism in their own name is like calling the naked king clothed and then handing him a selection of robes to hide.

Cultural integration can play an effective leading role in preventing terrorism and genocide — while creating peace — in several ways. Swiss Muslims do have their (albeit weak) representative voice within the national forum and the European Union, as the leader of the Green Party has raised the possibility of a complaint at the EU-level. Another is also already happening in Caux, Switzerland. Initiatives for Change, an organization which brokered meetings in the late 1940s between opposing factions in World War Two, have recently organized conferences for European Muslim students to become cultural ambassadors for peace in their communities and countries. The organizer, Peter Riddell, believes both sides (meaning Muslims and Europeans) need to seriously reconsider their relations. "We're faced with a need to redefine what it means to be European.”

As we know, identity-definitions (belonging to the nation-state or not) that remain static often lose their validity within different historical contexts, which means we must also come to terms with the temporal dimension of cultural change’s influence on identity formation and legitimization — and the unique opportunities for integration thereby gained. One line of cutting-edge work in pragmatic conflict transformation today seeks to use the powers of perennially or newly contested narratives to change self-understanding and behavior (say, terrorist or genocidal) and reorient self-understanding and behavior (say, towards peace). Narratives are not just found in the novels we read and movies we watch, but constitute the high-impact stories we tell in court, to legally immigrate, in business proposals and through which we understand who we are as individuals and societies. The influence narratives possess lie in their explanatory, persuasive and predictive powers, which the most effective leaders know how to wield to their ends, integrative or exclusivist.

Competing versions of local, regional, national and international histories can for example be reworked to be more inclusive, potentially stemming violence originating in the experience of exclusion. South Africa has probably taken the most proactive steps in this respect in recent times. Institutions like museums, galleries, sporting events, parades and holidays have for as long as we’ve known been consciously used in nation-building. The ethnic parades in Northern Ireland that have decreased in bloodshed and the religious monuments in Jerusalem that have increased in tensions are two cases in point. That they and the narratives they institutionalize and canonize can also be used in peacebuilding should be less of an innovation than it is. The opportunities for cultural integration they collectively offer exposes the minaret debate for its deliberate exclusivity. Perhaps the first step in systematizing and practicing cultural integration as a means of preventing terrorism and build peace at local, regional and global levels is to separate the nation and the state, just as John Locke did for religion and the state three centuries ago.     

 “In many ways you could say that European culture has defined itself in opposition to Islam," Riddell continued in his BBC interview. He’s right, but only to a point. Muslims were the fabled enemies of medieval Iberians, but they were also their trading partners and military allies on many an occasion. It is strange to arrive in Cusco, the capital of the Inca Empire in Peru, and find in the cathedrals decorative arts that are more Islamic than Christian in character, and more native than Christian in others. Beloved croissants are said to be shaped that way because they were modeled on the flags of the Turks who sieged Vienna in 1529. Let us also not forget important figures of European culture such as Aristotle, who resurfaced thanks to Arabic translations; or the mathematical and nautical knowledge that the Portuguese took from Muslims and used to make the first European empires. The point is not that we should all become Islamophiles, even if in a pragmatically ideal world there would be no need to be anti-islamophobe. To be islamophobe is to fear and hate part of who we — in the global sense — already are, and hopefully just a transitional phase to post-islamophobe world.