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Political Islam: A "European" Ideology?
Freedom; Posted on: 2008-05-15
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“The Islamic convenant, the shari’ah, is perpetual, it is not negotiable
and
it is not terminable”
From John Laughland
An article has just attracted the attention of the spokesman for Islam,
Integration and Extremism in the German Christian Democratic Union (CDU).
The
article is by the Grand Mufti of Bosnia-Herzegovina, Mustafa Ceric, and
two
things are remarkable about it at first sight. The first is its title,
“The
challenge of a single Muslim authority in Europe” (more on this in a
moment);
the second is the place of publication.
The article advocates the creation of a single global authority to
regulate
the religious and civil life of Muslims all over the world. It argues that
the
best place to start constructing such an authority is Europe itself.
The journal which has published this piece is European View, the journal
of
something called the Centre for European Studies, a mouthpiece of the
European
People’s Party (EPP), the parliamentary body in the European Parliament
grouped around the German Christian Democrats. There is no doubt about the
political affiliation of the journal: its editor, for instance, has an EPP
e-mail address.
According to Kristina Köhler, the CDU spokesman on such matters, the
article
advocates extremism. On 12 May, she told Die Welt that the author was
arguing
that all Muslims in Europe should live under a common political and
spiritual
leader and under sharia law, and that the state should guarantee this
parallel
jurisdiction by treaty. “This would mean a European caliphate,” she said.
Ceric makes no bones about the fact that Muslims must obey shariah law.
“The
Islamic convenant, the shari’ah, is perpetual, it is not negotiable and it
is
not terminable,” he writes. According to him, “a European Muslim imamate”
should be established “as a way of institutionalising Islam in Europe”.
(By
‘imamate’ he means the application of shariah law in practice.) The author
says that the two great strands of Islam, Sunnism and ****ism, should unite
“with the objective of creating a global Muslim authority”. Ceric argues
that
Europe is specifically the best place to start creating such a global
authority. He writes,
"It is not enough that Europe recognises the presence of Islam on its
territory. Muslims deserve more than that. They deserve that their
presence be
legalised in the sense of creating a political and economic climate in
which
European Muslims can represent themselves through the institutions that
should
have both governmental sup****t and public acceptance."
This is the part of his text which Köhler attacks as implying “a parallel
jurisdiction” and she is right. In a sense, we should not be surprised
that
such a call should come from a Bosnian. Bosnia precisely did have such
parallel jurisdictions under Ottomon rule, with courts for Muslims and
courts
for non-Muslims. To some extent, the paraphernalia of minority rights,
which
became a centrepiece of the 1974 Yugoslav constitution and which continues
to
bedevil Bosnian politics to this day, is a hangover from that period: both
stand in marked contrast to the English and French traditions of
centralised
statehood.
But what is really striking about the article – and what the Christian
Democrat official naturally overlooks – is that the rise of a Muslim
political
identity (and even perhaps of a Muslim parallel jurisdiction of the kind
which
the Archbishop of Canterbury seemed to call in a recent and very
controversial
speech) is precisely made more likely by the weakening of national
identity
caused, in part, by the anti-national pan-European ideology of which the
German CDU is one of the main propagators.
Ceric himself sees the link between Europeanism and political Islam very
clearly. After a few concluding sentences which border on the threatening
–
European society is still too “immature” to realise the advantage of a
single
Muslim authority, yet it will come whatever the European political
establishment now thinks – he concludes with this sentence:
"A single Muslim authority in Europe will come sooner or later because of
need
by young European Muslims who are capable of seeing their Islamic identity
as
prior to their ethnic or national identities and who are comfortable with
their European identity coexisting with their Islamic upbringing."
Elsewhere in the piece, the author makes the link between Islam as a
“universal” religion and Muslims as “global citizens”. There is, in other
words, a specific link between the proposal, which amounts to the creation
of
a global caliphate although Ceric does not use this term, and the general
cosmopolitan ideology of globalism of which European integration is a key
part. To put it bluntly, the stronger national identities, the weaker
Islamic
identity – and vice-versa.
Robert Dreyfuss makes the point, in his arresting work Devil’s Game: How
the
United States Helped Unleash Fundamentalist Islam, (New York: Henry Holt,
2005) that British and later American secret operatives deliberately
sup****ted
pan-Islamic radicals in order to weaken nationalist leaders in the Arab
world.
The more such people were committed to the ummah, the less they would be
interested in creating strong nation-states.
Continue
http://www.brusselsjournal.com/node/3253
News Source: brusselsjournal
2007-2008 European Americans United.
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