Disordered World, page 16
So what should be done? Pretend not to see differences? Act as if everyone is the same colour and has the same culture and beliefs?
These are reasonable questions and worth pondering for a moment.
We live in a period in which everyone feels obliged to fly a flag declaring their allegiances and to show that they have seen the flags of those they encounter. I do not know if this constitutes a liberation or an abnegation of the self, a form of contemporary politeness or bad manners. It probably depends on the circumstances and the way it is done. But the dilemma is real nonetheless. Pretending not to notice differences between the sexes, in skin colour, accents and the sound of a name, sometimes amounts to concealing and perpetuating centuries-old injustices. On the other hand, systematically and explicitly taking account of distinctive characteristics contributes to locking people into their inherited allegiances and confining them to their respective ‘clans’.
A wiser response seems to me to lie in a subtler, more acute and less lazy approach. It is not a matter of ignoring the differences there might be between a Dutch and an Algerian person — to stay with the same example — but, having noted them, of taking time to go beyond these differences, remembering that not all Dutch people are the same, nor all Algerians. A Dutch person may be a believer or an agnostic, enlightened or foolish, on the right or the left, cultivated or uncultivated, hard-working or lazy, honest or a scoundrel, miserable or fun-loving, generous or mean — and the same goes for an Algerian.
Pretending to ignore physical or cultural differences would be absurd, but it would be missing something essential if one limited oneself to the most obvious differences instead of going further towards the person himself as an individual.
Respecting someone means addressing him or her as a whole human being, as a free adult, not as a dependent being who belongs to his community like a serf to the land.
Respecting the Algerian woman would have meant respecting the individual who had devised a project and had the courage to go and present it to the authorities. Rather than dragging her back under the rule of her community leader.
I chose something which happened in Amsterdam as an example on purpose. Ever since the seventeenth century, Amsterdam has been a city which has played a pioneering role in Europe’s slow march towards religious tolerance. And I believe that the town hall official who consulted the local imam thought she was acting in complete accord with the spirit of openness which has always characterised the city.
That, after all, was the way that tolerance worked four centuries ago. Religious minorities were authorised to practise their faith freely. And if a member of one of these communities behaved in a reprehensible way, he was firmly brought back into line by his own community leaders. That is how Spinoza came to be excommunicated by his fellow Jews in 1656, when his supposed atheism threatened to compromise relations with their Christian fellow citizens. The question was made all the more sensitive as many Jews, including Spinoza’s own father, had arrived in Amsterdam relatively recently after their expulsion from the Iberian peninsula, and did not want to be suspected of behaving disloyally to their hosts, who, given the period, had behaved with unusual magnanimity.
Today’s realities are different and infinitely more complex, and attitudes do not have the same meaning. In our epoch, which is menaced by a drift towards global communitarianism, yoking men and women to their religious communities makes problems worse rather than better. Yet that is what numerous European countries do when they encourage immigrants to organise themselves on a religious basis and when they favour the emergence of community spokesmen.
The West has often made this mistake in its dealings with the rest of the world. For centuries it was incapable of applying to other people — especially those whose destinies it controlled — the same principles it applied to its own, principles that were the source of its greatness. That is why France as a colonial power, for example, in order to avoid granting the inhabitants of its Algerian départements full citizenship, restricted them to the status of ‘French Muslims’, a rather anomalous designation in a secular republic.
It is important to remember the mistakes of the past in order to avoid repeating them. In colonial times, relations between the dominant and the dominated could not have been anything but unhealthy, since the genuine desire to ‘civilise’ the Other was constantly in conflict with the cynical desire to subjugate him. It must be acknowledged, as Hannah Arendt says in The Origins of Totalitarianism, that nation states make very poor empire-builders, since empire-building needs to be accompanied by a certain respect for the peoples you want to gather together. Alexander the Great dreamed of mass marriages between Hellenes and Persians; Rome cherished Athens and Alexandria and ended up granting Roman citizenship to all the subjects of its empire, from Celtic Druids to the Bedouins of Arabia. Closer to our own time, the Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman empires sought to be inclusive, with varying degrees of success. But the colonial empires built by European nations in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries were never more than extensions of themselves, schools of applied racism and moral transgression that prepared the way for the wars, genocides and totalitarianism that were to steep Europe in blood.
Our period offers the West the chance to restore its moral credibility, not by donning sackcloth and ashes, nor in opening itself up to all the world’s woes, nor in compromising with values imported from elsewhere, but rather in showing itself at last to be true to its own values — respectful of democracy and human rights, concerned about equity, individual freedom and secularism — in its relations with the rest of the planet, and above all with the men and women who have chosen to live under its roof.
Chapter 6
The attitude of Western countries towards their immigrants is not just one issue among many. In my view — and not just because I am an immigrant myself — it is a crucial question.
If the world is divided today between rival civilisations, it is principally in the minds of immigrants, both men and women, that a clash of civilisations occurs. It was no accident that the most bloody and spectacular terrorist attacks of recent years — in New York, Madrid, London and elsewhere — were carried out by immigrants, some from the Indian subcontinent, others from North Africa or Egypt, such as the Islamist militant who directed the attack on the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center and who had just completed his doctorate in urbanism at a German university. At the same time, many migrants take part peacefully and generously in the intellectual, artistic, social, economic and political life of their new countries, contributing new ideas, rare skills, different sounds, tastes and sensibilities, allowing those societies to be in tune with the world, giving them the ability to know it intimately in all its diversity and complexity.
So I say unambiguously, choosing my words with care: it is above all among immigrants that the great battle of our time, a battle for hearts and minds, will have to be waged, and it is among them that it will be won or lost. Either the West will manage to win them back, to regain their confidence, to rally them to the values it espouses, making them into eloquent advocates in its relations with the rest of the world. Or they will become its biggest problem.
The battle will be tough and the West is no longer in a very good position to win it. In the past, the only things hindering its room for manoeuvre were economic constraints and its own cultural prejudices. Today, it has a formidable adversary to deal with: all those people whose identities have been crushed for so long and whose thoughts have turned murderous. All that immigrants in the past, like colonial peoples, asked for was that the ruling power behave more like a mother than a stepmother. Their children, whether out of bitter disappointment, pride, weariness or impatience, no longer want that sort of relationship. They brandish the symbols of their origins and sometimes act as though their adoptive homes were enemy territory. The integration machine, which used to work, albeit rather slowly, has ground to a halt, sometimes as a result of deliberate sabotage.
For someone like me, who has lived in Europe for over thirty years and observed the coexistence of different ethnic communities slowly breaking down in numerous countries despite the fact that they practise quite different immigration policies, there is a strong temptation to throw up one’s hands. I cannot be the only one to have had the depressing feeling that no approach brings the desired result — neither the strictest nor the most permissive; neither the ambitious republican model, which is supposed to make every immigrant to France entirely French, nor the pragmatic model from across the Channel, which accepts each community’s uniqueness without trying to make it English.
Equally distressing, for the concerned observer such as myself, have been the murder of the Dutch film-maker Theo van Gogh, the demonstrations linked to the Danish cartoons, and dozens, hundreds of other worrying symptoms which have happened in almost every country and are replete with physical or moral violence.
It is just a short step from this to the conclusion that there is no point trying to integrate immigrants from the Muslim world or Africa. It is a step which many people have already taken silently, even if they still feel obliged to deny it. I, however, continue to believe that harmonious coexistence is possible and is in fact indispensable if we wish to forge solid links between the members of different cultures rather than resign ourselves to divisions between them which breed conflict, hatred and violence. Immigrants who fully embrace a sense of belonging to two cultures are more likely than anyone to break down divisions.
That said, I am conscious of the fact that successful integration today is arduous and will only become more so in the decades to come, and that thoughtful, subtle, patient and even resolutely willed action will be required to avoid looming disaster.
In France, generous spirits explain with varying degrees of conviction that successive waves of immigrants — Italians, Poles, or refugees from the Spanish Civil War — have had to cope with hostility and prejudice before becoming fully integrated and that immigrants from the Muslim world will eventually follow a similar path. An admirable sentiment, but scarcely credible. The truth is that it will be hard for any European country to resolve its integration problems while the global atmosphere remains charged with mistrust and resentment, as it is today.
What happens in each country depends in part on the policies it implements, but it also depends in large measure on factors it cannot control. When someone from North Africa emigrates to the Netherlands, he arrives with an image of that country that has been conveyed by friends and family who have already gone there; but also with an image of the West as a whole, an image which is much more linked to US policy, or the memory of French colonialism, than the history of the Netherlands itself. This perception includes both positive aspects — otherwise he would not have come to live there — and negative ones, which today occupy a much bigger place than they did thirty years ago.
New immigrants observe the behaviour of their hosts with intense attention. They are constantly on the lookout for glances, gestures, words, whispers and silences that confirm that they are in a hostile or contemptuous environment. Of course, immigrants do not all react in the same way. Some are embittered and interpret everything that emanates from the Other negatively, while others are blissfully happy and only notice things which seem to show that they are accepted, valued or loved. Sometimes the same person will go from one feeling to another: a friendly smile makes him respond with overwhelming gratitude; an instant later, a word or gesture suggestive of hostility, contempt or simply a certain condescension and he feels a desire to lash out, break things and also to destroy himself. Because he hates his own image as much as the mirror which reflects it.
What makes relations fragile between immigrants and the societies which accept them — and as a result makes coexistence fragile too — is that the wound is always there. The skin that has formed on the surface has never been able to toughen. Anything at all can reawaken the pain, sometimes just a scratch or even a clumsy caress. In the West, many people shrug their shoulders at such hypersensitivity. Shouldn’t we let bygones be bygones and forget colonialism, segregation, the treatment of the blacks, the extermination of the bushmen, the Taínos, or the Aztecs, the Opium Wars and the crusades? But the past does not occupy the same mental space for everyone, nor for every society.
Chapter 7
For the past truly to become the past, it is not enough simply for time to go by. For a society to be able to draw a line between its past and its present, it needs something on this side of the hypothetical border on which to base its dignity, self-respect and identity. It needs among its attributes recent scientific inventions, convincing economic successes, cultural creations which are admired by others, or military victories.
Western nations do not have to look to distant centuries for reasons to be proud. Their contributions to medicine, mathematics or astronomy can be found in the morning papers. They do not need to invoke the contemporaries of Avicenna, or endlessly bring up the origins of terms such as ‘zero’, ‘zenith’, ‘algebra’ or ‘algorithm’. Their most recent military victory dates from 2003, or 2001 or 1999; there is no need to go back to the ages of Saladin, Hannibal or Ashurbanipal. As a result, westerners do not feel the need to keep harking back to their past. If they do study it, it is to get a better view of their journey, to reveal trends, to understand, speculate or extrapolate. But this is not vital nor a requirement of their identity. The present is enough to confirm their self-esteem.
Conversely, people whose present offers only examples of failure, defeat, frustration and humiliation inevitably scour their past for reasons to keep believing in themselves. The Arabs feel like exiles in the contemporary world, strangers everywhere, scarcely less in their own countries than in the diaspora. They feel defeated, discredited and humiliated. They express it, shout it, lament it, and wonder constantly — explicitly or implicitly — how they might reverse the direction of history.
All oriental peoples in the past few centuries have felt the same. All of them have had to measure themselves against the West at some point; all have borne the brunt of its extraordinary energy, its formidable economic and military effectiveness, and its spirit of conquest. All have admired, feared, detested and fought it with different outcomes — the Chinese, Indians, Japanese, Iranians, Turks, Vietnamese, Afghans, Koreans and Indonesians, as well as the Arabs.
None of these peoples could recount their history without a thousand references to their encounter with the West, which sometimes lasted centuries. The whole modern history of a great country like China could be expressed around one central question: how to respond to the formidable challenge posed by the white man. All their major upheavals — whether the Boxer Rebellion, the rise of Mao, the ‘Great Leap Forward’, the Cultural Revolution or the new economic policy initiated by Deng Xiaoping — could in large measure be interpreted as the search for a response to that question. The question could also be reformulated like this: in order to be able to join the modern world without losing our dignity, what should we preserve of our past and what should we reject?
This is a question which never totally disappears from the consciousness of any human society, but it is not asked with the same intensity in all times and places.
When a nation achieves success, others look on it differently, which influences its self-image. I am thinking in particular of the attitude of the rest of the world to Japan and later China. Criticised, feared, but respected for their ability to fight, and in particular admired for their economic miracles, these countries have seen respect rise for everything their culture does: their languages, their art, their ancient and modern literature, their ancient medicine, their spiritual disciplines, their culinary traditions, their ritual dances, their martial arts and even their superstitions have attracted enthusiastic attention. As soon as a people acquires the image of being a winner, every aspect of its civilisation is looked at with interest and automatic respect by the rest of the world. The country itself may thereafter allow itself the luxury of becoming detached and critical. Indeed, the Chinese today often behave indifferently towards their past and feign amusement and incomprehension when Western visitors marvel at a civilisation dating back millennia.
Will the Arabs soon be in a similar position, thanks to the renaissance which began in 2011? Will they be able to regain the world’s respect for themselves and also for their civilisation? One can hope, though it will take time to restore an image which has been deteriorating for decades, or indeed centuries. As they had suffered defeat after defeat, everything that constituted their civilisation was looked down on by the rest of the world. Their language was disparaged, their literature little read, their faith aroused mistrust, the spiritual masters they venerate were ridiculed. They themselves felt within their very souls the scorn of others and in the end they internalised and adopted it. The destructive feeling of self-hatred spread within many of them. I have written ‘them’ but I could have written ‘us’; I feel myself an equal distance from both pronouns, just as near or far, and it may be that the additional tragedy of my people is reflected in this uncertainty.
There is no need to launch into ‘wild’ psychoanalysis to see that such as attitude gives rise to contradictory impulses: the desire to take it out on a cruel world and to do away with oneself; the desire to shed one’s identity and yet assert it before the world; a loss of confidence in one’s past, which one nonetheless clings on to because when one’s identity has been scorned, it represents a lifeline, a refuge and a place of asylum.
What is true of the past is also true of religion. Islam is a place of refuge for identity as well as dignity. The conviction that one belongs to the true faith and has been promised a better world, while westerners have gone astray, lessens the shame and hurt of being a pariah, a loser, eternally defeated in this world. Indeed, it was until the uprisings of 2011, perhaps the only one in which Muslims still had a sense of being blessed among nations, of being chosen by the Creator rather than cursed and rejected.
