Islam in England and France

...A group of young women organized a conference in the Paris Pompidou Center this spring to denounce the discrimination Muslim women are subjected to within their families and communities—even in Europe...

...Many have brought their regional quarrels with them, and communities are split into mutually mistrustful factions...

...So their leaders are grateful for the opportunity to band followers together under unifying slogans like "Death to Rushdie" and, of course, "Death to Israel...

...Nevertheless, social and cultural tensions among Muslim immigrants (and their French-born children) in France are greater than they might appear to be from the limited surveys pollsters have managed to carry out...

...One could imagine Christian clergymen next in the dock for teaching about the Trinity, a blasphemy indeed in Muslim eyes...

...So why not an Imam...

...A February protest in Paris was preceded by visits to the small Pakistani community there by British Muslims...

...Practicing Muslims in Britain are estimated to outnumber churchgoing Anglicans...

...The words could be Salman Rushdie's, perhaps rejoicing somewhere in hiding over the death of the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini...

...Socialist Prime Minister Michel Rocard believes the best way to shortcircuit extremism or anti-French feeling is to encourage integration at school, at work and in politics...

...He seemed "paralyzed by terror...

...Provided, of course, that the Muslim community can some day agree —possibly with Saudi or Iranian help —on a single representative...

...Janice Valls-Russell writes about French and Spanish affairs for the NL...

...In France, Islam is the religion with the second largest number of adherents...

...French, Dutch and Belgian security officials fear that Iranian and Saudi minions in Britain may be trying to exploit the controversy over The Satanic Verses in an attempt to forge cross-Channel links between the different Muslim communities of Northern Europe...

...The event, however, was a far cry from "the biggest Muslim demonstration in the world" that one of its main organizers, Abdel-Hussan Choudhury, had boasted it would be...

...The House of Lords, whose influence far outweighs its constitutional powers, has as members bishops, the Chief Rabbi and the President of the Methodist Church...

...In April, Labor lost a County Council seat in Lancashire that it had considered safe to Abdul Bhikha, whose appeal resided less in the party he stood for—Conservative!—than in his platform of invective against The Satanic Verses...

...The enduring, albeit minority, political presence of the far-Right National Front has discouraged President François Mitterrand from granting foreign residents the right to vote, but second-generation Muslims naturally have the right to do so, and to run for public office...

...Muslims are more militant in Britain, where religious power still means political clout...

...On June 19, Rushdie's Muslim enemies scored a legal victory...

...While holding down illegal immigration, it accepts the reality that most immigrants are there to stay...

...last March...

...London's High Court ruled that Britain's anachronistic blasphemy law should henceforth apply to Islam as well as to Christianity...

...The French government, though, is not unduly worried...

...The 1 million in Britain are mostly of Asian origin, while France's3 million come mainly from North Africa, with the largest contingent from the former French territory of Algeria...

...The snag is, the interview first appeared in the American magazine Bomb...

...Dismayed by the restrictive customs of Islam, girls of North African descent tend to be more receptive to Western mores than their parents and brothers...

...They have set up youth clubs, radio stations and civil rights groups...

...Europe's Muslims are a racial and cultural mosaic...

...Some 400 men and women of North African origin—running on Socialist, conservative and centrist lists—were victors in this year's municipal and European Parliament elections (compared with only 12 in the 1983 municipal contests...

...Rushdie was burned in effigy along with a Union Jack, and the police clashed with a few demonstrators, but the British authorities did not take any action against identifiable—and much photographed—agitators shouting for the author of The Satanic Verses to be put to death...

...So the unkindly named Rushdie affair (it should be the "Khomeini affair," since the shame was Khomeini's) rumbles on, grist for unscrupulous sensationalists...

...Most Algerians prefer the French system to the one in Algeria, where the intolerant Arab regime has forced both Arabic and the Koran on everyone, including nonMuslims and the large Berber-speaking community (the original inhabitants of North Africa...

...In Britain, meanwhile, living down to the cloacal traditions of the tabloid press, the Sunday edition of the Daily Mail printed on June 18 what was purported to be an interview with Salman Rushdie, describing him as "sad and very angry...

...Another Muslim display of anger in Bradford on June 17 degenerated into violence...

...In Britain religious instruction is required for schoolchildren, with the result that British Muslims want their own schools...

...The maternity rate among those under 29 is surprisingly lower than France's national average, according to Etienne, who has also found that 90 per cent of North African teenagers in France are not fluent in Arabic and are ill-acquainted with the Koran...

...According to confidential reports drawn up in the United States and Britain, Iran and Saudi Arabia are estimated to have spent up to $1.5 million to fuel the anti-Rushdie campaign in Britain...

...As in Britain, second-generation immigrants in France are increasingly active and articulate...

...Already, Muslim constituents are displacing politicians they consider insensitive to their concerns by electing candidates drawn from their own ranks...

...Although French sociologist Bruno Etienne has found that barely 5 per cent of self-proclaimed Muslims in the Marseilles area are regular Mosquegoers, Islam remains an emotional badge of identity for most immigrants...

...This linguistic and cultural erosion is to a great extent due to France's strictly secular educational system, approved of by71 per cent of the Muslims Nouvel Observateur polled...

...Until Labor finds the votes and the courage to effect suchachange, MPs who owe their seats to Muslim constituents may well discover themselves under pressure to lobby for arepresentative of Islam in the House of Lords...

...The Labor Party'snewmanifesto, unveiled in May, proposes to replace the House of Lords with an elected assembly...

...About 30,000 Muslims were bused in from all over Britain and even ferried across the Channel for what Vaz went on to call "one of the great days in the history of Islam...

...Young Muslim (or ex-Muslim) women who have been able to study and become doctors, journalists or lawyers attribute their social success to their parents' decision to move out of Muslim ghettos where pressure to conform is strong...

...A French satirist and journalist, Jean-Edern Hallier, published in June a pirate edition of The Satanic Verses hastily translated by a 12-member team...

...Three weeks later, on July 19, Les versets sataniques was finally and officially brought out—one Paris store sold 1,000 copies in an hour...

...His decision was endorsed by the civil rights group SOSRacisme, which has among its most active members numerous people of NorthAfrican origin...

...In France, by contrast, Interior Minister Pierre Joxe has banned all public assemblies that are "an incitement to murder...

...An Algerian widower living in a village in the south of France told me he left Paris to get his teenage children away from the pressure of Muslim fundamentalists...

...After conducting the first-ever opinion poll among France's Muslims, the weekly Nouvel Observateur—a steady Rushdie supporter—reported this past March 23 that 56 per cent of those questioned feel as much French as Muslim, 73 per cent praised France's religious tolerance, and 44 per cent dissociated themselves from Khomeini's threats against Rushdie, asserting that Muslims are free to dissent from their leaders...

...The edition, in magazine form, was promptly seized by the authorities at the request of Christian Bourgois, Rushdie's French-language publisher, who had delayed publication "because the translation was not ready, " as one of his assistants told me on June 28...

...On television, the film actress Isabelle Adjani, whose father was Algerian, startled the host of a live talk show by unexpectedly reading an extract from Rushdie's novel...

...A court decision that Rushdie's novel is blasphemous suddenly seems less implausible than it did when the first protests erupted...

...AbdelHussan Choudhury informed journalists that he had traveled to Holland and Belgium to invite Muslims to the London rally...

...But in fact they were used by British Labor MP Keith Vaz to describe an anti-Rushdie rally in London last May 27...