An Islamic Europe?
03/10/04 00:00
By Kieron Wood
Last Sunday, an emergency session of the Turkish parliament dropped proposals to criminalise adultery as part of reforms of the country's penal code.
The capitulation followed a meeting in Brussels between the European Union's Enlargement Commissioner, Gunter Verheugen, and Turkish prime minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan.
Erdogan had initially warned the EU not to interfere in Turkey's "internal affairs''. He had argued that Turkish membership of the European Union did not mean it had to adopt the EU's "imperfect'' western morals.
But Verheugen insisted that if the Turkish prime minister went ahead with plans to make adultery a criminal offence, the European Commission would not back Turkey's planned accession to the EU.
The commission is due to report on Wednesday whether Turkey has met the economic and political criteria necessary for the start of accession talks. EU heads of state will make a final decision in December.
A commission impact assessment, leaked to Reuters last Thursday, said that Turkish membership could cost the EU between €16 billion and €28 billion a year, although the economies of EU member states would benefit from Turkish accession, "albeit only slightly''.
The Irish government has so far taken no official view on Turkey's application, but other European countries have been less reticent.
The EU's internal market chief, Frits Bolkestein, warned last month that Europe could meet the same fate as the Austro-Hungarian empire if Turkey was allowed to join the EU.
Bolkestein quoted American Islamic expert Bernard Lewis as saying that Europe would be Islamic by the end of the 21st century. "If he is right, the liberation of Vienna in 1683 [when Christian troops defeated an invading Muslim army] would have been in vain," said the commissioner.
In his speech at the University of Leiden, Bolkestein said EU leaders had hardly discussed the issue when they agreed in Helsinki in 1999 to consider Turkey's candidacy. "There was a three-minute debate - very thorough," he told Dutch television last week.
The commissioner said current trends supported only one conclusion: "The United States remains the sole superpower, China will become an economic giant, Europe is becoming more Islamic."
It wasn't the first time the Dutch commissioner had highlighted the dangers of the Islamicisation of Europe.
"Within but a few short years, the populations of four big cities [in the Netherlands] will have a predominantly nonwestern background and the majority religion will be Islam," he said last year. "It is high time to speak about these matters in plain terms.
"Christianity and the Bible have been subject to a tidal wave of criticism for around 500 years. Why should we not be entitled to criticise Islam and the Koran?
"Do we live in a free country or not?" Apparently, the answer is 'not'. After Bolkestein's countryman Pim Fortuyn warned about the Islamicisation of Dutch culture and the "backwardness'' of Islam two years ago, the populist politician was assassinated.
Opponents of Turkey's entry into the EU point to the fact that this nation of 72 million people - while ostensibly a secular state - is overwhelmingly Islamic by religion. They fear that a tide of Turkish immigrants could change the historic Christian tradition of Europe forever.
Around 15million Muslims lived in the 15 nations of the EU before May 1, excluding illegal immigrants. Of those, almost four million are Turks. Last week's study said safeguard clauses could be considered to avoid serious disturbances in the EU labour market if there were "significant additional migration'' from Turkey.
Ireland's experience of Turkish immigration is limited, as there are only 545 Turkish-born people living in the state.
But the situation in other countries is very different. In Germany, there are 2.6 million Turkish gastarbeiter (guest workers).
France, the Netherlands, Austria and Belgium also have large Turkish immigrant populations. Many politicians in those countries oppose Turkey's membership on cultural grounds.
Austrian agriculture commissioner Franz Fischler, in a recent letter to Verheugen that was leaked to the media, said that Turkey was a "sui generis society, far more oriental than European'' and its professed secularism was "only skin deep''.
He said that, while Islam continued to be the preferred religion of Turks, there was "no guarantee'' against a fundamentalist backlash.
Former German chancellor Helmut Schmidt said Turkey did not belong in the EU because "the decisive and essential developments that formed European culture - the Renaissance, the Enlightenment and the separation of clerical and political authority - are missing from the Islamic tradition''.
The president of the EU constitutional convention, Valéry Giscard d'Estaing, warned that granting Turkey membership "would be the end of the EU''.
Last week, French finance minister Nicolas Sarkozy predicted that it would be at least 15 years before Turkey joined the EU - and he called for a referendum in France first. French prime minister Jean-Pierre Raffarin questioned how Turkish governments could persuade Turkish society to embrace Europe's human rights values.
"Do we want the river of Islam to enter the riverbed of secularism?" he asked.
Even the Vatican joined in. Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger has maintained that from a historical and political point of view, Turkey represents a continent that is in "permanent contrast to Europe'' and should not be in the EU.
This surge of anti-Islamic sentiment was boosted by a poll last month indicating that Turkey's application was supported by only one in three Britons, one in four Germans and just one in six French people.
The US and British governments have actively lobbied for Turkish membership of the EU. At a Nato summit in Istanbul earlier this summer, President George Bush said that, "as a European power, Turkey belongs in the European Union''.
Bush said Turkish membership of the EU would prove that "Europe is not the exclusive club of a single religion'' and would be "a crucial advance in relations between the Muslim world and the west''.
But the majority of EU citizens appear not to want closer relations with the Muslim world - not least because of the worldwide association between Islam and terrorism.
Following the Beslan school siege, one leading Arab media commentator, Abdel Rahman al-Rashed of the al-Arabiya news channel, admitted that, while not all Muslims were terrorists, it was certain that almost all terrorists were Muslims - "sour grapes of a deformed culture'', as he called them.
Writing in the newspaper al-Sharq al-Awsat, al-Rashed pointed out that the Beslan hostage-takers were Muslims, the hostage-takers and killers of the Nepalese workers in Iraq were Muslims and those involved in rape and murder in Darfur, Sudan, were Muslims.
Those responsible for the attacks on residential towers in Riyadh and Khobar were also Muslims, he said, as were the Chechen women who crashed two airliners in Russia.
"Bin Laden is a Muslim. The majority of those who manned the suicide bombings against buses, vehicles, schools, houses and buildings, all over the world, were Muslims," he said.
"What a pathetic record. What an abominable 'achievement'. Does all this tell us anything about ourselves, our societies and our culture?"
In a different era, he said, extremists were considered a menace because of their adoption of violence. Then came the neo-Muslims. "An innocent and benevolent religion. . .has been turned into a global message of hate," he said.
"Terrorism has become an Islamic enterprise; an almost exclusive monopoly, implemented by Muslim men and women."
Even some of his co-religionists agree.
Kamal Nawash, the Washington-based president of the Free Muslim Coalition Against Terrorism, confessed: "Fundamentalist Islamic terror represents one of the most lethal threats to the stability of the civilised world." (I recently had a thread deleted by the moderators on this BB for daring to repeat these very comments!)
A spokesman for the Muslim Council of Britain, Inayat Bunglawala, contended that Muslims were "just as appalled by this barbarity as anyone else''.
But Irish Muslim convert Khalid Kelly, a supporter of the British Islamic fundamentalist group al-Muhajiroun, insisted: "Anyone who says terrorism is not part of Islam is wrong. It's an Islamic responsibility to fight. We are all terrorists."
Nobody suggests that all Turks are terrorists. But Turkey's social and religious influence on the European Union could have a longer-lasting effect than any number of bombs and bullets.
By 2050,Turkey will have an estimated 100million citizens - more than any other EU country. With EU voting rights tied to population size, future Turkish decisions in the EU could change the face of Europe forever.