The Caged Virgin: An Emancipation Proclamation for Women and Islam (9 page)

It could have been expected that this would lead to big problems with integration at all levels of society, including the workplace. For instance, when a Moroccan warehouse manager of a large supermarket directs his assistants by intimidating and verbally abusing them, he is acting in accordance with the standards of his group (culture). It is his way of establishing authority and defending his honor; management through “positive consultation” would be a sign of weakness. In Moroccan culture you would only begin an instruction with “Would you please…” if you were addressing a superior, but not someone of a lower rank than you. The Dutch employees, though, have a different frame of reference; to them the Moroccan’s conduct is unworkable and unacceptable. If he refuses to adjust, and to adopt the values of his Dutch staff, he will not be able to function at work and will become unemployed.

Situations like these occur every day. They lead to a great deal of mutual misunderstanding and mistrust, and can result in Muslims complaining of “discrimination” and employers saying that they would rather not employ “any more Moroccans.” For a Muslim in the Netherlands, the authoritarian approach is bound to fail. Getting others to agree with you and pursuing your own interests is imbedded in the Dutch social code; it takes into account the individual rights and interests of colleagues. A Muslim newcomer must develop his individual identity outside of his group identity and distance himself from the traditional culture of honor and shame. Instead of seeing himself “through the eyes of others” (honor and shame), he must develop a stable inner compass that will help him survive in a modern Western society.

Another common problem of integration is seen in the relations between men and women. The deeply patriarchal standards of Muslims often seem totally inappropriate, outdated, and degrading in modern society. The virgin/whore cult, the pressure to have as many sons as possible, the circumcision of girls (usually justified on religious grounds), arranged marriages for daughters—these are all products of the mentality of honor. As a group, Muslim women as well as men will have to forgo these practices and their underlying values to succeed in the West. If they do not, the emancipation of Muslims cannot really begin. Or, to put it in the words of the Dutch economist Arie van der Zwan, “this gap between the sealed-off world of non-Western immigrants and the society in which they have arrived cannot be seen separately from the stagnation in their home countries. For most [still] come from the Islamic world, and there is a growing stream of international literature which poses the question of why that world failed: ‘What went wrong?’ The Islamic world has seen little progress in science, culture, or the economy since the eighteenth century, although it once made major contributions in these areas.”

What is particularly good about van der Zwan’s statement is that he mentions both the international aspect (stagnation as an impetus for emigration) and the national dimension (cultural problems during integration that present a challenge to the host society). In his article he discusses the factors that have led to both the emigration and the fact that Muslims cling to values and standards that are “unsuitable” in a modern society.

Initially, Dutch politicians and policy makers interpreted the influx of foreign workers from the Muslim world (Morocco and Turkey) as a temporary phenomenon. The newcomers were “guest workers.” The Muslims themselves held a similar view, thinking that they had come to the West for a limited time, in order to earn money with which they could build a future back home. As it became clear that Muslims, like other non-Western immigrants, were settling permanently in the Netherlands, the debate about how best to integrate these people into Dutch society began. There are four positions to be distinguished in this debate, which are relevant to all Western democracies.

THE POLITICAL-LEGAL POSITION

In order to become full members of Dutch society, newcomers who possess a residence permit should have the same social and political rights and duties as the native population. Once they meet this political-legal condition, immigrants supposedly can participate in every aspect of society without further government intervention, although the campaign against discrimination and racism remains important to uphold.

The problem with this vision is that there is a gap between immigrants’ formal rights and the actual process of settling down and becoming fully emancipated members of society. In practice very few immigrants make use of their civil and political rights. Their turnout at the elections, for example, is depressingly low. Because familiarization with Dutch society is limited, their awareness of their individual rights is, too.

Paradoxically, in practice, formal rights are used to achieve the opposite of integration, namely to segregate the community from the rest of society on the basis of its religion (ethnicity). The most tragic example of this is the government system of subsidies for special Islamic schools. The ease with which immigrants can draw social benefits also has its drawbacks, one of which is that many immigrants have slipped into a permanent dependency on state benefits.

The political-legal approach is based on Dutch national history formed over centuries of political tensions among different Christian and secular groups. It does not take into account the background of the Muslims in the Netherlands. Because there is such a difference between the mind-sets of Muslim immigrants and the Dutch population, however, this approach perpetuates the disadvantages mentioned above. Radical Muslims will not be absorbed into the country the way the Roman Catholics and other sects eventually were in history. Radical Muslims are opposed to the system itself. Radical Muslims want to destroy the whole system.

THE SOCIOECONOMIC ANGLE

In this view, immigrants from non-Western countries are labeled as disadvantaged. The state aims its legislation to create equal opportunities for their education, employment and income, health care, and housing. The group’s disadvantages are considered only socioeconomic, however, and are not thought to be byproducts of any culture or religion.

The advantage of this approach is that it takes into consideration the different ways immigrants are excluded, in what we call “blind” segregation. For instance, large numbers of immigrants in deprived areas are virtually segregated into “black” schools, whereas most ethnic Dutch children are in “white” schools. But as before, the disadvantage of this approach is that it is based on the specific circumstances of Dutch social history, in particular the struggle between labor and capital, and the institution of the welfare state after World War II. After this, the Dutch working class became emancipated into a bourgeois middle class. Most Muslims in the Netherlands, on the other hand, come from a completely different background, one of institutionalized inequality, which is why this approach has two major downsides. In the first place, it leads to victimization, because it places all the responsibility for dealing with the problems on external factors (the government, Dutch society); it also gives the group a negative self-image and encourages a distrustful attitude toward the world outside the group. This causes tensions between the parties and gives rise to recriminations.

Moreover, the provisions of the Dutch welfare state, such as social security and rent subsidy, help cushion the consequences for those who have dropped out of society, who no longer absolutely need to adjust to the ways of Dutch society if they want to survive. In this way, the process of modernization comes to a halt for large groups of Muslims; from the margins of society they cling to values and standards that stand in the way of their own emancipation.

MULTICULTURALISM:
INTEGRATION WHILE RETAINING ONE’S OWN IDENTITY

A multicultural approach aspires to promote different cultures living peacefully side by side under one government, in accordance with the rules of mutual respect, and with the same opportunities and rights. Yet advocates of multiculturalism favor giving minorities special privileges. Originally, these special privileges are intended to safeguard the rights of the indigenous population in countries such as Canada (Indians and Inuit) and Australia (Aboriginals). Nonetheless, many people in the Netherlands still defend this position. For example, M. Galenkamp, a philosopher of law from Rotterdam, was critical of the Prime Minister Balkenende’s proposal to make the fundamental starting points for the government’s integration policy the Dutch system of morals and values (basic human rights) and the separation of church and state. Galenkamp argued that this would be impossible, since the Netherlands is no longer a homogeneous society; she also feels it would have the undesirable effect of polarization, which would be detrimental to social cohesion; and she argues that it would be unnecessary because a better starting point would be the “principle of damage” devised by J. S. Mill, the nineteenth-century philosopher, who believed that no person should ever have to suffer as a result of someone else’s exercise of freedom.

If John Stuart Mill were living in Holland today, he would disagree with Galenkamp. He would explain to her that the position of Muslim women living in Holland is already contrary to the “principle of damage.” The problem with Galenkamp is that she’s very formal in her thinking, as a lawyer is trained to be. Lawyers are not taught to understand the term
power
; they concentrate on the vertical relationships in society—the vertical relationship of the individual and his relationship to the government. So, they argue, the freedom of the individual must not be restricted by the government. But they do not see the way power works horizontally. They do not see how to prohibit one individual from taking the freedom of another individual. They do not see or understand the subcultures, particularly Islamic interior cultures. They do not see how Muslim women are socialized to believe in the importance and rightness of their own oppression. Mill was quite aware of the importance of reading and reasoning as tools of self-understanding and of understanding the world. If a woman is socialized to believe in her own oppression, that would not meet the condition of freedom.

Multiculturalism has been the biggest influence on Dutch integration policies since the realization, around 1979, that the guest workers who had flowed in from other countries to perform service jobs were going to stay for good. Multiculturalism is so influential partly due to the nation’s history of having learned to live with many minorities in a peaceful way. This coexistence was based on the principle of “emancipation through the conservation of identity,” of the integration of different peoples as they preserved their own ethnic, cultural identities. Multiculturalism is also influential because of the guilt that the Dutch feel over their colonial history and over the racism against and genocide of the Jews during World War II.

The problem with this multicultural view is that it denies that cultural and religious standards can have negative effects and retard the integration and emancipation of peoples, particularly Muslims. Thus, the multiculturalists welcome the emergence of a Muslim section of society because they are under the illusion that it will help encourage Muslim economic emancipation as it did with the Roman Catholic sectors years ago. The Catholics in a largely Protestant Dutch country were for some years poorer, with large families and low-paying jobs, like Muslims today. But they organized themselves around the Catholic Church and improved their financial and economic lives until they became quite integrated.

The multiculturalists say, “If it worked for the Catholics, why shouldn’t it work for the Muslims?” But this is a dangerous misconception about the vast majority of Muslims and will merely encourage their separate, inward focus on their own isolated culture. What the multiculturalists forget is that the Catholics shared with the other Christian/Protestant sects the same language, the same national identity, a common history, and basically the same ethnicity. And they were both Christian, although they might disagree on how to express their religion. The Muslims in Europe have myriad different languages and ethnicities that further separate them from their new country. The socioeconomic background of these many peoples is also quite varied and starkly different from the European background. Because multiculturalists will not classify cultural phenomena as “better” or “worse” but only neutral or disparate, they actually encourage segregation and unintentionally perpetuate, for instance, the unsatisfactory position of Muslim women. State subsidies for nonstate schools allow Muslims to have their own schools, including separate boarding schools for boys and girls, in which young girls are indoctrinated to expect a future as mothers and housewives in accordance with very conservative Islamic practices.

THE SOCIOCULTURAL APPROACH

The economist Arie van der Zwan recently concluded that the lack of progress in integration cannot be explained by objective socioeconomic factors alone. Sociocultural factors are equally important and combine with very real socioeconomic disadvantages to cause the integration problem. He draws distinctions, for example, between the various groups of non-Western immigrants. On the one hand, there are the people from Surinam and the Antilles, and on the other the Moroccans and Turks. Referring to the study by the Netherlands Scientific Council of Government Policy, mentioned above, he concludes that the former two groups form a subclass that has become almost identical to its native Dutch counterpart. But Turks and Moroccans present qualitative and quantitative differences, which arise from their sociocultural position. Only a third of the Moroccan and Turkish population can be considered integrated immigrants. For two-thirds, the prospects for integration are very poor indeed.