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Wednesday, June 13, 2012

Islam’s return to Europe: Assimilation or confrontation, Islam and the West, NewAgeIslam.com

Islam and the West
Islam’s return to Europe: Assimilation or confrontation
Strangers in the Land
By Fouad Ajami
August 2, 2009

A fault line opened in European society. On one side were those keen to keep their world whole and theirs; on the other was elite opinion, insisting on the inevitability and legitimacy of the new immigration. For their part, the new arrivals, timid at first, grew expansive in the claims they made. This was odd: they had fled the fire, and the failure, of their ancestral lands, but they brought the fire with them. Political Islam had risen on its home turf in the Middle East and North Africa, in South Asia, but a young generation in Europe gave its allegiance to the new Islamist radicalism. Emancipated women had shed the veil in Egypt and Turkey and Iran in the 1920s; there are Muslim women now asserting their right to wear the burqa in Paris.

The European welfare state tempted and aided the new Islamism. Two-thirds of the French imams are on welfare. It was hard for Europeans, Caldwell writes, to know whether these bold immigrants were desperate wards or determined invaders, keen on imposing their will on societies given to moral relativism and tolerance. In Caldwell’s apt summation, the flood of migration brought with it “militants, freeloaders and opportunists.”

http://newageislam.com/islam%E2%80%99s-return-to-europe--assimilation-or-confrontation/islam-and-the-west/d/1611


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