Fading Lines
In Europe, it comes down to hate vs. free speech
Those who stand to lose most in the current controversy are Muslims in the Middle East trying to fight tactfully for greater freedoms, as well as Muslims in the West seeking to justify themselves to both secular and Islamic critics. “Muslims in Europe have not made a move,” Zeghidour explains, because they’ve been “taken hostage” by warring camps: on the one hand, “the Islamists who consider them brothers living with infidels” and, on the other, “Islamophobic Europeans who see Muslims in their midst as the enemy’s fifth column.” Zeghidour believes the tolerant masses have been lost in the commotion, adding that Europeans are the population that has most intermarried with Muslims in the past 30 years, something that can be attested to by a quick stroll down the Champs Élysées and all the mixed couples one finds there. The religious scholar Tariq Ramadan — perhaps the most famous Western Muslim, a figure embraced by suburban Muslim youth but reviled by France’s secularists — articulated the widely held belief among Euro-Muslims that the current free-speech debate conceals a political debate about immigration: “Muslim citizens are not asking for more censorship but for more respect.”
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