Anne Norton, a professor of Political Science at Princeton, is angry. According to her, all West-European countries discriminate against their Muslim immigrants and even seem poised to deliberately insult them using the protective screen of modern secularization as an excuse.
In the first part of her book, the author discusses how Muslims are usually short-changed when it comes to the freedom of speech, the new European progressiveness regarding sexuality and the role of women in society, terror, equality and democracy. In the second part of her book, Norton analyses the difficult histories of a multicultural Europe, and the burden of the holocaust. In the penultimate chapter she holds out hope for Europe by pointing out that in the US immigrants with widely different norms and values can be become valued citizens provided they receive the freedom to be different. That is why, in her final chapter, she simply refuses to believe that the future will bring ‘a clash of civilisations’ as predicted by more pessimistic observers.
This overview seems to suggest that On the Muslim Question provides us with an academic analysis of the resistance against immigrants from North Africa and Turkey in many parts of Western Europe. In reality, however, it is a pamphlet, a cri de coeur imploring the Europeans to stop upsetting Muslims, and somehow to accommodate their sensitivities even when European Muslims seem to clash with hard-fought achievements such as the freedom of religion, the separation of state and church, the equal treatment of hetero- and homosexuals and settling private and public disputes by the judiciary.
True, Europeans have grown to become very skeptical towards Muslim immigrants, but Professor Norton fails to get at the root cause of this. She seems to ignore the rapidly increasing body of research regarding the low income levels of Muslim immigrants, their disappointing educational achievements and the relatively high numbers involved in crimes, nor does she dwell on the differences between Muslim immigrants in the US and Western Europe. In the US, most Muslim immigrants come from the middle classes, while the poor and sometimes even illiterate sections of the Turkish and North African societies have provided most migrants to Western Europe. That difference is fundamental in understanding why the Europeans see the Muslims immigrants as a drain on the public purse. The European welfare state is forced to spend a disproportionate amount of public money on all those who earn low incomes, have lost their jobs, need expensive medical care, send their children to school without sufficient knowledge of the language of instruction, and – in case of a divorce – were very often married to women, who after a divorce were unable to make a living independently. There has been some improvement over time, but studies regarding the economic performance of ethnic groups in Germany and the Netherlands show that second and third generation Muslim immigrants still need many more public transfer payments than the average citizen. That sheds a different light on the demand that Muslims in Western Europe are asked to adopt the norms and values of the majority as some of their own values might carry the danger of a low participation in the labour market and a continuing need to obtain social security transfers. In the US there is less forced solidarity with immigrants and thus less of a need to worry about their earning potential.
Unfortunately, the author not only seems ill-informed about the difficulties of combining large-scale unskilled immigration and an expensive social security system, but she also asserts that the situation of the Muslim immigrants in Europe resembles that of the Jews during the nineteenth century. The title of this book clearly refers to the famous pamphlet of Karl Marx, ‘On the Jewish Question’ (Zur Judenfrage), published in 1843. In this pamphlet Marx posited that in order to emancipate and become full citizens Jews would not have to give up their religion, as demonstrated by the migrants in the US, who at the time when Marx was writing usually were devoutly religious and in spite of that became loyal citizens of their religiously neutral host country.
In suggesting that the positions of the Jews in nineteenth-century Europe and that of the Muslims in present-day Europe are alike, I believe Professor Norton overlooks several fundamental differences. First of all, most European countries have had a resident Jewish population for centuries. Within the Jewish communities there was an elite that could communicate with the other elites. Jews were usually not opposed to the freedom of speech, the separation of state and religion, and did not commit acts of violence or terrorism. Even the position of the poor Jewish migrants from Eastern Europe (Ostjuden) cannot be compared with that of the present-day Muslim immigrants as nineteenth-century Europe mainly relied on private and not on public welfare.
These differences are not discussed in On the Muslim Question. That is why this book reads like an indictment against Western Europe and not as a scholarly monograph allowing the reader to make up his own mind.
