The barricades are going up all over Europe. The physical variety had already begun construction before the Paris attacks, such as the razor-wire fence Slovenia is erecting on part of its border with Croatia, to impede the flow of mostly olive- and dark-skinned immigrants.
Now they are going up in people’s minds, as a continent that was already pretty ambivalent about its Muslim population turns towards the suggestion they are outsiders whose patriotism must be considered suspect unless they prove otherwise.
The leader of Britain’s UK Independence Party, Nigel Farage, has warned: “It is clear that the UK Muslim population are conflicted in their loyalties between loyalty to the UK, its way of life and its institutions, and what elements within their organised faith are telling them.”
Mr Farage’s party has long been anti-immigration, but that no longer consigns them to the margins of European politics.
In France, Marine Le Pen is highly likely to make it to the second – and final – round of the next presidential election, and her party, the National Front, is tipped to make significant gains in forthcoming regional polls.
Ms Le Pen recently appeared in court over an incident in which she compared Muslims praying in the street (because the mosques were full) to the Nazi occupation.
There will be less al fresco devotion from now on, I imagine. In fact, as Bernard Godard, a commentator and former interior ministry official, puts it: “There is a serious risk, in public opinion, that people will become more radical. Maybe people will now say, ‘No, no, no more Islam in the public space, not any more’.”
They may go further, and echo Hungary’s prime minister, Viktor Orban, who said even before the attacks: “Islam has never been part of Europe, it came to us. Spiritually, Islam was never part of Europe. It’s the rule book of another world.”
Nobody knows exactly why the eight young men fell under a delusion so dark that they misguidedly thought they had a religious duty to slaughter 129 people in Paris last weekend. We do know, however, that one of the causes of radicalisation is a sense of marginalisation and exclusion, not only economically but also culturally.
For that reason, I would suggest that one of the solutions to young people in France and its neighbours falling prey to extremist ideologies is this: far from banishing Islam from the public square, Europe must rediscover and celebrate its Muslim past.
For Mr Orban’s declaration that the religion has never been part of the continent is patent nonsense.
From the Umayyad conquest of Spain in the early eighth century, there were Muslim states in the Iberian Peninsula until 1492. The Emirate of Sicily was created in 965. The Crimean Khanate was established in the 15th century, while the Ottoman Empire once extended over the entire Balkans and into much of Eastern Europe.
Indeed, Islam was entrenched in Europe at a time when many parts of the continent were pagan, and had not yet converted to Christianity, such as Saxony and Scandinavia.
To say that this presence was established by war, and that therefore it was invalid and forced, makes little historical sense.
Not unless you feel that after nearly a millennium it is high time the Normans repented of their conquest of England in 1066 and their imposition of “alien” Norman-Norse values.
Christianity was likewise brought to much of Europe by the sword, and if one wants to play the rather facile game of “who was there first”, then Christians are arguably the interlopers in Crimea and we ought to be standing up for the rights of the polytheists whose ancient deities, from Zeus and Athene to Loki and Thor, were originally worshipped before Christianity and Islam displaced them.
So Muslims are not newcomers or outsiders. They have long been part of Europe, and only “came” to the continent in the sense that other religions did.
This history appears to have been forgotten, or dismissed in the ultimate triumph of the Christian West in Europe. But it is just as much a part of the continent’s story as that of the Roman Empire. The glories of the classics have long been a part of an elite European education. Why should the splendours of the Islamic era not also be treasured?
The pluralism, toleration and learning in 10th century Cordoba, for instance, may not be unfamiliar; but they ought to be far better known and taught as part of the continent’s history in schools.
As the 19th century British Orientalist, Stanley Lane-Poole, wrote in The Story of The Moors in Spain: “To Cordoba belong all the beauty and ornaments that delight the eye or dazzle the sight. Art, literature and science prospered as they then prospered nowhere else in Europe.”
The city had the largest library in the world, a shared culture among Muslims, Christians and Jews as People of the Book, and was a centre of scholarship, architecture and commerce.
It eventually fell to a Catholic Spain that not only expelled its entire Muslim and Jewish populations, but also later the Moriscos, the descendants of Muslims who had converted rather than face exile.
Which part of European history reflects better on the continent and ought to be remembered as an example of what Europe could be today?
It may not put an end to attacks such as that which has left France in mourning. But if the continent’s Islamic past is properly acknowledged, the issue of Muslims being part of its present, and feeling they belong, might be better addressed.
As for Mr Orban, who sees them as “other” and alien to Europe: he should be reminded that Muslims have been in Europe since before the Magyars invaded Hungary. Does he, then, come from “another world”?
Sholto Byrnes is a senior fellow at the Institute of Strategic and International Studies, Malaysia
