When they discuss immigration policy,
especially when it applies to the influx of hundreds of thousands of Muslims to
the West, pundits don’t necessarily exhibit a liberal bias, or for that matter,
a left-leaning view of the world. How would John Locke, Adam Smith or Karl Marx
respond to the current debate? My guess is as good as yours.
In fact, when they welcome immigrants,
legal and illegal, from the Middle East and elsewhere, and blast the
immigration restrictionists as bigots and racists, most Western policy
intellectuals display what would commonly be described as the Whig
interpretation of history.
According to Whig history, our societies have been moving in an almost linear
fashion towards more advanced forms of enlightenment and liberty. Values like
secularism, religious freedom, individual rights, women’s rights and free
markets, representing the progressive future, were bound to overcome the
reactionary forces of the past, represented by religious oppression, absolute
monarchism, coercive government and backward-looking tradition, with liberal
democracy being the culmination of this forward-looking process.
This view of the world derived in part
from the ideas of the Reformation, which was seen as a central progressive
force challenging the reactionary Catholic Church. So it was perhaps not
surprising that while some of the leaders of the much-derided anti-immigration
movement in nineteenth-century America known as the “Know-Nothings” were
actually opposed to slavery, and supported extending more rights to women, they
were also opposed to the immigration of Catholics into the country, believing
that the followers of the pope and his illiberal traditions could end up
halting the march towards progress.
The notion of a progressive or a liberal
calling for restricting immigration would today sound mind-bending, if not a
contradiction in terms. After all, notwithstanding the warnings from the
Know-Nothings, the history of Catholic and, for that matter, Jewish immigration
into the United States followed the Whig interpretation.
In fact, as political scientist Samuel
Huntington put it, members of both religious groups as well as those
of other non-Protestant branches followed the route of “Anglicizing” their
religious practices and traditions and integrating themselves into the more
secular and liberal environment of the country. They embraced what Huntington
called the “American Creed,” which he regarded as the unique creation of a
dissenting Protestant culture, with its commitment to individualism, equality
and the rights to freedom of religion and opinion.
So from that perspective, the assimilation
of these immigrants into American society could be integrated into a narrative
of progress. They may have not been “like us” in terms of their view of the
world when they had arrived into this country, which was why the Know-Nothings
campaigned against them.
But then history proved that those who
were opposed to the immigration of Catholics and Jews were wrong, playing the
role of reactionaries in our forward-looking narrative. Today’s leading liberal
pundits assign the role of villains to opponents of Muslim immigration, who are
depicted as the modern-day Know-Nothings.
This Whig interpretation of history would
recall how the children and grandchildren of Catholic immigrants from Ireland,
Italy or Poland, and those of eastern European Jews, abandoned their parents’
and grandparents’ archaic religious traditions and sense of religious
particularism and ethnic tribalism. They have, indeed, become very much “like
us,” and in some cases, more committed to the progressive American creed than
members of old Protestant families from New England.
So why should we assume that Muslim
immigrants from the Middle East and South Asia wouldn’t play the same role in
the sequel to that movie? Presumably the same economic, social and cultural pressures
that eventually helped Anglicize the Catholics and the Jews in this country
would do magic for today’s Muslim immigrants. And those who don’t share that
expectations are part of the reactionary past: angry old white men who cannot
come to terms with the changing demographics of the country.
But these upbeat expectations assume that
many things that may be wrong, including scientific and economic progress, and
other forces of modernization like industrialization and urbanization, are so
powerful that they force one to leave the traditions of the past behind to
embrace liberal and secular forms of identity.
We are told to remember that the
granddaughters of the families who emigrated from highly stratified,
patriarchal and religiously oppressive Italy’s south now wear a bikini when
they go to the beach. As do the granddaughters of the ultra-Orthodox Jews who
immigrated to America from the shtetl in eastern Europe. Why shouldn’t
that happen to the granddaughters of the Muslim immigrants from Egypt?
But wait a minute. Why do things seem to
be happening in reverse in the case of many young Muslim immigrants in Europe
and the United States? Their grandmothers, growing up in the 1950s in, say,
Alexandria, actually looked “like us,” wearing the latest European fashion and
a spiffy swimsuit on the beach. It’s their granddaughters who are now wearing
veils, the hijab and the burkini to make sure that they don’t look “like us.”
That many Muslim
immigrants resist playing the role assigned to them in the forward-looking
narrative may be explained, in part, by the backward turn taken by many Muslim
societies where, as in the case of Turkey, the Whiggish interpretation has been
turned on its head. As forces of modernization like industrialization and
urbanization have accelerated, these societies have actually started shredding
what remained of the secular and liberal values that were embraced by many
during much of the twentieth century.
Hence the contrast between the dramatic
transformation of Western societies during the age of globalization and
postmodernism, where the debate has moved to a point where same-sex marriage is
now the law of the land in several countries, and the trend towards more
oppressive religious standards, intolerance and tribalism in the Muslim world.
So while the liberal West has been opening its doors to Muslim immigration,
shrinking Christian communities in the Middle East are being decimated and its
members, facing a radical Islamic assault, are forced to leave countries where
their ancestors had resided before the Arab invasion.
Liberals who adhere to the Whig
interpretation of history face a dilemma. They cannot accept the idea that many
Muslims living in the West, not unlike members of the ultra-Orthodox Jewish
communities in Israel and the United States, don’t want to be “like us,” and if
anything detest the liberal and secular values that prevail in the United
States and Europe.
Yet hanging to their liberal fantasy,
policymakers and pundits accuse “Islamophobes” of wrecking progress and resist
considering the inevitable: as these Muslim communities grow and expand, expect
not only an end to same-sex marriage. Muslim citizens would then challenge
other core principles of the Enlightenment, accusing bikini-wearing women of
violating the changing standards of the community.
And as multiculturalism becomes a form of
secular religion in the West, many liberals also try to deal with their
cognitive dissonance by insisting on the preservation, if not the celebration,
of regressive Muslim traditions, like the hijab. Liberal
intellectuals, who spend much of their time denigrating evangelical Christians
and warning of their plans to challenge the rights of women and gays, become
apoplectic if someone dares to criticize Muslim traditions. Islamophobia!
Demonstrating the challenges liberals have
in trying to keep their progressive narrative intact, Canada’s Prime Minister
Justin Trudeau, a self-styled feminist and a leading global promoter of
multiculturalism, appeared recently at a gender-segregated event in a mosque,
singing the praise of Islam on the main floor where only men were permitted,
while women were watching Trudeau from the balcony.
“Right now we have these political leaders
— ironically, politically liberal leaders — who are just putting blinders on
their eyes about their values,” Asra Nomani, a liberal Muslim, told Canada’s National Post. “That’s the big
differential for liberals, they fancy themselves as honouring the women’s body
and yet the segregation by its very definition hyper-sexualizes women’s bodies.
That’s the great irony.”
Perhaps not such an irony. As liberals
like Trudeau discover that Muslim immigrants are not ready to become “like us,”
they conclude that they are left with only one choice: to become more like
them.
Leon Hadar, senior analyst at Wikistrat, a
geostrategic consulting group, is the author of Sandstorm:
Policy Failure in the Middle East.
Image: A Muslim couple sitting in a
private screening room and wearing 3D goggles, Auckland, New Zealand. Wikimedia
Commons/Jorge Royan
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