“Mediterranean is Beatiful!”
from Limes 3/2004
By Lucio Caracciolo
There are many Islams. Spiritually they all look to Mecca, but some have a geopolitical dimension. Two in particular—one deeply-rooted outside, the other inside the European and Mediterranean space. This volume of Limes will concentrate on the second. But to investigate the Muslim community in Europe (over 20 million, not counting Turks and Russians), we must take the external Islam into account. A sprawling galaxy from the Arabian peninsula to the Indian subcontinent, from South-East Asia to Indonesia, this circuit revolves around the Saudi Arabian-Pakistani axis; two states in the balance, after having nourished fundamentalism and financed Islamic terrorism, they seem to have lost control of it.
From that immense space immigrants and fundamentalist envoys are arriving in Europe.
The Muslim emigration from the Indian subcontinent (Pakistan, India, Bangladesh), not immune from the radicalism of the Deobandist school, inclines towards the ex-colonial British power. From Saudi Arabia, on the other hand, come the prophets of Wahabbist Islam.
Objective: to construct everywhere—even in the Euro-Mediterranean context, historically outside their field—platforms for the expansion of a fanatically anti-western Islam. Their preaching pursues a georeligious and geopolitical project: to reconnect European Muslims with the rest of the Islamic nation. A counter-reconquista on a jihadist scale, mindful of the
“tragedy of Andalusia”, the liquidation of Iberian Islam by Christian armies, completed in 1492. The various positions fertilized by militant Islamism must form a network of enclaves of dar al-Islam (house of Islam) from within the dar al-harb (house of war). Thus rises in Europe a network of Saudi imams in Riyadh’s pay, utilized also by the terrorists. London is the showcase of this network.
We have only begun to realize the immensity and gravity of this phenomenon since
September 11th. There are by now thousands of extremist imams preaching their religion in unregistered areas. Their sermons are shot through with hate for the West and exhortations to self-segregate from their host societies to avoid becoming infected by them. The great majority of Europe’s Muslims reject the ideology of confrontation.For many of them, whether Maghreb or Turk, Wahhabist radicalism is a deviation from the true faith, emanating from an environment doubly remote—to their society of origin and their adopted one.
We Europeans cannot operate on the geopolitical scale of these Islamisms. It is too far, too diffused, too widespread. Nor is it feasible to eradicate the radicalism at the source, given the degree of decay in the Saudi and Pakistani regimes and their intrinsic ambiguity. And yet Bush had decided to play this card, enlisting for his war on terrorism the Saudi regent ‘Abdallah and the Pakistani leader Musharraf, and he has dragged a few Europeans countries to patrol Afghanistan. With modest results.
To face the penetration of the Islamist threat, our best allies, however, are the Muslims here at home. From the point of view of Saudi/Pakistani radicalism, their unskilled labor, already influenced by the belligerent—and by now self-sustaining—Salafist extremism of the Maghreb brand, will conquer all. Stretched between extremist pressure and scarce communication with their host societies—aggravated by instances of Islamophobia—European Muslims appear as the main victims of the so-called “clash of civilizations”.
The Islam with which we can best interact is the Mediterranean one; a space that we should know well enough, seeing how much it corresponds to the Roman empire. But the fall of Rome led to the disappearance of the Mediterranean as a whole. Thus broke apart a family of peoples and territories centered on the Mar Nostrum; a circuit never again reconstructed. It is as if we had withdrawn the southern limes from the North African provinces to the Sicilian coasts (even further north still for some). The Mediterranean heart of the empire has passed to the periphery of Europe.
This geopolitical fracture is at the origin of the modern idea of Europe, marked by Christianity; a representation historically determined by a double removal. At first we erased from the civilized world the western Mediterranean conquered in the VIII century by the Muslims.
As for the eastern Mediterranean, the Turkish expansion reduced it to a “black hole”, to the point of obscuring its Byzantine heritage.
The ideology of Christian Europe is still active. And it continues to produce geopolitical, economic and semantic chimeras. The thunder of the armies of Lepanto (7 October 1571) still echoes in the curious obsession of certain old-fashioned continental governments for the “Christian roots” of our continent. Hardly what our Muslims wish to hear, Turks least of all.
The Mediterranean caesura has then evident political and economic consequences in the European Union. A mere fraction of what was transferred to the more or less Christian countries of the former Soviet Empire throughout the 1990s now flows from Brussels towards North Africa and the Near East. Even Italy lacks a serious commercial projection in the sea that bathes its eight thousand kilometers of coast.
Special philological talents are not necessary to pick up the anti-Mediterranean stereotypes in the everyday language of the Europeans, including the elites. So it was anyway at the time of the battle of Maastricht, when from the mouths of certain northerners, “Mediterranean” was synonymous with “unreliable”; who attempted to deny access to the Euro to the four countries of the so-called “Club Med” (Spain, Italy, Greece and even the most Atlantic, Portugal), outcasts as the Southern periphery of “virtuous Europe” (Franco-German); or the imprecations of certain Germans against the Italian “Bedouins”—not intended as a compliment.
Perhaps we should come to know better the Mediterranean space, and free ourselves from certain prejudices. For example, the Southern coast of our sea is currently labeled as part of the “Arab world”, understood as altogether homogeneous from Mauritania to Iraq. It is not at all so. The peoples of that shore—Berbers in particular—don’t allow themselves to be squeezed into a single category. The presumed European dialogue with the South shore—an aphasia sponsored by Brussels—will never take shape if it refuses to conceive the same idea of the Mediterranean space, which is to say a necessarily plural sphere.
In the Mediterranean context, we find once more the two historical matrixes of our Islam, the western and the eastern. The first goes back to the Maghreb towards the Iberian peninsula, where a north-south synthesis of Mediterranean civilization once flourished, broken only by the Catholic reconquista. We have conflicting memories of this Islam, codified even in our children’s textbooks. We not only denied to that Iberian Islam any European connotation, we made it one of the necessary counter-models for legitimizing a Christian Europe juxtaposed with the religion of Mohammed. Against the “Moors” operates a syndrome of permanent civilizational warfare, almost as if we wanted to throw them into the sea metaphorically as well.
The other branch of Mediterranean Islam is the Turkish one, that has reestablished the Byzantine space, shattered by the Crusades. But even here we presume to know that which is still wrapped in obscure legends. The myth of the resistance against the Ottoman hordes has contributed to founding the representation of Christian Europe, breakwater against Turkish Islam—one stereotype very much still alive among those opposed to the integration of Turkey into the European Union. When it serves geopolitical ends, history is always contemporaneous.
The European and Mediterranean Islam is extremely various. The country of origin and the moment of arrival in Europe mark the principal differences. The first great wave, beginning from the 1950s—when only 800 thousand Muslims were living on the whole continent—was defined by the “guest workers”, a definition that is itself a schedule: come, slave away and return home. The Gastarbeiters are concentrated in the industrial zones of France (Maghrebs), Germany (Turks and Kurds), Great Britain (Middle Easterners, as well as traditional Indo-Pakistani stock) and Benelux. Many “guests” will, however, be joined by their families, confirming themselves as permanent factors of our daily lives. It is above all the second wave, in the 1970s, that produces the birth of a true Muslim community in Europe. The third wave, beginning in the 1980s, concerns more directly the Mediterranean countries, first of all Spain and Italy. This group, the majority of which are Maghreb Muslims, follows again the ancient Mediterranean route from North Africa to Europe—the Islamic avant garde of a new possible Mediterranean space.
Today a part of the European Muslims has obtained passport to their country of reception.
But formal nationalization doesn’t mean integration. On the other hand, in cultivating membership on many levels, in which the culture of origin coexists with participation in public life in the country of recent settlement, many European citizens of the Mohammedan faith suffer from a sort of schizophrenia. It is enough to attend a soccer match between France and Algeria or Germany and Turkey to recognize how the older psychological-cultural affiliations prevail over the new passports. Likewise, the original Europeans consider their Muslim countrymen as type B citizens—and that if they’re lucky.Between rights and opportunities lies an ocean.
In the immigrant communities originating from the eastern Mediterranean, the dominant Islam is still of Turkish origin. At the end of the last century the Balkan wars and upheavals routed a further Islamic flow bound for the heart of the Old Continent along the historical production line of Ottoman emigration: Albanians, Kosovars and Bosnians have rediscovered their Muslim roots, cultivated under the Ottomans, in juxtaposition to the Orthodox Serbs and Catholic Croats.
And us? Italy hinges between the eastern and western migratory flows. We are an important territory of transit, before the final destination. The Sicilian Canal is the doorway to Europe, crossed also by the supervisors of radicalism and Islamic terrorism. Any theory of reconnection to a Mediterranean circuit, of which the Muslims are an integral and equal part, must be based on our peninsula.
The reconstruction of the Mediterranean space is one of our priority national interests.
Not just to harness the savage immigration from the South and drain the swamps of Maghreb jihadism. Much more: to make the Mediterranean serve the making of Europe.
As the standard-bearer of Mediterranean integration, Italy rediscovers its geopolitical function in the European Union, a mysterious and directionless object in which the relations of force prevail over the presumed rules. In the European family today we count for very little, not only because the recent “enlargement” has shifted the center of gravity towards the northeast. Viewed from the Franco-Germany perspective, Italy has sunk into the Mediterranean. At most, it is a cultural-tourist attraction; the Beautiful Country, not a geopolitical factor.
The strategy of suture for the Mediterranean space must involve the Muslims of each shore, extricating the fascination for the preachings of hate, for which Islam is the religion of the
anti-West.
It is necessary to work on different levels, primarily on the internal front. We have to break up the ghettos in which extremist imams seek to seclude immigrants.Here the jihadist cells hunt in order to feed the transit of terror. Nor can we delude ourselves that the unsuccessful integration of the great part of Muslims doesn’t affect the quality of the state of rights,
doesn’t mar the democracy itself.
Certain policies appear immediately evident. On the cultural level, we should favor the exchange of knowledge, without indulging in pacifist pedagogies. This presupposes the respect and the incentive of Muslim cultures that have almost no space in our media. A first step could consist in the common rewriting of the common history of the Mediterranean, mixing frequently conflicting but equally legitimate points of view. A glance at the scholastic manuals is enough to notice the terrible gaps around Islamic events and Islamic doctrines, consummated by a historical record defined by the Battle of Lepanto.
On the social and political level, a useful measure could prove to be the obligatory registration of the imams, as a condition for receiving a stipend from the state of residence—a way of rendering them less dependent on the Wahhabist or Salafist networks. The maximum opening to the Muslims truly disposed to participate in the European home in respect to its laws means the repression of jihadist terrorism. On these bases a European Islam might rise, already perceptible among third generation Muslim immigrants. The Euroislam will be the measure and instrument of our rapport with more distant and adverse Islams.
To approach this strategic objective it is necessary to link the internal front with the external one: the Mediterranean project, seeing as without solid Mediterranean foundations, the entire European house risks collapsing under the push of a tumultuous and uncontrolled immigration from the south and east.
The Mediterranean structure rests on a few territorial pillars. We invent nothing: many of the possible mainstays already have an outline in the form of the coastal strips, partners in the projects of finance, according to the Commission’s schoolwork. It lacks only the project, the guiding spirit. We see the priorities and the nerves of a possible strategy, contracted on the harmonious development of the highway, railway and port infrastructures, but also on tourism, on agriculture, on small industry and the media. On the western side, for example, a first tie can extend from Savona to Barcelona. A second, from Almeria to Orano, linking Spain and Maghreb. On the African side, a third macro region can emerge, designed to tie Annaba to Tripoli and to insular Italy. In the eastern quadrant, it is best to play on the wide maritime and land corridor from Bari, via Otranto, Albania and Greece up to Smyrna—ultimately, the circuit from Adana to Alexandria, through the coastlines of the Near East.
The geopolitical product of this strategy is the consensual surmounting of the Euroarab limes, as of the Euroturkish one; to extol the harmony of the territories beyond the presumed fault-lines of civilization which fuel the theories of the clash between Islam and the West; and to orient Islamic immigrants towards a plural and Mediterranean identity.
In this project Turkey has a key role. At the end of this year we will decide if the Euroturkish pantomime will have a happy ending or descend into farce. Seventy million Muslims integrated in Europe can give cause for fear. In view of demographic trends, Turkey would become in the not too distant future the most populous state in the European Union, surpassing Germany. But if we slam the door in Ankara’s face in the name of Christian Europe—naturally without confessing it—we would lose any credibility with our own Muslims, who would then have every reason to feel discriminated against on the basis of their creed. In that instance, we would make a handsome gift of propaganda to the current extremists of Turkish Islam, throwing them into the arms of anti-Western fanatics and jihadists throughout the world, beginning with the Middle East. And we would renounce playing on Turkey as a moderating point of reference for its ex-Muslims from the Balkans. The Turkish nationalists would feel at last authorized to extinguish, with extreme prejudice, the hotbeds of independence movements in Iraqi Kurdistan, liquidating any mirage of Mesopotamic stability.
Of course, the strategy of Mediterranean recreation is ambitious—at the threshold of utopia.
But the menace of militant Islam, fierce enemy of the West, can be driven back only by our Islam, emancipated from the ghettos and included in a truly European and Mediterranean project. In the end, it is an attempt to right the American fortunes of the “war on terrorism, badly conceived, badly initiated and pursued even worse; to redirect it according to our interests, as by continuing to conform to Bush’s non-strategy, we Italians and Europeans are bound to lose it. To lose ourselves.