BRUCE BAWER
Tolerating Intolerance: The Challenge of
Fundamentalist Islam in Western Europe
I
GREW
UP IN
NEW YORK, the world's most multicultural city, and for
some time lived only a few blocks from the imposing Islamic Center
on Third Avenue between 96th and 97th Streets. But it wasn't until
I moved to western Europe in 1998-living first in Amsterdam, then in
Oslo-that fundamentalist Islam became a daily reality for me .
The reason this took so long seems pretty clear. Owing partly to dif–
ferent immigration patterns, but partly a lso to Amer ica's genius for
turning immigrants into proudly integrated citizens with realigned loy–
alties, Muslims in America tend to be more affluent, more assimilated,
and more religiously moderate than their co-religionists in Europe . A
perhaps not terribly atypical example is Walter Mourad, a secularized
Lebanese-American businessman who was profiled a while back in the
New York Times.
Mourad has two children in a Montessori school, a
wife "who says she would shoot him in the head if he suggested she
cover her head with a scarf," and a love for America that drove him to
respond at once when the CIA, FBI, and NSA put out the call for Ara–
bic translators after September 11.
Every American Muslim is not Walter Mourad, to be sure, but his like
is considerably easier to find in the United States than in Western
Europe, where Islam, generally speaking, offers a somewhat different
picture. For various reasons, Western European Muslims are more likely
than their American counterparts to live in tightly knit religious com–
munities, to adhere to a narrow fundamentalist faith, and to resist inte–
gration into mainstream society. The distance between mainstream
society and the Muslim subcu lture can be especially striking in the
Netherlands and in the countries of Scandinavia, whose re lative ly small,
ethnically homogeneous native populations had, until recent decades, lit–
tle or no experience with large-scale immigration from outside Europe.
The distance I speak of was certainly striking in Amsterdam, where I
resided for a time in a neighborhood-the Oud West-where I grew
accustomed to the sight of women in
chadors
pushing baby carriages
past shops with signs in Arabic. A few doors from my fiat, a huge Turk-
