BRUCE BAWER
343
A few weeks later, British Muslim leaders were busy battling the
repeal of Section
28,
Great Britain's notorious antigay law. Dr. Hasham
El-Essawy, director of the Islamic Society for the Promotion of Religious
Tolerance in the U.K., told the
Telegraph
that it was Muslims' obliga–
tion "to discourage homosexual behavior." EI-Essawy, who according
to the
Telegraph
is "considered an Islamic moderate," found it appro–
priate to quote the Koran's punishment for lesbians-"Keep the guilty
women in their homes until they die, or
till
God provides a way out for
them"-and for homosexual men:
"If
two of your men commit the
abominable act, bother them. But, if they repent ... then bother them
no more." El-Essawy made clear his "moderation" by contrasting his
view with that of some other Muslims, who, he explained, "believe that
the punishment for homosexuality is death."
Apparently, such views don't disturb the likes of Waage and LeBor–
at least not enough to affect their conviction as to Islam's overall value
to the West. Nor, one must assume, do these facts give any pause to the
leaders of Britain's Labour Party, which recently introduced a bill that
would make it illegal in Great Britain to criticize any religion. This
would not only make possible (as Matthew Parris noted in the London
Times)
the prosecution of this year's Nobel laureate
V.
S. Naipaul for his
writings about Islam, it would effectively rob gay people of the right
even to challenge imams who call for their extermination.
Of all the English-language books I found in Amsterdam that devoted
substantial attention to Islam in the West, one stood out for its straight–
forwardness about the fundamentalist bent of most European Muslims
today and about the unpleasant implications of their antipathy for
Western values. The book was
The Challenge of Fundamentalism
by
Bassam Tibi, a professor of international relations at Gottingen Univer–
sity-and a liberal Muslim. Indeed, he was the only Muslim in the
pack-and the only one engaged neither in blatant whitewashing nor in
wishful thinking.
IN 1999 I MOVED FROM AMSTERDAM to Oslo. I soon found that in Oslo,
as in Amsterdam, the cultural gap between natives and the Muslim
immigrant minority (which, in Norway, consists largely of Pakistanis)
was miles wide. Here, too, the native-born children of immigrants were
called "second-generation immigrants," not Norwegians. (Indeed, in
Norway these days the words "immigrant" and "Muslim" are effec–
tively synonyms.) Here, too, the authorities, presumably fearing accusa–
tions of insensitivity or cultural imperialism, tended to avoid addressing
undemocratic practices within immigrant communities.
