No Problem With the Veil

Such attitudes have until recently been tolerated in the name of multiculturalism. British and other European politicians have bent over backward to be as accommodating as possible toward their Muslim citizens, fearing they would feel prey to racism and discrimination. Time and tolerance, it was believed, would bring assimilation and good neighborliness regardless of creed or ethnic origin. The fact that they haven't presents a challenge to this melting-pot thesis of integration. You see the result in rising anti-immigrant, anti-Islamist sentiment across the continent.

Less noticed, but more important however, has been the reaction within Europe's Muslim communities themselves. Once upon a time, in my district, the sons and daughters and grandchildren of first-generation immigrants seldom married into the broader community. Marriages were instead arranged within the family, reproducing patterns of poverty rather than yielding to the gentler and progressively more prosperous co-mingling of faiths and cultures that previous immigrant groups experienced. Today, many beautiful young women choose not to marry at all rather than accept a cousin imported from, say, Pakistan. However much young Muslims love their traditions, they more and more refuse to be told how to live their lives in a modern Britain.

The signs are also encouraging when it comes to what the former German foreign minister, Joschka Fischer, calls "the new totalitarianism of jihadi fundamentalism." The endless violence against democracy (virtual or verbal) by groups claiming to be acting on behalf of Islam has begun to change mainstream Muslim attitudes. Every one of my Muslim constituents, as best I can tell, hates terrorism. They shun violence and would willingly denounce terrorist cells to the local police.

To me, the most striking feature of the current debate is the degree to which, for almost the first time, it has been dominated by ordinary Muslim men and women speaking out. While radicals protest their right to teach school wearing a burqa, many others have gone on TV and radio to argue against them. They ask why reason and science cannot co-exist with faith--an argument settled for Christians centuries ago but which Islam has not fully begun. In Parliament, a young generation of elected Muslim lawmakers is taking on its elders and saying what once could not be said: that a modern Muslim community must not seek separation or superiority beyond the laws and customs that other Britons live by. Across Europe, old taboos are being broken. Yes, the likes of Straw and Blair feel free--indeed, compelled--to break with past political correctness. But so, increasingly, do Europe's Muslims.

MacShane, a Labour MP, was minister for Europe until 2005.

© 2006