Edward Said Salon: «Islam in Europe — the Dutch experience» (second session)

Pal-Think for Strategic Studies organised, within the events of its “Edward Said” intellectual salon, in Gaza City yesterday, Sunday, a discussion session entitled “Islam in Europe… the experience of the Netherlands”. The session aimed to shed light on the question of the coexistence and integration of Muslims in Western societies, especially the Netherlands, which has witnessed severe tension in recent years. The salon hosted Mr Omar Shaban” to speak on this subject, and he began by introducing the Netherlands, saying: the Netherlands is a relatively small country in area, about 41,500 km, currently inhabited by 16 million people, that is, a density of 400 persons per square kilometre, and it is therefore considered one of the highest population densities in Europe. Its system of government is a constitutional monarchy and parliament is the legislative authority. Economically, the domestic product amounts to about 700 billion dollars and the unemployment rate is less than 5%, and it depends on refined heavy industry, natural gas, tourism, agricultural supplies and cheeses. Average per-capita income amounts to 35,000 dollars.
Foreigners in the Netherlands:
The Dutch constitution defines the foreigner as “the one who comes from another country”. Foreigners represent a fifth of the population, 20%, of whom 9% are of Islamic origin while 11% are of non-Islamic origin, most of them from the former Dutch colonies, Indonesia and Suriname. The Netherlands is considered the second European country in terms of the number of Muslims in it, where their proportion amounts to about 6% of the total population compared with France 7%, Denmark 5% and Switzerland 4%. The Netherlands is also considered one of the countries most attractive for political-asylum applications, receiving about 15,000 political-asylum seekers annually.
After that introduction, Mr Shaban summed up the situation of Muslims and their relationship with Dutch society by saying:” For the past two decades the Netherlands has constituted a model at the European and Western levels in respecting the rights of religious and national minorities, foremost among them the Muslim minority, as the Muslim community in the Netherlands has been able to achieve very distinguished accomplishments in the fields of politics, the economy and education, thanks to the climate of tolerance and coexistence available in the country. For example, there are eight deputies out of one hundred and fifty in the Dutch parliament, and there are also more than fifty councillors in the local councils of the major Dutch cities, and the mayor of Rotterdam, the second-largest Dutch city, is Mr Aboutaleb, who is of Moroccan origin. In addition to more than forty Islamic primary schools, funded from the Dutch state treasury, in which more than thirty thousand Muslim pupils are educated. There are also in the Netherlands more than 450 mosques, prayer halls and Islamic centres and more than 23 minarets. Meanwhile the Dutch government allocates more than half a billion euros annually to projects to raise up the educational, social, economic, political and cultural conditions of Muslims,
The tension in the relationship between the Islamic community and the far right in the Netherlands:
The far right attempts to influence and belittle the scale of the Islamic community's positive contribution in all fields of life. The seeds of tension began with the emergence of the second generation of immigrants, since the first generation was concerned with searching for job opportunities and did not enjoy a high level of education and culture, whereas the second generation of them, which became more educated and aware, began to demand its civil rights and was able to compete for high-level jobs and to obtain distinguished positions in the state and the private sector. The crisis that lay beneath the ashes between the Islamic community and the far right erupted in November 2004 when a young Moroccan killed the film director “Theo van Gogh”, known for his hostility to Islam, who had produced a film insulting Islam; the far right, in response to this incident, burned some mosques and Islamic schools. The conflict erupted again shortly after the far-right deputy Geert Wilders produced the film “Fitna”, in which he likens Islam to fascism and the Quran to Hitler's book “Mein Kampf”.
Shaban affirmed that Dutch society and the Muslim community still face many problems in this field, among them:- the definition of “integration” .. and whether it is a goal everyone seeks to achieve or a continuous process that never ends; also how integration is measured and what its manifestations and indicators are, and how to reconcile total integration with preserving cultural and religious identity. Likewise the problem of naming, since Dutch society still applies to foreigners the label “immigrants”, which indicates in its substance that they are still “strangers”. Everyone is therefore seeking a more positive term such as “the new Dutch”.
On another level, external interference sometimes plays a negative role in inflaming the internal conflict, which led the Muslim community in the Netherlands to ask Sheikh Yusuf al-Qaradawi not to interfere in their affairs when the latest crisis was stirred up, asking him and affirming to him that the Muslim community with its institutions is capable of dealing with the right in the Netherlands.
The meeting was attended by a select group of media people, intellectuals and thinkers, as well as by a number of Dutch nationals working in international institutions in the Gaza Strip.