Wed, 20 Aug 2003

Westerners and good Muslims

Tariq Ramadhan claims that what we have here in the West is the absence of Islam (The Jakarta Post, Aug. 17, 2003). Well, it all depends on his perspective, on how he interpreted it and, of course, on how he views the issue of the relationship between the civil government and the religious authorities.

I am sure that many good Belgian Muslims would disagree with his opinion. Actually, a view on that issue is not clear yet as far as most Indonesian religious figures are concerned. It appears as if they are all confused when asked to have a clear position on that specific issue, even when they are involved in politics.

About the situation of Islam in the West, and in Belgium in particular, we have an Islam adapting to its new environment the best it can, step by step. Islam was nowhere to be seen at the end of the 1960s in our country. Now, we have a large community of Muslim people -- mostly from rural regions of Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia and Turkey -- who came to work in Belgium.

Most of them are living in urban areas such as Brussels and Antwerp. Seemingly, they like it here since many of them decided to settle and to bring more members of their families to make a new life in Belgium. The Belgian civil government is giving its place to Islam on a slow and legitimate pace so as to ensure that there is no conflict of interest between the respect of basic Human Rights and how Islam is lived in general.

So the problem, if any so far, is that the majority of Belgian people are opposed -- who could say they are wrong -- to an Islam which would like to import "extremist views or habits" into our country. The vast majority of the Belgian people do not want to see Muslim people in their streets wearing religious attributes such as the veil for example. It is contrary to our culture to wear such religious attributes in school for example.

I, personally, have nothing against that when such items are worn by consenting women. However, in many cases, you have many problems with that specific issue in the Muslim community (mostly rural Maghrebins who are intolerant about their women making their own choices and are definitely not willing to give them the same freedom as Belgian women, indeed a similar thing exists for most Indonesian women).

If we do accept the import of Islam in Belgium, we do not accept the import of foreign cultural "attributes and habits" of any religion in our country that is contrary to the important basic human rights that Belgian women and men obtained step by step, sometimes fought over, -- over the last two centuries.

YVAN MAGAIN Tubize, Belgium