When cultures clash in climate of fear

Ian Buruma, Guardian News Service, London

The empire strikes back in strange ways. A few weeks ago I strolled around one of the more arresting monuments of European imperialism. It is called, in Flemish, the Jubelpark, opened in Brussels in 1880. To "jubel" is to shout in celebration, in this case of 50 years of Belgian independence. The park still reeks of money made in the Belgian Congo. One of the donors was a general who made his fortune there. His statue is at one end of the park. At the other is an arch of triumph, bigger and more grandiose than anything in Paris or Rome, bearing the arms of King Leopold II, the man who owned the Congo.

Between the general and the royal arch is a monument called Belgian Pioneers in the Congo. A relief, now sadly eroded by acid rain, shows a benign European patriarch receiving naked Africans, crouching at his feet. And above his head is a nude virginal figure, representing Belgium, spreading her arms over several black women holding up their babies for her blessing. The engraved text informs us that Belgium "is receiving the black race" to further "civilization".

Perhaps people really believed in these pious sentiments at the time. The hypocrisy is breathtaking, of course, but that may not have been so obvious then.

Very near the Congo relief is an even more extraordinary monument to pious hypocrisy. It is called the Temple of the Human Passions, designed by Victor Horta. It is a simple, neoclassical building, constructed in the 1890s, whose contents are barred from view by a thick iron door. In fact, ever since the Belgian government commissioned the sculptor, Jef Lambeaux, to depict the human passions, as a stern warning to King Leopold's good Catholic subjects against a life of vice, the temple has been sealed. And when you get down on your knees, to peer through the keyhole at the art work inside, you can see why. For the evildoers indulging their wicked human passions are simply having too much fun.

It is a stone orgy of writhing limbs and ecstatic, eye-rolling expressions, half way between Rubens and Benny Hill. There is no reason why Belgians should be shielded from such a scene now, for Belgium, like France, has shed most of its Catholic prudery. Yet the building is still closed, and this is because its location is now owned by the adjacent mosque, which illustrates a more general phenomenon. Immigrants, sometimes from the old colonies, are the pious ones now. They still have the religious fervor which the host countries have rejected.

This can cause problems. Think of the Muslims in Britain, burning effigies of Salman Rushdie, and calling for his death. Or think of the difficulties in France of integrating veiled Muslim girls into the secular education system. Think of the young people born in Europe, who are forced to marry people from villages thousands of miles away, and the fate of some who refuse.

The tendency of our political elites has been to dodge these issues. On the left, even raising them meant you might be branded as a racist, while some on the right would like the rest of us to emulate the stricter ways of immigrant parents. The Rushdie case, for example, was an occasion for some conservatives to call for tighter blasphemy laws.

September 11, and to some extent the current violence in Israel, has changed the picture, in this, as in so many other ways. Instances of young Muslims, born and bred in Europe, rushing off to the Middle East to be religious martyrs and suicidal killers, or torching synagogues in Brussels and Marseilles, have suddenly brought a simmering problem into the open.

Relatively complacent before, many people are now frightened of the strangers around them. A veiled head or bearded face is no longer seen as an exoticism or administrative nuisance, but as a threat. And this is being exploited by rightwing demagogues.

The clearest instance of this is the Dutch populist, Pim Fortuyn, who wants to halt immigration, especially from Muslim countries, because immigrants, in his view, are a menace to the liberal values of Dutch society. Here, then, for the first time, we have a rightwinger denouncing immigrants for their bigotry. Similar arguments have been made in Germany. Jean-Marie Le Pen is hardly the man to promote liberalism, but even he, in his boundless hypocrisy, has used the anti-Jewish outrages of Algerian youths to frighten the good people of la France profonde about Muslim fanaticism.

The current success of rightwing scaremongering should at least force us to confront the problems of immigration. Islamism is a serious issue, because it allows confused youths to identify with a worldwide brotherhood, with its own ethics and goals. It gives them something to believe in. And one of the reasons some do so readily is that modern, secular, liberal society has little to offer in its place. The whole point of our disenchanted society is that we have more or less banished faith. This does not cause widespread anguish among the mainstream of young Europeans, but for people who feel trapped between conservative immigrant parents and a bewildering society in which they feel barely accepted, it can.

Liberal pieties about freedom and prosperity don't get us very far. For freedom is something that aspiring Islamists, who have already tried discos and drugs, often seek to escape. And prosperity throws out no moral or social anchors either. To say that we should all return to an enchanted world of church and hierarchy is not the answer I would seek. And a conscription army which could conceivably help to integrate people from all races and creeds no longer exists. So there is no easy answer, but we should at least recognize that immigration can produce severe cultural tensions. If we don't, we hand the debate over to the demagogues. And we all know what can happen then.