I haven't read the book sounds interesting.

That said, I would warn that just because a movement is “modernizing” doesn't mean it's good… as I wrote earlier [1]:

“The problem with the Arab world (and those it influences) is not that it is modernizing too slowly, it is it is modernizing in the wrong way.”

The last “non-democratic force for secularization] were the Naserists, Baathists, etc, who did so much to destroy traditional cultures, and replace them with something much emptier, much more modern, and much worse.

Michael,

Indeed, but it's probably best for Europe if the natural economic stress of integration low-wage workers (for the purpose of decreasing the relative cost of labor) isn't complicated by cultural/civilizational tension, as well.

[1] http://www.tdaxp.com/archive/2007/01/09/jew.html

Imagine, your parents hauled you to a new and strange country when you were young, raised you in a Cabrini Green-style tenement and sent you to a shitty school. When you aren't underqualified for a job, you're being told (by someone or another) that you can't get a job because of your foreign heritage or skin color. And when the police aren't ignoring your entire neighborhood altogether, they're hassling you and your friends at slight provocations. Now imagine you're in your teens or early 20s (aka, the angry years).

You don't need to be muslim to riot under those conditions and if memory serves correct the Arabs weren't the only ones rioting a couple of years ago (I haven't read enough about the latest riots to know if that's still the case). You wouldn't even need to be muslim to be recruited by extremist groups– remember the Black Panthers in the '60s?

The problems with Islam is not confined to Muslims living in Europe… similar problems flair up throughout both Muslim countries and countries with Muslim minorities. (The US being a notable exception.)

Regardless, even if it was a problem with Europe (which I've considered previously), it still makes sense for Europe not to expose itself to more friction than necessary. If the same labor (euro-cost-wise) can be imported from the West Balkans or Ukraine as Arab countries or Turkey, but without the problems of “a new and strange” cultural shock, then do it.

[1] http://www.tdaxp.com/archive/2004/12/12/turkey_in_europe.html

Have you ever read “Globalized Islam: The Search for a New Ummah” by Oilvier Roy? He makes some interesting points, like, e.g., Islamism is non-democratic but nevertheless a force for secularisation (as it reifies the ideal of a nation in an area or demographic that was previously more interested in tribal politics and blood ties).

Political Islam in Europe (where I live — UK) is in fact much more western than Islamic; basically junior school Marxism (a point which Paul Berman also kinda makes).

So anyway, I'm wondering whether the violence in France is particularly “Islamic” and whether it should count against increasing connectivity with other states that are “Muslim” (and I'm not certain that either Russia or Turkey should be discribed as such).

Doesn't Turkey's recently increased “Islamisation” (if you will) really only represent an increase in democracy and the integration of previously Islamist and marginalised parties? Won't democracy in the Muslim world always result in this in the short term?

best,

vim

Short term
1. Give anti-discrimination laws some sharp teeth.
2. Give law enforcement in the ghettos teeth too.
3. If the Muslim immigrants aren't already citizens, give them a path to achieve it. It doesn't have to be an easy path: Germany's new language law, Holland's citizenship test, time in the Foreign Legion, or criminal record restrictions like I suggested with the Palestinians would all be appropriate approaches. There just has to be a path of some sort to being able to call themselves French (British, whatever).
3. If a portion of the young people don't want to be French or whatever, don't force them. Find out what job training they need to migrate to their parents' home countries and give it to them along with a one-way plane ticket. Let them be someone else's headache.
4. Depending on how badly the immigrants' children have been educated, giving the ones who want to become citizens remedial job training would also be a good idea.

Long term:
Fix the birth rates and the economy, and make sure the immigrants' schools are both up to snuff academically and integrated with the schools of native-born children.

In the future, this sort of friction should be minimized when possible. The West Balkans and Ukraine are better sources of new labor than North Africa or Turkey.

True, but it can re-enforce assimilation as the EU muslim population loses a powerful connection — continued immigration — to their ancestral countries.

“And treating Balkan and Ukrainian immigrants the same as it's treated said muslim immigrants in the past probably won't produce wonderful results.”

Indeed. Still, the lack of rioting, bombings, calls for holy wars, etc, even in the face of very questionable government policies (Italy's expulsions of Romanians, etc), imply that it would be considerably harder for a eastern Europeans to feel that they are being treated the same as European Muslims perceive their lot.

“Globalised Islam” is totally recommended: it focuses on the European Muslim experience as the paradigm example of the search for a new Muslim identity under the conditions of globalisation / modernity. A really thought provoking read.

One of Roy's points is that democratisation and secularisation are not necessarily carried out or helped by forces or entities that are in and of themselves democratic or secular. And furthermore, that secularism in the Mid East & wider Muslim world is, as you note, associated with dictatorships and non-democracies (Egypt, Turkey, Syria, etc). So Islamism (let's face it, a political, not, religious movement), from Roy's perspective, is a secularising force, because, although not secular itself, it acts to bind adherents to the idea of a nation, a group identitiy not based on blood ties, to say nothing of the western, secular (and obviously leftist) concepts it embeds in Muslim discourse, and the expression of a “religiosity” previously denied by the various Muslim autocrats.

Roy uses the example of The Reformation as an secularising event that was not driven by in-any-sense secular actors or individuals.