Interesting article:
"If we don't take drastic measures to modernize our culture, Muslims will continue to live in the dark ages"
Can Dutch Muslims convince voters Islam Is tolerant?
Wall Street Journal Europe 14/5/02
By Dan Bilefsky.
AMSTERDAM - Making his way past a drag queen in a pink feather boa, Imam Marzouk Aulad Abdullah stepped on the stage at a gay pride festival earlier this month. "I do not have a gay detector at the entrance of my mosque - anybody is welcome to come and pray," he said, to hoots and cheers from the crowd. "Islam is a humanistic religion and we must be open to everyone."
Off to the side, Oussama "Sam" Cherribi beamed. A Moroccan-born member of the Dutch Parliament, Mr. Cherribi has become the spin doctor of the Dutch Muslim community. He orchestrated the imam's appearance and persuaded him to wear a Western suit rather than his traditional Moroccan djellabah. He coaches the soft-spoken religious leader for television appearances, telling him to smile at the camera and to pepper his speeches with terms like "tolerance," "humanism" and "progressive Islam." He also translates the Dutch-speaking imam's words into French or English.
"We Muslims need an outspoken person who can show that we are not backward, and Oussama acts as my eyes and ears," Imam Marzouk says.
With national elections Wednesday, Mr. Cherribi is leading a campaign to convince a skeptical electorate that Islam is tolerant even by Holland's famously liberal standards. His efforts, begun a year ago, acquired more urgency with the surge in popularity of candidate Pim Fortuyn, who branded Islam a "backward religion" that threatened Dutch acceptance of homosexuality and women's rights. After Mr. Fortuyn's assassination last week, his party is expecting a large sympathy vote. The election may be determined, in part, by how many Dutch voters choose Mr. Fortuyn's party as a statement against immigration.
In an opinion poll released Monday, the first since Mr. Fortuyn's death, his party polled 18.5%, two percentage points behind the right-of-center Christian Democrats. The poll, by the Amsterdam pollster NIPO, had a margin of error of 1.3 percentage points. If the Fortuyn party does as well in the actual voting, it stands a good chance of becoming part of the governing coalition.
Mr. Cherribi's tolerance campaign faces daunting challenges. Traditionalists within the Dutch Muslim population of nearly one million people accuse Mr. Cherribi of selling out Islamic values in the hope of gaining votes and respectability. Yassin Hartog, director of the Islamic Citizenship Office in The Hague, says Mr. Cherribi's campaign has offended many Muslims. "There is a backlash against him because many in the Muslim community feel he has sold out to the `whities' and see him as an apologist for ignorant assimilation policies," Mr. Hartog says.
Fearful that Mr. Cherribi isn't resonating with enough voters, the Liberal Party, a right-of-center member of the governing coalition, dropped him from its list of candidates for Wednesday's election. "Ousamma was too much of an intellectual and a bit too `out there' for the typical Dutch voter," says Hans van Baalen, a party spokesman. Undeterred, Mr. Cherribi says he will run for the European Parliament in 2004, and so press his policies in a broader forum.
The 42-year-old Mr. Cherribi came to Amsterdam in 1983 from Rabat. After completing a doctoral degree on Dutch imams, he became a Dutch citizen and joined the Liberal Party, which advocates integrating immigrants into mainstream Dutch society. In 1994, he won a seat in Parliament, representing Amsterdam. "I'm looking for the citizen in the migrant and not the migrant in the citizen," his campaign posters declared.
But while Mr. Fortuyn wanted to bar further immigration, claiming the Netherlands was "full," Mr. Cherribi advocates allowing more migrants into the country and integrating them. He wants all Dutch immigrants to memorize the national anthem and urges the government to bus immigrant children to schools that are now all-white. He calls for the Dutch government to create a course to teach imams about Dutch tolerance. And he has proposed the training of "homegrown" imams, arguing that they will be less doctrinaire than those from Islamic countries.
"Imams need to learn that there is a separation between church and state and that they need to follow Dutch laws rather than the Quran," he says.
In many Islamic countries, homosexual behavior is considered a crime, sometimes punishable by death. In the Quran, there are seven quotations referring to the "people of Lot" - or the Sodomites - whose punishment is linked with their sexual deviance, says Omar Nahas, author of a book on homosexuality and Islam.
But there isn't an explicit reference to homosexuality, making it difficult to come to any clear conclusions, says Imam Mazouk, who appeared at the gay pride rally. "Muhammad says that every human being is a construction of Allah," he says. "If the Prophet can show such compassion, why can't we treat homosexuals as Muslims?"
To try to prod Dutch imams to take a broader view, Mr. Cherribi last year organized a Dutch language course in Amsterdam for a dozen conservative imams. One big problem was their resistance to being taught by women wearing skirts and blouses. He also shepherded a group of Muslim leaders to the Dutch Parliament for a panel discussion about Islam's attitudes toward homosexuality and women's emancipation.
But relations continued to deteriorate. Early this year, Dutch media focused on an attack on an openly gay Dutch schoolteacher by Moroccan-born youths. That was followed by a television interview with Khalil El Moumni, the leader of the a Nasr mosque in Rotterdam, who called homosexuality a sickness. "If men continue to marry men and women continue to marry women, then Dutch society will disappear," the imam said. After the interview, two members of the Dutch Parliament demanded that the imam be deported to Morocco. Now the imam refuses to speak to the press, and his friends say that he is so afraid of the backlash that he seldom leaves his mosque.
"There was a lot of fear and misunderstanding about Islam in Dutch society and the incident just served to confirm the stereotype," Mr. Cherribi says.
The Sept. 11 terrorist attacks in the U.S. heightened anti-Muslim sentiment throughout Europe. During the following month, there were 70 attacks against mosques in the Netherlands, one of the highest tolls in Europe, according to the Moroccan Association of Mosques. The Sultan Ahmet mosque in Zaandam, one of the biggest Turkish mosques in the country, was nearly burned to the ground by arsonists. The Dutch intelligence agency said it stepped up investigations of mosque-funded schools to see whether children were being taught to hate the Netherlands. The Dutch left-wing political magazine HP Detijd captured the mood when it published a cover story with the headline "What's Wrong with Islam?"
For his part, Mr. Cherribi tried to show a different face of Islam. He renamed himself "Sam" and draped himself in an American flag during an address to the Parliament by the queen. "Having the same name as the bearded al Qaeda chief is too much of a burden to bear for a Dutch politician," he says.
After Mr. Fortuyn's assassination, Mr. Cherribi went into overdrive, touring mosques around the country, organizing debates about Islam and Dutch society and stepping up his efforts to recruit imams to the cause. A few days after Mr. Fortuyn's murder, Mr. Cherribi told Muslim leaders gathered in a large Amsterdam mosque that unless they promote tolerance, "the Fortuyn message may be adopted by more extreme groups who see him as a martyr."
At the urging of Mr. Cherribi and others, about 200 Turkish, Moroccan and North African leaders from across the country laid wreaths of flowers at Mr. Fortuyn's home after the assassination. A young Muslim woman wearing a headdress left a banner: "This wasn't necessary."
Mr. Cherribi is continuing to look for allies. This past weekend, he made a stop at Habibi Ana, an Arabic gay bar in Amsterdam, to confer with Chafik Kadir, a 36 year-old Moroccan-born immigrant who is gaining prominence in the Muslim gay community. Inside the cavernous bar, Muslim men of all ages greet each other with "Salem Alaykum" and gyrate on the dance floor to the sound of Turkish pop.
Mr. Kadir, who "came out" at the recent gay pride festival, says he's determined to show other young gay Muslims that they needn't be ashamed of their sexual orientation. He even praises Mr. Fortuyn for forcing the Muslim community to confront its taboos. "I was thrilled when he entered Dutch politics - here, finally, was someone willing to talk about issues that no one else would dare mention," he says, before taking a sip of his beer.
The youngest of 10 children in a conservative mosque-going family, Mr. Kadir will appear this month as a guest on a televised panel discussion titled "Coming Out of the Muslim Closet." He volunteers for Youssef, a gay Muslim organization that counsels young Muslims struggling to come to terms with their sexuality. "In my community it is dangerous to come out - if people find out you're gay, they think that you're a prostitute," he says.
Resistance to the tolerant-Islam message is evident in The Hague, about 50 kilometers away. Kneeling on the Persian carpet of the El-Islam Mosque after Friday afternoon prayers, Talib Aakel, a 26 year-old electrician, says he rejects the term "gay Muslim."
"Homosexuality is strictly forbidden by the Quran," he says. "Assimilation shouldn't mean that I have to drink alcohol or that my sister must wear a short skirt."
But Mr. Cherribi is undeterred. He is preparing a database of progressive imams across Europe whom he hopes to sign up for his campaign. "Other Muslim leaders like to kiss ass to other Muslims, but if we don't take drastic measures to modernize our culture, Muslims will continue to live in the dark ages," he says.
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