While ruling al-Andalus, the Muslims also looked southward, to West Africa across the Sahara. There, on the savannas between the forests of the coast and the desert of the interior, lay a tier of thriving African states in control of trade and traffic. From what is today Senegal in the west to northern Nigeria in the east, these states benefited from what economic geographers call "double complementarity": the peoples of the steppes to the north needed goods available from the forests of the south (starches, spices, animal products, building materials) while those of the forests wanted items from the interior such as leather and salt. These goods were traded on the bustling markets of the savanna states, and the Niger River ("where the camel met the canoe") was the Mississippi of West Africa. Through these markets, attracting the attention of the Muslims of Morocco, moved a considerable quantity of gold and gemstones.
Stable, durable, and in control of large populations and territories, the West African states such as Ghana, Mali, Songhai, and others were tempting targets for the powerful Muslims of the north. Caravans carried not only Moroccan leather but also Muslim proselytizers, and before long the kings and chiefs of West Africa's savanna states were converted to Islam and were ordering their subjects to follow suit. This led to a momentous cultural reorientation, because now the savanna corridor between forest and desert stretching across Africa from west to east became a conduit to Mecca. Ghana fell apart when the Muslim invasion was backed up by armed force, but Mali survived, and from there, gold-laden annual pilgrimages involving tens of thousands of the newly faithful walked eastward, making Khartoum a gathering point before heading for their final stage to Mecca. Khartoum became a West African outpost, its population swelled by pilgrims who never made it to Mecca and others who stayed there on the way back.
Christianity, with its six-century head start, did not make an impact in West Africa until colonial times, but in Africa's "Horn," where Ethiopia lies today, several African states had accepted Christian beliefs: Kush, Nubia, and Axum among them, the last giving rise to the Christian dynasty that eventually shaped modern Ethiopia. When Islam reached this area, it could not overpower these kingdoms, and Christianity survives there to this day, virtually encircled by Islamic societies.
Islam's southward march was halted by the arrival of European colonists, who established beachheads along the West and East African coast and moved inland, taking control not only of peoples who practiced traditional African religions but also those who had adopted Islam. The modern map of West Africa bears witness to this episode: boundaries between former British, French, and German possessions run from the coast into the interior, sometimes for dozens, elsewhere for hundreds of miles. Britain's Nigeria extended from the coastal forests to the interior desert, and its girdle of boundaries threw together Muslims and non-Muslims alike. Then the colonists set about promoting Christianity among their subjects, so that Nigeria today has a Muslim north and a mainly Christian south (traditional African religions do survive in Africa's "Christianized" areas), creating severe tensions that lead to recurrent riots and political strains that could eventually endanger the state.
When the colonial powers gathered in Berlin in 1884 to finalize their partition of Africa, they paid little heed to the religious divide that stretched across the continent from Guinea in West Africa to Kenya in East Africa. Not only Nigeria but other West African states, as well as Chad, Sudan, and Ethiopia to the east, found themselves with regional-cultural contrasts fraught with problems. In the process, the colonial powers created a regional problem whose consequences they could not foresee. The Islamic Front has become a zone of conflict that threatens the cohesion of countries and facilitates the actions of terrorists and insurgents.
Undoubtedly the costliest impact of the divisive Islamic Front has been in Sudan, whose Muslim government waged a decades-long, bitter war against the three southern provinces where African Christian and animist communities are in the majority. The cost in terms of casualties and dislocations will never be known; estimates of the death toll over more than three decades of conflict are in the hundreds of thousands. The fundamentalist-dominated Sudan regime wanted to impose Islamic (Sharia) law in the South; Southerners wanted independence or, failing that, protection and guarantees against Khartoum's cultural domination. Finally, in 2005, a settlement of sorts was reached, but almost simultaneously another deadly conflict broke out elsewhere near the Islamic Front, this time in Sudan's Darfur Province along the border with Chad, costing tens of thousands of lives even as the United Nations deliberated over the question of whether what was happening there could be technically construed as genocide.
In West Africa, the Islamic Front's proximity to Cote d'Ivoire proved costly in 2004 as well. Long a stable and relatively prosperous country, Ivory Coast had had a northern Muslim minority ever since its territory was bounded. But in postcolonial years, Muslim herders and farmers from neighboring Burkina Faso to the north have been crossing the border and settling in rural areas of the country. Initially there were occasional skirmishes over crops damaged by Muslim pastoralists' cattle and land taken by immigrants, but then the growing strength of the Muslim minority began to translate into political power. When the country's long-term ruler died and a Muslim politician sought the president's office, he was disqualified by southerners and civil war broke out, ruining the cocoa-based economy and precipitating French intervention. The French force was accused of favoring the Muslim northerners, the large French expatriate community was set upon by mobs, and even the modern, once-thriving port of Abidjan was engulfed by violence. The effects of the Islamic Front had reached the sea.
If the breakdown of order in Cote d'Ivoire was a shock to observers of the African scene, simultaneous events in Liberia were even more surprising. Liberia has long been in the grip of ethnic conflict, but in late 2004 reports from the capital, Monrovia, described serious clashes between Muslims and Christians in several parts of the country. This, as far as I have been able to determine, is the first instance of such religious strife in the country's history. As Figure 9-2 shows, Liberia lies to the south of the Islamic Front, but the Islamic component of its population has been rising and is now 16 percent. Still, Liberia's Muslim minority is scattered in the main towns, not in the northern region of the country. Whether the Muslim-Christian clashes are an isolated event or a signal of more serious problems is not yet clear.
As the map below indicates (with a 90% Muslim population at the top), the Islamic Front loops into the Horn of Africa, coinciding very roughly with the border between mainly Muslim Eritrea and dominantly Christian Ethiopia before dividing the latter into a Muslim east (Ogaden) and a Christian west. The Muslim east is the historic home of the Somali people living on the Ethiopian side of the border with the failed state of Somalia that, as the map indicates, is virtually 100 percent Muslim. Ethiopia's Christianized core area, centered on the capital of Adis Abeba, lies in the highlands, a natural fortress that has protected the country in the past and from where the founding emperor, Menelik, extended its power over the encircling plains. In the process Ethiopia's Christian rulers gained control over the Ogaden with its Muslim Somali population and its leading city, Harer (Fig. 9-2). Thus the Somali found themselves on both sides of a superimposed border, but after the colonists withdrew it mattered little. Clan allegiances and divisions, not invented boundaries, dominated life. Somali pastoralists drove their herds across the borders in pursuit of seasonal rains as they had for centuries, and in Somalia they fought among themselves over influence and dominance.
The approximate position of the Islamic Front in Ethiopia is of less concern that its extension along the Somali-Kenya border, because Somalia has been a failed state for decades and it is there, rather than in Muslim Ethiopia, that the greatest potential for terrorist activity exists. In early 2005, Somalia remained a state divided into three parts; Somaliland, the former British colony in the north, doing best in every way; Puntland in the middle, seeking to distance itself from the rest, and rump Somalia in the south, centered on the capital and largest urban agglomeration, Mogadishu. It is the southern third of Somalia that is in the worst condition, in effect a territory without the rule of law.
Long before Somalia became linked with fears of Islamic terrorism, Kenya had been experiencing the effects of terrorist activity based on the Muslim side of the Islamic Front. Somalia shifta, marauders on the move, have been attacking targets in northeastern Kenya ranging from game lodges to archeological digs and from cattle owners to bus drivers for many years. They have struck as far west as Lake Turkana, disappearing into the Ogaden on their way back to Somalia; they have traded their sharp-edged pangas for guns, and they are a menace. But they do not have an ideological agenda: that dimension only appeared during the 1990s, when East Africa became the stage for al-Qaeda's attacks on United States embassies in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam and subsequent assaults on a tourist hotel near coastal Mombasa and an Israeli airliner departing Mombasa Airport. As in the case of Bali, note the juxtaposition of refuge and target: Western interests in East Africa's cities lie short distances from areas as tribal as Pakistan's Waziristan.
Is the Islamic Front static or mobile? The evidence from C6te d'Ivoire to Kenya suggests the latter. But even as the Islamic Front moves southward, African countries well beyond its leading edge form obvious opportunities for Islamic expansion. The horrific experiences of Rwandans, Congolese, and the citizens of other malfunctioning African states (or parts of states) may be so strongly associated with Christian contexts-many Rwandans were herded into churches and killed with the connivance of ministersthat Islam may appear as a hopeful alternative. Although data may be unreliable, it is noteworthy that Rwanda two decades ago reported that 2 percent of its population was Muslim; today it is reporting 15 percent, a huge increase in a Roman Catholic country.
The above map as mentions the percentages of Muslims in the populations of African countries, and the Islamic Front effect is obvious from these data. In general, the closer to the Islamic Front, the higher the Muslim component. Tanzania's high percentage, much higher than Kenya's, results in part from its merger with Zanzibar, since almost all Zanzibari are Muslims. But even so, Tanzania's coastal zone, including Dar es Salaam, is strongly Muslim, and may become a regional extension of the Islamic Front. Note that countries in approximately the same latitude-the Democratic Republic of Congo, Malawi, Zambia, Angola-report a minimal Muslim presence.
Today South Africa's population is about 3 percent Muslim, and some of the country's 1 million Muslims are South Asians, descendants of a later immigration now living in Kwazulu-Natal, in the city of Durban and its hinterland. But Islamic activism, and some incidents of terrorism, center on Cape Town. Soon after South Africa's democratic transition, which unleashed freedoms unheard of under the repressive apartheid regime, an Islamic group began issuing fatwas against pornography, homosexuality, drug use, and other "excesses" of freedom; warnings against commercialism were followed by the bombing of a Planet Hollywood in a new waterfront shopping center. Effective police work rolled up the group responsible, but a low-grade terrorist threat continues. In April 2004 there were unconfirmed reports of a threat and interdicted attack on the visiting cruise ship Queen Elizabeth II.
As the above map shows, there are no confirmed links between any remaining terrorist cells in the Cape Town area and either Southeast Asian or Middle Eastern networks; the activism of the 1990s appeared to be homegrown. If there is any external link, it may be to Nigeria and have more to do with organized crime than with terrorism. But Cape Town is one of those chaotic, fast-growing cities that harbor terrorists elsewhere in the world. Behind the facade of Table Mountain lie the "Cape Flats," a vast expanse where more than 2 million arrivals have built an informal city far larger than the original. Few contrasts in the world are more vivid than that between the opulence of the Victoria Waterfront and its shiny malls and luxury hotels and the abject poverty of "The Flats" a short drive away.
As for the situation specifically in France , since World War II, France has absorbed large numbers of immigrants for economic reasons, especially from its former colonies. The 1960s saw a steady influx of more than 100,000 workers a year. This immigration amounted to 3 million foreign workers by 1970 and 6 million in the mid-1990s. Without this cheap source of labor, France could not have modernized its economy. Today, however, as it makes the transition from an industrial economy to a service economy, France no longer needs unskilled or semi-skilled foreign labor.
The second generation of North African origin, nicknamed the beurs, express frustration and despair at being second-class citizens. In a society that has more than 13 percent unemployment and that has become increasingly hostile toward immigrants, especially North Africans, they have little hope of upward mobility. According to many, France has never fully accepted North African immigrants, and the second generation perhaps even less than the first. That they speak French fluently and readily absorb French culture does not make them welcome in France as earlier waves of immigrants had been, including the Jews and Protestants, Italians and Russians. Even those Algerians who are relatively well integrated into French society, and who think of themselves as French or Westernized, find themselves sometimes treated differently than the indigenous French people. Most North Africans feel they are trapped in a hopeless downward spiral of joblessness, racial discrimination, and clashes with police. What the inner cities are to the United States, the banlieus (suburbs) are to France.
By the end of the Mitterrand period, racial and ethnic integration had failed at every level of French society. This failure explains the large and increasing number of Islamic associations in France that attempt to "re-Islamize" Muslim communities. In the 1970s and early 1980s, these associations, such as Jama`at at-Tabligh (Society for the Spreading of Islam), financed essentially by the petrodollars of Saudi Arabia and Kuwait, were involved in social and cultural activities (such as helping school dropouts and drug addicts, and giving financial assistance to needy families). As a sign of the proliferation of associations, the Union of Islamic Organizations in France (UOIF) brought together just thirty associations in 1980 and approximately 200 in 1995.
Then there is the National Front, founded in 1972, it emerged in the 1990s as the primary challenger to the Fifth Republic and its status as a liberal democracy. The common denominator of Le Pen's militants, like those backing any ultra-rightist party, is their hatred of immigrants, who are blamed for society's ills, like crime and unemployment. Within a single decade, support for this party rose from 1 to 16 percent of the electorate, even as all the other parties lost ground. The party's ideological influence is greater than its raw numbers suggest, for one out of three persons of voting age admits to agreeing with some of Le Pen's ideas, namely, the expulsion of three million Arabs.
To recapture the support of voters lost to the National Front, the Chirac government (as well as its leftist opposition) has embraced harsh measures against Arab communities. It dispatches more money to the police to fight violence in the suburbs. Rather than create more jobs for young members of minority groups, the government favors more effective tools to fight social violence and terrorism. This "iron fist" policy in fact implements Le Pen's politics, just as the Socialists implemented the Right's politics in the past. If the socioeconomic crisis is further exacerbated, Le Pen could take power through democratic means, much as Hitler did in 1933.
And , there is the Muslim Brotherhood, In France, the Union des Organisations Islamiques de France (Union of Islamic Organizations of France) has become the predominant organization in the government's Islamic Council. In Italy, the Unione delle Comunita' ed Organizzazioni Islamiche in Italia (Union of the Islamic Communities and Organizations in Italy) is the government's prime partner in dialogue regarding Italian Islamic issues.
According to an article in Time, Nov. 2, 2003, parallel to European Union integration efforts, the Muslim Brotherhood is also seeking to integrate its various European proxies. Over the past fifteen years, the Muslim Brotherhood has created a series of pan-European organizations such as the Federation of Islamic Organizations in Europe, in which representatives from national organizations can meet and plan initiatives.
Perhaps the Muslim Brotherhood's greatest pan-European impact has, as with the Islamische Gemeinschaft Deutschland, been with its youth organization. In June 1996, Muslim youth organizations from Sweden, France, and England joined forces with the Federation of Islamic Organizations in Europe and the World Assembly of Muslim Youth to create a European Islamic youth organization. Three months later, thirty-five delegates from eleven countries met in Leicester and formally launched the Forum of European Muslim Youth and Student Organizations (FEMYSO), which maintains its headquarters in Brussels.
Ibrahim el-Zayat, who held the presidency until his commitments in Germany forced him to step down, even used the FEMYSO perch to address the European Parliament. Because the Muslim Brotherhood provides the bulk of FEMYSO's constituent organizations, it provides the "de facto voice of the Muslim youth in Europe." While FEMYSO claims that it "is committed to fighting prejudices at all the levels, so that the future of Europe is a multicultural, inclusive and respectful one,"such statements ring hollow given the position of sponsors like the World Assembly of Muslim Youth which believes that "the Jews are enemies of the faithful, God, and the Angels; the Jews are humanity's enemies. … Every tragedy that inflicts the Muslims is caused by the Jews."
Bassam Tibi, a German professor of Syrian descent and an expert on Islam in Europe, thinks that Europeans—and Germans in particular—fear the accusation of racism. Radicals in sheep's clothing have learned that they can silence almost everybody with the accusation of xenophobia. Thus any criticism of Muslim Brotherhood-linked organizations is followed by outcries of racism and anti-Muslim persecution.(Bassam Tibi, Islamische Zuwanderung, Die gescheiterte Integration Munich, 2002, p. 135.)
-Islam spread along the northern shores of Africa by caravan and along the eastern coast by boat, establishing itself in modern-day Egypt before the end of the seventh century and reaching Morocco before the end of the eighth. The faith's rapid diffusion transformed not only what we call the Middle East today but also North and East Africa, reaching Dar es Salaam, Tanzania by the eleventh century-about the same time it penetrated modern China after sweeping across Central Asia. From their bridgehead in North Africa, the Moors (or Mors, hence Morocco) invaded Iberia, where flourishing Islam left indelible imprints on the cultural landscape.
While ruling al-Andalus, the Muslims also looked southward, to West Africa across the Sahara. There, on the savannas between the forests of the coast and the desert of the interior, lay a tier of thriving African states in control of trade and traffic. From what is today Senegal in the west to northern Nigeria in the east, these states benefited from what economic geographers call "double complementarity": the peoples of the steppes to the north needed goods available from the forests of the south (starches, spices, animal products, building materials) while those of the forests wanted items from the interior such as leather and salt. These goods were traded on the bustling markets of the savanna states, and the Niger River ("where the camel met the canoe") was the Mississippi of West Africa. Through these markets, attracting the attention of the Muslims of Morocco, moved a considerable quantity of gold and gemstones.
Stable, durable, and in control of large populations and territories, the West African states such as Ghana, Mali, Songhai, and others were tempting targets for the powerful Muslims of the north. Caravans carried not only Moroccan leather but also Muslim proselytizers, and before long the kings and chiefs of West Africa's savanna states were converted to Islam and were ordering their subjects to follow suit. This led to a momentous cultural reorientation, because now the savanna corridor between forest and desert stretching across Africa from west to east became a conduit to Mecca. Ghana fell apart when the Muslim invasion was backed up by armed force, but Mali survived, and from there, gold-laden annual pilgrimages involving tens of thousands of the newly faithful walked eastward, making Khartoum a gathering point before heading for their final stage to Mecca. Khartoum became a West African outpost, its population swelled by pilgrims who never made it to Mecca and others who stayed there on the way back.
Christianity, with its six-century head start, did not make an impact in West Africa until colonial times, but in Africa's "Horn," where Ethiopia lies today, several African states had accepted Christian beliefs: Kush, Nubia, and Axum among them, the last giving rise to the Christian dynasty that eventually shaped modern Ethiopia. When Islam reached this area, it could not overpower these kingdoms, and Christianity survives there to this day, virtually encircled by Islamic societies.
Islam's southward march was halted by the arrival of European colonists, who established beachheads along the West and East African coast and moved inland, taking control not only of peoples who practiced traditional African religions but also those who had adopted Islam. The modern map of West Africa bears witness to this episode: boundaries between former British, French, and German possessions run from the coast into the interior, sometimes for dozens, elsewhere for hundreds of miles. Britain's Nigeria extended from the coastal forests to the interior desert, and its girdle of boundaries threw together Muslims and non-Muslims alike. Then the colonists set about promoting Christianity among their subjects, so that Nigeria today has a Muslim north and a mainly Christian south (traditional African religions do survive in Africa's "Christianized" areas), creating severe tensions that lead to recurrent riots and political strains that could eventually endanger the state.
When the colonial powers gathered in Berlin in 1884 to finalize their partition of Africa, they paid little heed to the religious divide that stretched across the continent from Guinea in West Africa to Kenya in East Africa. Not only Nigeria but other West African states, as well as Chad, Sudan, and Ethiopia to the east, found themselves with regional-cultural contrasts fraught with problems. In the process, the colonial powers created a regional problem whose consequences they could not foresee. The Islamic Front has become a zone of conflict that threatens the cohesion of countries and facilitates the actions of terrorists and insurgents.
Undoubtedly the costliest impact of the divisive Islamic Front has been in Sudan, whose Muslim government waged a decades-long, bitter war against the three southern provinces where African Christian and animist communities are in the majority. The cost in terms of casualties and dislocations will never be known; estimates of the death toll over more than three decades of conflict are in the hundreds of thousands. The fundamentalist-dominated Sudan regime wanted to impose Islamic (Sharia) law in the South; Southerners wanted independence or, failing that, protection and guarantees against Khartoum's cultural domination. Finally, in 2005, a settlement of sorts was reached, but almost simultaneously another deadly conflict broke out elsewhere near the Islamic Front, this time in Sudan's Darfur Province along the border with Chad, costing tens of thousands of lives even as the United Nations deliberated over the question of whether what was happening there could be technically construed as genocide.
In West Africa, the Islamic Front's proximity to Cote d'Ivoire proved costly in 2004 as well. Long a stable and relatively prosperous country, Ivory Coast had had a northern Muslim minority ever since its territory was bounded. But in postcolonial years, Muslim herders and farmers from neighboring Burkina Faso to the north have been crossing the border and settling in rural areas of the country. Initially there were occasional skirmishes over crops damaged by Muslim pastoralists' cattle and land taken by immigrants, but then the growing strength of the Muslim minority began to translate into political power. When the country's long-term ruler died and a Muslim politician sought the president's office, he was disqualified by southerners and civil war broke out, ruining the cocoa-based economy and precipitating French intervention. The French force was accused of favoring the Muslim northerners, the large French expatriate community was set upon by mobs, and even the modern, once-thriving port of Abidjan was engulfed by violence. The effects of the Islamic Front had reached the sea.
If the breakdown of order in Cote d'Ivoire was a shock to observers of the African scene, simultaneous events in Liberia were even more surprising. Liberia has long been in the grip of ethnic conflict, but in late 2004 reports from the capital, Monrovia, described serious clashes between Muslims and Christians in several parts of the country. This, as far as I have been able to determine, is the first instance of such religious strife in the country's history. As Figure 9-2 shows, Liberia lies to the south of the Islamic Front, but the Islamic component of its population has been rising and is now 16 percent. Still, Liberia's Muslim minority is scattered in the main towns, not in the northern region of the country. Whether the Muslim-Christian clashes are an isolated event or a signal of more serious problems is not yet clear.
As Figure 9-2 shows, the Islamic Front loops into the Horn of Africa, coinciding very roughly with the border between mainly Muslim Eritrea and dominantly Christian Ethiopia before dividing the latter into a Muslim east (Ogaden) and a Christian west. The Muslim east is the historic home of the Somali people living on the Ethiopian side of the border with the failed state of Somalia that, as the map indicates, is virtually 100 percent Muslim. Ethiopia's Christianized core area, centered on the capital of Adis Abeba, lies in the highlands, a natural fortress that has protected the country in the past and from where the founding emperor, Menelik, extended its power over the encircling plains. In the process Ethiopia's Christian rulers gained control over the Ogaden with its Muslim Somali population and its leading city, Harer (Fig. 9-2). Thus the Somali found themselves on both sides of a superimposed border, but after the colonists withdrew it mattered little. Clan allegiances and divisions, not invented boundaries, dominated life. Somali pastoralists drove their herds across the borders in pursuit of seasonal rains as they had for centuries, and in Somalia they fought among themselves over influence and dominance.
The approximate position of the Islamic Front in Ethiopia is of less concern that its extension along the Somali-Kenya border, because Somalia has been a failed state for decades and it is there, rather than in Muslim Ethiopia, that the greatest potential for terrorist activity exists. In early 2005, Somalia remained a state divided into three parts; Somaliland, the former British colony in the north, doing best in every way; Puntland in the middle, seeking to distance itself from the rest, and rump Somalia in the south, centered on the capital and largest urban agglomeration, Mogadishu. It is the southern third of Somalia that is in the worst condition, in effect a territory without the rule of law.
Long before Somalia became linked with fears of Islamic terrorism, Kenya had been experiencing the effects of terrorist activity based on the Muslim side of the Islamic Front. Somalia shifta, marauders on the move, have been attacking targets in northeastern Kenya ranging from game lodges to archeological digs and from cattle owners to bus drivers for many years. They have struck as far west as Lake Turkana, disappearing into the Ogaden on their way back to Somalia; they have traded their sharp-edged pangas for guns, and they are a menace. But they do not have an ideological agenda: that dimension only appeared during the 1990s, when East Africa became the stage for al-Qaeda's attacks on United States embassies in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam and subsequent assaults on a tourist hotel near coastal Mombasa and an Israeli airliner departing Mombasa Airport. As in the case of Bali, note the juxtaposition of refuge and target: Western interests in East Africa's cities lie short distances from areas as tribal as Pakistan's Waziristan.
Is the Islamic Front static or mobile? The evidence from C6te d'Ivoire to Kenya suggests the latter. But even as the Islamic Front moves southward, African countries well beyond its leading edge form obvious opportunities for Islamic expansion. The horrific experiences of Rwandans, Congolese, and the citizens of other malfunctioning African states (or parts of states) may be so strongly associated with Christian contexts-many Rwandans were herded into churches and killed with the connivance of ministersthat Islam may appear as a hopeful alternative. Although data may be unreliable, it is noteworthy that Rwanda two decades ago reported that 2 percent of its population was Muslim; today it is reporting 15 percent, a huge increase in a Roman Catholic country.
Figure 9-2 shows the percentages of Muslims in the populations of African countries, and the Islamic Front effect is obvious from these data. In general, the closer to the Islamic Front, the higher the Muslim component. Tanzania's high percentage, much higher than Kenya's, results in part from its merger with Zanzibar, since almost all Zanzibari are Muslims. But even so, Tanzania's coastal zone, including Dar es Salaam, is strongly Muslim, and may become a regional extension of the Islamic Front. Note that countries in approximately the same latitude-the Democratic Republic of Congo, Malawi, Zambia, Angola-report a minimal Muslim presence.
Which leaves the country farthest from the Islamic Front but prominent in Islamic history: South Africa. More than 350 years ago, the Dutch began to bring Muslim Indonesians to Cape Town as workers, and these "Malays," as they are often called, built the first prayer houses and established a base for the faith. Over time, these Malays became part of the larger population referred to as the Cape Coloured community, and Islam spread into it: this, during the decades of apartheid, was one way to reject the churches that preached oppression. Small, graceful mosques were part of the cultural landscape of Cape Town's historic District Six when it was demolished under apartheid laws to move its nonwhite residents farther from the city center.
Today South Africa's population is about 3 percent Muslim, and some of the country's 1 million Muslims are South Asians, descendants of a later immigration now living in Kwazulu-Natal, in the city of Durban and its hinterland. But Islamic activism, and some incidents of terrorism, center on Cape Town. Soon after South Africa's democratic transition, which unleashed freedoms unheard of under the repressive apartheid regime, an Islamic group began issuing fatwas against pornography, homosexuality, drug use, and other "excesses" of freedom; warnings against commercialism were followed by the bombing of a Planet Hollywood in a new waterfront shopping center. Effective police work rolled up the group responsible, but a low-grade terrorist threat continues. In April 2004 there were unconfirmed reports of a threat and interdicted attack on the visiting cruise ship Queen Elizabeth II.
There are no confirmed links between any remaining terrorist cells in the Cape Town area and either Southeast Asian or Middle Eastern networks; the activism of the 1990s appeared to be homegrown. If there is any external link, it may be to Nigeria and have more to do with organized crime than with terrorism. But Cape Town is one of those chaotic, fast-growing cities that harbor terrorists elsewhere in the world. Behind the facade of Table Mountain lie the "Cape Flats," a vast expanse where more than 2 million arrivals have built an informal city far larger than the original. Few contrasts in the world are more vivid than that between the opulence of the Victoria Waterfront and its shiny malls and luxury hotels and the abject poverty of "The Flats" a short drive away. It is another one of those juxtapositions.
As for the devellopments in Paris the past days, France's main Muslim organisations feuded on Monday over a fatwa one group issued against rioting after officials suggested Islamist militants might be fanning unrest across the country.
The Union of French Islamic Organisations (UOIF), a large group linked to the Muslim Brotherhood, quoted the Koran and the Prophet Mohammad to support the religious edict issued late on Sunday condemning the chaos and destruction the unrest caused.
But Dalil Boubakeur, head of France's Muslim Council and rector of the moderate Grand Mosque of Paris, denounced the move on Monday as equating Islam with vandalism and blaming all Muslims for the rioting whether they were involved or not.
"It is formally forbidden to any Muslim seeking divine grace and satisfaction to participate in any action that blindly hits private or public property or could constitute an attack on someone's life," the UOIF fatwa said.
"Contributing to such exactions is an illicit act," declared the edict, which said it was applicable to "any Muslim living in France, whether a citizen or a guest of France."
The rioters
are mostly French-born youths of Arab or African origin, many of them Muslim,
who say racial bias condemns them to unemployment in the rundown suburbs
around main cities. France's 5 million Muslims make up 8 percent of the
population.
The sight of
imams and local Muslim leaders in the suburbs calming down angry teenagers
who reject all other authority has prompted French officials to warn that
Islamic extremists might exploit a power vacuum to gain control over some
suburbs, something I mentioned in my comment yesterday, posted above this
link.
Boubakeur, a political ally of President Jacques Chirac, said "many Muslims are surprised and regret that, in these dramatic and reprehensible circumstances, some Muslim organisations such as the UOIF think they can invoke God's name in a call for calm.
"We urge strict respect for French law," he said in a pointed jab at the UOIF for not mentioning law in its fatwa.
Reflecting how sensitive the issue is, UOIF Secretary General Fouad Alaoui was grilled on radio and television on Monday by journalists asking why his group made the appeal on religious grounds rather than on the basis of secular law.
"The fatwa is meant to reinforce the law," he argued.
Apart from Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy, most French leaders have kept a critical distance from the UOIF because of its links with the Islamist Muslim Brotherhood. Sarkozy is the only minister who has ever gone to the UOIF annual congress.
But many influential grassroots Muslim groups in the riot-hit suburbs are closer to the UOIF than other national Muslim groups and enjoy more influence than local officials.
Anthropologist Dounia Bouzar, a former member of the Muslim Council board, said local authorities often had to turn to these groups for help because social workers had lost all authority.
"That's not
so bad in itself, but what bothers me is that the officials stubbornly
avoid asking themselves questions about this phenomenon," she told the
daily La Croix.
