An enlarged EU fans the fears of Europe's Muslims
By Roula Khalaf, Joshua Levitt and Stefan Wagstyl
Published: May 12 2004 5:00 | Last Updated: May 12 2004 5:00
Ali, a 25-year-old Egyptian born engineer who lives in the UK, has little reason to welcome the enlargement of the European Union.
"I've been here for years but I'm thinking of going home," he says, standing outside the Regent's Park mosque in London.
"With my beard I'm having trouble finding a job and now more east Europeans are coming, companies won't need to employ me at all."
As the EU celebrates its enlargement, Muslims - who make up the largest minority community in Europe - feel left out.
Many are struggling to distance themselves from an extremist minority and show that they too are good European citizens.
Beate Winkler, director of the European Monitoring Centre on Racism and Xenophobia, the EU's race relations watchdog, says enlargement has increased the sense of alienation.
She sees a parallel with the way that German unification affected German Muslims: "German Muslims said to other Germans 'You have welcomed the people from eastern Germany very warmly, but you never welcomed us'," says Ms Winkler, who worked for the German government at the time.
A lot of recent hostility to Muslims dates back to the 2001 al-Qaeda attacks, which were followed by a surge in anti-Muslim racist violence. At the Regent's Park mosque the challenges for Muslims are clear. A police notice on a pillar explains the presence of officers in the street during Friday prayers.
It says Muslims are sometimes badly portrayed in the tabloid press and that this is unfortunately believed by many people. But it warns that demonstrations outside the mosque, while understandable given world tensions, do nothing for the reputation of the vast majority of worshippers.
Young Muslims at the mosque say that the fight against terrorism and the rising police scrutiny of Muslim communities are making their life difficult. The frustrations are all the greater today, with the enlargement of the EU to new, mostly central and eastern European countries.
Sana Ullah, a religious teacher originally from Pakistan, says he is grateful to have raised three children to become doctors in the UK.
"They're happy here and there are jobs. This country is rich enough to accommodate us and the Poles and the Hungarians," he says.
"The problem is that we feel the media and others don't understand Muslims; some use bad language when our women walk on the streets. And with enlargement, there will be more Europeans who say that we are not good, more people who are against Muslims."
The sentiments are similar in France, home to over 4m of the new EU's 12m Muslims. Rachid Ben Issa, an Algerian community leader who lived in France until recently, says the alienation of European Muslims stems from many years of frustrations. "We feel unloved and excluded," he says.
In Spain, after the Madrid bombings, which have been blamed on a group composed mostly of Spanish-resident Moroccans, Muslim leaders in big cities denounced Islamic militancy.
But in the fruit farms in the south, Moroccan and sub-Saharan migrant labourers find themselves competing with Poles and others imported under government-sponsored schemes from eastern Europe. Unemployed Moroccans say they are suffering from racial discrimination by farmers.
Katinka Barysch, a researcher at the London-based Centre for European Reform, says people from the new EU states competing with North African immigrants have an advantage because east Europeans are better educated.
There are big cultural differences among Europe's Muslims, but they are united in their sense of the discrimination they feel from the non-Muslim population.
Some European Muslim leaders say they would feel more at home in the EU if it were eager about starting accession talks with Turkey now that it has embraced 10 mainly Christian states and is planning to accept two more - Bulgaria and Romania - in 2007.
Mr Ben Issa says bluntly: "Europe is now affirming that it wants a Christian Europe - even Turkey's hopes for joining the EU are being played down."
However, Ms Winkler says the priority should be to make a success of the current round of enlargement, including the integration of ethnic, national and religious minorities.
"We have to establish and strengthen relations among the different minorities in the EU on the basis of common respect for human rights."
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