Let's Redecorate the Tree

YALLA!

sphere cultural muslim the and sweden –

LET’S REDECORATE THE TREE

YALLA! LET’S REDECORATE THE TREE

Mighty is he who hath knowledge

Ferdousi (940–1040) LET’SYALLA! REDECORATE THE TREE

44 contributions in five chapters

1 ➾ 10 living together LOVE TRAIN (6) by Nadia Jebril ➾ LOVE POEM (8) by Nizar Qabbani ➾ THE MOST BEAUTIFUL PLACE ON EARTH (9) by Per Axel Nordfeldt ➾ MUSLIM WITHOUT ALLAH (14) by Pelle Kronestedt ➾ SIX QUESTIONS TO CEYLAN (22) by Gufran Al-nadaf ➾ BE NOT SWIFT TO CONDEMN!... (23) by Hafiz ➾ LIVE AND LET LIVE (24) by Javeria Rizvi ➾ WHAT’S THE POINT (27) by Ramsis James Assal ➾ “HONOUR KILLINGS” (28) by Åsa Eldén ➾ IMPOSSIBLE LOVE (32) by Ranna Kas Hanna

11 ➾ 20 a new world THE THREAT TO DEMOCRACY (34) by David Sandberg ➾ A MUSLIM IN KRYLBO (38) by Jenny Berggren ➾ KABUL (41) by Shakila Emami ➾ MEDIA IMAGES AND HISTORICAL IMAGES (42) by Alexander Cavalieratos ➾ ISLAMOPHOBIA (50) by Anne Sofie Roald ➾ WHAT ARE RACISTS? (52) by Taher Ben Jelloun ➾ HALABJA (54) by Evin ➾ WHEN THE FUN- DAMENTALISTS CAME TO TOWN (55) by Cekdar Kaya ➾ HOW COME? (57) by Daniel Harlid ➾ LOOKING AT IT FROM ANOTHER ANGLE (58) by Christina Zaar

21 ➾ 25 the shawl THE RIGHT TO WEAR A SHAWL (64) by Hidayet Tercan ➾ HEAD COVERINGS IN ISLAM (66) by Anne Sofie Roald ➾ I OFFER YOU... (72) by Jila Mossaed ➾ WITH OR WITHOUT A SHAWL (73) by Elnaz Baghlanian ➾ O, IF LIBERTY... (74) by Ahmad Schamloo

26 ➾ 32 common history ISLAM IS NOT AS ALIEN AS WE THINK (76) by Ingmar Karlsson ➾ DIDAR SAMALETDIN (86) by Gufran Al-nadaf ➾ SREBRENICA (91) by Gellert Tamas ➾ SABRA & SHATILA (95) by Rawia Morra ➾ REFLECTIONS OF A NEWCOMER (96) by Gufran Al-nadaf ➾ MY HEART... (99) by Ibn al-’Arabi ➾ NADIA ON THE GO (100) by Pelle Kronestedt

33 ➾ 44 faith MANY SIMILARITIES AND SOME MAJOR DIFFER- ENCES (108) by Christer Hedin ➾ DIFFERENT ROOTS IS COOL (116) by Eivor and Sonia at Tensta Upper Secondary School ➾ INNOCENT AS CHARGED (118) by Surkan Kilic ➾ LEAVING THE RELIGIOUS SANDPIT (120) by Pierre Durrani ➾ ON WINE (123) Koran quatations, Swedish proverb, Omar Khayyam ➾ ÖSTRA REALS UPPER SECONDARY (124) ➾ TENSTA UPPER SECONDARY (126) ➾ ISLAMIS AND ITS ORIGINS (128) by Bitte Hammargren ➾ FIGHTING OVER DIFFERENCES (134) by Mehrnoush Khoshnevis ➾ ON CHILDREN (135) by Gibran Kahlil

(page numbers in brackets) foreword

THIS BOOK FOCUSES on people with roots in Muslim cultures. In articles, interviews, essays, poems, quotations and pictures, young people, experts and journalists examine themes such as living together, a new world, the shawl, our common history, and religious faith. The book is being distributed to all students in their first and second years at upper secondary school in Sweden, and also to interested organisations. It is available at www.ud.se and has been translated into Arabic and English. The aim is provide a basis for discussion: What do we know about one another? How do we live together? Do we have prejudices and if so can we do something about them? Muslim cultures vary considerably, and so do Muslims. One often gets the impression that ‘Muslim’ is a concept—but there are substantial differences between individuals depending on their denomination and culture. The same applies to Christians and Jews. In this book, we meet the secularised and the believers, the young and the old, contemporary and historical figures, all with their own widely differing perspectives. Most are easy to identify with. Others may be harder to understand, like the three boys who refused to observe the three minutes’ silence held after 11 Septem- ber—although they are against terrorism. Cultures only partially explain why we are the persons we are. This book is about cultural interaction. Ultimately, it’s about being a human being.

Anna Lindh Swedish Minister for Foreign Affairs

3 a word in passing

Fatima

David

YALLA!LET’S Mohammed REDECORATE THE TREE

Björn

Eva-Lena Ali

THIS BOOK IS not so much about the Islamic religion as about what happens when people meet in our increasingly multicultural and multireligious world. If it gathers dust on the bookshelf, we’ve failed. We hope you’ll read it, perhaps starting with those parts that look interesting, possibly skipping a page here and there and reading another chapter twice instead—and above all we hope you’ll think about what’s in the book and discuss it with others. The views expressed in the book are solely the responsibility of the contributors themselves. To aid us in our task we brought in students from two upper secondary schools in Stockholm, Tensta and Östra Real. We have also had the support of a reference group to discuss our ideas and drafts with, comprising experts, journalists, cultural workers, young people and Foreign Ministry staff. In addi- tion, we have received valuable assistance from the Ministry of Justice, the Ministry of Industry, Employment and Communications, the Ministry of Education and Science, the National Agency for Education, the National Board for Youth Affairs, and others.

STOCKHOLM, 18 FEBRUARY 2002 Gufran Al-nadaf, project manager/editor, Ministry for Foreign Affairs Mårten Andersson, editor, freelance Martin Högström, graphic designer/picture editor, freelance Eva-Lena Gustafsson, project assistant, Ministry for Foreign Affairs Stefan Amér, political advisor, Ministry for Foreign Affairs

4 1 ➾ 10 living together 1

love train by Nadia Jebril

WHEN I MARRY, the first thing I’ll do is take an Interrail trip with my husband. Out into the world! Anywhere, just the two of us. I believe in love, I dream about it a lot. There are people who look at me and think that because of the way I live and dress—I wear hijab, a shawl—I’ve ruled love out of my life. That I’m not allowed to love, or even to choose my life partner myself. There are even those who go so far as to claim that dressing like this robs me of my own sexuality, as though sexuality was a privilege granted to all other women on this earth as a matter of course... I’ve decided not to have a boyfriend, to avoid relationships until I meet the right person—someone I’ve chosen because of my religious convictions. As a Muslim, marriage means a great deal to me, for a number of reasons. Apart from the fact that you can’t be together with someone of the opposite sex physically until you’re wed, being married means that you have a companion for life who shares all your ups and downs and complements you in every respect. Getting married is the only way for two Muslims who are fond of each other to express their love fully and completely. I often think about the freedom that such a relationship gives you to do things you’ve wanted to do with someone you liked but were unable to before—like dating. This may sound strange to many people. Marriage is something you usually think about when you’re 30 or 40, not when you’re 19. We young people are expected to go out and enjoy life now—marriage can wait. But what make me different from just any other teenager is that this is precisely the kind of life I intend having with my husband. Going off on Interrail trips, going to art exhibitions and plays, flying to Australia, scuba diving, or hiking in the Alps. Marriage doesn’t represent an obstacle—in my life and the lives of

6 many other Muslims, the opposite is the case. I’m showered with questions when I tell people how I’ve imagined all this. How do Muslim men and women meet? How are you to know if you’re suited to each other in the long run? Can Muslims only marry Muslims? What do you do while waiting for the love of your life? These are questions I can only answer from what I’ve seen and learnt from my sisters. Another question I often get is whether I can choose my own husband or if he is chosen for me by my father or brother. So how do Muslim women and men meet? There is no general answer to this question. We meet like everyone else, but perhaps in different circumstances. We meet in mosques, in the library, at school... I know a couple who met while waiting in line at their local chain store. There are many ways for us to meet, but the big differ- ence between non-Muslims and Muslims is that in our case both partners know how far you are allowed to go. Out of respect for our parents and family, if things get serious we usually tell them we’ve started seeing someone and that the relationship may lead to marriage. Whether or not we’re suited to each other in the long run, only God knows. You have to trust your feelings and pray a lot. Pray that you’ll meet someone who will feel the same for you as you feel for him, someone you can be yourself with and who shares the same values and—most important of all—the same faith. That he believes in what I believe in, feels for what I feel—this is absolutely essential. And finding someone who shares what means the most to you is beautiful. The love that grows out of such an encounter, I believe, is the kind of love that lasts. This also helps to answer the question of whether your partner has to be a Muslim. If you think that Islam is very important, you want to be with someone who shares this view. It’s that simple. All right... but what do you do while waiting for the love of your life to appear? Many people find the right person when they are very young, while for others it takes longer. Among both Muslims and non-Muslims, there are those who pick and choose, test different partners, while others stand firm and wait. One of my closest friends feels exactly the same way as me about relationships, and she’s not a Muslim. I have a lot of friends

7 with differing views about what I’m doing and other Muslims are doing. Some think it’s sad that we’re “missing out on so much”, while others fully agree with our way of looking at things,“as free relationships don’t bring you much more than a headache, ultimately”. Whatever view you may take of people who prefer to wait, three things are for sure: the choice is theirs, it doesn’t have to exclude love and if it is due to religious conviction there is nothing for it but to respect this. As far as my father’s and my brother’s involvement in my choice of future is concerned, it’s like this: if I hear that someone is interested in me, I send my brother along to check him out. My father’s primary concern will be whether the person I meet has enough money saved up, so that I get my Interrail trip. He doesn’t want me to be disappointed.

Nadia Jebril,19, works at the Sensus adult education association

meet Nadia on pages 100–106

LOVE POEM

The day I met you I tore up all my maps all my prophecies Like an Arab stallion I smelled the rain of you before it wet me Heard the pulse of your voice before you spoke Undid your hair with my hands before you had braided it

Nizar Qabbani (b 1923) 3

the most beautiful place on earth – young people caught in a conflict by Per Axel Nordfeldt

DEVELOPMENTS IN THE Middle East are generating bigger and blacker headlines from month to month. Terror, oppression, suicide bombings, fear and revenge are creating a spiral of evil that seems to be plunging the region closer to the abyss, slowly but surely. How can one feel anything but despair and powerlessness in the face of such a conflict as this, where dialogue has been replaced by political manoeuvring and clamorous unilateral action. But what is it like being young and having to live with this? Is there any room for hopes and dreams when death and terror are never far away? To find out, I arranged to interview Hagar Edlund and Hanin Shakrah at a café in central Stockholm. “Both the Israelis and the Palestinians have lost their senses,” says Hagar.“Emotion rules nowadays, nothing else counts. “The situation is strained, to say the least,” adds Hanin with a bitter laugh. Hagar is 23 and Israeli. Her mother is an Egyptian Jewess, her father a Swede and a Christian. The couple settled in Israel, but Hagar was born in Sweden. When she was five, the family moved back to Israel, to Neve Shalom/Wahat al-Salam. This is a community

9 set up at the initiative of a Christian priest, Bruno Hussar, to show that Arabs and Jews can live together and work hand in hand for peace. The name means ‘The Oasis of Peace’ in Hebrew and Arabic respectively, and the people living there respect one another while at the same time cultivating their own distinctive characters and cultures. At present, Hagar is studying economics at Södertörn University College. Hanin Shakrah is 20 and a Palestinian. This means that she comes from a family which lived in the region that became the state of Israel in 1948. Palestinians either live in the occupied zones (Gaza, the West Bank, Eastern Jerusalem) or are refugees. Israeli Palestinians—Arabs—are Palestinians with Israeli citizenship. Hanin’s family comes from Safad (Hebrew: Zefat). In the same year as the state of Israel was founded, the family was forced to flee to Syria, where three successive generations have now lived in refugee camps. Hanin came to Sweden with her parents at the age of four and is currently studying Oriental studies at Uppsala University. At the beginning of 2000, she went to Palestine for the first time, but was unable to visit Safad until this year. She is the only member of the family to have been there since their flight. Both Hagar and Hanin describe themselves as political leftists. Neither of them practise their religion in an orthodox manner. A young Israeli woman and a young Palestinian woman, both living in Sweden. What is ‘home’ to them? “Israel,” replies Hagar,“it’ll always be Israel.” “Palestine,” says Hanin.“I didn’t think it would be as I’ve never been there. But when I arrived there it felt as though the whole family had come home. As though my journey wasn’t just mine but everyone’s.” What does having—and not having—a state of your own mean? “Having a state means independence, having rights, living in a democracy,” says Hagar thoughtfully. “Not having a state means not having an identity,” says Hanin. “I tell people I come from Palestine. But when I can’t point it out on the map, it’s difficult to explain. When people sound me out, it feels

10 as though they’re questioning my existence. When we were studying religious history at school, Biblical Palestine felt like an acknowledgement, a confirmation. There was actually something called Palestine, it had a name.” “I feel guilty about this,” says Hagar,“towards you and towards all Palestinians. I think the situation is terrible, that I have a state and you don’t. You really should have a state of your own. At the same time, I find it a little strange your saying that Palestine is your country, when you didn’t grow up there. I may have been born in Sweden, but I grew up in Israel. You should feel at home in Sweden rather than Palestine.” “At home I wasn’t brought up in a Swedish culture,” counters Hanin.“I feel tolerated in Sweden, but I don’t feel at home here. I don’t feel as though I’m a part of the place in any way. There was quite a lot of cultural conflict when I got to Palestine, too, but somehow we understood one another. People there were warm and open in a way that made me feel I belonged. “I consider it a tremendous provocation when Jews say that they are in Israel by right of birth. My family comes from those parts but isn’t even allowed to visit the country.” Hagar’s solution to the conflict involves Israel retreating to the borders that applied before the war of 1967 (when the West Bank and Gaza were occupied). Hanin thinks all Palestinian refugees should be entitled to return and live in Israel, a viewpoint that Hagar objects to strongly. “It’s unrealistic,” she says.“Some of the refugees must be allowed back, but not all. The Israelis can never agree to that as it would result in the Palestinians constituting a majority.” “What’s the problem?” asks Hanin.“You yourself are living proof that coexistence works—you lived in Neve Shalom.” “Neve Shalom is a bubble,” replies Hagar.“We could live together there—many of my best friends are Palestinians—but in the whole of Israel, never. There’s too much distrust and suspicion. The only solution is to divide the country up.” Hagar’s views and her close contacts with Palestinians are often

11 regarded with scepticism by other Israelis. “Sometimes they call me a Palestinian,” she sighs. Trying to work out a comprehensive, viable solution to the problem is no easy matter in itself, but the conflict is having a powerful impact on people’s daily lives, in Sweden as well. “I’m often met with suspicion when people hear that I’m from Israel,” says Hagar.“Some guys are impressed by the fact that I did military service (and how I hated being a soldier!), but people often withdraw and don’t want to discuss politics with me. I try to explain my position and say what I feel, but somehow or other I always end up having to defend Israel.” “Do you get frightened when you see Palestinians?” asks Hanin. “Here in Sweden? I’ve got nothing against them, but they’ve got something against me. There are some situations where I definitely don’t want to say I’m from Israel or that I’m Jewish.” “I get really scared sometimes,” says Hanin.“There was a guy who came up to me after a debate and asked where I was from. “Palestine,” I said.“I’m from Israel,” he said. I thought my heart would stop. Not that I expected him to jump on me, but suddenly I wasn’t standing in front of a person, I was standing in front of Israel. He became a symbol. This has happened several times, both in Sweden and when I was in Palestine. OK, so he’s in this bar now, but in a couple of weeks’ time I may come across him as a soldier at a roadblock. “When I was in Palestine, I was angry the whole time,” says Hanin.“When I got back to Sweden, I was tired, completely exhaust- ed as a result of all the anger I felt about the whole situation. What hope do those people have for the future?” “My dream is the same as Hanin’s,” says Hagar.“A state where people of all faiths can live side by side in peace.” “It’s not just a dream, for me,” Hanin interjects.“I think we can help bring about such a solution. It’s fear that makes people unable to see the Other’s viewpoint.” “I want to live in Israel when I’ve finished studying here in Sweden,” Hagar continues.“I want to start a family, but not if my

12 children are going to have to do military service and be exposed to the kinds of conflicts and risks you find there today. “Things are difficult at the moment, there’s less scope for toler- ance. But my friends and I are keeping at it. We go on arranging meetings where Israelis and Palestinians can get together, discuss the problems, listen to one another and discover that we’re all human beings.” “I want to live in Palestine,” says Hanin.“I want to be able to land at Ben Gurion Airport without anyone asking me what I’m doing there or what religion I have—because I’ve come to my country. I’ve now applied to the Hebrew University in Jerusalem and to the university in Palestine as well. I want to go there, and I want to help change things. “It’s the most beautiful place on earth. We can’t just let it be submerged in darkness like this.” Two young women. Hagar with her feelings of guilt about a situation she cannot be blamed for, Hanin with her anger over the way things are. Despite all the differences, they have similar dreams and goals, and they are united by a strong sense of injustice, a feeling that a great wrong has been committed and must be put right. As the interview ends, they swap phone numbers and begin discussing the possibility of a joint trip to Israel/Palestine. The road to a solution of the Middle East conflict is a long and extremely arduous one. But if the journey is to be embarked on at all, it must surely start here—with the willingness of people to meet and try to understand one another.

Per Axel Nordfeldt is a freelance journalist

»Better wide-open eyes than a wide-open mouth« Turkish proverb

13 4 photo Pelle Kronestedt

Muslim without Allah

CEYLAN HOLAGO is 22 and works as a journalist at Sveriges radio, on the P3 programme Doris. YALLA! followed her around for a few days to find out who she is. Ceylan grew up in Bergshamra outside Stockholm Slam dunk, Yalla! I have great respect for all religions, but Islam » is closest to me as my roots are Turkish. I’m not a practising Muslim, though. My family has never been religious—but we have other values and we’re very active politically. When I fall in love, I really fall, and that’s only hap- » pened once in my life. For me, being able to laugh with the person I love is tremendously important.

Someone’s waiting for Ceylan at home I’ve nothing against people having » sex before marriage but I respect those who prefer to wait. In action at P3, Doris

My job means a lot to me. At the radio, I get the » chance to reach people I’d probably never come into contact with otherwise. And I learn an incredible amount every day.

Together with friends and her sister, Ülkü, who runs the Ali Baba club.

5 six questions to

Ceylan Holago by Gufran Al-nadaf

“Being secular yourself, how do you feel about Islamic fundamentalism?” C: I’m against all forms of fundamentalism. As I’m not a believer, I can’t understand why people sometimes go to extremes in the name of religion. In this connection, it’s important to remember that you find fundamentalism in other religions as well.” “Can you understand those who resort to terrorism? C: No, that’s another galaxy for me. I’m against all forms of violence, even if I can sometimes understand that people get angry about certain things. “Why do you think some young people are attracted to Islamic fundamentalism, for instance? C: Perhaps young people are more easily attracted to different lifestyles. And that includes different subcultures. Maybe they’re looking for some kind of identity. “Are there any social patterns involved here, do you think?” C: I think the influences we’re exposed to affect us a lot. People are drawn to each other in various ways, looking for somewhere to belong, and some may be tempted to go to extremes. “Can and should society take steps to prevent such a development? C: At school we were taught too little about the different religions. So information and a more varied type of religious instruction at school might be a good idea. It would help people to think more clearly. “What is the best possible solution, in your view?” C: People are quick to condemn others. Naturally, I believe we should all be allowed to have our own ideas and convictions, but in a disciplined way, not through fundamentalism or terrorism.

22 6

Be not swift to condemn! Be forbearing! Forgive! Consider thy own guilt! Were we to know more about one another forgiveness would come easily. And neither pride nor arrogance would endure.

Hafiz (1320–1389) 7

live and let live by Javeria Rizvi

THERE’S A SWEDISH saying that closely resembles the English ‘live and let live’. By implication, this means you should accept diversity and not interfere with how other people choose to lead their lives. A simple enough concept, perhaps, but in practice things have turned out differently and thrown Swedish society into confusion. The media, the authorities and the courts have joined in con- juring up a static image of the ‘Muslim immigrant girl’ and the life she leads. She is stereotyped as an oppressed, cowed and helpless victim. Such an image doesn’t help this girl much, nor is it very subtle. The public debate on ‘honour killings’, for instance, has been one-sided and has frequently assumed the character of a battle against a specific culture—usually Muslim culture. Culture and tradition are used as an excuse for certain kinds of behaviour, and religion thus becomes a scapegoat for the kind of deep-rooted oppression of women that is to be found both in Sweden and the rest of the world. But it was not until the summer of 2001, when I returned to Sweden after completing my studies abroad, that I realised how ‘honour killings’ and the public debate on the subject affected me personally. An unpleasant incident on the underground train from Mörby Centrum shattered my belief in my own Swedish identity. A well- dressed woman in her thirties sitting opposite me smiled kindly. I smiled back. She said she thought the train was going slowly, didn’t I agree? “No,” I said. Whereupon she made the peculiar observation:“I suppose from a Turkish viewpoint you think the train’s going really fast, don’t you?” It took me about half a minute to realise what she meant, and

24 the smile quickly vanished from my lips. “I’m not Turkish,” I said. “Where are you from, then, Iraq?” “I’m from Sweden,” I replied. “Then what’s your religion?” “Islam!!!!” I said in a firm voice, realising what a negative ring this was likely to have in her ears. “So how come you’re allowed to stay out so late? What do your parents think about that sort of thing? Don’t they get angry? Don’t they beat you? Don’t you feel sorry for girls like yourself?” The woman was neither stupid nor drunk. She simply wanted to provoke me. But why? It made me so angry that I just wanted to shout at her, but instead I remained calm and asked her the same questions as she had asked me. Naturally, she didn’t answer, claiming only to be interested in Iraqis. She said she wanted to know what life was like for “you girls” and was planning to make a document- ary film about those of us who were “liberated”. By then I was unable to contain myself any longer and told her she was a racist. It was wrong of me to judge her like that, but my emotions got the better of me. Why couldn’t she just mind her own business and let me mind mine—live and let live? The following day, I was having dinner with some friends and acquaintances and told them about the incident with the woman on the underground. I tried to explain how much it had upset me. To my surprise, almost none of them understood why I was so upset. A discussion about Muslim women rapidly ensued and I was showered with questions about why we wear shawls and why people commit ‘honour killings’. No-one asked me about my faith or my spiritual life, they were only interested in the outer aspects. A heated discussion taught them a lot of new things about Swedes who are ‘different’. During the years I spent abroad, about a dozen young immigrant women were murdered by male members of their family. The murders were brutal and the punishment legitimate.‘Honour killings’ are neither standard practice nor endorsed in the Koran.

25 Blaming violence against women in immigrant or Muslim communities on religious or cultural tradition is far too easy an excuse. And anyway, which Muslim culture are they referring to? You never hear people talking about a single, unified Christianity, for example. Although Sweden today is a country with more than 350,000 Muslim inhabitants, prejudice and misunderstanding concerning Muslims and their ‘culture’ is widespread. In the struggle to help what are termed immigrant girls, a misleading and over-simplified image of young Muslim women as a whole has emerged. Many of them are unwilling to give up their culture or their religion despite holding critical views about them. This is because religion and culture are often an important part of your identity. At the same time, all of us—Swedes, immigrants and Muslims —must tackle these problems and not be afraid of reacting forcefully. Being a second-generation immigrant, I am a skilled ‘social navigator’. I have learnt how to strike a balance, to tread a path between the two cultures I live in. This is a quality that is often forgotten—instead, young immigrant women like me are viewed as victims. No-one wants to be regarded or treated as a victim. I may be vulnerable. But I’m not weak.

Javeria Rizvi, 24, is a law graduate specialising in Third World studies.

26 8

WHAT’S THE POINT

If life’s just play Where’s the bucket and spade If life’s just for fun Why are most people crying If you only live once What’s the point If death’s the end Where’s eternity If we were born to die Why live If we were born to live Why die and not reawaken Why is there love If it’s not eternal Why spread hatred When life’s so short God did not create us in vain So let’s pray together and love one another till we die.

Ramsis James Assal, 18, a student at Tensta Upper Secondary School, Stockholm 9

»honour killings« in the land

of equality by Åsa Eldén

DURING THE WINTER of 1996–97, the people who composed Sweden’s newspaper headlines learned a new word, hedersmord— “honour killings”. Press, radio and TV reported a series of murders or murder attempts on young women. In Stockholm, a woman from Turkey was stabbed by her brother outside a discotheque. In Umeå, a young woman from Iraq was strangled by her brother and a cousin. In Eskilstuna, a Kurdish woman was severely stabbed by her 16-year- old brother. In Hällefors, a Palestinian woman was murdered by her father. All these cases were described in the media as having one thing in common: the men who attacked and murdered these young women viewed their “sexual” behaviour—their contact with young men, for instance, or their “indecent” clothing—as shameful. The shame was not the young women’s alone but “contaminated” the family as well. Murder was the only means of restoring family honour. Among the men who committed the murders and assaults were Muslims, Christians and atheists, Arabs, Turks and Kurds. Yet the media often described the crimes as extreme manifestations of Islam or Arab culture. Honour killings were portrayed as a direct consequence of an alien religion or culture—one, it was implied, that represented the very opposite of the culture of gender equality found in Sweden.

28 But do cultures and religions in fact “govern” people’s actions? Does a man who murders and assaults people really have no choice? If he has a choice, how are we to view such “alien” actions— a father, brother or uncle murdering his daughter, sister or niece? A few winters later, honour killings are once splashed across the tabloids’ newsbills. Fadime—who openly defied her Kurdish family, reported her father and brother to the police for threatening her and told her story to the media—is murdered by her father when meeting her mother and sisters in secret. A wave of anger sweeps across Sweden, memorial services are held, headlines are huge and for several days the episode overshadows all else in the press and on television debate programmes. Almost exactly a year before Fadime’s father shot her to death, sentence was passed on two Swedish-Kurdish men who had murdered their niece. This particular girl left her upper secondary school class in the spring of 1999 in the belief that she was going to Iraqi Kurdistan that summer to find a husband. On a number of occasions the previous year, she had run away from home in protest after her father and brothers tried to force her to break with her friends. Now she was ready to go to Kurdistan to get married, not perhaps because she wanted to but for the sake of domestic peace. She wouldn’t listen to friends who were concerned about her and asked if she wasn’t worried that her father and his brothers might harm her—perhaps kill her—in Kurdistan. She replied:“Don’t worry, I’m going with my family.” When the autumn term began, she was dead. She had been murdered by her father and his brothers in the family home in Iraqi Kurdistan. Her sister described to the Swedish police how one of the uncles fired a gun at the girl’s head while the father and his other brothers held back the mother and the sister who tried to save her. The murder resulted in court proceedings in Iraq but later in Sweden as well, after the sister and the two uncles had returned. At both trials, the two men denied the charges, claiming that the girl’s father was the murderer. When asked why he had killed her, they

29 gave different versions in the two countries. At the Iraqi trial, the uncles said the father had killed his daughter to “erase the shame”, because she had “lost her chastity” and to “restore the family’s honour”. In Sweden, however, they claimed that he committed the murder because he was “mentally ill”, had been exposed to torture and “was in bad shape” due to unemployment and alienation in Sweden. The Swedish court chose to believe the sister’s version that the father and his brothers had planned and committed the murder together. The two, who pleaded not guilty, were jailed for life. Why did the two brothers offer different explanations of the crime in Iraq and Sweden? Why did they cite family honour in Iraq but mental illness and alienation in Sweden? Was it to make others view them and their crime in a more lenient light? Was it a case of believing that different justifications for violence against women are more acceptable in different cultures? A male Kurd who murders or assaults his daughter can find sympathy for his actions among other Kurds—or perhaps among Sicilians, Iranians, Pakistanis, Brazilians—if he says he was forced to murder her in order to save his family’s honour. He can say that people were talking about his daughter, about her mini-skirts and her high heels. There were rumours that she had been meeting young men and had no doubt lost her virginity; people called her a “whore”. He can cite cultural ideas whereby women with bad reputations like his daughter are considered shameful; they bring disgrace on the whole family, and on the men of the family in particular. In Iraq,“honour” can be a culturally acceptable motive for violence against women. Swedish politicians like to congratulate themselves on having achieved the highest level of gender equality in the world. But in Sweden, too, women are murdered by men close to them—not usually a brother or father but often a husband or partner. Almost half of all Swedish women have been subjected to male violence at some time or other. But no-one would ever dream of saying that Swedish men beat women to protect their honour. Often, however, male violence is said to be caused by what the two uncles described

30 at their Swedish trial: mental illness, unemployment, alienation or perhaps alcoholism or drug abuse. Violence against women is a consequence of the male attackers’ individual and/or social problems—this is a culturally viable explanation in Sweden. This explanation suits us perfectly: it allows us to retain our image of Sweden as a Garden of Gender Equality. If Swedish men who beat women have personal problems, the violence has nothing to do with Swedish culture. Different societies use different explanations in seeking to make men’s crimes against women seem less terrible—perhaps even acceptable. Family honour, mental problems and jealousy are just some of them. Viable explanations can be drawn from Arab, Kurdish, Swedish or Danish cultural ideas (or from Christian, Muslim or Hindu religious doctrine) affirming a man’s right to decide over and control a woman—and sometimes his right to decide whether she is to live or die. But people can also choose to take a stand against such cultural ideas. A man who beats and murders a woman cannot escape responsibility for his deeds by citing unemployment or alcoholism or drug abuse, or defence of his family’s honour. There is no excuse for beating or murdering a daughter, sister or wife. Men can choose not to.

Åsa Eldén is a postgraduate student at Uppsala University

»Roses and thorns grow on the same bush« Turkish proverb

31 10

impossible love by Ranna Kas Hanna

SO MANY HORRIFYING things have happened lately. Most recently the terrible “honour killing” of Fadime. She was a strong woman who fought for what she believed in—love. I’m a girl who was born and raised in Sweden. My parents originally came from Syria and we are Christian Syrians. I’m fortunate as there’s no such thing as ‘honour killings’ amongst us Syrians in Sweden—but no such thing as boyfriends or boys who are just friends, either. If you have a boyfriend you’re supposed to be engaged if you want to be together without ‘ruining’ the family’s reputation. This is a burden we girls have to bear. My parents are strict but they only have our best interests at heart. If I were to come home with a boy, my father would welcome him with open arms but he would probably check to see whether he was a suitable match. My sisters and I must never go behind our parents’ backs as there’s nothing worse than sneaking about and lying. In my view, Fadime’s father is one of the weakest people on this planet—along with everyone else who thinks like he does—as he couldn’t stand the pressure. He chose to take his daughter’s life rather than grapple with his demons. Why, I wonder. What was it that made Fadime’s father pull the trigger, why was he unable to withstand the taunts, how could his love turn to hatred? One of the causes of this murder was ignorance. I know that Fadime’s in a better place now. She’s my heroine— she died for love and for what she believed in.

Ranna Kas Hanna, 18, is a student at Östra Real Upper Secondary School in Stockholm

32 11 ➾ 20 a new world 11

the threat to democracy by David Sandberg

“ISLAM IS A THREAT to our democracy”. This was the headline in a polemical article by Lennart Persson in the Swedish paper Nerikes Allehanda on 9 October 1992. At the time, Persson was chairman of the local town planning committee, and as such was one of the councillors due to decide whether or not to allow a mosque to be built in Örebro. His message leaps off the page: as long as there is oppression in Muslim countries, Muslims must not be allowed to build mosques here. The article sparked a controversy. New articles appeared in response. Those who opposed Persson’s views argued that he was failing to respect the principle of freedom of religion. This caused a Christian pastor to respond that Islam is a religion full of threats, war and persecution. In a letter to the local council, he wrote:“In Sweden, we uphold freedom of religion but there must be limits beyond which people’s safety and security come first.” How a mosque poses a security threat is not explained in the pastor’s article. This is a frequent argument among the opponents of mosques—that Muslims practising their religion may present a threat to Swedish society. Some even argue that Muslims are a threat to democracy. Freedom of religion is a basic freedom of our democratic society. It means that we all have the right to practise our religion. Seeking to restrict this freedom in the name of democracy seems a contradiction.

34 The question is, what happens to democracy if a handful of politicians or a pastor are allowed to choose who it is for? And if they are, is democracy still democratic? And what happens when they base their assessments on acts of violence? Acts for which Islam is blamed, but which hardly enjoy the support of all the one billion people who embrace the Muslim faith. Ann-Christin Harman is an expert on comparative religion. When the mosque in Stockholm was due to be built in 1998, she was one of those who went round informing neighbours and others affected by the project. As she sees it, the media have helped whip up fear and opposition. News reporting about Islam often focuses on violence and oppression. And terrorist acts. Islam is something menacing. With this image in mind, it is not strange that people are reluctant to see a mosque going up next door. “They see Muslims portrayed as violent, fanatical and tyrannical,” says Hartman.“In our perception of Islam, Swedish culture tends to be held up as its opposite. The good as opposed to the evil. It’s as though Islam represents everything we don’t want to become.” This image is based on a highly simplified view of reality but nevertheless helps make Islam appear a threat. Something we have to protect ourselves against. There are five mosques in Sweden today. A few more are at the planning stage. All the projects have led to protests. These have included letters to newspapers and appeals against municipal planning decisions. Even when the number of those who protested publicly has not been very large, some of the protestors have taken drastic action. On the night of 14 August 1993, someone set fire to the mosque in Trollhättan, which was totally destroyed. In Malmö, someone released a pig in the mosque. When the Stockholm town planning committee was to take a decision on the mosque there in February 1995, a number of threatening calls were made to City Hall. Ann-Christin Hartman believes the protests are caused by a fear that Islam may “take over” in Sweden. The mosque issue thus becomes a struggle between the Islamic and Christian cultures. In

35 Stockholm, the conflict centred on the mosque’s minaret and the church tower on the nearby St Catherine’s Church. People did not want the minaret to be built higher than the church tower. Accor- ding to Hartman, many people are afraid that “Christian Swedish values” such as democracy, gender equality and freedom of religion will disappear if further mosques are built. A recurring argument is that in a number of Muslim countries, Christians are oppressed and prevented from building churches— so what gives Muslims the right to build mosques in a Christian country? But the situation is not that simple. The provincial newspaper Smålandsposten, refuted this argument in an editorial on 7 April 2001, pointing out that Christian churches are to be found in most Muslim countries. This is also confirmed by the Church of Sweden. The argument can be turned on its head: if Muslims are not allowed to build mosques here, is it likely that Christians will be allowed to build churches in Muslim countries in the future?

David Sandberg works for Quick Response, a media watchdog sponsored by the youth branch of the Swedish Red Cross.

FACTS: There are five mosques in Sweden today, in Malmö, Trollhättan, Västerås, Uppsala and Stockholm. Further mosques are planned, at least in Göteborg, Skövde, Växjö and Örebro.

Although freedom of religion is enshrined in the Swedish Constitution, only 41 per cent of Swedes feel that immigrants should have the right to practise their religion, according to a poll conducted by the SOM Institute in 1999.

Today a man was knocked down by an Arab ›

36 illustration by Jesper Waldersten

a muslim in Krylbo by Jenny Berggren

HORNDAL PEOPLE—you know what they’re like. A bit thick. That was how Mehmet Kaplan and his friends in Krylbo saw it when they were due to start school and have classmates from the neighbouring village. Today, more than 20 years later, he likens the way Swedish society views Muslims to his critical attitude towards his classmates. As chairman of the Swedish Young Muslims Association he comes across the same kind of fear of the unknown, both in journalism and in the community as a whole. “The media have two ways of describing Muslims, either as sweet and loveable or as something scary,” he says. The sweet and loveable version includes an element of indul- gence, as though “we of course know better than the Muslims”. As an example, Mehmet Kaplan cites the case of a teacher who told a newspaper interviewer that pupils were allowed to defy the rules of their religion and drink water at school during the Muslim fast as long as they promised not to tell their fathers and mothers. As Mehmet Kaplan sees it, the teacher is thereby failing to take the parents seriously, treating them as though they were stupid instead of giving them a chance to explain. Mehmet Kaplan prefers to be taken seriously. He would like to see serious media reporting on how Muslims pray instead of pictures taken out of context simply showing men on their knees.

38 He feels that such pictures give the impression that Muslims are a bit dense and that they unthinkingly allow themselves to be oppressed by the Koran. “I can’t identify with such images—the Muslims I know in Sweden are proud people.” He says that press reporting tended to take the indulgent line when there were fewer Muslims in Sweden. When they only prayed at home in their living-rooms, the media could afford to find prayer mats and shawls exotic and amusing. Today, however, the children of these Muslims have grown up. And they want to live and be allowed space on the same terms as everyone else. They want a prayer mat at work, just as smokers are allowed smoking rooms. They want a mosque. They want to wear headshawls without having to defend the practice. “In which case, someone will have to give up some of their space to make room for us to pray.” And the indulgent attitude, says Mehmet Kaplan, then turns into one of suspicion. He compares the way (Swedish) society treats Muslims to the way (male) society treats women. Women are praised and patted on the head as long as they do not represent a threat to male power. But when they are given a job because they have the best qualifica- tions for it, male support tends to vanish. Women can either react by thinking,“Get used to it, lads”—or they may have a bad day and lose heart. Mehmet Kaplan describes the same mixed feelings among Muslims. He says Muslims, just like women, encounter suspicion when they are no longer manageable and easily indulged. He says that media attitudes tend to harden when Muslims are no longer content to pray at home, when they want to build mosques and take their rightful place in society just like everyone else. According to Mehmet Kaplan, Muslims are then described as a threat, and their religion is portrayed as a brutal regime symbolised by women in shawls. Mehmet Kaplan emphasises that the Koran does not require women to wear shawls. What, then, does the shawl represent for him?

39 “It represents submission—but not to the man, to God. Just as you submit to God by washing before you pray.” He appreciates, however, that a young feminist girl may regard a classmate wearing a shawl as oppressed. For a girl with that kind of impression, he would like to arrange a meeting with one of the young women who wear shawls through choice, and who do so proudly. But he also discusses at length the Muslim girls who live in conflict situations, and sometimes are directly threatened, because they wish to lead their lives according to values that are not acceptable to their fathers. He agrees that such problems do indeed exist and that Muslims themselves have failed to take them seriously enough. But he feels that it should be emphasised more clearly in the public debate that this applies only to a few girls, not to all young female Muslims. In other cases where Islam is presented as a menace, the subject is often the sexual mutilation of girls or terrorist acts, two phenomena that in Mehmet Kaplan’s view have nothing to do with the Muslim faith. He does feel, however, that some things have changed for the better in the media field following the terror attacks in the US last September. Islam and the Muslim community are no longer presented in such a simplified light, and some media are showing a greater eagerness to try and understand Muslims. “People aren’t interested in clichés any more,” he says. He finds it hard to understand those who feel that the growing number of Muslims represents a threat to Christianity. Partly because Islam and Christianity often share the same fundamental values, he says, and partly because it is not a matter of taking over but rather of being allowed in on equal terms. Just like in the case of women fighting for equality of the sexes. He feels that women must first have more executive power if Sweden is to become a fairer place— after which it will be time for equality between cultures.

Jenny Berggren works for Quick Response, a media watchdog sponsored by the youth branch of the Swedish Red Cross.

40 13

KABUL

It was a black day when I left my country It was five o’clock in Kabul early in the morning There was a curfew No-one went with us to the station Do you know why? No-one had said a word We weren’t allowed to tell anyone that we were leaving Someone might report us We didn’t know friend from enemy Leaving your country is like dying Never again would I see my loved ones Never again sit and laugh and joke with my friends Never again see the snow-capped mountains ringing the town like a fence Never again see the indescribably blue sky and be dazzled by the strong sunlight Leaving your country is like dying My heart still lies there in shreds

Shakila Emami, from ‘In the Heart of Tensta: Poems, Tales and Images from Tensta Upper Secondary School’ 14

media images and historical

images by Alexander Cavalieratos

“The militant Muslim movement Hamas today urged ‘Muslims and Arabs around the world’ to attack Jewish targets during Easter.”

“The concept of honour killings is found mainly in the Middle East. In Jordan, an estimated 30 women a year are murdered in this way.”

“...many young British Muslims are ready to take part in the Taliban’s war against the US-led alliance.1”

THE ABOVE QUOTATIONS come from articles in Sweden’s biggest evening paper, Aftonbladet. We recognise the theme: over there, in the Muslim countries, brutal acts of violence are being committed all the time, and Muslims living in the West are also prone to violence. But is that really the case? Media research shows that of all reporting on Islam in the news programmes Aktuellt, Rapport and Nyheterna (TV4) a few years ago, 85% was violence-related. By comparison, only 25% of the items in the overall volume of news reporting had to do with violence.2 The problem is not whether the above quotations are true or

42 not. Rather, a collection of true articles taken together can mis- represent reality. It is the selection of true images that creates the lie: when we in Sweden hear about Islam in news programmes, it is almost always in connection with violence. For many who do not have a personal relationship with Islam, the constant repetition of the word Islam itself, or of Allah, becomes associated with violence. We choose to see violent Muslims. Otherwise we would have been told about Muslims who are also parents, children, working professionals, people of differing views and so on, instead of only suicide bombers and persecutors of women. But why do we prefer to see only violent Muslims?

THE FACT IS that there is a special branch of research concerned with precisely this question. Edward Said, a Palestinian-American professor of literature, declares that over the past few centuries Europeans have carved out a European identity for themselves by simultaneously cultivating an image of a diametrically opposed identity, the Oriental one. Europe thus becomes a collective concept defining ‘us’ as opposed to ‘them’—them being the world’s Orientals (a term used mainly to describe Arabs, but also Persians, Indians, Afghans and Chinese). The defining mark of the European identity is its superiority to all non-European peoples and cultures. When Europeans choose to see Arabs as violent, they are seeking to affirm their identities by saying:‘they’ are violent, uncivilised non- Europeans,‘we’ are peaceloving, civilised Europeans. By viewing Arabs and Muslims as a menace, Europeans develop a sense of community among themselves. This whole approach has its most recent roots in the colonial era and in Europe’s need to justify its brutal treatment of colonised peoples. At the time, it was said that Arabs and Africans needed European leadership, that they were unable to manage on their own. All this may sound exaggerated, but a couple of examples from the colonial era may serve to illustrate the point. Fredrika Bremer, a leading figure both in Swedish literature and in the struggle for women’s rights, described a trip she made to

43 Palestine in 1859. Her attitude towards Arabs and Islam reflects that of most Swedes and Europeans at the time. The Arabs, she wrote,

“are destroying all culture and sense of wellbeing in Palestine. To command respect, European consuls and missionaries are having to establish colonies and defend themselves by force of arms against this plague of locusts; but this does not represent much of a problem as the Arabs are not the least bit courageous.”3

The Arabs destroy all culture and sense of wellbeing, she says, and they are like locusts—in other words they lay waste to all in their path. Her comments, made just before colonisation of the world began in earnest, reflected the European view that non-Europeans were inferior and thus could be treated with whatever brutality was required. In those days, Palestine, the Holy Land, played a more central role in the Christian faith than it does today. It was here that Jesus was born, lived and was crucified. What upsets Fredrika Bremer is that the cradle of the Christian faith is in the hands of Muslims. When describing the problem of Islam in the following terms, her point of departure is that Christianity is the only correct faith:

“The Mohammedan concept of God, so like that of blind fate, heartless and senseless, and the bleak resignation, the lack of hope and of peaceful improvement...are indeed corrosive, murderous forces in the life of a people.”4

Later in the 19th century and well into the 20th, other Swedes followed in her footsteps and made pilgrimages to Egypt and Palestine where they searched for traces of Jesus and the stories of the Old Testament. The image of Arabs as an inferior people ‘laying waste to all culture and sense of wellbeing’ persists. Oscar Dreiwitz provided the following account in 1923:

“Ancient Cairo, which dates back thousands of years, is of characteristic Eastern design. The streets are extremely narrow and dirty. All manner of refuse is tossed into the street, and if you are fortunate enough you will be involuntarily doused by someone emptying a pail of slops from a roof or window.”5

44 Yolanda Colliander described in 1913 how the Egyptian children called after her:

“‘Bakschisch, bakschisch!’ Much of the pleasure and delight of travelling in Egypt is dispelled by these never-ending calls for ‘coins’. I have seen children feeding at their mother’s breasts break off and stretch out their hands asking for ‘bakschisch’.”6

Just as today, these narrators were concerned with singling out certain aspects of what they saw and preferably exaggerating them. But instead of focusing on violence—even if there was much talk in those days, too, of how violent the Arab was—such accounts emphasised time and again the absence of proper hygiene and how greedy people were in Egypt or Palestine. In the streets of Cairo you have to zigzag your way through the waste and excrement and duck flying slops while even babies at their mother’s breast beg money from you! To call Islam Mohammedanism, as Fredrika Bremer did, is to belittle the Muslim faith. By their choice of words, Christians sought to portray Islam as a cult of personality centring on its founder, Mohammed. In this way, and through stories about the dirty, greedy Arabs, they wanted to show that Islam was a heathen, immoral religion in comparison with Christianity. The Europeans’ sense of identity embraced an image of Europe as a pillar of modernity, civilisation and culture in contrast to the ‘Orient’, which represented underdevelopment, primitive behaviour and savage landscapes. When Fredrika Bremer and the Swedish pilgrims described the people of Egypt and Palestine as dirty, primitive and heathen, this was an affirmation of their own Swedish and European superiority.

SUCH IDENTITY-AFFIRMING images of the ‘Other’, however, are not unique to European culture. Let us take a giant step back through history, to the year 920 AD, to see what an ancient Arab culture had to say about other peoples and religions:

“They are the vilest of Allah’s creatures: they do not wash

45 themselves after defecating or micturating, nor after sexual intercourse, and nor do they wash their hands after meals. They are as wayward donkeys.”7

These words come from an Arab diplomat, Ibn Fadlan, who met Swedish Vikings on his travels and wrote an account of his impres- sions when he returned home. He goes on to describe these men of the north in the following terms:

“One has intercourse with his slave girl while his companion watches. Often, a whole brood of them behave in this way in each others’ presence...Every day they wash their faces and heads in the dirtiest and most repulsive water imaginable. The manner of this is as follows. Each morning a slave brings in a bowl of water and gives it to her master. He washes his hands, face and hair and disentangles it with a comb in the bowl. He then blows his nose and spits in the water—verily, there is no filth that he does not confine to this same water. When he is finished, the slave carries the bowl to the next man, who repeats the process. And thus she carries the bowl round from one to the other until all in the house have used it. And each and every one of them blows his nose and spits in the bowl wherein he washes his face and hair.”8

Hardly a flattering account. How are we to interpret Ibn Fadlan’s words? Were the Vikings immoral and primitive pigs? It would help us to remember that Ibn Fadlan himself belonged to the upper crust of Arab society and belonged to a culture in which people ritually washed themselves five times a day. To win the approval of his own kind, and not least to provide some excellent entertain- ment, he represented the Vikings as a people whose behaviour was diametrically opposed to what was acceptable in Arab culture. Bearing in mind that Ibn Fadlan describes not only the Vikings but also most of the people he comes across as immoral pigs, we must assume that the image of the dirty Viking who spits and blows his nose may be no more than a powerful exaggeration based on the

46 fact that the Vikings were not as interested in personal hygiene as he was. When he goes on to describe their religion, he is intent on ridiculing them:

“They make their way to a tall stake driven into the ground and bearing a humanlike face ... fall to their knees and pray, saying ... ‘I come to thee with these gifts’ and with these words he places them before the wooden image and says, ‘I want you to give me a merchant rich in dinares and dirhems who is willing to buy from me all I wish and does not oppose what I say!’”9

Ibn Fadlan goes on to describe how the Viking, if his wish is not ful- filled, moves on to the next wooden figure with his gifts and asks it for help instead. When the Viking offers meat as a sacrifice and the dogs eat it up at night, Ibn Fadlan describes how the Viking believes that it is the wooden god that has consumed the offering. Ibn Fadlan clearly looks down his nose at the Viking practice of worshipping ‘wooden images’. To him, praying to a wooden figure or having more than one god was inconceivable. It is obvious from his account not only that he finds the Vikings greedy in their prayers but also that he considers them pretty foolish. In this lies an implicit homage to his own religion, Islam. To orthodox Muslims like Ibn Fadlan and his readers, this account of the Vikings’ religious practices was confirmation that their own religion was the only right and proper one. What else causes him to describe the Vikings as he does? To answer this question we can look at another part of his account, in which he compares the Vikings to palm trees, presumably because he finds them taller than the average Arab.10 So if the Vikings were taller, they in turn might compare Ibn Fadlan with something shorter than a palm tree—a tree stump, for instance, or a child. How Ibn Fadlan describes the Other, therefore, depends upon his perception of himself, and the Other thereby becomes a form of self-affirmation or a reverse reflection. In other words: a person is only tall once he or she comes across someone who is short and can be used as a comparison. The negative aspect of such comparisons is that the Other is frequently invested with all the bad

47 qualities that the person concerned wishes to be dissociated from, such as dirt, smut, immorality and stupidity. This image suited Ibn Fadlan’s purposes and self-perception. So it served to represent the Vikings.

THIS, THEN, IS how an Arab government official in the 10th century described people from the region that later became Sweden. Today, in contrast to Ibn Fadlan’s time, when only a few people could read his accounts, we learn about foreign cultures through various kinds of media that have a powerful impact on society. TV, newspapers, magazines and books overflow in our modern world and the images that confront us constantly shape our percep- tions concerning other cultures. There are a number of examples showing how the prevailing literary culture describes the Other. For the past couple of centuries, the West has largely prevailed in this respect but as we saw in the case of Ibn Fadlan this was not always the case. We have seen how the way one portrays the Other is dependent on one’s own self-image and that people tend to invest in outsiders all the bad qualities that they themselves wish to be dissociated from. So we are forced to conclude that a fair picture of foreign cultures is to be found neither in the historical accounts of Ibn Fadlan, Fredrika Bremer or the Swedish pilgrim, nor in the general media image presented today. The Swedish media, through its images of violent Muslims, is confirming a Swedish and European sense of identity by showing that this identity is under threat and that it is also superior to that of the Arabs or Muslims. Edward Said, the Palestinian-American researcher and professor, calls this Western outlook Orientalism. In Fredrika Bremer’s and the other pilgrims’ day, Swedes sought to emphasis the image of dirty, uncultured and primitive Arabs and Muslims. In Sweden today, we emphasise violent Arabs and Muslims. The choice of image become a distortion of reality that suits Sweden’s self-image.

Alexander Cavalieratos is a student at Södertörn University College in Huddinge 48 REFERENCES Fredrika Bremer, Lifvet i Gamla Verlden. Palestina och Turkiet, 4:e delen, Stockholm, 1859. Yolanda Colliander, Ögonblicksbilder från en resa i Orienten, Helsingfors, 1913. Oscar Dreiwitz, Med kamera och penna genom faraoners och Israels land, Stockholm, 1923. Håkan Hvitfelt, ‘Den muslimska faran: om mediebilden av islam’, in Ylva Brune (ed.), Mörk magi i vita medier, Stockholm, 1998. Sigrid Kahle in the preface to Edward Said, Orientalism, Stockholm, 2000 (Swedish pocket edition). Edward Said, Orientalism, Stockholm, 2000 (Swedish pocket edition). Stig Wikander, Araber Vikingar Väringar, Lund, 1978. www.aftonbladet.se

1 The quotations have been taken in chronological order from Aftonbladet’s web editions of 8 April 1998, 7 January 2002 and 17 November 2001. 2 The figures are for 1991-95 and are taken from Håkan Hvitfelt, ‘The Muslim Peril: On the Media Image of Islam’, in Ylva Brune (ed), ‘Dark Magic in White Media’, Stockholm, 1998, pp 79. 3 Quoted by Sigrid Kahle in the foreword to the Swedish pocket edition of Edward Said’s book, Orientalism, Stockholm, 2000, p 21. 4 Fredrika Bremer, Lifvet i Gamla Verlden, Palestina och Turkiet, Del 4, Stockholm, 1859, p 192. 5 Oscar Dreiwitz, Med kamera och penna genom faraoners och Israels land, Stockholm, 1923, p 31. 6 Yolanda Colliander, Ögonblicksbilder från en resa i Orienten, Helsingfors, 1913, p 33. The Swedish spelling has been modernised by Alexander Cavalieratos. 7 Quotation from Stig Wikander, Araber Vikingar Väringar, Lund, 1978, p 64. 8 Quotation from Stig Wikander, Araber Vikingar Väringar, Lund, 1978, p 64. 9 Quotation from Stig Wikander, Araber Vikingar Väringar, Lund, 1978, pp 64. 10 Quotation from Stig Wikander, Araber Vikingar Väringar, Lund, 1978, p 63.

»Easy to tear down, hard to build up« Turkish proverb

49 15

islamophobia by Anne Sofie Roald

FEAR OF THE unknown, of outsiders, is not a phenomenon peculiar to the modern era. Down through the centuries, groups of people have gathered together to ward off intruders. In order to keep the group together, the idea has been implanted that ‘we’ are superior to ‘them’. One way of maintaining this self-image has been to portray other groups as ‘different’,‘strange’ and ‘unacceptable’. Historically, the Jewish community is the one that has been most exposed to agitation and persecution on the part of other ethnic groups. For long periods, the Jews did not have a country of their own and were often driven into exile in various parts of the world. They built up minority groups in a number of countries and were therefore easy to use as scapegoats at different times. Gypsies, or Roma as they prefer to be called, are another social group frequently exposed to persecution and isolation in the countries they have lived in. Like the Jews, they have not had a country of their own where they could live in peace. In the countries they lived in, they were often chased from place to place and as time passed the belief grew that Roma were not interested in settling down. In Sweden today, we have come to understand that the reason why so many Roma travelled around was that they were forced to. Now that they have the opportunity, they live in flats and the children attend ‘ordinary’ Swedish schools. Since the Second World War, attitudes towards Jews and Roma have undergone a change as a result of the horrifying persecution

50 they suffered at the hands of the Nazis. Some prejudice towards the Jewish and Roma communities still persists, but it is the Muslims who have become the scapegoats of today. The persecution of the Jews and hatred of Jews is called ‘antisemitism’. Similar ideas and sentiments are expressed today in the case of Islam and Muslims, and this is called ‘Islamophobia’. Islamophobia means that you are afraid of the religion known as ‘Islam’ and of Muslims, the people that follow this religion. A major international conference (Combating Intolerance) in Stock- holm in January 2001 declared that Islamophobia should be defined as intolerance just like racism, antisemitism and xenophobia (hatred of foreigners or of their politics or culture). Previously, many countries around the world had not been prepared to accept such a definition.

CAUSES Islamophobia has many causes. First and foremost, it may be caused by the fact that many Muslims come from countries where cultural traditions differ from Western ones. Alternatively, or in ad- dition, Islamophobia may have religious, racist or economic origins. Religious Islamophobia may derive from the idea that the Islamic faith is unacceptable in itself as it is thought to represent a threat to the West. Interpretations of Christian and Jewish texts have undergone certain changes. For example, Sweden had no women clergy before 1950. Since the 1950s, a growing number of women have become clergy in the Church of Sweden. The same is true of Judaism, where the position of women has altered in many Jewish denominations. Other aspects of these two religions have changed as well, such as the way the family and homosexuality are viewed. In the case of Islam, however, the fact that the Islamic message itself is currently undergoing change is not so widely known. Swedes, for instance, tend to view Islam as a religion that is hostile to women and prone to violence. The fact that the attitudes to be found in many Islamic denominations today are very much like those found in Christianity and Judaism is not so widely known. It is

51 important to remember that in all three religions there are groups with a strict,‘old-fashioned’ outlook and groups with a more ‘modern’ outlook who are open to the community around them. In the case of Christianity and Judaism, people do not claim that those with an ‘old-fashioned’ outlook represent all Christians and Jews, but when it comes to Islam such claims are often heard.

HOW IS ISLAMOPHOBIA EXPRESSED? This kind of fear of Islam and Muslims is primarily expressed in the media and in conversation. One example is ‘honour killings’—a better description might be shame killings—which is a practice found in various religions, among them Islam, Christianity and Yazidi (a religious community that is neither Jewish, Christian nor Muslim but combines shamanism and Zoroastrianism, denies the existence of evil and believes that the soul passes to another body upon a

“What are racists?” “Racists are people who, on the pretext of not having the same colour, not speaking the same language and not observing the same customs in the same way, believe they are better, more advanced, than those who are different from them.”

Conversation between author Taher Ben Jelloun (b 1944) and his 10-year-old daughter person’s death—transmigration). The practice has its roots in the Mediterranean area and in South-Eastern Asia. The first young woman to be murdered in this way in Sweden was of Christian-Palestinian descent. Nor did Fadime—murdered by her father in January 2002—describe herself as a Muslim. When such things occur in Sweden, Muslims and Islam are blamed. People write letters to the newspapers describing Islam and Muslims in negative terms, and you frequently see editorial writers, columnists and contributors to the cultural pages drawing parallels between Islam and honour killings—even when Muslims are not involved. Many Muslims receive e-mail messages, letters or telephone calls blaming all Muslims for crimes of this kind. Following the terror attacks on the US in September 2001, allegedly the work of Muslim terrorists, expressions of anti-Islam and anti-Muslim sentiment increased. The Muslim community as a whole was blamed in the Swedish public debate, and people demanded that Muslims at various levels dissociate themselves from the terrorists’ actions. On the one hand, a number of Muslim representatives were invited to take part in TV and press debates immediately after the attacks. On the other, both the press and TV showed a greater readiness to air expressions of Islamophobic sentiment, some of which deteriorated to the point where a small group of ‘Muslim fundamentalists’ came to be identified as the role models of all followers of Islam. In the debate surrounding the US-led reprisals for 11 September, particularly the bombing of various Muslim countries, Muslims have been left with the impression that racist Islamophobia has increased and that people think Muslim lives are less valuable than American/European lives.

Anne Sofie Roald is a university lecturer in religious history at Malmö University College

53 17

HALABJA

In March 1988, spring was on the way once again. The mountains of Kurdistan, still not finished with the winter, would presently turn green. Soon the snow would melt all around the country and the earth would be decked with flowers instead. Spring is like a gift to us Kurds. That’s when preparations begin for Newroz, the Kurdish New Year. The Kurds start by whitewashing their houses and sewing new clothes for both children and adults. Each house is cleaned and the women cook traditional dishes. Preparations for Newroz were under way in Halabja this particular spring just like any other. Every morning, people awoke to the clamour of the streets, children playing, men hurrying to work, women beginning the day’s chores. But one morning all this life and bustle was brought to an end. Instead of bodies at play, dead bodies lay on the streets of Halabja. No sounds, no laughter, no eager chatter heralding the arrival of Newroz. Mothers had pressed their children’s bodies to their breast to protect them from the poisonous air. Fathers had hugged the small bodies of their children to protect them. But who is to protect these mothers and fathers?

Evin from ‘In the Heart of Tensta: Poems, Tales and Images from Tensta Upper Secondary School’.

In 1998, Iraqi President Saddam Hussein gassed to death the Kurdish population of the town of Halabja. 18 when the fundamentalists came to town by Cekdar Kaya

WHEN I WAS a child on visits to my birthplace in Kurdistan, a town called Batman, only the wives of clergymen wore shawls. Married women who had not received an education seldom appeared in public with their heads uncovered. But young people and educated women dressed in accordance with Western fashions. Women were allowed to go to college and find work wherever they wished. They were active in both legal and illegal political parties. All my aunts on my mother’s side are educated and support themselves. They used to go to cafés and to the cinema with their friends. In the 1980s, the military regime in Turkey allowed the Islamic fundamentalists to grow strong. They were considered the easiest internal enemy for the Turkish state to deal with. But the last thing that NATO (of which Turkey is a member) and the West wants is a fundamentalist dictatorship. The military’s grip on political power, therefore, is accepted, although it means oppression and the absence of democracy and free debate. When I visited Batman at the age of 15, in 1993, everything was different. Most women walked around in clothing that covered their whole body. You almost never saw women walking alone, unaccompanied by any male member of their family. The Hizbollah movement, which had previously been small and insignificant, had suddenly grown strong. The movement unites fundamentalists whose aim is a society governed directly by medieval Islamic law. It had grown in strength principally as a result of its militant methods. Women who went into the street bareheaded, for instance, risked having acid thrown in their faces. Another way of harassing women with short skirts was to bend a razorblade and fire it like a projec-

55 tile at the women’s bare legs. My aunts refused to quit their jobs but they were terrified at what might happen to them every time they went to work. During this period, over a thousand young Kurdish men in Batman were murdered by the Hizbollah movement because they questioned its view of women. Even though the movement has since grown weaker, it has managed to bring religion onto the political agenda in Turkey in an unprecedented way.When I was a child, the fact that we were all Muslims was totally irrelevant in political terms. In those days, discussions were about political ideology and the Kurdish struggle. In Sweden, too, Muslim fundamentalists are trying to establish a foothold for themselves. I once heard a representative of the Muslim Council demanding on the radio that Muslims in Sweden be judged according to Sharia law (religious Muslim law) instead of Swedish law in cases concerning family. The idea is of course absurd. Swedish law is not based on what the Bible says but on what present generations have agreed on. Ensuring that all people respect and obey the same laws is a way of keeping society together. If different laws were observed, what would happen in the event of a legal dispute between people of different faiths? Islam can be interpreted in many different ways. We should remember that most Muslims are not fundamentalists. A Muslim who interprets Islam strictly according to the book cannot exist in a non-Muslim society. Those who live here, therefore, have had to make some concessions. This is inevitable, as life would otherwise be very difficult to cope with. You cannot, for example, insist that your teacher or classmates wait while you pray, or repeat what they did while you were out of the room. You shouldn’t make things too difficult for those around you.

Cekdar Kaya, 22, military conscript

56 19

TUESDAY 11 SEPTEMBER 2001 HOW COME?

How come a thing like this can take place How will it end, all this shame and disgrace When will people stop hating one another When will people stop fighting, become sister and brother

You who did this, I ask myself why You behaved just like animals, hear my cry, What gives you the right to take a life What are your reasons for causing such strife

Do you really know what it is you’re doing People are dying in the World Trade Centre ruin Do thousands of innocents really have to go So that you men of evil can sow your woe

No-one really knows just what’s going on But sending those planes was just plain wrong I rubbed my eyes when I saw the first one crash Then came another, and another—unreality flash

This poem’s for you who met such unfortunate ends For you who went in today but never came out—friends, I hereby light a candle to honour your names And pray this kind of thing will never happen again

Daniel Harild, 18, a student at the Östra Real Upper Secondary School, Stockholm 20

another point of view by Christina Zaar

ARASH, MAHDI AND MOHAMMED shocked friends and teachers at their school by refusing to observe the three minutes’ silence called to honour the victims of the terror attacks in the US on 11 September 2001. All three boys were torn by conflicting emotions when the reports of the terror attacks filled the media. On the one hand they believe that US policies need to be resisted, on the other they reject terrorism. They believe the Muslim faith to be the anti- thesis of terrorism. “We will now observe three minutes’ silence as a protest against terrorism and in support of an open, democratic society”, the headteacher announced over the loudspeaker system. “Why should we observe three minutes’ silence now when we’ve never done so before?” wondered Mohammed. Mohammed Kaivan was born and raised in Baghdad. He has terrifying memories of his own of bomb attacks. American bombs destroyed the bridge on which he used to play football with his friends when he was young. As luck would have it, they weren’t on the bridge when the bombs hit. Four years ago, Mohammed arrived in democratic Sweden and found the peace and quiet he needed to concentrate on his studies. He is doing the general science course at upper secondary school. Both Mohammed and his parents are practising Muslims. They say

58 prayers and observe the fast at Ramadan. On 11 September, Mohammed’s peace and quiet was rudely interrupted, although this time it was the US that was attacked. Mohammed’s initial reaction was one of glee, until he realised how many innocent people had died. Mahdi Adawi is at the same school as Mohammed, but is doing the motor mechanics course. Mahdi was born and raised in Sweden but his father is from Palestine and his mother from Jordan. Mahdi’s parents are followers of Islam and so is he. Arash Zargarian is also at the same school, doing the electrical and telecommunications engineering course. Arash was born in Iran and has lived in Sweden for the past twelve years. He remem- bers virtually nothing from his time in Iran and has never been back there. Neither he himself nor his parents are particularly religious. Both sets of grandparents, however, are practising Muslims. The Kaivans, Adawis and Zargarians all have satellite dishes that allow them to watch TV channels from a number of different countries. This gives them a broad outlook on the world. They are used to seeing other perspectives besides the Swedish one. Mohammed’s class had earlier been asked to observe a minute’s silence on the morning after the terror attack. Mohammed protested at first but sat in silence and read a verse from the Koran to himself during the silence, in honour of all innocent people who had died throughout history and all over the world. Then he left the room. He felt that his classmates were not prepared to accept his arguments and were not really interested in them, either. At that moment, a yawning gap opened up between Mohammed and those who up until then had been his best friends. He suddenly felt alone, more alone than he had ever felt before. When Mohammed turned 18 a couple of weeks later, there was no birthday party. None of his old friends came to congratulate him as they had done a year earlier, on his 17th birthday, when the house was packed. “My brothers and sisters and my parents told me,‘Now, you fool, perhaps you’ll realise that you can’t just say anything you like in

59 Sweden, either’,” Mohammed says truculently. He finds it difficult to accept that democratic Sweden, too, wants him to keep his opinions to himself. For those prepared to listen, however, his opinion is that US policy is both manipulative and oppressive and that the US wants access to the Arab world’s resources but respects neither its people nor its religion. Mahdi said not a word in the days immediately following the attacks. Inside, he felt roughly the same as Mohammed. But Mahdi knew that he would become as isolated as Mohammed if he expressed his opinion aloud. “I talked to some girls on the day after the attacks and they said they felt so bad because so many innocent people had died in the

Arash, Mahdi and Mohammed refused to take part in the three minutes’ silence held for the victims of the terror attacks in the US on 11 September. PHOTO SAM STADENER / PRESSENS BILD US. I went cold. If I were to grieve for all the young children and others who had died in Palestine, I’d be sad all the time,” says Mahdi. “I observed those three minutes’ silence and I regret it. I feel I should have left the room,” he says. He would have liked to object that “no minutes of silence have ever been observed for any other victims except American ones.” To be fair, the headteacher ended his appeal over the loudspeaker system with the following words:“Let us never forgot those innocent people who have been injured or killed or have sacrificed their lives all over the world, in terrorist acts and in the fight for freedom and democracy.” These words, however, appear to have been lost in the general indignation that followed 11 September. The attacks helped make Arash realise where he belonged, being neither a Muslim nor an Arab. Arash is Persian and does not believe in any religion, but in Sweden he is often regarded as an Arab. “If I do something wrong, I’m a bloody Arab. That stands for someone who’s incompetent, stupid, all the bad things,” says Arash. He became furious at all the references to ‘Muslim terrorists’ that were heard in the media reporting on the events of 11 September. “You never hear references to ‘Christian terrorists’, or someone who’s done something good being referred to as a Muslim, such as ‘the Muslim racing driver’”, he says. Arash is keen to defend both Islam and Arabs as he can see how misunderstood they are in Sweden. “A thousand students have died in my country, but no-one observes a minute’s silence for them,” he says.“When we were supposed to have a minute’s silence, I didn’t keep quiet. And that felt good,” he says. Arash has his own views about the relentless US-led hunt for terrorists in Afghanistan. “Even if you cut off a sick arm the germs remain in the body and you need antibiotics to combat the disease.” Arash thinks freedom is the antibiotic that can exterminate the germ of terrorism.

61 Mohammed lost some illusions about Sweden in the month of September 2001. Since arriving in this country, he has made such a point of behaving well, of not throwing litter on the ground, for instance, that his friends have teased him, wondering if he is “playing at being a Swede”. He is active in the school group against bullying and is thus supposed to be a model to others. “This thing is haunting me,” he complains.“In my native country I wasn’t allowed to say what I wanted and now that I’m in Sweden I can’t say what I want, either. Things are different here, of course, but I still can’t state my opinions in the same way as others.” In Sweden, adds Mahdi, you are supposed to think like everyone else, like the majority.“And if you don’t, there’s something wrong with you.” None of their friends at school have since asked what really happened on that occasion, when the three minutes’ silence led to conflict instead of a sense of community. How come? Arash knows, as the rosy image of Sweden that Mohammed just lost is something he saw through long ago. “They don’t ask because they’re afraid of the answer. They don’t want to hear that their closest friend is against this or that. People are supposed to think the same as you, it’s that simple. Especially your best friend.” “A great gap has opened up inside me,” says Mohammed, still aggrieved—although he can’t help still being himself, talkative and eager.

Christina Zaar is a journalist with Dagens Nyheter, Stockholm

FOOTNOTE: This interview is taken from an article published in Dagens Nyheter on 16 December 2001. It was conducted in col- laboration with teacher Lena Holmberg as part of a paper for the Faculty of Theology at Stockholm University.

62 21 ➾ 25 the shawl 21

the right to wear a shawl by Hidayet Tercan

MY HUSBAND ARRIVED home the other night looking relieved. He had been thinking about that sensitive issue—women with shawls. I myself am a Muslim. I don’t wear a shawl and I have a good job, but my sense of justice caused me to react very strongly when he put forward his views. This is what he said:“If a Muslim woman with a shawl applies for a job and isn’t prepared to adapt to the style of dress at that particular workplace, she has only herself to blame if she is turned down.” He mentioned the municipal old-age care service as an example.“Imagine if poor old dears who’ve never seen a woman in a shawl suddenly get a helper covered from head to toe—they’d get the fright of their lives, wouldn’t they!” My husband has clearly been influenced by a public debate that associates the wearing of shawls with male oppression of women and argues that foreign women in shawls should adjust to this part of the world—‘when in Sweden, do as the Swedes do’! Preferably, I’d like to dismiss him as an idiot and stamp a ‘xeno- phobe’ label on his forehead, but I know that he is neither. My mother wears a shawl and has done so all her life. Her shawl is part of her personality. She was left to raise eight children on her own when she was just 32 and as a lone young Kurdish woman all the odds were against her. Yet she has brought us all up to be independent, free-thinking individuals. She made sure we had an

64 education, and when it was impossible for her to stay in her native country, she brought us to Sweden. To the country where you can look and dress as you want, where there is democracy, where you have freedom of expression and freedom of the press...—the list of Sweden’s advantages is a long one! She did all this while wearing a shawl. I myself regard my mother as a woman worthy of admiration. I asked my husband for his opinion—he couldn’t help but agree. Who am I to tell my mother, who has fought all her life to give us a good future, that she mustn’t wear a shawl in Sweden because some people object to it? It would be like telling her that her whole person is wrong for this country. To a great extent, her personality, her identity, is associated with that shawl. It’s a symbol of her integrity. I think it would be shameful if I had to tell someone who has fought for the equal worth of all, and been frightened into exile as a result, that if she wants to be accepted in this country—of which she had such high hopes—she cannot be herself. Appearances, it seems, take precedence over human dignity.

Hidayet Tercan works with integration issues

(This article is an edited version of the one published by www.quickresponse.nu, website of the Swedish Red Cross’s youth section)

»You can’t fight fire with fire« Turkish proverb

65 22 head coverings in Islam by Anne Sofie Roald

HISTORICALLY SPEAKING, veils and head coverings used to be symbols of power and elitism. In ancient Assyria and Persia, for instance, only women of rank were allowed to cover their heads. Female slaves were punished if they wore veils or head coverings. Later, too, in Byzantine for instance, only rich and privileged women were allowed to wear headdress. Men of high degree also covered their heads, and we read how the prophet Mohammed and his peers wore head coverings. In Muslim countries today, too, many men cover their heads. Some believe you should do so as a mark of respect for God. This is common, for instance, in Turkey, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Malaysia and Indonesia. In the Gulf States around the Persian Gulf, head coverings have a social function. There, the native male population wear full-length tunics (dishdasha) with a type of head covering (ghutra) held in place by a black ring (‘agal). Such clothing chiefly indicates an elevated social status and differs from the clothing worn by the large immigrant community of lower status.

HEAD COVERINGS IN THE KORAN The Koran says nothing about men’s clothing. It does, however, urge men to lower their gaze when they meet a woman they are not married to. The Hadith—the body of legend about the life of Mohammed and his followers—describes what men wore in the time of

66 Mohammed, and on the basis of these texts many Muslims believe that not only women but men, too, should cover their bodies. The Koran does however prescribe in several places that women should cover themselves. The verse quoted by most Muslims to illustrate the importance of women wearing head coverings is the one in which they are urged not to “display their ornaments [charms] except what appears thereof”. It goes on:“Let them therefore fasten their head-coverings (khimar) over their bosoms”. (Koran 24:31). Elsewhere, the Koran states:

“O Prophet! say to your wives and your daughters and the women of the believers that they let down upon them their over-garments (jilbab); this will be more proper, that they may be known [as respectable women], and thus they will not be given trouble; and Allah is Forgiving, Merciful.” (Koran 33:59)

There is also a direct reference in the Koran to the wives of the Prophet. This verse states that should male believers wish to ask anything of Mohammed’s wives they should do so from behind a curtain (Koran 33:53). In Arabic, the word used for curtain is ‘hijab’, which has come to take on the meaning of ‘veil’ or ‘head covering’. It is unfortunate that this word is used to depict head coverings when it was originally intended to mean simply that women and men were to be kept apart. Different Muslims interpret the term differently, as a result of which they often mean different things when talking about hijab. One way of explaining the three terms in the Koran—the khimar, jilbab and hijab—is to define the khimar as a head covering or headshawl and the jilbab as an all-enveloping shawl or robe that can sometimes be pulled over the head, while hijab can be taken to mean the screen or dividing line between the male world and the female. A single verse from the Koran cannot be taken at face value but must be considered in context, and many Muslim scholars contend that the verse about the khimar was the last of the three to be revealed. They claim, therefore, that according to Islam, Muslim women should wear a head covering but not a veil.

HEAD COVERINGS IN MUSLIM COUNTRIES Women in different Muslim countries cover themselves in different ways. In the Gulf States, women wear black full-length robes (‘abaya) and black veils, while in other parts of the Arab world it is more common for women to simply wear headshawls—if they cover their heads at all. In African countries, women often wear long thin colourful fabrics that they wind around their bodies and then around their heads. In Afghanistan, Pakistan and India, women have wide trousers (serwar) and wide knee-length tunics (qamis), often with a transparent shawl over their head or around their shoulders. Some women, especially in Afghanistan, rural areas of Pakistan and Palestinian towns, are covered from head to toe by a shawl that has a net for the eyes. This all-enveloping garment is called a burka. During the reign of the Taliban in Afghanistan in the late 1990s, all women were required to wear burkas. The situation of Afghan women, in fact, was one of the main focal points of the public debate in Sweden, alongside the war on terrorism. In both Iran and Saudi Arabia, women’s clothing is dictated by law. In Iran, women are required to wear some form of head covering, even if in recent times the authorities have not been too upset if the woman’s hair shows. In Saudi Arabia, women wear both a head covering and a full-length outer robe. Under the country’s religious laws—not to be confused with national laws—the wearing of a head covering is a matter for each individual, as is the case with all other Islamic edicts, such as those concerning prayers and fasting. In most Muslim countries it is up to the woman concerned to choose her own style of dress. In countries like Turkey and Tunisia, girls and women who cover their heads encounter problems at school and at work. These countries do not have laws prohibiting head coverings, but in Turkey, for instance, a number of institutions, including parliament and educational establishments, have intro- duced bans on this kind of headdress in their internal regulations. In point of fact, it is the Turkish debate on this issue that has led

‹ I’ll have you unveiled

69 illustration by Jesper Waldersten Western researchers to conclude that the use of head coverings represents a political protest against the authorities.

HEAD COVERINGS IN SWEDEN In Sweden, a growing number of Muslim girls and women have begun to wear head coverings, a trend that began in the late 1980s. Some of course have been forced to wear them by the men in their families but most have chosen to do so of their own free will. The wearing of head coverings by Muslim girls and women has sparked a controversy in Swedish society. In the debate on immigrants in Sweden, these shawls have been viewed as an obstacle to integration. A study carried out by students at Malmö University College showed that 19 out of 20 companies and organisations were not prepared to employ women wearing such garments. Head coverings, therefore, might well be described as a Swedish problem rather than a Muslim one. Muslim women themselves would be happy to become integrated but Swedish society does not approve of their headdress. There are many reasons why some Swedes are against the practice of wearing head coverings. First and foremost, they are considered a symbol of male oppression. Muslim women, who are constantly being told that they are oppressed because they cover their heads, find it hard to understand what all the fuss is about. Nowhere in the Koran or in Hadith literature is there any sugges- tion that a woman’s clothing has anything to do with male supremacy. Could it be simply that the Swedish reaction against head coverings is part of a latterday Western rebellion against traditional Christian ideas of female headdress as an expression of male power over women? St Paul did after all devote much of the First Letter to the Corinthians to emphasising the need for women to cover their heads during prayers and prophecies. The kerchief with which many Swedish married women still covered their heads as recently as the 1950s and 1960s probably reflected both a society based on Christian mores and certain notions concerning female and male roles in the Swedish community.

70 A NORWEGIAN WITH A HEAD COVERING I became a Muslim when I was living in Oslo in February 1982. In those days, no-one wore headshawls. The few immigrant women who lived in Oslo at that time usually had the same kind of clothing as Norwegian women. Nor were Norwegians aware that Muslim women were supposed to cover their heads. When I read about what was happening in Saudi Arabia and Iran, for instance, I thought the women’s all-enveloping shawls and veils were due to culture rather than religion. I became a Muslim without in fact realising that women are supposed to cover their heads. I’d read the Koran, but hadn’t paid any great attention to the verses that mentioned this. Six months passed before a man in the mosque drew my attention to the relevant passages in the Book. As I am a convert, I did what so many converts do—became ‘more royal than the king’. I immediately went home, found a shawl and put it on. Today, I thank God that I wasn’t aware of the head covering edict when I decided to become a Muslim, as shawls are perhaps the hardest part of joining the faith. Not that the shawl itself is a problem to wear but because head coverings nowadays send out such a powerful symbolic message in the West. When I go out, people look at me. I’m so used to this now that don’t react any more. When I was out shopping a few years ago with my son, who was then about ten, he suddenly exclaimed: “Mum, everyone’s looking at you.” I looked around and saw that he was right. Sometimes I get upset at the stir that my shawl creates, usually when I’m feeling a bit down or depressed for one reason or another. I suddenly notice all the stares and get even more depressed. When I was working as an Arabic interpreter in the healthcare service in the late 1980s, people often confused me with the patient. Many nurses and doctors thought that a woman with a headshawl was hardly capable of having a job and being an active member of the community. Fortunately, things have changed. When the Skandia hotel chain displayed its latest staff uniforms here in Sweden, a head covering

71 was included for those who wished to wear one. The manager who presented the uniform also pointed out that wearing such a garment was a good idea from a hygienic viewpoint in the hotel service trade. Today, I’ve actually learnt to be proud of my shawl. On young Muslim girls I can see how beautiful and special they are. They radiate a light, a self-confidence, that makes me proud to be a Muslim. Girls who choose to wear these shawls in modern society must be made of stern stuff, as letting yourself be singled out in this way requires courage.

Anne Sofie Roald is a university lecturer in religious history at Malmö University College

I offer you rice and lamb cooked by my hand over an eternal flame I offer you the gnostic herb I offer you the sweetest word in my book of words the gateway to a mysterious country solitary and unconquered

Jila Mossaed (b 1948) 24 with or without a shawl by Elnaz Baghlanian

WELCOME TO A NEW ERA. It’s all over the newspapers and I believe it’s called multicultural Sweden. We now have new issues to face. And it’s not always easy to make up your mind about them. Take the hijab, for instance—the shawl. Yes or no? Is it right or wrong? Oppressive or liberating? Should we ban it or not? It’s at this point I begin to get tongue-tied and blink nervously. Nothing leaves me so much in two minds as the hijab issue. I decide that everything not required by law is up to the individual—we live in a free country, after all, where we can wear whatever we like. Then I remember Iran, the country I come from. A country where the Koran and its rules concerning a woman’s clothing are used as a way of keeping her out of the public arena, of depriving her of her rights, of making her subservient to the male. You cannot of course compare two countries as dissimilar as Iran and Sweden, but behind all the talk there is one incontrovertible fact—what the hijab symbolises. The hijab denotes that the female body is something dangerous and sinful. Something that should be kept out of sight. The hijab is worn as a sort of security screen, to protect women from the lustful gaze of the male. Many practising Muslims believe this enables girls and women to escape sexual harassment, rape and other kinds of abuse from the opposite sex. Thus it is the woman alone who has the awesome responsibility of protecting herself and upholding her ‘honour’. Early in life, girls and women learn that their bodies are a menace to society unless they are covered. But how are things in Western/Swedish society, with all its rights and all the protection it offers girls and women? Rape and sexual harassment occur daily, and here such matters are discussed openly, in contrast to other countries where no doubt much is hidden and

73 ‘covered up’. Does a girl or a woman without a hijab have only herself to blame if she gets into trouble? Is it really true that men are unable to contain their ‘lust’ when they see a female without a shawl? Some women convert to Islam precisely because modern society is becoming increasingly sexualised. The shawl allows them a breathing space and is a way of making a statement. Yet I still find it difficult to believe that male harassment and violence are going to lessen simply because you wear a shawl. The fact that women are regarded as sex objects has nothing to do with their clothing. Rather, the problem lies in the ingrained view of women taken by men and male society, and this is a problem we must do something about. This I can state categorically without becoming tongue-tied or starting to blink nervously.

Elnaz Baghlanian, 20, is a freelance journalist with the provincial newspaper Östgöta Correspondenten

O, if liberty sang a song as tiny as the larynx of a bird nowhere would there remain a tumbling wall. It would not take years to learn that every ruin signifies man’s absence For the presence of man is restoration and renewal.

Ahmad Schamloo (1925–2000) 26 ➾ 32 common history 26

islam is not as alien as we think by Ingmar Karlsson

ON MY MOTHER’S side of the family, I can trace my roots back to 1670. This particular ancestor—‘Olof of Stavås’—lived on a farm just two kilometres from the farm outside Burseryd where I myself was born. The whole of my family—on my father’s side as well—has lived off the land for centuries, as farmers and peasants, within a radius of a couple of dozen kilometres on either side of the border between Småland and Västergötland, where these two provinces meet Halland. Outsiders—aliens—therefore loomed large in my childhood. In 1950, when I was eight years old, there were rumours that a man from the island of Gotland had moved into Smålandsstenar, about ten kilometres from our home. Some friends and I cycled over to look at him. He was a telegraph worker and to this day I can remember his surprised expression when he suddenly saw four boys gaping at him up there on his telegraph pole. Halland and the old border with Denmark were just a dozen kilometres away, but the worldly older boys of the village were quick to warn us of the dangers that would be lying in wait for us across the border, on the Saturday night dance floors of Kinnared and Drängsered. We looked fairly like the people of Halland and spoke the same dialect, except for one word—an extremely impor-

76 tant one. We learned at an early age that the answer to a single question determined whether you were a Smålander—and thus a stranger in Halland territory, fair quarry for a good beating. The question was quite simply:“What comes after thirty-nine?”. If you pronounced forty as fötti you were immediately branded a Smålander but if you had the good sense to deny your origins by replying förti you were promptly adopted as a fully-fledged member of the Halland community. So the way you pronounced a single word was what today might be termed an ‘ethnic marker’— it decided whether you were an alien or not. The outside world, however, gradually penetrated our corner of Sweden. There was a great stir in 1952 when a Danish family moved into the village. The wire and nail factory developed into a works that required labour, and farm workers without employment due to land closures were not numerous enough to meet demand. Hungarian refugees arrived to build up new lives in the forests of Småland after their dream of freedom had been crushed in the 1956 uprising against Moscow, and a number of East German families were forced to take the same route in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Additional labour was subsequently recruited from Greece and Yugoslavia, and in the 1980s and 1990s Turks, Arabs, Vietnam- ese, Kurds, Iranians and Somalis settled in these parts, as well as refugees from Bosnia and Kosovo. Third-generation ‘immigrants’ are now growing up in my childhood area. They’re as much a part of the local scene as the children whose roots in that part of the world go way back, and nowadays they can cross into Halland and claim that fötti comes after thirty-nine without risking a beating. Today, fifty years after the long cycle trip that my young friends and I made to Smålandsstenar to examine a Gotland islander, there are more Muslims than Pentecostalists in Burseryd. If someone had claimed back in those days that such a thing was possible, they would have been certified as insane. And if, twenty years ago, someone had claimed that Islam would become the second largest religion in Sweden by the turn of the century, and that almost a fifth of the population would by then have at least one parent of foreign

77 descent, people would simply have shaken their heads and declared it inconceivable—and predicted that such a development would tear Swedish society apart. That’s where we are now. Despite the fact that the great wave of immigration from countries outside Europe coincided with the worst economic crisis that Sweden has experienced since the Second World War, we have, with the exception of phenomena like the New Democracy party, been spared the xenophobic backlash that might have been expected when a homogenous state in the margins of Europe undergoes such a rapid change in such a short space of time. We should not of course blow our own trumpet, but I do feel that this positive aspect of the situation is often ignored when people discuss immigration. There is, however, one unfavourable exception to this rule. In the case of Muslims in general and Muslim Arabs in particular, people still feel free to express prejudices openly. Celebrities claiming to advocate anti-racism do not hesitate to appear at premieres of films that show Muslims in a bad light, thereby helping to legitim- ise anti-Muslim feeling, as happened not so long ago when one of the worst films of this kind—Arnold Schwarzenegger’s True Lies— opened in Stockholm. Had the event involved an antisemitic film, these celebrities would naturally have refused to mingle, but clearly the same inhibitions do not apply in the case of Islam and Muslims. Within the Church, too, prejudices persist. I am not referring simply to Islamophobes in certain free church communities. A few years ago, I heard a clergyman on the radio suggesting that the problem of the many empty churches in Göteborg could be solved by converting them into bingo halls, warehouses or sports centres. “Why not a mosque?” asked the reporter, noting that the city’s Muslims were in need of places to meet.“No, that’s where we draw the line,” the clergyman replied. Worshipping Mammon in our churches was clearly preferable to making room for Allah and Islam. There are a number of reasons for such prejudices. There is a fear dating back to the time of the Christian Crusades that everlast-

78 ing war between Islam and Christianity is inevitable. Christianity seems never to have recovered from the traumatic experience of seeing the representatives of a new religion—albeit one that regarded its faith as a paragon of Christianity and recognised the Christian prophets—conquer in a short space of time extensive parts of the known world, including the holy places of Christianity itself. There is also a type of racism that has followed in the footsteps of European colonialism. Englishmen spoke of “the white man’s burden” and the French justified their conquests by claiming a “civilisa- tionary mandate”. The resistance that the European colonial powers encountered in the Arab world, not least in the Algerian wars of liberation in 1954 and 1962, helps explain why Arabs are so swiftly equated with terrorism. Naturally, this applies equally to developments in Palestine both before and after the founding of the state of Israel. The fact that the first terror groups were created by Christian Palestinians and not by Muslim fanatics escaped most people at the time and probably still does. A more recent factor in all this is the need to create a new main enemy to fill the gap left by the red peril of communism. We now have the green peril of Islam instead. Following the collapse of the Soviet empire, Willy Claes, then the secretary-general of NATO, sought to give the defence pact a new role by claiming that Islamic fundamentalism constitutes a greater threat to Europe than ever before. A year or two later, Harvard professor Samuel Huntington added his theories of an imminent and inevitable conflict between different civilisations, primarily between Islam and the West. Last but not least, the behaviour of Arab politicians down through the years has done its part in creating this negative image. The often exaggerated political rhetoric bandied about, and the constant feuding that has gone on between Arab states, have both contributed to the emergence of a self-inflicted negative image that Saddam Hussein reinforced in the Gulf War and that Bin Laden has since done his best to consolidate. “We hate what we don’t know.”This maxim is attributed to Ali

79 ibn Abu Talib, the fourth Caliph, who was both cousin and son-in- law to the prophet Mohammed. It has remained valid both in Europe and in the Muslim world. As a result of ignorance, fear and contempt, hostile images have for too long held sway on both sides. Personal experience and interpersonal contact are important means of tackling this problem, and here I believe the wars in former Yugoslavia acted as an eye-opener for many Swedes. As a result of these wars, Bosnian and Kosovo Albanian refugees were scattered throughout Sweden and a steadily growing number of Swedes, both children and adults, came into daily contact with people who identified themselves as Muslims. The Swedes quickly found that their new neighbours were not creatures from another planet but people with the same day to day problems and hopes for the future as they themselves had. While travelling around giving talks and attending conferences and seminars in recent years, I have observed a growing interest in Islam as a religion. People want to know what Islam is and is not, and I have encountered fewer biased questions and comments. We can also see that public opposition to the building of mosques is on the decline. Hopefully, in ten years’ time it will be as incompre- hensible as the protests against the building of a Catholic church in Stockholm in the early 1960s seem to us today—it was felt the church would be too close to Kungsträdgården—or as the arguments from around the same time to the effect that we couldn’t join what was then the EC as it was a “congregation of Catholics”. Today, too, unfortunately, we hear leading politicians openly giving voice to prejudices. Italian Prime Minister Berlusconi, for instance, set what was surely a record in ignorance and historical illiteracy when in the aftermath of 11 September last year he spoke about the inherent superiority of Western civilisation to the Muslim world. Nothing could be further from the truth. Islamic culture is by no means as alien to us as our prejudices and clichés would suggest. One of the most enduring of these is the claim that through his victory at Poitiers in 732 AD, Frankish ruler Karl Martell saved the

80 Western world from destruction. The ‘Saracen’ invaders were beaten back across the Pyrenees and returned to southern Spain, where a Muslim state was set up that lasted for almost 800 years. This Islamic presence on the European continent did not, however, lead to the destruction of the West but to a unique and profitable symbiosis between Islam, Christianity and Judaism, and to unprecedented advances in the fields of science, philosophy, culture and art. Here, in fact, the ground was laid for what we today call Western civilisation. During their explosive spread across four continents from Central Asia to the Atlantic, the Arabs had gathered cultural impres- sions and ideas from all the peoples they conquered—not just Christians and Jews but also Indians, Persians and Hellenic Egypti- ans. Greek antiquity dated back to the reign of Alexander the Great in the Orient, and Greek science was kept alive by the Muslims of southern Spain and amalgamated with Persian and Indian science. This was due not least to extensive translations of works by Aristotle, Euclides, Hippocrates and other Greek classics into Arabic from Greek, Hebrew and Syrian. These were not word for word translations—the original texts were commented on, criticised and added to. Thus the Arabs became the bona fide inheritors of the Greek culture that we so revere today. It was the Arabs in particular who rescued, preserved and updated this cultural legacy, and they became the midwives of Western humanism by making the classics of scientific history known to Christian Europe. This is true for instance of the mathematical works of Euclides, Appolonius and Archimedes, the astronomy of the Egyptian Ptolemy and the medical doctrines of Hippocrates and Galeno. The Arab contribution to European medicine is one of the most significant transfers of expertise in human history. The philosopher Ibn Sina/Avicenna (d 1037), who was also a physician, compiled a medical encyclopaedia that was still in use at European universities well into the 19th century. Arab astronomers made great progress in determining the orbits of the moon and other planets. Early scien-

81 tific works were also written on tidal ebb and flow, rainbows, the lunar halo and the aurora. As far back as the 11th century, Arab astronomers were proceeding from the theory that the earth was spherical, and the works of Copernicus and Kepler would scarcely have been possible without this basic research. Not least, the Arabs liberated Europe from what one monk called “the tyranny of whole numbers” by introducing us to Arabic numerals, in particular to zero. The Swedish word for numeral, siffra, comes from the Arabic sifr, meaning empty or zero. The decimal system revolutionised calculation. With the new figures at their disposal, people could solve mathematical problems much more easily than with Roman numerals. The word algebra, incidentally, comes from the Arabic ‘al-jabr’ (reunification). The rapid spread of Islam also boosted people’s geographical knowledge. Thus ‘atlas’ is an Arabic word, and Vasco da Gama knew what he was doing when he employed an Arab pilot, Ibn Madjid, to guide him on the journey that led to the opening of the sea route from Europe to India. The guitar, mandolin and lute were other features of Arab culture. Hence their Arabic names, and with their spread into other countries Europe also adopted Arab musical forms. Songs and music in praise of women led to a new form of music and poetry that in France, for instance, developed into the troubadour tradition. The legacy of Arab rule in Spain is particularly noticeable in the languages of Europe, above all in Spanish. Every fifth word in Spanish is thought to be of Arabic origin. Few Swedes are aware that when people shout Olé at bullfights and flamenco dance sessions in Majorca and the Canary Islands they are speaking Arabic. The word is derived from Wallah (O God), and the word hasta in phrases like hasta mañana comes from the Arabic word hatta (until). The conquest of Spain began with a lightning attack—a ghazia—which means a razzia or raid. Arsenal, fanfare and calibre are other military terms of Arabic origin, and just as a reminder that it was the Muslims and not the English who ‘ruled the waves’ for centuries, Lord Nelson’s military title also stemmed from Arabic:

82 Amir ar-rahl—commander of the fleet—became the Italian ammi- raglio, the English admiral and the Swedish amiral. Monsoon and the Swedish word haveri (shipwreck) also derived from Arabic. Botany in particular is full of words of Arabic origin: apricot, aubergine, tarragon, durra (sorghum), estragon, hashish, ginger, jas- mine, coffee, henna, cumin, saffron and spinach, to name but a few. Muslim Spain represents a challenge to our prejudices and stereotypes concerning Islam and the Arab world. Here, Islam was for centuries the superior civilisation and the contributing party with Christendom hundreds of years behind. The following sample list of English and Swedish words borrowed from Arabic suggests that Arab influence extended into so many different areas in those times that nowadays it would probably be termed cultural imperi- alism: algebra, amalgam, alcohol, alcove, arrack, baldachin, bensin (petrol), carafe, carat, cipher, coffer, damask, elixir, hazard, jackal, kabel (cable), kemi (chemistry), konditori (pastry shop), lack (sealing wax), magazine, mattress, marzipan, pyjamas, racket, race, risk, safari, satin, sheriff, sherry, siffra (numeral), syrup, sugar, soda, sorbet, talcum, tariff and zenith. No cultural impulses flowed in the opposite direction. An idea of how Islamic Spain viewed the North European barbarians at that time may be gained from the following comments made by a Muslim in Toledo in the mid-11th century: “They are more like animals than human beings. The huge distance from the sun makes the air cold and the sky cloudy. Consequently, they lack warmth in their souls, they are coarse, pot-bellied, pale and long of hair, thick-headed, indolent, lacking in judgement and simple of mind.” Arabic influence on European learning, science and culture also took another route, via Sicily. By the beginning of the 10th century, the whole island and parts of southern Italy had been conquered. Muslim dominance was not as enduring here as in southern Spain, however. Towards the end of the 11th century, these lands were recaptured by the Normans, but their rule in this part of the world remained Arabic in character for a lengthy period. For over a century, Sicily was a Christian monarchy in which a number of the leading

83 posts were held by Muslims. The openness of mind and spirit that marked this royal court laid the foundations for the golden era of the Italian Renaissance—a fact of which Italian Prime Minister Berlusconi appears to be blithely unaware! In the above, I have simply offered a few examples to show how modern Europe is much more rooted in Islam than we usually imagine. Islam is not as alien as we tend to think. Rather, Islam and Christianity might be regarded as companion religions sharing the same Jewish, Hellenic and Oriental legacy.We are all children of Abraham. I began this account with a few personal reflections on what we considered foreign when I was a child. Let me end by describing another event that illustrates how rapidly our world has changed and with it our view of what is alien and dangerous. Thirty-three years after I cycled 20 kilometres to look at a Gotland islander, my family and I moved from Damascus to Peking. My daughter Andrea was three at the time. We stopped off at New Delhi, Bangkok and Hong Kong en route, and she became increasingly anxious for every change of scene. After a fortnight’s travel we arrived at the embassy residence in Peking, where I explained to her that this would be her new home for several years to come. She appeared deeply upset. Her lips started to tremble, but just as the tears were about to flow, the muezzin began calling to prayer at the Pakistani embassy next door. She immediately grew calm. A relieved smile lit up her face and she exclaimed “Allah, Allah!”. Suddenly, this little girl with a Catholic Slovakian mother and a Swedish Protestant father felt safe. Allah is in Peking so there’s nothing to fear.

Ingmar Karlsson is Sweden’s Consul General in Istanbul.

84 illustration by Jesper Waldersten

photo Pelle Kronestedt

Didar Samaletdin – a slice of swedish

history by Gufran Al-nadaf DIDAR SAMALETDIN AND I meet on a rainy December day in 2001. I have seen her on TV and been impressed by her frank and outspoken attitude, by the warmth and inner strength she radiates. We sit down in a Finnish café in Drottninggatan in the centre of Stockholm. Not many guests are there yet but they will soon be arriving. The place gradually fills up with people and cigarette smoke. I ask Didar if she minds the smoke and she laughs,“Smoking is my only vice, ha ha,” drawing a pack of cigarettes out of her bag. It will be another three hours before our conversation ends.

FLIGHT FROM ESTONIA Didar and I talk for a while about everything under the sun before eventually moving onto the question of how she, with her Tatar- Muslim background, happens to be living in Sweden. It all began during the Second World War in Estonia, the country in which Didar’s parents were born and raised. Originally, they came from Tatarstan, an autonomous republic in what is now the Russian Federation. The family were Muslims with their own traditions and cultural heritage. At home they spoke a form of Turkish (roughly as close as Danish to Swedish). When I try asking Didar if she feels Swedish-European or Tatarian she reminds me that her family have been Europeans for over a thousand years. In an even voice, Didar describes the family’s time in Estonia. Her father, Ali Zakerov, grew up in Tallinn, where their neighbours were largely Jewish. His best friend was a Jewish boy of the same age. So as to screen off his Estonian surroundings and share a common language with his friend, Ali learnt to speak fluent Yiddish. Their friendship lasted until the war separated them. Didar’s father, who had grown up by then and had started a family and entered a profession (furrier), fled to Finland. His Jewish friend shared the same fate as so many other Jews in that war. Later in life, Ali Zakerov’s stories about the war and his Jewish friend awakened Didar’s interest and subsequent involvement in politics. In the 1970s, she helped start a support group for the peace village of Neve Shalom/Wahat al-Salaam in Israel, whose inhabi-

87 tants are both Palestinians from Israel and Israeli Jews. As an adult, she has worked in various ways and in different forums for the establishment of a dialogue between Jews, Christians and Muslims.

A GIRL IS BORN Didar herself was born in 1943 in Finland and is an only child. The following year, the family moved to Umeå and shortly thereafter to Stockholm. In all, there were 50 Tatars living in Sweden at that time and it was Didar’s father who started the first Muslim community in Sweden, in 1949. They were the first Muslims of the modern era to have a religious community and a platform in this country. Today, Didar is 58 and an established figure in the Swedish community. She is head of the Swedish Red Cross/Noah’s Ark. She has been married to the same man for 40 years and has three children and five grandchildren. “I was only eighteen when I met my husband, a Tatar like me, and fell in love. My parents didn’t like my getting married so young, but I was allowed to have my way. My mother, you see, Zeinab Zakerov, had waited until she was twenty-six to marry my father.”

BEING A MUSLIM When she was a child, commuting between different cultures was not a problem for Didar, but as a teenager life began to get more complicated. At the age of fifteen, she finally plucked up her courage and had “a deep conversation with my father”, as she puts it. “I told him I had decided to become a Muslim. I also asked him to give me duties to perform in the Muslim community. My first assignment was to send out invitation cards when the various Muslim holidays were to be celebrated.” I become curious and ask if she has kept her promise to her father to be a Muslim. Didar replies that she feels like a Muslim convert and has a strong sense of God. She tells me she has a language of her own for communicating with him. Her grandmother taught her how to be a Muslim. One day when Didar’s father came home from work he heard his daughter singing a Christian psalm at the top of

88 her voice. Worried, he called in the imam (the Muslim equivalent of a priest) to supplement grandmother’s instruction in Islam. Didar was excused from lessons in Christian studies at school but,“after a couple of boring free periods”, chose to attend all the same. “The fact that I learned about my friends’ religion and traditions has stood me in good stead—I learned to understand and respect Sweden and I learned about the foundations that Swedish society is built on. Over the years, I’ve celebrated all the Muslim holidays, but the Christian ones as well. “Somewhere in Paradise there must be a place for me, too. All my life I’ve been building bridges between two cultures, two religions and two languages.”

THE NEW COUNTRY When the family arrived in Sweden, they were welcomed with open arms. People came round with gifts and invited them into their homes. They were anxious to ensure that the refugees should get a good start here. No-one asked them what their religion was. This was not considered important. The few Tatars living in Sweden at Didar Samaletdin that time tried to blend into the community as best they could. has been head of “But over the years, this changed. People started seeing us as the Swedish Red Cross/Noah’s Ark something exotic. In my view, this was a way of telling us that we’re since 2000. different. But I’m not. Each individual is unique—so in that case we’re all unique and different. Muslims are not a people. All of us, Muslims, Christians or whatever, live in different ways and have our own cultures and traditions. We all share the same God, and the monotheistic religions are more similar than dissimilar.” Didar thinks Swedes were more tolerant in the old days. Muslims used not to be seen as a threat. She feels that present-day media reporting about Islam and Muslims leaves much to be desired. The words and pictures that the media choose to present, combined with the journalistic need for speed and a scant knowledge of Islam, has led to the emergence of a narrow, rigid image of the Muslim world without shades or variations.

THE FUTURE IS BRIGHT I try to gain some insight into Didar’s life by asking about her children. All were born in Sweden and grew up here. Didar says they find it important to be Swedes among Swedes and Tatars among Tatars. They speak Tataric, they have been brought up as Muslims and they have been at summer camps for Tatarian children in Finland. “They may not live as Muslims today,” says Didar,“but they’ve been taught the basics. The two eldest have Swedish partners and all my grandchildren are ‘semi-Swedish’. My father and grandfather might feel that I’ve failed with them, but as a parent you have to realise that you can only give them the basics and then it’s up to them to choose what kind of life they want to lead.” We spend some time discussing children, and naturally get onto the subject of how Didar foresees the future. She is optimistic. “The atmosphere may be a bit hostile at the moment, because of all that’s happened recently, but I’m quite hopeful about the future. Islam is no longer a new phenomenon in this country.We’ve been here for over fifty years. And in time it will become as integrated and established as both Catholicism and Judaism. At least that’s what I’m fighting for.” Suddenly, we both check our watches and find that we’ve been sitting in the Finnish café for three hours. Yet it feels like three minutes. We’re both in a hurry to get back to our jobs. I feel elated and wear a smile on my lips, reflecting that I’ve just been granted a slice of Swedish history.

Gufran Al-nadaf is an editor with the Swedish Foreign Ministry Press Office

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Srebrenica – genocide in the heart of Europe by Gellert Tamas

THEY ARRIVED AT dawn, cautiously at first, climbing slowly down the steep mountainside overlooking the town. Then the Bosnian Serb troops launched a full scale attack, with mortars and heavy machine gun fire. It was 6 July 1995 and within a few days the troops would commit genocide. Srebenica’s Muslim defenders knew what kind of fate awaited them. They fought for their lives. The war in Bosnia had begun three years earlier, after the country had declared itself an independent state in the spring of 1992. National- ist Bosnian Serbs took up arms and attacked villages and towns. Their goal was to create a republic of their own for Serbs only. Srebenica was besieged almost immediately. A report from the UN High Commissioner for Refugees described the situation on 19 February 1993:“The local population has not had food for months. People are dying of hunger and exhaustion on a daily basis.” In an attempt to save Srebenica, the UN declared the town a protected zone, and at the same time negotiated a truce with the Bosnian Serb army. Despite this, the Serbs attacked. Dutch commander Tom Karremans had 350 UN solders with which to protect Srebenica. Ranged against him were 10,000 Serbian troops. Karremans desper- ately summoned air support. The UN and NATO held meeting after meeting but were unable to agree. When they finally sent in a few planes, after days of hesitation, it was too late. The battle of Srebenica

91 was over. The majority of Srebenica’s 25,000 inhabitants managed to flee to the nearby UN base of Potocari before the town fell. General Mladic, military leader of the Bosnian Serbs, arrived on the same day. The picture showing him patting a young boy on the cheek and telling the terrified refugees,‘Don’t worry, no-one’s going to hurt you’, was cabled out across the world. Then the TV camera- men left and the slaughter began. UN staff were forced to stand by and watch, unable to intervene. A Dutch UN soldier said later:“We saw two lorries with about 50 people in each. The Muslim prisoners sat with their heads between their knees. Those who looked up had terrified expressions. The lorries drove round the corner and a few minutes later we heard a hundred or more shots. Then just silence.” In the village of Kravica, almost 2,000 Muslim men were herded into a barn, whereupon the Serbs opened fire with anti-tank rifles and automatic weapons. Hakija Huseinovic was one of the few to survive. “I protected myself by pulling two dead bodies on top of me. I lay under those corpses for 24 hours.” Another 1,000 people were executed at the football stadium in Nova Kasaba. About the same number of people were killed in the neighbouring village of Pilica. The prisoners were between 17 and 60 years old. They were all men. They were lined up in front of us. Ten at a time. They begged us, don’t shoot. At first we shot them with machine guns. But too many only suffered wounds. So we were ordered to use our Kalash- nikovs instead.” By the time darkness fell, Drazen Erdemovic and his group had shot more than 1,000 Muslim men to death. The slaughter was well organised and took place with military precision. In the space of a few days, an estimated 7,000 people were murdered. The massacre of Srebenica’s Muslims has gone down in European history as the worst case of mass murder since the Second World War. Just as in the Holocaust, the Muslims of Srebenica were slaughtered for one principal reason—their murderers felt they belonged to the wrong ethnic group with the wrong religion. The massacre in Srebrenica, like the wars elsewhere in former Yugoslavia, had its roots in contemporary European history. After the Second World War, Yugoslavia became a communist-ruled one-party

92 FOTO PASCAL GUYOT / PRESSENS BILD

Busloads of women and state without democratic rights in the form of free elections. With children leave the collapse of the Berlin Wall in December 1989, the Communists Srebenica. Within a few lost their monopoly on power in Eastern Europe. With one excep- days, some tion—Yugoslavia, where the Communist Party managed to stay in 7,000 Muslims power. The regime adopted a well-tried strategy—unite the people had been murdered—mostly within by seeking an enemy without. In this respect, there were men. parallels between the Srebenica massacre and the Nazis’ genocide. The slaughter of Europe’s Jews did not take place from one day to the next. The Holocaust was preceded by years of hate propaganda. Jews were compared to rats and other vermin and portrayed as greedy bloodsuckers. This was a deliberate strategy aimed at building up a specific image of the Other, the deviant, the enemy, the threat that has to be eliminated. The process was much the same in former Yugoslavia. The government had almost total control of the TV and radio. Day after day, they pumped out propaganda; Muslims were described as evil, barbaric creatures.“We killed each other in the media for years before the war began,” observed a Serbian human rights activist, Tanja Petovar. The hate propaganda initiated by Milosevic’s Serbian Communist Party was quickly followed by similar campaigns on the part of Croatians and Bosnians. A growing number of people were scared into the nationalist camp. The ground was being laid for the Srebenica massacre.

93 The Nazis did not use the word genocide. They referred to the ‘final solution’. Similarly, the Serb nationalists coined their own term for the task they were engaged in:“ethnic cleansing”. But the meaning was the same. Just as in the Holocaust aftermath, those responsible for the Srebenica massacre were charged with genocide. The first ruling by the international war crimes tribunal in the Hague was handed down in 1996. The tribunal has identified two men principally responsible for the massacre: Bosnian Serb general Mladic and the Bosnian Serbs’ political leader, Radovan Karadzic. Almost seven years after the mass killings, both are still at large.

Gellert Tamas is a freelance journalist

FACTS: flag of a one-party state. Post-war Yu- Yugoslavia was founded in 1918 in what goslavia comprised six republics: Serbia, was ethnically and culturally one of Croatia, Bosnia, Macedonia, Monte- the most diverse parts of Europe. The negro and Slovenia. citizens of the new state included Serbs, After the collapse of the Berlin Wall Croats, Slovenians, Bosnians and Alban- in 1989, a number of independence move- ians. Historically, parts of Yugoslavia ments emerged and Yugoslavia was di- had belonged both to the Austro-Hun- vided by bloody wars. Bosnia became garian monarchy and to the Ottoman an independent state in 1992 and is Empire, and a variety of ethnic back- made up of three main ethnic groups: grounds and religions coexisted in the Bosnians, Croatians and Serbs. Histor- new state. The largest ethnic group, ically and culturally, the capital, Sara- the Serbs, were Greek Orthodox Chris- jevo, is one of the most interesting tians, the Croatians were Catholics and cities of Europe, with mosques, syna- most Bosnians and Albanians were gogues, Catholic and Orthodox Chris- Muslims. tian churches that have stood peace- During the Second World War, parts of fully side by side for centuries. Like Yugoslavia were occupied by Hitler’s the rest of Yugoslavia, Bosnia was a army, and Fascist puppet governments melting-pot until the nationalist par- were established there. A period of per- ties came to power in the early 1990s. secution and mass extermination of According to studies carried out at the minorities then followed. A multinatio- end of the 1980s, more than a third of nal partisan guerrilla force, led by all marriages were mixed, and most Tito, fought both the German and the families had relatives who were Bos- Yugoslav Fascists, and united the coun- nian, Serbian and Croatian, Christian try at the end of the war under the and Muslim.

94 29

SABRA & SHATILA

On the white surface of your ribs the poppies grow cheating me of the great clear drops that envelop my soul

I carry your heart in both hands and pray for our star for our only canopy You weep for Shatila my beloved You weep for this crack in time and the shadow that wandered out so calmly straight into time closing around our throats like a noose

You think of Sabra my beloved of the youth who stole a horse and rode off into the tale of our gaping wounds You think of Sabra my beloved Step not over the bodies lying out of sight Die not with them in the last alley we possessed

Poet Rawia Morra was 16 when the massacre of Palestinians in the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps in Beirut took place in 1982 30 reflections of a newcomer by Gufran Al-nadaf

THE TRAIN ROLLED into Stockholm Central in the dark of night. It was 1978 and autumn. The air was clean and refreshing. The station was full of giant hoardings—lots of fair-haired boys and girls in happy poses. I was almost 11 years old and I was finding it difficult to concentrate. Bursting with curiosity, I looked everywhere at once. Everything was new and exciting. My mother, my younger brother and I stepped off the train and searched the crowd for my father. After a while, we caught sight of him. He was happy to see us and to finally be reunited with us in Stockholm. He had travelled to Sweden six months before us—to a country that was favourably disposed towards asylum seekers, a country with a democratic government and an agenda that embraced humanism and human rights. Nineteen seventy eight was an important year for more reasons than one. Apart from being the year we arrived in Sweden, it was when the Iranian revolution was in full swing. My mother is of Iranian descent and my father is Iraqi, while I myself was born in Bucharest in Romania. So when we reached home, my mother frantically twiddled the knob on the radio to try and find the Iranian news. She was worried about her family in Teheran. For the first couple of months, we lived in a small room on Magnus Ladulåsgatan in the Södermalm district of Stockholm. This was very much a time of upheaval for me, and things moved quickly About a week after our arrival, my mother and father decided that I was ready to resume school. My father contacted the headteacher of the nearest school and we marched round there one afternoon to meet the head and his staff. Everything seemed to be going OK and I saw my father smile broadly. Not being able to

96 understand a single word of the new language was tough, and I couldn’t help wondering if I’d ever learn it. It felt frustrating. We shook hands and my father told me that I’d be starting at the school the following week. He took my hand and we were wandering down the school corridor when he suddenly came to a halt. I saw the colour drain from his face. He grabbed my arm and almost dragged me at a run out of the school. Wow—what had gone wrong? He shouted something about me not starting in that decadent place, young lady, thank you very much. He had apparently seen a boy and a girl of about my age, 11, exchanging a kiss. It had come as quite a shock to him in view of their tender age. He had left his native country in 1963 and had been living in Europe ever since, yet he was still shocked. Shortly after this episode, we moved to Abrahamsberg in Stock- holm. Before allowing me to attend, my father checked to make sure that the local school maintained a high standard of moral behaviour, or fairly high, at least. I remained there for 18 months. At that school, I received the best present a new pupil can receive—my own Swedish language teacher, Mr Håkansson (that was how you addressed teachers in those days) and a class of only 14 (ten boys and four girls). Everyone was pleasant, generous and kind towards me, not to mention all the attention I received because of my background. We engaged in lively political discussions. Later in life, I would find that not all Swedes take such an active interest in politics as my classmates in Abrahamsberg. The next shock for my parents arrived in the form of an invitation to a classmate’s party. It was totally out of the question.“What! You? Go to a party at the age of eleven?!” My parents, who were newcomers and had yet to develop a social network or a grasp of Swedish culture, thought the word party meant cocktail party with every conceivable kind of drink. I begged and pleaded, trying to explain—but to no avail. My first shock in Sweden came when I made the acquaintance of a piece of liquorice. A friend invited me to try this strange phenomenon, a black sweet. I thought the idea peculiar but politely

97 accepted. I popped the sweet into my mouth and begin chewing it. I felt sick. As it might have upset my friend if I had spat it out, I went on chewing. Times change, though, and today as an adult one of the things I miss most about Sweden when living abroad is liquorice. The generosity I found among my friends in Abrahamsberg was exchanged for the chillier atmosphere of Akalla when my family moved to this Stockholm suburb, where unemployment was higher and the social problems greater. Yet the place had a warmth and heart that helped me through my youth. It just took a little more time to get to know people and to get them to trust you. One day, I visited a friend’s home after school. When we had played for a while, her mother came in and said it was time for dinner and that I could sit and wait until the family had finished eating. I was both surprised and sad at this, and wondered if I had done something wrong. In my family, anyone who happened to be visiting was always invited to join us at table, whether this was an adult or a friend of one of us children. I felt a bit ill at ease and reflected that Swedes were a strange lot. At home, I told my parents what had happened and they were as surprised as I had been. It takes time to discover that not all Swedes are alike. That a city like Stockholm, for instance, may be different from the rest of Sweden. That Swedes can be hospitable and are generous towards close friends. Today, at least, I don’t have to feel left out as I did then. My adjustment to my new country was going very well, however, and I found Astrid Lindgren’s children’s books a fantastic help in learning to understand Sweden and the Swedish soul. I cannot stress too often the value of books like Lotta of Troublemaker Street, Mardie (Madicken), Pippi Longstocking, the Brothers Lionheart and Katitzi (the story of a gypsy girl). Katitzi was someone I myself could identify with. It took my parents slightly longer to trust Swedish society and to see its riches and shades. They were helped in this by their jobs and their friends from work, and by meeting both my friends and my brother’s, and their families. Once they felt safe and had learned the language and the social precepts, it was much easier for them

98 to understand, to adjust and to absorb everything that their new country had to offer. The cultural identity I brought with me almost 25 years has of course changed. It has evolved through the passage of time, the people I’ve met and, hopefully, through a greater understanding of the world around me. Today I may be shocked at certain kinds of behaviour but it is a shock of a different kind. Cultural diversity ought to open our eyes and senses to one another’s similarities and dissimilarities—whether they have to do with age or with social, ideological or religious background.

Gufran Al-nadaf is an editor with the Swedish Foreign Ministry Press Office

My heart has become capable of every form: it is a pasture for gazelles and a convent for Christian monks, and a temple for idols and the pilgrim’s Kaa’ba, and the Tables of the Torah and the Book of the Koran. I follow the religion of Love: whatever way Love’s camels take, that is my religion and my faith.

Ibn al-’Arabi (1165–1240) 32 photo Pelle Kronestedt

Nadia on the go

Nadia Jebril is 19 years old and works at Sensus adult education association. YALLA! followed her around for a few days. Nadia circulates between Lund and Stockholm » If I were to describe myself, I think I’d say I’m a Muslim girl on the go.

I believe in love, I dream about it a lot. The first » thing I’ll do together with my husband when I marry is take an Interrail trip.

Nadia is given a job writing columns for Sydsvenskan’s youth pages Nadia helps out in her father’s shop

I’ve decided not to have a boyfriend, to avoid rela- » tionships until I meet the right person—something I’ve chosen because of my religious convictions. 33 ➾ 44 faith 33

many similarities and some major differences what separates and unites jews, christians and muslims? by Christer Hedin

GOD IS ONE—all three religions agree on this. Jews, Christians and Muslims all believe in the same God and address him in their prayers. All three view him as the Creator, a being who has existed in all eternity. God has created all and everything but no-one has created God. God has brought forth the world, life on earth and humankind.

DIVINE IMAGES AND DIVINE FAITH How God himself came to be, no-one knows. God surpasses human understanding and therefore no-one can answer such questions. Muslims say Alla-u-Akbar,“God is greater” which implies that. We do however know something of God’s more important qualities. God is first and foremost good, loving, helpful and forgiving. This is summed up in the word merciful, or compassionate. Compassion, showing charity, is God’s foremost quality. God may also be described as wise and omnipotent—God the Almighty. He created the world as a good place and put us humans on earth to do his work. The Creation illustrates God’s wisdom. He designed all things to work in harmony. All is not perfect, but if humanity uses the earth’s resources wisely, life can be a joy to us all. 108 God is also righteous. This means that he does not permit anyone to abuse divine mercy in order to harm the Creation or other people. Those who do wrong and repent can be forgiven, but mercy or compassion has its limits. Those who deliberately harm others and neither feel guilt nor show repentance may be punished. This principle tends to be interpreted in many different ways, however. What is God’s ‘name’ or what should he be called? Christians say ‘God’ if they speak English and something else in another language. Christians who speak Arabic say Allah, which means ‘The God’. In Sweden, many Muslims say Allah when speaking Swedish, too, as he is considered the only God. Jews never use the name ‘God’ but say something else instead, such as ‘The Lord’ or just ‘The Name’. By this they seek to show that God is above all human designation.

HUMANKIND AND EVIL In the beginning, the Creation is perfect and without blemish. Humanity is given the freedom and responsibility to look after it. As human beings are tempted to abuse their freedom, however, the world does not turn out as well as it might have done. Evil on earth derives from human actions. In this, we can see significant differences between the three religions. The Bible tells us that the first people on earth lived in a paradise where they were allowed to eat from all the trees except the tree of knowledge. They ignored this interdict, however. A serpent lured the woman into first eating the fruit of the tree of knowledge and then offering it to the man. As a punishment, they were driven out of Paradise and condemned to work, suffer and die. The Bible also describes how Cain became jeal- ous of his brother Abel and slew him. Thus humanity is capable of evil. The Koran has a similar story describing the disobedience of the first humans. They repent and are forgiven but are obliged to leave Paradise all the same. Jews take this to mean that people can be tempted into evil ways even if they were originally good. Christians, however, tend to regard the human race as evil by nature. They sometimes refer to the episode in Paradise as ‘The Fall’ (of humankind). This is meant to signify that humanity thereafter was tainted by sin from birth. This is sometimes 109 called original sin. Muslims do not regard us as evil at all. As the first man and woman on earth understood immediately that they had done wrong and sought forgiveness, they cannot be evil, say the Mus- lims. Neither Jews nor Muslims accept the concept of original sin.

BETTERMENT AND DELIVERANCE Christians take a slightly darker view of humanity than the other religions. This has an important effect on the way certain issues are dealt with. All three religions believe that God has done his best to save us from evil. He has sent guidance and succour to help us mend our ways and find deliverance. It is here that the most important differences between Jews, Christians and Muslims are to be found. The Jews believe that God entered into a holy alliance with the people of Israel so as to make his will known on earth. Israel has been called God’s ‘pilot project’. God gave Moses the Commandments on Mount Sinai and urged the people of Israel to be his messengers on earth. They were to go forth and preach that God had given us all life and that we were to use it for the benefit of all and live in harmony with one another. The Jews have long been waiting for God to send down a Messiah to create peace and justice on earth. Christians say evil was conquered through Jesus, who according to Christian belief was the Messiah that the Jews had been waiting for. The Christians gave Jesus the name of Christ, which means Messiah. They regard God as three beings in one (Trinity)—the Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost. The son became Jesus Christ. He died for our sins and triumphed over death through the resurrection. It is through him that we may be freed from the forces of evil. Muslims contend that God wished to save us from evil through the prophets, who have shown us how to live our lives in accordance with God’s will. According to Islam, prophets have existed since time immemorial. Jesus was one of the great prophets. The last of them was Mohammed. The revelations he heard from the archangel Gabriel are set down in the Koran. Mohammed’s own life also offers us guidance, say Muslims, but he was not a divine saviour—he was simply a person who can help us to a better life through his revelations and by his example. 110 FORGIVENESS THROUGH FAITH All three religions believe that we can be saved from evil through faith. They regard the Abraham of the Old Testament and the Koran as a shining example of this, as his faith was so strong, yet they tend to define faith in slightly different ways. Jews and Muslims say we must believe in God as earth’s creator and strive to obey his will. Should you disobey God, you can pray for forgiveness. You are then forgiven. God does not punish those who repent. The only condition is that you set things right as far as you are able. Christians say that Jesus has taken our sins upon himself and that we can only obtain forgiveness by believing in him. This forgiveness can be obtained either directly from God or through the Christian church. The church uses symbolic acts as tokens of God’s mercy. These are called the sacraments. In Christianity, priests have an important role to play. They act as intermediaries between God and his people when giving us the sacrament or granting us divine forgiveness. Thus Christians and Muslims take a very different view of how we are to go about obtaining forgiveness for our sins. Muslims say that all who repent may turn to God and pray for forgiveness. It is granted immediately if you repent. In Christianity, you secure forgiveness through Christ. His death and resurrection represent a victory over evil, which entered the world through the ‘Fall’ in Paradise. If you believe in this, you escape punishment for your sins. Muslims believe that Jesus was a great prophet who can help us through his teachings but not through his death and resurrection. According to Islam, he was an ordinary human being who preached God’s word, not a divine being who adopted human form. In the Mus- lim view, the idea of a Trinity conflicts with the belief that God is One. Islam contends that God can forgive people’s sins without being recom- pensed by sacrifices. God forgives without asking anything in return.

IDEALS AND RULES How is one to live in order to be a good person? On this point, all three religions agree. One should be responsible, honest, considerate, generous and loyal. The weak are to be helped and protected. The riches of the earth are to be managed in an enlightened and responsible 111 way. Gifts are to be shared fairly. Christians and Jews encapsulate all this in what they call the dual commandment: Thou shalt love thy God above all else and thy neighbour as thyself. Muslims share the same view but rather than speaking of love of one’s fellow-beings they say we must show care and consideration towards one another. Jews and Muslims also have rules concerning food. Both religions say you should not eat pork, eat or drink blood or eat the meat of animals that die by natural causes. Jews have quite a few additional rules for how to proceed in daily life, not least during the sabbath. All these commandments come from God but are not as important as the commandment whereby we are to love our fellows. Some Muslims comply with rules governing dress, hair and enter- tainment. Such everyday rules serve an important purpose in that they reinforce people’s sense of community.They show who belongs to your particular religion. When a group is oppressed or its survival is threatened, therefore, these commandments become extra important. Christians do not have any very detailed rules concerning food or dress. Down through the ages, however, Christians have held very firm views on how people should dress and amuse themselves. All three religions have church services once or twice a week at which believers congregate. Jews usually hold services on Saturday, Christians on Sunday and Muslims on Friday. All three have annual holidays that are very important for their pious observance of religious duties and for keeping the group together. Christian holidays are largely dictated by the solar year. Jews and Muslims let the moon decide when religious holidays are to be held.

LIFE AFTER DEATH What, then, is the after-life for which religion is to save us? Jews generally consider that no-one can know anything about life after death. If any form of punishment awaits us it will only be for a limited period and if Paradise exists then we will all be allowed in, whatever our religion may have been. Christians and Muslims refer to Paradise more as the home of the kind-hearted after death. As to what happens to the rest, views tend to differ slightly among the

112 faiths. Some believe they can expect dire punishment, either for all eternity or for a limited period. Others believe such people will simply be annihilated or punished by being excluded from Paradise. All three religions foresee the triumph of good over evil. This applies to the individual as well as humankind as a whole. The Jews’ belief in a Messiah has taken new forms over the years. Nowadays, many believe that the Messiah’s day will come as a result of humanity making the earth a better place to live in. Christians believe that Christ will return to earth to denounce and conquer evil once and for all. Most Muslims foresee a final encounter between good and evil, at which Christ, too, will be present, ending in the triumph of good. We will then be free to live in Paradise without the threat of evil hanging over us. But aren’t there a number of other differences concerning things like violence, politics and the status of women? Such differences do exist among religious believers, of course, but they are not due to the religions themselves. This can be seen from the fact that people’s views on such issues differ so strikingly within each religion. Also, history shows that all the various viewpoints can find endorsement within all three religions. Both war and the oppression of women have been blessed by leaders of these religions. Men wishing to uphold the oppression of women can always call on the holy scriptures.‘Honour killings’ are an ancient tradition in the Middle East. The practice is referred to in the Book of Deuter- onomy 22:21, which states that after the wedding the bride must be able to show that she was a virgin by producing the sheet or ‘chastity cloth’ with the blood of her pierced maidenhead on it. Otherwise, she was to be brought to the door of her father’s house,“and the men of her city shall stone her to death”. And the Jewish bible, the Torah, refers to women as being “more bitter than death” (Ecclesiastes 7:26). Christians look to the New Testament in seeking to understand the Old Testament. Conceivably, the new text might have done away with wording in the Old Testament that reinforced the oppression of women. In fact, the New Testament, too, refers disparagingly to women. Paul the Apostle, for instance, finds it shameful for women to show themselves without covering their heads. The man, howev-

113 er, need not cover his head “as he is the image and glory of God; but the woman is the glory of the man” (Corinthians 11:5-7). Elsewhere, the Christian bible says:“Let the woman learn in silence with all sub- jection. But I suffer not a woman to teach, nor to usurp authority over the man, but to be in silence” (Timothy 2:11–12). Like the Christian bible, the Koran contains wording that can be used to oppress women. It states for instance:“Men have authority over women because God has made the one superior to the other, and because men spend their wealth to maintain them. Good women are obedient. They guard their unseen parts because God has guarded them. As for those among you who fear disobedience, admonish them and send them to beds apart and beat them. If they obey you, you are not permitted to transgress against them.” (Koran, Sura 4:34). That text gives the man the right to use violence to make his wife obey him. Husbands’ conjugal rights apparently take precedence over those of wives:“Your women are the bearers of your seed. Thus, you may enjoy this privilege however you like.” (Sura 2:223). The scriptures of the three great religions, then, differ little in the way they treat important issues relating to coexistence, such as equal status for women and respect for dissenting views. In various ways, they reflect an old and extremely patriarchal type of society. Religious attitudes have been affected by both external and internal pressures. Today, the leaders of these religions condemn the malpractices of old but much evil remains in the world. This includes prejudices concerning others. It is easy for people to imagine that their own faith is more enlightened, but in fact all three religions place the same emphasis on the search for solidarity and justice. The yearning for a world free from evil is as strong today as it has always been. Jews, Christians and Muslims share this vision and can all help make it a reality..

Christer Hedin is a senior lecturer in religious history in Stockholm and Uppsala

Funny, we borrowed the word alcohol from the Muslims and now they don't want it back! ›

114 illustration by Jesper Waldersten

different roots

is cool summarised by Eivor and Sonia at Tensta Upper Secondary School

WE’RE FOUR YOUNG students at Tensta Upper Secondary and we were curious about one another’s views on religion, morals, culture and love, so we met on a couple of occasions to discuss these fasci- nating subjects.

Brief presentation of the discussion group: Athina (A), Greek Orthodox, agnostic, 17 Erik (E), atheist, 17 Mohammed (M), Muslim, 17 Petra (P), Syrian Orthodox, 17

“What do you think will happen to you when you die?” M: I believe I’ll go to heaven or hell, depending on my actions. After death you regain consciousness and see the true light. I try to say my prayers every day, and when I don’t I repent. I began practising my religion quite recently. I was born here in Sweden and my parents are from Bangladesh. My grandfather used to tell me about Islam but I only started taking it seriously when I was in the sixth grade. Today, I’m at upper secondary and I have difficulty fitting in five prayer sessions a day. Now, though, we have a prayer room at school so I pray more often than I would have done at home. I try to pray

116 five times a day, but it varies. I also visit the mosque sometimes. “Could you marry a non-Muslim?” M: Yes, I could imagine marrying someone who isn’t a Muslim, as that would mean she’d seen the real Muslim in me and not the media image of a Muslim. I know a lot of people with Muslim and Christian parents who are married. They each have their own religion and celebrate both Christmas and Ramadan. “What do you think of the custom of girls wearing shawls?” M: I think girls who wear shawls should do so because they believe in God, and not just for show. Their reasons for wearing them should be genuine. I know girls who wear shawls but don’t live according to the Islamic faith. They wear a shawl because they have to, perhaps, or simply to make people think they believe in God and live in accordance with Islamic beliefs and customs.

NEXT IT’S ERIK’S TURN. “What do you think will happen to you when you die?” E: When I die, my consciousness dies with me. The brain’s electrical signals and chemical reactions cease and everything comes to an end. I can’t believe that I have a soul or such like that goes on living after my death. “Do you think religion can help believers cope with difficult situations?” E: All of us feel sorrow and that kind of thing in different ways, but for those who believe in God religion can be a great help. Non- believers find it harder to tackle their problems, they search around for the answers, but believers usually find the answers in their faith. “Have you been confirmed?” E: I’ve been both christened and confirmed. My confirmation was a sort of tradition, under pressure from my friends. But I don’t go to church and my parents aren’t religious. “Could you marry a Muslim?” E: Yes, of course. Love is love. I have great respect for other religions. Religion is good for those who believe, even if I don’t myself.”

117 NEXT, PETRA. “What do you think will happen to you when you die?” P: Just like my Muslim friend here, I believe I’ll go to heaven or hell, depending on my actions here on earth. My parents are Christians and I grew up in that faith. “What’s your first recollection of your religion?” P: When I was in the first grade, I was in the lunch queue and our teacher asked us if we were Christians or Muslims and whether we ate pork or not. I stood there wondering why you couldn’t eat pork and what a Muslim was. I hardly knew what a Christian was. I’d always thought everyone had the same faith. I sang in the local Church of Sweden choir for many years, but it was my aunt that brought me closer to the Syrian Orthodox Christian faith. I have a cross that my grandfather gave me several years ago. I’ve worn it ever since, and it has a genuine meaning for me, to do with my beliefs. People don’t always wear crosses for religious reasons. They

35 INNOCENT AS CHARGED

How do you think it feels? to be called a murderer? Why do you accuse me of something I haven’t done? What am I to do? All I can do now is weep For me all people are equal I didn’t come into the world of my own free will Why should we who are young suffer for what our rulers do?

Surkan Kilic, from ‘In the Heart of Tensta: Poems, Tales and Images from Tensta Upper Secondary School’ often have them just to show off their jewellery, or themselves, or to give themselves or others the impression that they’re good Christians. I don’t think you should wear a cross for that kind of reason. You should wear it with reverence, as I do. The same applies to people who wear shawls or other things that tradition demands. “Could you marry a Muslim?” P: I don’t think so, because we’d probably have far too different views about lots of things, although the two religions are so close. I’m convinced that non-Christians can’t enter heaven and I imagine Muslims say the same thing about Christians. Many marriages nowadays end in divorce, so I believe you should choose a partner with the same religious beliefs as your own. Also, my parents would be very much against it. Like me, they believe that a marriage built on a shaky foundation will eventually collapse.

FINALLY, IT IS ATHINA’S TURN. “What do you think will happen to you when you die?” A: Everything goes black and your body rots. As for the soul, I don’t know if there is such a thing so I’ll wait and see if I have one and what happens to it. “What does being an agnostic mean?” A: My parents are Greek Orthodox Christians. I’ve grown up with their traditions but I haven’t adopted their religion—I’m not religious. I’ve been able to make up my own mind as a result of the freedom I’ve been given by my parents, and I respect them for that. If they hadn’t given me that freedom, I’d probably have been religious. I’ve come to the conclusion that I’m an agnostic, in other words I can’t prove that God exists but nor can I prove that God doesn’t exist. So I prefer to wait and see what happens instead.

119 36 leaving the religious sandpit by Pierre Durrani

IT WAS TWELVE years ago that I embarked upon my present path. I had grown up in the Pentecostal Church, been a punk for a while, tried shamanism and a few other things, and had finally found my way to the religion I knew least about yet had roots in—Islam. After talking to different people, reading a few books and especially after sitting on a dusty rooftop in the Pakistani city of Lahore, drinking carrot juice and mulling over life’s complications, I found Islam an interesting alternative. If you grow up with a deeply religious Chris- tian mother and attend Sunday School every week, belief in God is virtually automatic. But I never really felt at peace with the concept of the Holy Trinity in Christianity. My father has a Muslim Pakistani- Afghan background but has been more secular, and the only things I learned about his religion as a child was that there were two holidays like Christmas—Big Eid and Small Eid. An important point for a child, this, as it meant three Christmas celebrations, but it didn’t exactly further my insight into Islamic tradition. It takes time to build up an identity. A part of our identity is given us, other parts we build up and revise all our lives, and still others we create from scratch. This is how it is with religion, too. Over the years, since for- mally joining the Muslim faith, my thoughts and ideas about Islam have evolved, become involved and also dissolved. A religious identity is seldom static, as many people seem to imagine today, and those who try to keep the faith often change over time. You mature, perhaps, or become more or less religious, you acquire more knowledge or experience, you quite simple develop with the passage of time just like everyone else on this little blue-green planet of ours. I’ve often thought what an exciting debate I would have had

120 with myself if the present 30-year-old me had met the 18-year-old me who became a Muslim. I’ve probably lost some of the self-confi- dent religious fervour I had back then, but over the years I’ve also learnt to appreciate the rich variety that life has to offer. Further- more, I’ve learnt that it is not always easy to be a practising Muslim. I’ve often been put to the test, in various ways—environments, people and situations that have put my thinking in perspective. Sometimes I’ve been provoked, but as a rule the problems I’ve encountered have left me with a firmer grip on reality as a follower of Islam. I’ve found that having your views questioned is a good thing. Well, up to a point, anyway, for unfortunately as a Muslim you’re too often painted as a potential terrorist-fundamentalist-fanatic...and believe me, this can be pretty harrowing after a while. But apart from all the suspicion that is cast over Islam nowadays, being a Muslim in Sweden is fairly painless. I see myself as a Swedish Muslim with Pakistani-Afghan roots. A hyphenated identity that has matured gradually and which I now feel secure about. I’ve learnt to love my religion—although I’m fascinated by and appreciate other religions, too—and of all the texts, rituals and acts that I enjoy in practising Islam it is the daily prayers, al-Salat, that I value most. To be able to reflect on existentialist issues such as: Who am I? Where do I come from? Where am I going? And what is the meaning of life? These are questions that most people put to themselves from time to time and which in a way have informed the whole of human history both at the private and public level. Prayers are like a small church service, a few moments of contem- plation that give you a pleasant break from what is often a stressful existence. To commune with God with my forehead pressed against the prayer mat gives me both strength and comfort. It is my way of charging my batteries. I feel that both Christianity and Islam are part of my cultural heritage and that at present these two religions, the largest in the world, are being pitted against each other. It’s us loving, democratic Christians against those fanatical, violent, women-beating Muslims who want nothing more than to hack our limbs off—or it’s us devout,

121 righteous and wise Muslims against those hypocritical, bloodthirsty, power-hungry Christians whose societies are riddled with pornogra- phy and problems. That kind of thing. I’m convinced that the majority of Christians and Muslims in the world are not fooled by the myth of eternal enmity between our two religions. Most followers of the faith, of whatever kind, are peaceful, calm and good people. In the modern era, differences and conflicts are emphasised in the media, but why does no-one mention all the millions of Muslims and Christians who live and have lived on good terms with one another? Comparing Islam and Christianity appears to be all the rage these days; sometimes it’s done in an objective and balanced way, but all too often it’s a matter of ‘proving’ the superiority of one over the other. Often, you don’t see the ‘Others’ as they want to be seen themselves but through the filter of your own prejudices. A fundamental problem is that we tend to compare the finest aspects or highest ideals of our own religion with the worst aspects or lowest practices of the Others’, and vice versa. Instead of comparing ideals with ideals and practices with practices. It may be a bit upsetting for some people to discover that the Others are not as evil and different from us as we would like to imagine. Perhaps something good will emerge from the ashes of 11 Septem- ber 2001? A new era of self-examination and reflection, perhaps, of cooperation and reappraisal? Our tiny planet has far too large and pressing problems to confront, such as environmental destruction and social injustice, for us to engage in childish squabbles reminis- cent of the sandpit. It is time to raise our sights from the sandpit and realise that the world and Sweden are big enough for us all, Christians and Muslims alike, and all the other religions as well. And that God is greater than we imagine, but that we, too, are so much greater than we might suspect. God’s peace! Pax vobiscum! As-Salâmu ‘alaykum!

Pierre Durrani is press secretary of the Swedish Young Muslims Association.

122 37 THE KORAN ON WINE

16:67. (...as a guidance and a mercy for a people who believe). And of the fruits of the palms and the grapes—you obtain from them intoxication and goodly provision; most surely there is a sign in this for a people who ponder.

2:216. They ask you about intoxicants and games of chance. Say: ‘In both of them there is a great sin and means of profit for men, and their sin is greater than their profit’. And they ask you as to what they should spend.

4:43 O you who believe! Do not go near prayer when you are intoxicated until you know (well) what you say...

5:90. O you who believe! Intoxicants and games of chance and (sacrificing to) stones set up and (dividing by) arrows are only an uncleanness, the Satan’s work; shun it therefore that you may be successful.

38 Where wine enters, good sense departs

Swedish proverb

Why, be this Juice the growth of God, who dare Blaspheme the twisted tendril as a Snare? A Blessing, we should use it, should we not? And if a Curse—why, then, Who set it there?

Omar Khayyam (1050–1123) 40 photo Pelle Kronestedt

Östra Real Upper Secondary School, Friday 10:30

L to r: Ruben Brundell, Emelie Klefbeck, Ranna Kas Hanna, Katinka Höglund, Sally Tally and Daniel Harild at Östra Real Upper Secondary, Stockholm Sally, 17: We know too little about Daniel, 18: As long as boys are circum- Islam and Muslims and we perhaps have cised under proper care, I’ve nothing too many prejudices. against it. I’m circumcised myself and it hasn’t harmed me. Ruben, 17: Swap the circumcision of boys for some other kind of ceremony. Katinka, 17: I can’t understand people Children must decide for themselves who won’t let their daughters live their when they want to grow up. lives as they want.

Ranna, 18: Moving from Rinkeby to Emelie, 17: I’ve got a Muslim friend who Östermalm was a big step for me. My old doesn’t dare come to see me here at friends in Rinkeby think I’m a snob now, school because she thinks you have to while here I’m the Rinkeby girl who wear snob clothes at this place. doesn’t take any shit. 41

photo Pelle Kronestedt

Tensta Upper Secondary School, Friday 13:30

L to r: Nazib Miah, Anna Etoh, Tomek Jansson, Arian Al Bazi, Petra Boles, Kalle Larsson and Maria Byrnäs at Tensta Upper Secondary, Stockholm Nazib, 17: ‘Honour killings’ is something Petra, 16: I’d prefer to marry someone all religions are against, it’s really sick! who shares the same faith as me—Chris- tian Orthodox. Tomek, 17: I probably have some prejudices, but I try to avoid them. Anna, 17: Before I started at Tensta Upper Secondary, I had a lot of preju- Kalle, 16: There’s nothing wrong with dices. Nowadays, though, being here male circumcision, but I’m completely feels really good. against the sexual mutilation of women. Arian, 16: Sometimes it seems as though Maria, 18: Everyone’s so different here media reporting reinforces prejudice in Tensta. No-one’s like anyone else! towards certain groups. 42

islamism and its origins by Bitte Hammargren

FUNDAMENTALISTS OF DIFFERENT persuasions—Muslims, Christians, Jews and Hindus—have at least one thing in common: they all seek to build a society on religious foundations and intro- duce religion into politics. They are not prepared to compromise on what they consider to be religious truths. One only has to look at the conflict between Israel and Palestine to see how implacable and irreconcilable religious extremists on both sides can be. As long as fundamentalists are the underdogs, their criticism of the country’s rulers can prove effective in attracting popular support. Justified censure of the corruption and overbearing practices of those in power appeals to both the young, frustrated unemployed and the devout middle classes. But history shows that once the religious purists gain power themselves, they find it harder to retain their popularity. Among fundamentalists of the same faith, there are any number of diverging and competing movements. Muslim fundamentalists—or Islamists—are not a unified bloc. Rather, they might be viewed as different limbs of a many-branched tree. Usama bin Ladin, al-Qaida and the Taliban represent just one of these Islamic branches. The Saudi royal family represents another and the Shi’ite clergy in Iran a third. Armed Muslim groups like those in Algeria, Palestine and the Philippines are other branches of this tree. But most Islamic fundamentalists do not resort to Kalashnikovs or explosives to try and force people to accept their

128 interpretations of the Koran. Instead, they try to awaken slumbering souls by spreading the word and the scriptures. Present-day Islamic fundamentalism has its roots in the Muslim Brotherhood, which was founded by an Egyptian, Hassan al-Banna, in 1928. The movement, which spread rapidly through the Arab world, arose in response to the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, when the founder of modern Turkey, Kemal Atatürk, abolished the Caliphate in 1924. (Caliphs were acting leaders of the Muslim community, al-umma, following the death of the prophet Mohammed in 632.) Even though the Caliphate lost its political influence in the early 20th century, it represented an ideal: the notion that all Muslim believers, regardless of nationality, were part of a unified whole. The message of the Muslim Brotherhood has been summed up in the phrase,“The Koran is our Constitution”. Together with the Saudi theocracy,the Brotherhood is implacably opposed to non-religious Arab nationalism, which unites Christianity and Muslim Arabs. One of the most radical Brotherhood ideologists, Sayyid Qutb, was hanged in Egypt in 1966. He had challenged the Egyptian leader of the day, President Nasser, by likening him to a pharaoh and describing Arab nationalists as idolatrous heathens who prayed to the state instead of to God. Islamists since the time of Hassan al-Banna have viewed the prophet Mohammed’s community in Medina in 622 as a model for political Islam. They draw on the Koran for their dogma and from the ‘traditions’ attributed to Mohammed. Their sources of inspiration today are a number of theologians from early times, such as Ibn Taimiyya (1263–1328) and Ibn Abd al-Wahhab (1703–1791) as well as 20th century thinkers like the Pakistani theologian Mawdudi. But seeking to build a modern state based on the holy scriptures is also used by forces seeking to democratise the Muslim countries from within. Thus Fatima Mernissi from Morocco argues on behalf of gender equality by citing the Koran and the traditions of the prophet Mohammed. She has attracted the wrath of Islamists, who accuse her of using religion simply as a means to achieve her feminist ends. Another interesting figure is Tariq Ramadan, a researcher in Swit- zerland. This grandson of Islamism—his mother was the daughter of

129 the Brotherhood’s founder, Hassan al-Banna—has discussed the question of how you can live as a democratic Muslim believer in modern Europe. His book,‘To Be a European Muslim’, has inspired many people, while others suspect him of harbouring covert Islamist motives. For several decades now, the Muslim Brotherhood, Pakistan and Saudi Arabia have been seeking to promote a Sunni Muslim revival worldwide. In 1962, the Muslim World League was founded in Saudi Arabia, with the aim of giving the deeply conservative Saudi form of Islam—Wahhabism—interpretive priority in the world. Brandishing this global ideological export, the Saudi Arabians and those who share their beliefs have stormed at Shi’ite Muslims, at traditional Sunnite leaders (Ulema), at mysticists (Sufis) and at practitioners of popular Muslim customs (such as pilgrims to the graves of the saints or those who celebrate Mohammed’s birthday), as well as at those Muslims who distinguish between religion and politics (secularists). In order to spread their dogma, Saudi-oriented Islamists, with the backing of wealthy financiers, have paid the salaries of imams, translated books into numerous languages and supported the building of mosques and Islamic institutions around the world, from black Africa to northern Europe and Central Asia. By devious routes, funds have also been channelled to those who have fought for their beliefs with weapons in hand, the ‘jihadists’. With the advent of the revolution in Iran in 1979, the Saudis encountered competition. When the Shi’ite Muslim revolutionary leaders in Iran shouted “There are no kings in Islam!”, a shockwave passed through Saudi Arabia, heart of the Sunni Muslim world, where the royal family is supposed to be the guardian of the holy cities of Mecca and Medina. The message from the ayatollahs in Iran echoed men- acingly through the Saudi palaces with their 5,000 princes, wasteful luxury, corruption and indifference to social injustice. The Saudi royal family was equally shocked by events on the first day of the year 1400 according to the Islamic calendar (20 November 1979 in Sweden). On dawn that day, the Great Mosque in Mecca, the holiest of all places for Muslims, was occupied by Saudi extremists urging a return to orthodox Islamic principles. The intruders were eventually forced out and

130 executed, but their action had badly shaken the Saudi establishment. It now had both an external and an internal foe to contend with. Col- laboration with the US thus became even more important for the reigning House of Saud. The Afghan resistance movement fighting the Soviet Union in the 1980s provided Saudi Arabia with a means of pro- moting its cause among Muslims and of diverting its internal critics. Together with the US and Pakistan, the Saudis invested massive- ly in the Afghan resistance movement. The fight against the Soviet infidels on Afghan territory was hailed as a holy war. Thousands of Arab volunteers became jihadists in the Afghan mountains. After ten years of war, the Soviet Union was forced out of Afghanistan. The occupying power slunk home with its tail between its leg and shortly thereafter the entire Soviet empire collapsed. Conquering a superpower was naturally a tremendous fillip for the Muslim Afghanistan veterans, and in the early 1990s these soldiers of God began seeking out new fronts where their experience of armed war- fare could help to exacerbate conflicts. The civil war in Algeria is one such example. For the Saudi royal family—the Americans’ allies in the Persian gulf—Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait in 1990 came as a further blow. It brought Saddam Hussein dangerously close to the Saudi oilwells. In order to drive Saddam’s forces out of Kuwait, the Saudi royal family allowed half a million US soldiers to use the kingdom as a base. Today, more than a decade later, there are still US bases in Saudi Arabia. This alliance between the House of Saud, guardian of the holy places, and the American ‘infidels’ vexed a number of people, including a well-known Afghan veteran, Usama bin Ladin, exiled son of a wealthy Saudi businessman. In the mid-1990s, he began turning his weapons on his former native country, Saudi Arabia, and on their patrons, the US. The fact that the royal family was allowing US military bases to be established on holy Saudi soil was viewed by Usama bin Ladin and his associates as a grave crime. This is also why there was such a strong Saudi element in the terror attacks of 11 September —15 of the 19 hijackers are believed to have been Saudis. The fall of the Taliban in Afghanistan and the continuing hunt for members of

131 the al-Qaida network is affecting the entire Muslim world. For several years now, Islam watchers have been claiming that Islamism has reached the end of the line. Today, the situation hangs in the balance. Developments could tip matters in a number of different directions: – In the Islamic Republic of Iran, the power struggle between the theological establishment and reformist factions seeking an end to the political rule of the clergy has intensified. Should the reformists triumph, this could signal the end of the brand of militant Islamism that has emanated from Iran. – Muslims both in the West and in the Middle East who feel neg- lected and marginalised may be drawn to religious extremists wishing to spark conflicts between religions and civilisations. The flames of discontent may be fanned by the professional Muslim soldiers who have been put out of work by the fall of the Taliban in Afghani- stan. Should these soldiers of God seek out new fronts to fight on, there is a danger that the conflicts presently found in places like Chechenya, Kashmir and the Middle East may worsen. – Secularists, sickened by and worried about such a polarisation, may be strengthened in their determination to separate religion and politics in societies in both East and West. The secularists then face a choice: they can either build up authoritarian government machinery or strive for societies based on democratic principles, the rule of law, equality of the sexes and human rights. – A further tendency may develop among those religious followers disappointed by the corruption and power-seeking that is evident among the elites of the Islamic core countries. Such people may be drawn to new ideals and a modernised form of Islam. This may lead to greater individualisation in religion and greater support for political pluralism. The future, however, is unforeseeable. What will happen depends on which forces gain control of political and religious power centres in the West, in the UN and in the Muslim world. The events of 11 September and their aftermath show what a boundless world we live in.

Bitte Hammargren is a journalist with Svenska Dagbladet, Stockholm 132 GLOSSARY: Islamism: Another name for Muslim fundamentalism. An ideology that aims to create an Islamic State according to the Koran. Jihad: Literally means the search for God and the Prophet, but is often translated as ‘holy war’. In one of Mohammed’s early revelations from Medina, he was urged to embark on a jihad against the ruling Quraysh tribe in Mecca as it was trying to prevent the establishment of Islam. Caliph: ‘Deputy’, the position held by Mohammed’s successors as supreme leader of the Muslim community following his death in 632. Caliphate: Lasted from Mohammed’s death in 632 until 1258, when the Mongolian conquerors murdered the last Abbasid caliph in Baghdad. The office was restored by the Ottomans (a dynasty that lasted from 1281 up until the end of the First World War). Theocracy: Government by a deity or priesthood; a society in which God is deemed to have supreme power and the rulers claim to represent him or his deputies directly. Al-umma: Title of the first Muslim community established in Medina in 622. Today, al-umma stands for the community of Muslim believers, wherever they may live.

LITERATURE: Hjärpe, Jan: Politisk islam: studier i muslimsk fundamentalism (Förlagshuset Gothia, 1983). Kepel, Gilles: Expansion et déclin de l’islamisme. (Gallimard, 2000). Mernissi, Fatima: Drömmar om frihet: berättelser från min barn- doms harem. (Norstedts, 1994). Otterbeck, Jonas: Islam på svenska: Tidskriften Salaam och islams globalisering (Lunds universitet, 2000). The Oxford Encyclopedia of the Modern Islamic World. (Oxford University Press, 1995). Ramadan, Tariq: To be a European Muslim (Islamic Foundation, 1999). Rashid, Ahmed: Talibanerna: islam, oljan och det nya makt- spelet i Centralasien. (Svenska Afghanistankommittén, 2000) Roy, Olivier: The Failure of Political Islam. (I.B. Tauris Publishers, 1994). Simonsen, Jørgen Bæk : Islamlexikonet. (Forum, 1994). Solomin, Nina: OK, amen: om kärlek och fientlighet i chas- sidernas New York. (Wahlström & Widstrand, 2001).

»Hatred and piety are incompatible« Turkish proverb

133 43 fighting over differences by Mehrnoush Khoshnevis

I’VE OFTEN WONDERED why there is such a thing as religion. It seems to cause more harm than good. Looking back at history, you find that countless wars were over religion. The great world religions (the monotheistic) preach that there is only one God, that one should not kill, steal, commit adultery and so forth. In many cases, the various religions are more similar than dissimilar—and so they fight over the differences. Is Jesus the son of God? Has the Messiah been born or are we still waiting for him? These are some of the things they are fighting about. Things that happened thousands of years ago. Of course you should have a religion if that’s what you want. But you must accept other people’s religions and views. If we are to avoid condemning the religious views of others, we have to begin by learning about the various religions and learning to distinguish between religion and culture. For many, words like sexual mutilation of women and honour killings are synonymous with Islam, which is not at all correct. My family comes from a Muslim background but I don’t practice the religion actively. I have friends with other religions, and it’s fun comparing them—the differences and the similarities. You learn a lot. Religion has often been abused by those in power, and still is, but at the same time it gives many people hope. The dangerous part— for all religions—is when those who practise the faith become fundamentalists. A world with only one religion would be like a paint- ing without colour. But by acquiring knowledge and learning toler- ance we can paint a beautiful colourful picture together.

Mehrnoush Khoshnevis, 19, is a student at Tensta Upper Secondary School, Stockholm 134 44

ON CHILDREN

Your children are not your children. They are the sons and daughters of Life’s longing for itself. They come through you but not from you, And though they are with you, yet they belong not to you. You may give them your love but not your thoughts. For they have their own thoughts. You may house their bodies but not their souls, For their souls dwell in the house of tomorrow, which you cannot visit, not even in your dreams. You may strive to be like them, but seek not to make them like you. For life goes not backward nor tarries with yesterday. You are the bows from which your children as living arrows are sent forth.

Gibran Kahlil, from “The Prophet” (1883–1931) Ben Jelloun, T. (1998), Vad är rasism - samtal med min dotter. Stockholm: Alfabeta Bok förlag AB. Emami, S. (1989), i I hjärtat av Tensta: dikter, berättelser och bilder från Tensta gymnasium. Bromma: Tryck Offset Ekonomi AB. Evin (1989), i I hjärtat av Tensta: dikter, berättelser och bilder från Tensta gymnasium. Bromma: Tryck Offset Ekonomi AB. Gibran, K. (1992), Profeten. Helsingborg: Proprius förlag AB. Hafiz (1989), i Källor till persisk vishet. Hafiz et al. Solna: Quellen Verlag. Khayyam, O. (1997), En liten bok med Omar Khayyams Rubaiyat. Vällingby: Strömberg B< Förlag AB. Kilic, S. (1989), i I hjärtat av Tensta: dikter, berättelser och bilder från Tensta gymnasium. Bromma: Tryck Offset Ekonomi AB. Koranen, (1986). Ungern: Wahlström&Widstrand. I översättning av K V Zetterstén. Källor till persisk vishet (1989), i Källor till persisk vishet. Solna: Quellen Verlag. Maalouf, A. (1991), Korstågen enligt araberna. Ungern: Alhambra förlag AB. Mossaed, J. (1997), Månen och den eviga kon. Stockholm: Ordfront Förlag AB. Nordberg, M. (1989), Profetens folk. Kristianstad: Prisma förlag AB. Oweini, S. & Burton, N. (1991), Alkemins blå eld. Falköping: FIB- bokklubb. Qabbani, N. (1991) i Oweini, S. & Burton, N. (1991), Alkemins blå eld. Falköping: FIB-bokklubb. Schamloo, A. (1996), Allomfattande kärlek. Rinkeby: Arash Tryck och Förlag. Tensta gymnasium (1989), I hjärtat av Tensta: dikter, berättelser och bilder från Tensta gymnasium. Bromma: Tryck Offset Ekonomi AB.

YALLA! Let’s Redecorate the Tree! (Swedish title: JALLA! Nu klär vi granen!) Published 2002 by the Swedish Ministry for Foreign Affairs Gustav Adolfs torg 1, 103 39 Stockholm

ISBN 91-7496-276-0 Art.nr 02.019

Printing/Repro by Danagårds grafiska AB

Translation by Stephen Croall

136

YALLA!

sphere cultural muslim the and sweden –

LET’S REDECORATE THE TREE

YALLA! LET’S REDECORATE THE TREE