There are going to be social norms - rules. The question is who makes them? A civilization that declines to tell immigrants what the rules are will see its rules - social norms - replaced by others. Social norms and power abhor a vacuum.
I suggest you follow the counsel of this Canadian Muslim. He's a Saudi-Canadian Muslim's responding to a Quora question about how he'd react to a female family member removing her hijab. It's reasonable to ask what % of Muslim immigrants would respond similarly vs those who play the game of religion-driven authoritarian collectivist disapproval described here:
"I just asked my sister. She hasn't worn one since she turned 16, before that, she wore it on and off in school, mostly to fit in with her crowd of friends, who did, and because some (a few) boys and girls called her names for not wearing one. She asked my father if it was OK. He sighed and said "I feared you'd never ask"… And that was that, she took it off.
When I met my wife, she was worried I'd force her to wear one, because my mother did a few times when we met. Fact is, my mother wore hers, because she was worried my girlfriend at the time would disapprove of her not wearing one. You see, it's all a game of telephone, everyone thinks everyone else will disapprove, and that's why so many women wear one. My wife doesn't wear one, and it actually disgusts me, when 5-year old girls walk around with them, even in the most conservative interpretations at home in Qatif (if you know Saudi Arabia, you know it's a very conservative city), five year old girls didn't have to wear one, they had to when they were old enough to be attractive to men.
"We live in Canada, now. We're guests in this country, I'd like to be more than just a guest. And just as I hope that Canada respects my/our life and choices, so do I have to respect those of Canada. Veils aren't about modesty anymore, they're about making a political and religious statement to non-Muslims. I pray, I observe the holidays, and I try to live my life as a good Muslim. That's my life. I have no right to control that of my sister, wife, or anyone else. That control, that's political and sectarian, it's not Muslim. We left Saudi Arabia to get away from that control, I'd be a bastard to bring it with me, enjoy the freedoms of Canada, and still force women to live under it."
Here's the deal I developed while talking to a couple of Syrian refugees (https://medium.com/@ljgolden55/an-ill-fitting-suit-islam-vs-secular-government-and-individualism-3dcf0e577468):
On academic and business trips to Stuttgart and Prague I got to know two Syrian refugees and we had long conversations about these issues. One had worked for CNN and got a full ride scholarship to Davidson College in North Carolina. The other worked for a refugee resettlement agency in Greece. They had both had very unpleasant contact with the some members of the extended Assad family business with a flag. But they had no illusions about the Sunni Islamists on the other side of Syria’s civil war. Seeing no way out, they left while they could.
We had extended discussions about Islam’s conception of the state — the Umma — or community of believers, and how it differs from the Christian West’s “render unto Caesar” view of the state. They agreed that Islam’s conception of the purpose of the state makes it resistant to separating Koran-inspired religious authority and subordinating it to constitutionally and electorally legitimized secular authority.
A Social Contract for Muslims in Secular States
The authoritarian theocrats who pass blasphemy laws need a social contract to learn that political and social restraint will enhance, not undermine, authentic religious faith; that persuasion works better than the kind of inquisitorial enforcement Daoud wrote about:
“In some of Allah’s lands, the war on women and on couples has the air of an inquisition. During the summer in Algeria, brigades of Salafists and local youths worked up by the speeches of radical imams and Islamist TV preachers go out to monitor female bodies, especially those of women bathers at the beach. The police hound couples, even married ones, in public spaces. Gardens are off-limits to strolling lovers. Benches are sawed in half to prevent people from sitting close together.” (https://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/14/opinion/sunday/the-sexual-misery-of-the-arab-world.html)
On a trip to Istanbul in December 2012, ages ago in the Islamist regime of Erdogan, we talked to a Turkish English literature professor from Ankara on our hotel terrace. He complained of the dirty looks and criticism he was now getting when he hugged or kissed his wife in public — in what was one of the most secular states of the Muslim world.
The Contract
The Arabs and Muslims I’ve known know they don’t need what George H.W. Bush called westerners’ “soft bigotry of low expectations” with regard to Islam’s fraught relationship with secularist freedom of inquiry, female empowerment and the dismantling and deregulation of their authoritarian patriarchal family life. The secular Syrian refugees I met when teaching in Stuttgart and Berlin and travelling in Prague agreed with me. They also agreed with the ideas embedded in this contract for assimilation into secular societies for refugees.
Here are the clauses in the contract that all theocrats, of whatever religion, will find difficult to swallow. Only a contract can solve the 2015 Collision in Cologne that Algerian novelist Kamel Daoud wrote about: “People in the West are discovering, with anxiety and fear, that sex in the Muslim world is sick, and that the disease is spreading to their own lands.”:
1. Groups don’t have rights, only individuals.
2. Secular constitutions supersede all religious law (Sharia, Koranic, Catholic canon law, Mosaic law). All satire of religious belief is protected speech. Religion as an ideology and belief system enjoys no special exemption from satire, ridicule, insult and open debate. Blasphemy is not a valid legal concept.
3. Absolute freedom of conscience in religion. All individuals, including all your family members, have the right to convert to another religion or no religion.
4. Female genital mutilation (FGM) is illegal and criminal.
5. Women have equal rights under the law. Your female children over the state’s age of consent have the right to marry, partner and have sexual relations with whom they choose, of a different religion or of no religion. Your female children have the right not to marry. Coercive arranged marriage is illegal. Child marriage is illegal.
6. Family honor is not a valid legal concept. Muslims in the West must explicitly renounce family honor as a legal concept and acknowledge the illegality of honor killing.
7. Wife-beating is illegal. Wives, and daughters over 18, have absolute freedom of choice in dress. Male relatives have no legal right to limit female family members’ freedom of choice in dress. (Only this taboo-breaker can solve the problem Daoud wrote about: “ Clothing is also given to extremes: At one end is the burqa, the orthodox full-body covering; at the other is the hijab moutabaraj (“the veil that reveals”), which combines a head scarf with slim-fit jeans or tight pants. On the beach, the burqini confronts the bikini.”)
8. Homosexuality and homosexual relations are legal and homosexuals have equal legal rights. If you own a business you have no legal right to refuse employment to a qualified homosexual applicant or service to a homosexual customer because of his or her sexual orientation.
9. Holocaust denial is illegal hate speech.
10. Antisemitic speech is a hate crime punishable by imprisonment.
This last clause would land the manuscript director of the UNESCO-financed Alexandria Library in jail since he included the Protocols of the Elders of Zion in the library’s exhibits:
“the manuscript museum director, Dr. Yusuf Zeidan, in the November 17, 2003, edition of the Egyptian newspaper Al-Usbu’, he “decided immediately to place it next to the Torah. Although it is not a monotheistic holy book, it has become one of the sacred [tenets] of the Jews, next to their first constitution, their religious law, [and] their way of life. In other words, it is not merely an ideological or theoretical book.” For Zionist Jews, he explained, the Protocols is more important than the Torah, as it informs their every action.” (https://www.israelnationalnews.com/News/News.aspx/54063)
But this contract can’t work unless it’s voluntary and the initiative for it comes from the Muslim citizens of secular western states and recently arrived Muslim refugees. The Syrian and Egyptian refugees I’ve known have all agreed that Islam’s tight prohibitionist governance of patriarchal family hierarchy and girls’ and women’s choices needs more of this therapy than other religions. Assuming all Muslims are snowflakes who can’t take a cartoon’s joke about their BELIEFS is a form of what Bush senior called the “soft bigotry of low expectations”.
Would you sign the contract? If not, which clauses do you object to? If you object to most, you have 50+ Muslim countries to choose from.
