After the Cold War drew to a close, the Western World lost the political other. The Soviet Union collapsed and the otherness, which would be constructed by the threat perception of the Western political layout, had vanished. Thus, the Middle East and Islam started to replace that position. At first, this was called “ Islam’s fundamentalism”. As a matter of fact, in the 1990s, the matter of Islamic fundamentalism was topping the list of the most debated matters. In the American cinema, the Russian agents were replaced with Iranian or Palestinian “terrorists”, who are dark-skinned, wear silk scarves and speak Arabic, as the enemy and the other. September 11 was the storm that broke out. The expected imaginary threat had been actualized! Islam had come to the fore as a barbarism that attacks the Western civilization. Thus, Bush’s advisor, Thomas Friedman, was saying, “They are savages that envy our civilization”.

Each passing day, the Islamophobia, which had been created through Islam by the international Western system, turned into a reality within the Western communities. Minarets were demolished, bombs were thrown at the mosques, interventions were made on the grocery stores that sold Halal food, and headscarf bans became evident. On the first day of 2015, Molotov cocktails were thrown at a Mosque in a country like Sweden. However, Sweden was the country that had confirmed recognizing Palestine as a state just a couple of months ago. Recently, the movements against Islam are increasing gradually in Europe. France and Germany are two prominent countries in this matter. Algerian Muslims in France and Turkish Muslims in Germany are facing extreme exclusion. In France, new legislations are being enacted in this context. In Germany, more refined policies are being adopted. The government officials are making warnings about investigating the ethnical and religious identities of the workers that are employed in the workplaces. The racist and fascist wave against Islam is rising. As a matter of fact, the demonstrations against Islam, which started in the Dress village of Germany, consisted of 350 people at the beginning, and now, this number had reached 18,000. This new global Islam counterpart racists are calling themselves  PEGIDA, or Patriotic Europeans against the Islamization of the Occident (meaning of the West). Such an interesting name! They are carrying patriotism beyond the nation state, and identifying it on the surface of Europe. Besides, they were structuring it against Islam.

Islamophobia is being rediscovered in the history of Western thinking. Muslims are presented as savages, while the Europeans are shown as the civilized. The famous historian Bernard Lewis identifies Islam as a religion that expands and spreads in the countenance of Christians, and, this serves the purpose of blatantly constructing the historic legitimacy of Islamophobia. The problem, which recently became evident after the construction of this theory, is being presented as it was in the history of Christians and Muslims. The relation between Islam and Christianity is being interpreted according to their one-sided, conflicting relations based on dominance. Both religions’ historical and communal worlds are being interpreted on a basis of a progressive and secular approach.

It was quite remarkable to see all the European ideologies to be on the same side on the matter of Islamophobia. Thus, the socialist and conservative intellectuals are uniting on the matter of racist policies against Islam. In France, the left-winger and right-winger intellectuals had put their signatures on the declaration against the headscarf. According to them, the headscarf is an attitude that humiliates the women and prevents their freedom. Consequently, in the secular republics this cannot be permitted. In the strict sense, this approach is reflecting the arrogant and equalizer equality (homogenizer) attitude of the Europe secularism. This is explaining the arrogant attitude of secularism, because, the French secularism’s view of the women’s world is being seen as the only universal reality. They believe that this Universalist reality is the maturity reached by French secularism. Because of this, they assume that all the women will dress and act accordingly to this and become a “perfect secular person”! This is an ethnocentric attitude. The delusion of matching the European culture with mankind and presenting it as the most supreme!

The European secularism possesses an equalizing organizer, because it believes that it can provide equality by wiping out the existence of all religions from the public field. The “religion of the state”, which was adopted by Rousseau (he is referring to this as the civil religion), the religion mentality, which takes place outside the church’s relativity in the direction of the state, is coming into play at this point. Through this secular equality, it renounces the plural worlds of religions. Also, the religion mentality perceives religious pluralism as being the Protestants taking a stance against Catholics. According to socialist or liberal Europeans, religions can steer towards representation in a way that is predicted by European secularism. Thus, any religious phenomena outside this will become a counterpart of secularism. At this point, Islam also turns into a phenomenon, which questions the secularism projects and opens them to discussion.

Indeed, at the beginning, Islam was Europe’s “under the stairs” religion. To put it better, it is the religion of the “under the stairs” classes. The “under the stairs” Muslims, who had migrated to work in the 1960s, made a tangible contribution to the community with their bodies, swept the streets, cleaned the toilets and worked in factories… (Last year, in the town of Witten, Germany, Mr. Burhan from Bektaşlı took me on a tour of one of the world’s biggest iron and steel plants of its time, which is now a converted museum, and told me that his father had worked and retired here). Later on, those Muslims became teachers, worked as technicians and engineers, ran businesses and opened groceries. Their self-confidence was formed. They were closely acquainted with the community. They left the stairs and started climbing up. They started to take place in the existence of the community. They desired to go to schools with headscarves; to sell Halal food in their groceries; and to explain their problems beyond politics by speaking to some parties. Muslims stopped being an “under the stair” community, and became a normal community. They were exceeding the role given by Europe. They were joining the public field as the normal individuals of the community by leaving the immigrant worker class. European communities were foreign to this new cultural class and they were steering towards meeting it with fear. The sociology of the Islamophobia came to life at this point. The pursuit of perceptions, like the headscarf, the mosque, Azan, Halal food and etc., to find a place in the community was actually the gravitation of Islam towards existence within Europe. In the historical visualization of Western modernism, only Christianity and Judaism existed. Islam was the other and fear. Thus, they steered towards giving the same reaction when they encountered it in their own communities. At the beginning, by believing that they could tame it and make it resemble themselves, they acted as a “gardener”. However, Islam continued being visible.  Not only that; Islam also brought its problems along with it to Europe. In other words, the problems of the Muslims…. The regime problems, wars, poverty, disputes and conflicts in the Islamic communities were brought to Europe along with the Muslims. Even the Gülenist movement and the rulership conflict, which is only experienced in Turkey, are finding a reflection in Europe with various conferences, broadcasts, researches and meetings. In a more negative sense, the violent actions of the “jihadist” movements were also reflected on Europe.

The classic secular identity of Europe is experiencing a crisis against these demands. The solution is clear; Europe will accept the Muslims’ cultural identity demands, and in order to do that, will re-structure its secularism politics by revising it. As for the Muslim communities, they will stay away from functioning as nation state tools of the geographies they come from.

Twitter: ergunharputi