Although terrorist attacks in Europe continue to attract much attention, they don’t dominate the news as much as they did when they were a horrendous novelty back in 2014 and 2015. That terrorists can create localized but not widespread panic has been proved time and again; Sir Jeremy Greenstock, the former head of the United Nations’ counterterrorism committee, has aptly described Islamist terrorism as “a lethal nuisance.” [...]
In contrast to attacks committed by non-Muslims such as Stephen Paddock, who massacred fifty-eight people at a concert in Las Vegas on October 1, 2017, jihadi attacks have repercussions on the communities and traditions that are believed to have encouraged them. Each atrocity increases by a fearsome multiple the distrust, surveillance, and interference to which Muslims in the West are subject. In the month following the Arena bombing, the Manchester police logged 224 anti-Muslim incidents, compared to thirty-seven in the same period a year earlier. On June 19, 2017, when a white Briton, Darren Osborne, plowed his van into a group of Muslims in North London, killing one, many Britons, including ones I spoke to, felt that the Muslims had had it coming.2 This is what Kepel means by fracture: jihadism engenders a reaction “against all Muslims,” while populist politicians “point the finger at immigrants or ‘Islam.’” [...]
According to an opinion poll commissioned by Le Figaro in April 2016, 63 percent of French people believe that Islam enjoys too much “influence and visibility” in France, up from 55 percent in 2010, while 47 percent regard the presence of a Muslim community as “a threat,” up from 43 percent. A poll conducted in Britain around the same time found that 43 percent of Britons believe that Islam is “a negative force in the UK.” Many British Muslims, I was told by a Muslim community activist in Leeds, spent the hours after the Las Vegas massacre “praying that the perpetrator wasn’t a Muslim,” for had he been, it would have led to furious responses online, in addition to the usual round of ripped-off hijabs and expletives in the street, if not actual physical threats. [...]
In recent years, England’s encouragement of multiculturalism has weakened in response to terrorist attacks and a rapid increase in the Muslim population, which has doubled since 2000 to more than three million people. By 2020 half the population of Bradford—which, besides being one of the country’s most Muslim cities, has one of its highest birth rates—will be under twenty years old. Responding to this demographic shift and the fear of terrorism, Britain under David Cameron and, more recently, Theresa May has given the policy of multiculturalism a very public burial, a shift that seems entirely in tune with the defensive impulses that led a small majority of voters to opt for Brexit. (I was told in Bradford that many Muslim inhabitants of the city also voted for Brexit, to indicate their displeasure at the recent arrival of Polish and Roma immigrants.) Typical of the panicky abandonment of a venerable article of faith was May’s reaction to the terrorist attack on London Bridge in early June 2017, after which she demanded that people live “not in a series of separated, segregated communities, but as one truly United Kingdom.” A central element of the government’s anti-extremism policy is the promotion of “British” values such as democracy, the rule of law, individual liberty, and tolerance. [...]
President Emmanuel Macron has made friendly overtures to France’s Muslims, and during his campaign last year he acknowledged that terrible crimes were committed by the French in Algeria. On November 1 anti-terrorism legislation came into force that transferred some of the most repressive provisions of France’s state of emergency—which ended on the same day—into ordinary law. Prefects will continue to be allowed to restrict the movement of terror suspects and shut down places of worship without a court order, even if raids on people’s homes—a particularly controversial feature of the state of emergency—are now possible only with the permission of a judge. To be Muslim will be to remain under suspicion, to be belittled, profiled, and worse. As in Britain, the short-term imperative of keeping people safe is proving hard to reconcile with the ideal of building a harmonious society.
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