Muslims in Europe are less happy, more likely to support their government, and more likely to have significant relations with people of other faiths—than their non-Muslim countrymen and –women.

This according to a new study released by Gallup, drawing on research previously done during their global survey of Muslims.

What’s really interesting to me, navel-gazing American that I am, is that when respondents from the United States and Canada were included for comparison, North Americans came off as far more likely than their European counterparts to agree that they’ve learned something from people of another faith in the last year.

That part made me proud, I must say. Over the 20-plus years I’ve been watching Europe, this may be the first time I’ve seen pollsters add a challenging question (that of learning from someone in the last year) to the usual, bland, tolerance questions, which always strike me as condescending.

Even as the global credit collapse of 2008 is still undergoing investigation, with apparent trigger mechanisms (the US mortgage market, among others) separated from merely incidental developments (such as the price of wheat), one factor has repeatedly unnerved me: the sheer complexity of global finance.

I flatter myself to have a citizen’s grasp of several basic issues, from currency rates to free trade issues. But it has become clear that no citizen can possibly have an adequate grasp of the goings-on, by which I mean a grasp sufficient to inform a thinking voter’s opinions. It’s too complicated.

The fact that some of the leaders of the world’s banks hardly understand some of the issues leads Jeremy Harding of the London Review of Books to suggest that the elite financial world is behaving more and more like magic and magicians and less like the economics we learned in 101 classes and textbooks.

Contrasting the major international financiers with sharia-compliant Islamic banking, and it’s the nominally secular banks that appear cultic, and the devout banks that appear coldly rational:

Since the credit crunch not many people trust the sophisticated keepers of the modern money culture; in this sense the rise of sharia-compliant products is also a challenge to the unofficial, polytheist faith of offshore Britannia: the worship of markets in general and financial markets in particular.

One of the central differences between the Islamic and conventional approaches to finance is that our own cults – which may well see a revision before the end of this crisis – ascribe supernatural powers to money. Cult specialists are at great pains to understand and control how it works, but admit that it does so in magical ways that go beyond the effects of human commerce (for the markets, too, have magical attributes, including innate goodness). Whatever we want from money, we suspect, as devotees, that in the end it will always behave as it sees fit.

What’s going on here is a story of performance: Sharia-compliant banks (which vary widely and use differing notions of interest, usury and capital) have plain outperformed conventional banks over the last year. And in a disenchanted world, that's the only banking that matters. But if we are no longer disenchanted – if there's a new mystery cult in charge, it should be less than responsive to a competing ideology.

As someone who has no intention of joining a Muslim bank, I nevertheless see incredible stories—far beyond the drudgery of numbers—in play here. I’m not sure what it all means, and I cannot evaluate Harding’s treatment of HSBC Amanah and others, but his suggestion that cult-like superstition is in operation in the global centers of commerce rings plausible.

It’s the twentieth anniversary of the Salman Rushdie affair, which though formally over, is still alive, both for the condemned man himself, and for the European intellectual culture he represents.

Thierry Chervel of signandsight.com has written a retrospective in a German newspaper, now available in English.

The main problem, says Chervel, is that

In the confrontation with Islamism, the Left has abandoned its principles. In the past it stood for cutting the ties to convention and tradition, but in the case of Islam it reinstates them in the name of multiculturalism. It is proud to have fought for women's rights, but in Islam it tolerates head scarves, arranged marriages, and wife-beating. It once stood for equal rights, now it preaches a right to difference – and thus different rights. It proclaims freedom of speech, but when it comes to Islam it coughs in embarrassment. It once supported gay rights, but now keeps silent about Islam's taboo on homosexuality.

Set aside, for a moment, the highly debatable notion that free speech and equal rights are the exclusive domain of the Left (big L, which Chervel means those of the 1968 generation). What he's saying is significant: that the West no longer stands for anything, human rights included, aside from multiculturalism.

To review, for those too young to remember 1989:

Bombay-born Salman Rushdie, Booker Prize-winning author of Midnight’s Children, published a novel called The Satanic Verses, which he knew would be considered offensive against Islam.

The Ayatollah Khomeini, spiritual leader of the Iranian Revolution (the same revolution depicted in the movie Persepolis), issued a fatwa, a judgment, against Rushdie, condemning him to death.

I inform all zealous Muslims of the world that the author of the book entitled The Satanic Verses—which has been compiled, printed, and published in opposition to Islam, the Prophet, and the Qur'an - and all those involved in its publication who were aware of its contents, are sentenced to death.

Riots and book burnings ensued, not only in Iran, but in liberal Europe as well—largely by angered Muslim residents of those countries.

The secular West may have won the struggle, Chervel argues, but only in the short run. Yes, Rushdie survived. Yes, his book became a bestseller and is today widely available. And yes, the fatwa was put in the back shed after Khomeini’s death.

But, Chervel continues, today the West’s attitude toward Islam is marked by a multiculturalist spirit of taboo. That is, in the name of respect we submit to censorship—in advance of any real controversy.

“We” (left-leaning, secular cosmopolitan types) need only look at our great success in taming Christianity to realize the importance of pushing the envelope with Islam:

Playing with the symbols, discourse and constraints of Christianity has long been taken for granted in Western culture. But playing with the symbols of Islam has been out of bounds since the fatwa, ostensibly out of "respect."

What do you think?

It seems to me that Chervel has drawn a bizarre conclusion from the Rushdie affair: that blasphemy is a duty of enlightenment, and that self-restriction out of respect necessarily constitutes submission. In fact, we restrain ourselves all the time, even when we’re entirely among those who share our culture.

It is a rhetorical trick to suggest there is no alternative between, on the one hand, embracing religion-cloaked anti-female violence, and on the other, celebrating the humiliation of that same religion. It's a false choice Chervel--and others like him--present to us.

There is a muscular civility, modeled for us by Martin Luther King and his followers, that can combine unwavering and principled judgement with kindness.

Blasphemy may be a noble calling to the transatlantic cultural élites, but it is not at all clear to me that the blasphemous life is the liberated life. In fact, to develop an idea I first heard from Slavoj Žižek: as with the senseless violence of countless urban riots, in which the property of friends and neighbors is destroyed, or with the pitiful tantrums of a two-year old, intentional offence, far from creating space for freedom, can actually be an expression of impotence and fear.

In the end, it seems to me, if Khomeini has won it is because he stands for something, while neither the multiculturalists, too timid to risk, and the Enlightenment vanguard, paranoid of restraint, stand for much of anything—they fail to define a world worth living for.

But: surely we don’t have to embrace death sentences for blasphemers. What is a better way?

[photo credit: sxc.hu member sumeja]

I’ve received my latest copy of Saudi Aramco World, a free bimonthly magazine on the Islamic world, published by Saudi Aramco, the Saudi oil monopoly. It’s always got a bit of a corporate-citizen feel, but it’s always enjoyably far from politics.

Last month, for instance, they published a lengthy profile of a chocolate-maker in Syria; previously a guide to the many forms of Turkish yogurt.

They also sent me a Gregorian/Islamic monthly calendar with images of fabrics from across the Muslim world.

This month gives us a photo essay of the Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem. It’s pretty. They promise us a "virtual walking tour," which is "Coming Soon."

There’s been some tumult in France lately over desecrated Muslim graves in a WWI cemetery.

In staunchly secular (“laïque”) France, these graves—maintained by the government—are one of very few public concessions to religious identity. To vandalize the headstones is to attack Muslim presence and difference.

The trouble is that the logic of French secular republican thought inevitably eliminates any religious, racial, or other “communal” identities from the discussion, leaving us with bizarre answers. So an MP and author of a newly-minted report of grave vandalism, tells Le Monde that only one out of every eight of these incidents per year is racial in character, stemming rather from “stupidity, alcohol and drugs,” and a society-wide disrespect for the dead. Ignoring racial attacks, his solution, of course, is to have a unit on death in the high schools. And so on as we talk past each other.

Since this situation isn’t going to clear up anytime soon, a more interesting question to me is: who were these soldiers? North African colonials, most likely. But who were they? This one above, from the same cemetery, simply reads “Boungab Douadi Ben Amor” (sounds like an Algerian name), “Soldier, 1st RT,” and “Died for France, the 25th May 1915”. If we had access to all the records, we could find out lots, I suppose.

[photo credit: flickr user Laurent LAMACZ]