Muslims in European cities ---- Europe’s cities are finding ways of managing religious difference—but national governments must set the rules

IN THEIR latest assessment of how the world will change between now and 2025, America’s intelligence agencies had only one big point to make about Europe: the concentration of Muslims in some cities could lead to “tense and unstable situations”, especially if economies lagged. It was also likely that European adherents of Islam would “value separation in areas with Muslim-specific cultural and religious practices”.

As our report this week on Islam in urban politics suggests , this picture of angry, self-isolated communities—living in slums where violence and terrorism fester—may well be too bleak. The historic cities of Europe, which are far older than most nation states, retain a remarkable ability to absorb newcomers and accommodate many different kinds of social reality. The practical problems posed by co-existence between faiths and cultures—from swimming-pool regulations to the slaughter of animals to headgear in municipal premises—can often be handled in practical ways through a healthy process of local bargaining. Issues like land use, burial, hygiene, food safety and noise simply have to be managed locally for cities to function at all. From the school canteens of Lyon to the cemeteries of Leicester, there is a perpetual and often successful search for new ways of managing difference.

That’s the goodish news. But in matters of co-existence between religions and cultures, not all politics is local. At a minimum, there have to be national arrangements—in the form of laws, ombudsmen and constitutional safeguards—to make sure that local bargaining doesn’t produce outrageous results. The more pressure there is at local level to accommodate particular cultural practices, the greater the need for countervailing pressure, and perpetual vigilance, on the part of national (and sometimes supranational) bodies. The European Court of Human Rights has a role to play in curbing the sort of religious nativism that crimps individual liberties; it recently vindicated a French Muslim journalist who had criticised the rector of Lyon’s main mosque. But absent a federal Europe with an American-style constitution, most of the vigilance will have to be exercised by national governments.

Almost as important, there need to be nationally enforced safeguards to stop urban “no-go” areas—places that are so much dominated by a single faith that they are virtually off-limits to people of other backgrounds—from developing. When Michael Nazir-Ali, a Pakistani-born Anglican bishop, said some urban areas in Britain were becoming out of bounds for non-Muslims, he was denounced for alarmism. Perhaps it was unwise of him to blame just one religion for trying to mark out urban territory; in recent memory, one British city (Belfast) had no-go areas for people of the “wrong” Christian sect.

Moreover, urban areas dominated by one religious group in a bullying way are not merely an affront to members of other groups who might want to walk, shop or trade in that place. They are also a risk to individual members of the locally dominant group who want to exercise their rights: for example, young women who choose not to wear headscarves or enter arranged marriages. Upholding the rights of those individuals is a vital task for national governments, legislators and courts. Many European states have large bureaucracies, reinforced by a network of NGOs, whose job is to protect immigrants from oppression by the majority “white” population. These institutions should be just as concerned when the infringers of human rights are locally dominant religious establishments.