Democratic Muslims: Denmark’s Naser Khader and his band

National Review, May 22, 2006

The restaurant, unpretentious and vaguely chic, and the weather, cold and rainy, were as they should have been in northerly, elegant Copenhagen. The watchful plainclothes policemen were not. These are strange, unsettling times in Denmark: quiet, orderly, peaceful, nothing-happens-here Denmark; hated, reviled, infidel, embassies-in-flames Denmark. I was having lunch with Naser Khader, a Syria-born member of the Danish parliament for the Social Liberals (the party of Denmark’s metropolitan elite), a brave, engaging man who has discovered that, in today’s Denmark, for a Muslim to speak his mind about Islamic extremism means immense popularity — he’s probably the country’s most acclaimed politician — and a life under police protection.

When we met he was emerging from the brief period of seclusion that followed the release of footage shot for French TV in which Ahmed Akkari, one of Denmark’s militant imams (the very notion of militant imams in Denmark — Denmark — would have been ludicrous a decade or so ago), appeared to suggest that if Khader became a minister in the Danish government he should be blown up. It was, Akkari claimed later, a joke. Ha ha ha.

We live in a venomous, inflamed, and dangerous age, an era of barbarian zealotry and brutal piety in which twelve cartoons can trigger deaths by the score, and a twelve-minute movie can lead to ritual slaughter on the streets of Amsterdam. Under the circumstances, it’s not so shocking that Akkari said what he did. It was surprising that his words were caught on tape. A more experienced provocateur — Akkari is only in his 20s — might have been more discreet. Perhaps the corpses, boycotts, and blazing embassies had gone to his head: After all, he’s a big man now, one of the bright sparks who compiled and circulated the incendiary dossier designed to convince the Islamic world that there was indeed something rotten in the state of Denmark. As propaganda goes, that dossier, a ragbag of resentment, bombast, press clippings, and cartoons (including three truly grotesque — and genuinely blasphemous — images of conveniently mysterious provenance), was a poor, crude thing, but in our poisoned, poisonous world, it was enough to do the trick.

And a trick, a contrivance, a device to manufacture hysteria was what it was all about, something lost on those Western statesmen — if we can call them that — who were so quick to distance themselves from those pesky, tactless Danes. It was an act of abandonment that rankled just about everyone I spoke to in Denmark, a nation with troops in both Iraq and Afghanistan. Bill Clinton may be one of Khader’s “heroes” (as I said, Naser Khader’s party is the party of the metropolitan elite), but when it came to the cartoons, well, the Man from Hope “didn’t know what he was talking about.” And George W. Bush had been no better. To Khader, the U.S. president was “too much of a Muslim,” more interested in defending religion than freedom of speech, a thought-provoking, if harsh, point of view.

As for Khader, the cartoons hadn’t bothered him too much (“if you don’t like them, don’t buy the newspaper”). There had been “such cartoons before,” and there hadn’t been any trouble. The real significance of Jyllands-Posten’s impious portfolio was that it had appeared “at the right time, and in the right place” to be exploited by people who wanted to foment “confrontation,” which could be milked for “money and support.”

To grasp exactly why Khader thinks that “money and support” might be required, and by whom, is to glimpse a far darker future than conventional pessismism about Europe would have it. Given profound cultural differences, made even more difficult by continued mass immigration, integrating the continent’s new Muslim minorities was never going to be easy, but as Khader sees it there are now those with a vested interest in making matters worse. He’s not a believer in the much-advertised clash of civilizations, an idea with something of a bleak, tectonic inevitability to it, but in a different sort of conflict altogether: something more controlled, planned, and directed.

It’s a conflict being promoted, Khader believes, by Islamists (“well organized,” he argues, and established worldwide) set on “controlling Muslim society in the West.” After that, the next objective will be to establish regimes more to their liking in the Muslim heartland. And then? “A global jihad. That’s why we have to stop them now.”

Khader has founded “The Democratic Muslims” to help do just that. It’s typical Khader, high-minded, well-intentioned, a little grandiose, and put together with an eye for media appeal. A true champion of Enlightenment values, Khader is somewhat uneasy about having to define people by reference to their religion (his own religious beliefs, such as they are, seem to be more a matter of heritage than anything else), but he regards the formation of this group as a necessary corrective to the idea put about by Islamists that they alone represent the true voice of Denmark’s Muslims. As Khader explains, the media will pay more attention to an organization than to any one individual (“they won’t be able to say that I’m just speaking for myself”). Hitherto the most visible organized Muslims in the country have been the Islamists. Now there will be an alternative.

What’s more, he notes, with perhaps a touch of his showman’s hyperbole, “For the first time Danes can see that a Muslim is not a monster . . . and for the first time they can see Muslims saying that they are first Danes and democrats, and then Muslims.” And, just for an instant, chatting to a civilized charmer over a civilized frokost in a civilized restaurant in a civilized city, it all seems very plausible — but then reality, as cruel as al-Qaeda, as cold as that Danish rain, reasserts itself: For all the goodwill that has attended its launch, the Democratic Muslims have reportedly attracted under a thousand recruits so far, a tiny fraction of the approximately quarter-million Muslims now living in Denmark (roughly 5 percent of the total population). Khader himself admits that most Danish Muslims want to keep out of the debate, to be “left alone.”

That’s believable. But while apathy, as an expression of people’s interest in just getting on with their lives free from politics, can sometimes be encouraging, recent polling data are not. A March survey prepared by the Danish polling company Catinét purported to show that 11 percent of Denmark’s Muslims “fully understood” those who thought that a handful of mildly satirical cartoons entitled them to trash an embassy or two. Two-thirds of those surveyed replied that Denmark’s prime minister should apologize for those naughty drawings (a view also shared by some 20 percent of ethnic Danes, according to other polls). That response suggests that acceptance of the right of free expression has a way to go among many in the country’s Muslim community.

That said, for all the difficulties there are some grounds for thinking that this small Scandinavian nation may be on the right track. The rise of the populist People’s Party over the last ten years may have added to the sense of isolation felt by many Danish Muslims, but it has also led Denmark’s center-right government to introduce some of the toughest immigration legislation in the EU: The result has been a sharp fall in the number of immigrants coming into the country, an essential precondition for the successful integration of those who are already there.

If diagnosing a problem is the first stage in its solution, then the cartoon crisis ought to have given Denmark a brutal lesson in the exact nature of the challenge it faces. The Islamist bombings in Madrid and London could — just — be put down to alienation, anomie, and chaotic religious rage, but the cartoon wars have, like the murder of Theo van Gogh or the persecution of Salman Rushdie, signaled the existence of a profoundly disturbing and ideologically driven assault on Europe’s Enlightenment legacy.

Even so, Khader is not convinced that the message has gotten through. Akkari’s “joke,” he reckons, was nothing of the sort, but he doesn’t expect any prosecutions to follow (and so far they haven’t). When it comes to confronting the Islamist threat, Denmark is still, he complains, “very soft.” The authorities are “waiting for victims” — Khader pauses as he says that, and the word “victims” hangs heavily in the air — “before they do anything.” His wife, lively, attractive, and gracious, is with us at the table — I can only imagine what is going through her mind. The problem, he continues, is “naïveté” (tellingly, this most Danish of new Danes pronounces that French noun in a distinctly Danish manner). Danes simply “cannot imagine what kind of enemy we have to deal with.”

Outside it’s still gray, still overcast, but somehow it’s no longer quite Denmark.