UmeÃ¥, 200 kilometers north of Stockholm. On arrival, furious rain, low and gray sky, bare trees with desperate branches, so little light. Spring in Sweden is a subject of humor: it starts late, ignites the country for a while, then quickly dies down. On the town square, near the hotel, a bus stop. Two veiled, laughing women are waiting. We are surprised when we come from elsewhere at the number of veiled women, in Sweden, and even in places of “…post office” – airport, administrations, counters. The image that we could retain is that of “integration” successful, of a utopia of transfaith asylum.
Sweden, “world humanitarian power”, country of frank welcome, “Japan” of Europe, we repeat. However, the model is experiencing a deep crisis. The SD party, nationalist and anti-immigration, now oversees political life, and the subjects of “Islamism immigration” are discussed without taboo. On the question of its universalist ambitions, Sweden is revising its position: reduction, strict supervision, legislation.
The two young girls in hijabs are joined by others. A brief sun rises, attempts an appearance, then dilutes as if it had been knocked down. At the sight of the bus stop, the columnist wonders, as he always does: why do “Muslim” immigrants in the West, whether they come from Jordan, Syria, Algeria, Sudan or Egypt, switch at the first generation born and even more so in the second, towards religious identity as self-expression… In certain European countries, the retreat of the children of exiles towards “the so-called confessional origins” is observed: we capsize towards the claimed otherness and recluse, we say, we claim ourselves, we want to be “Muslim”.
Paradox
Strange failure of the nationalisms of the ex-colonized countries or of the “South” from which the parents left: those who flee them no longer even claim it as a “national origin”, but claim a Muslim religious affiliation, of an “Umma”. Often, the alternative to not becoming “Swedish” or “French” is to become Muslim again, not to become Iraqi, Algerian or Egyptian again. But still…?
The whole paradox arises when we open up to a few “immigrants” of the first generation, already Swedish (or otherwise) on paper or at heart. According to some, racism targets Muslims and their children, and they are today tempted not by integration, but through separation and religious conversion which expresses it in the fracas We almost come to excuse Islamization on the pretext of rejection by the host country. From then on, the veil of young girls, even though born after the exile of their parents, and the supposed Islamophobia, haunt people’s lips.
However, it is not, strangely, Islamization as a false solution to exclusion that is thought of and dismissed, but presumed or real “racism”. Islamization almost becomes a “normal”, admissible, “cultural” reaction. We are silently surprised. Is it not because of the Islamists, their preachers and their killers, the catastrophe inflicted on the countries of origin, Islamism as an ideology, that the parents fled their native land? Why then excuse Islamism almost as a justified opposition in the country which could be ruined in a few years?
Unlike other migrations to Europe who came to seek rights and peace, it is no longer performance, education, success and integration (despite rejections) which are, sometimes, targeted. Rather, it is separation, legitimized by ostracism. Why is Islamism in the West perceived as a fault of Westerners towards the generations of children of emigrants, and not as a catastrophe which overtakes the generations of exile in the flesh of their children? Why does what we fled in the native country find ourselves excused in the country of arrival, in the name of a theory of disappointment?
Migratory utopias
Sweden is today returning to its migratory utopias. His model illustrates naive universalism, its limits, its blind spots and its noble and disastrous ideals at the same time. Humanitarian utopianism has contributed to creating an extreme right that has become sovereign and an Islamism that is now expanding. Those who seek in the veil an expression of resistance, identity or belonging can do so, but those who take advantage of it, in their transnational Islamist ambition, are never far away.
How can we preserve freedoms without at the same time fostering abdications? It is this ridge path that we can sense in the looks, in the hesitation of the responses, in this precaution which takes the place of language in Sweden. In Umeå, the few veiled young girls laughed, free. You have to live in free countries to believe that giving up this freedom is a choice and an identity.
