Graphic by Megan Eloise/ The Gazelle

Many European Muslims will by now have sore throats from repeating the time-honored slogan “Islam means peace.” Apart from the fact that the etymological connection between Islam and Salam is rather weak — and in my opinion a politically motivated liberty taken by an amateur etymologist with a weak grasp on Semitic linguistics — we, European Muslims, have grown tired of the societal expectation for us to react, let alone apologize, for the actions of all other people who happen to consider themselves to be Muslim. I must stress that the “we” here is not my ridiculously ambitious attempt to find a lowest common denominator by which to identify myself with the remaining 1.6 billion Muslims in the world, but rather an internalisation of the pejorative “you” with which European Muslims have been addressed in almost every politically salient discussion to date.

The pejorative “you” establishes a discourse which collapses all nuances of difference between Muslim schools of thought and renders the individuality of the Muslim impossible. All people of the culturally Islamic world, including a handful of atheists and agnostics from a range of socioeconomic and national contexts are generalised into a single category, standing on trial for what all other Muslims have done. It is because of this reality that the Muslims of Europe have, since the aftermath of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, felt an urgent need to take a firm political stance on issues concerning Islam. The irony, of course, is that despite the suspicions of an appallingly large portion of the public, the average European Muslim does not necessarily know much more about these issues than their non-Muslim compatriots.

The racism behind the assumption that Muslims would have insider knowledge about political events in the Muslim world by virtue of their self-proclaimed, and often attributed, religion should be self-evident. Europe’s Muslim community is not, as claimed by alarmist right wing sources, a threatening network of sleeper cells whose goal is to impose Shari’a law upon Europeans once they have achieved demographic supremacy. In reality, European Muslims are often socially disadvantaged, facing ethnic discrimination on a quotidian basis, and are, by and large, divorced from significant political and economic power.

Although few European Muslims will be familiar with the specifics of the events which they are expected to dissociate themselves from and apologise for, they nevertheless do so, because what happens abroad often has consequences for them at home due to their vulnerable social position. For instance, when Switzerland banned the construction of minarets in 2009, advocates of the referendum justified the decision by remarking that churches were banned in Saudi Arabia. Of course the reference to places as remote as Saudi Arabia relies on the popularised trope that Muslims are foreigners and don’t belong in Europe; note the similarity to pre-existing anti-Semitic and anti-Roma tropes.

Muslims feel the urge to apologise, because regardless of our level of integration, we will always be regarded, not as compatriots, but as outsiders connected to the sensationalised menace of Islam. Europeans must realise that the stable notions of European identity found in textbook histories do not correspond to the contemporary reality. The Muslim presence in European metropoles is not one which can easily be overlooked, nor is it temporary. The absence of Muslims in the standard accounts of national identity, or their inclusion only as an incidental anomaly or inconvenience, are, I suspect, a means to undermine their agency in national politics. We must come to terms with the reality that this generation of Europeans is unmistakably more diverse than any generation which preceded it. Moreover, it must be understood that Muslims are just as much the heirs of European history as our white counterparts since we have become forcibly associated with Europe through her global imperialist and capitalist venture of expansion. I fear that it is this treatment as Europe's unacknowledged bastard children, who because of their irremediable foreignness must justify themselves for events in remote places, that makes Muslims feel increasingly alienated.