By Christine Donjean

International current affairs issues often make a point of mentioning religious or community tensions. They spark off many questions in schools, reveal fears and provoke withdrawals and retreats based on identity or on security issues. How to protect the values of tolerance and respect and protect young people from stereotypes and prejudices caused by a lack of knowledge of the other and the ignorance of cultures? That is the objective of this collective work (1), which delivers an instructive panorama of the concepts linked to migrations and their cultural clashes.

‘How do the youth perceive immigration and cultural diversity, particularly concerning Islam and Muslims?’ It is on the basis of this question that Malika Madi and Hassan Bousetta carried out an enquiry in 36 teaching institutions in the French Speaking Community of Belgium. The former is a novelist, author of A Night of Ink for Farah (Nuit d’encre pour Farah) and The Silences of Medea (Les silences de Médéa), whilst the latter is a sociologist and FNRS researcher at the University of Liège. Both of them themselves come from a background of immigration. The work is above all addressed to young people who are asking themselves questions about the relationships between Islam, Muslims and their place in Belgian society.

The authors have attempted to review the numerous prejudices held against other cultures and in particular Islam.

Being of foreign origin is no protection against racist prejudice

Cultural diversity is one of the foundations of our contemporary societies. It has become rare in our world to still find mono-cultural societies. In a multicultural society, it is necessary to live together: to communicate and share on an equal footing. It is in this issue, quite obviously, that all the difficulties are to be found. Any society based on the ghetto cannot be a democratic multicultural society.

An individual can exist beyond his/her own culture and can become enriched by that of others. Nonetheless, in cultural diversity, living together often goes hand in hand with a lack of understanding, rejection and stereotypes due to a misreading of cultures. Or a clash of civilisations, of concepts which are a priori antinomical.

This misunderstanding leads to a fear of the other, of ‘the foreigner’. Pushed to their extremes, this misunderstanding and rejection take the form of xenophobia. Without a democratic handling of this situation, and a very profound consideration of the phenomenon if inter-culturalism, individuals and societies risk, by withdrawing into themselves, adopting racist behaviour and policies.

A number of young people consider that the other is first of all a human being, with qualities and faults. Some consider that too much importance is given to differences and that it is better to concentrate above all on what unites us. It is fear itself that needs to be defeated.

(1). Je ne suis pas raciste, mais…By Malika Madi and Hassan Bousetta, in collaboration with Anne Morelli, Editions Luc Pire, 2008.