Politically incorrect journeys (6): Sweden
This is a travel blog about Malmö,
Scandinavia and the failure of multiracialism throughout northern Europe.
I didn’t
venture out of Malmö much, but one day I had a look at the old university town
of Lund, just down the line. Lund teems with visitors all year, but I thought
Malmö was equally beautiful, and, for various reasons, including not being
conspicuously full of students, more interesting. The main sight in Lund is the
twin-towered Romanesque cathedral, once the mother church of all Scandinavia,
later of all Denmark, and after 1658 of southern Sweden. One of the few major
buildings in Skåne to have a stone fabric, its flamboyantly Italianate
appearance looked rather out-of-place in its austere Nordic setting.
Sweden too underwent the Reformation, and this creation of Catholicism is now Lutheran, under the Svenska kyrkan (Church of Sweden). Now Svenska kyrkan is an organization that knows which side its bread is buttered on. While the Church of England quietly sits on its multibillion pound landbank and investment empire and hopes nobody notices how rich it is, Svenska kyrkan is a brand with a logo, and you see both displayed prominently on its real estate, on big, colourful placards, along with its flag. If you didn’t know better, you would think Svenska kyrkan was a property developer. But when it comes to getting bums on pews, it is doing no better than the CofE. That very week, it was reported that 40,000 people had left Svenska kyrkan in the previous two months. This was partly connected with a church-related tax that Swedes have to pay, but it was part of a longer-term decline in faith. “Good heavens, no, I am not religious,” a warden in one of Malmö’s churches had assured me the previous year. “I think most people just come here for the company.” Support for gay marriage had cost them another swathe of worshippers, the papers said.
One religion, though, is doing okay in Sweden. In Malmö, I visited a mosque. Malmö has a quite well-known main mosque with a madrassa on the edge of town, a surprisingly shoddy-looking, domed white compound with a crude minaret that from a distance looked uncomfortably like a fairground space rocket. But I wanted something local. The Iranians at my breakfast local told me there was one twenty minutes’ walk away. “Not easy to find, mind.”
They weren’t kidding. Planning regulations are strict in Malmö, and mosques may not stick out architecturally in downtown areas. I eventually located it tucked away on the third floor of a large office block. It had no frontage whatsoever. The building was, of all things, a converted brewery. You opened a metal door to an old workshop where presumably fermentation tanks or filtration gear had been, and there it was, a great carpeted space decorated with wall plaques of Koranic scripture, suffused with that lulling tranquility you always find in mosques. A single bored-looking worshipper stared at a mobile phone in the corner, by a kind of misaligned booth half sticking of the wall—it was the bit that faced Mecca.
I learnt from him, a Bosnian, and a mosque warden, a Turk, that the mosque was a community-financed endeavour and that there were others dotted around town, equally low-profile.
“The building doesn’t matter anyway,” the Bosnian said. “Any will do, even if its original purpose flies in the face of religion.”
They estimated that only about a quarter of the Muslims in Malmö are actually practicing, but congregations were growing slowly and they had had a few Swedish converts—though less than a dozen, they reckoned.
I wondered, what on earth could induce a Scandinavian, born into one of these practical, permissive and equality-obsessed societies, to embrace Islam? A few weeks after this visit, the daily Aftenposten of Norway carried a long and insightful interview with one Norwegian who did. I’ve lost the original article, so I will call her Maria and scrape up as much as I can from notes and memory.
Maria originally became a Muslim, she said, to give “spiritual meaning” to her life, and later married an Iraqi imam. Originally, she wore the niqab, with eye-slits only, because “converts have to do more than other Muslims to prove that they are good Muslims.” Converts did not have the same perspective as Muslims born into Muslim families, where Islamic cultural traditions are part of their upbringing and identity. They lacked this background of moderated religiosity and often got their training from the Internet, where often the most rigid interpretations are emphasized. “They have a first phase where they become euphoric and more intense in their belief,” Maria said. “This can last several months or even years.” Asked about the growth in niqab use in Norway, she said: “At the moment an orthodox, conservative wind is blowing. There is a lot of pressure on Muslims and with the media chorus about Islamic extremism … young girls want to prove that they are not afraid. I respect those that do it. It’s a question of belief. Islam is about offering up yourself.”
But Maria eventually divorced the imam and gave up the niqab: “Now I think that the niqab, which covers the face, is backward and unnatural in Norway. It creates differences between us and others, and religious piety can lead to women restricting themselves as women, restricting their participation in society. The niqab reduces women to the minimum.”
Though I am not religious, I have always liked mosques. I like walking around unshod in their sanctified spaces, among the pillars and arches contrived to evoke the Arab origins, and watching the quiet praying and bowing. Ritual devotions are now completely alien to mainstream western society. In a mosque, I feel a mix of curiosity and respect. I cannot help viewing liturgical and political Islam as completely different things, even though, of course, they are not.
When you attend a service in European mosque, a couple of things soon dawn on you. For the average Muslim abroad, they are reminders of home as much as places of worship. And they are the cornerstones of Muslim communities in every sense, not just religious. As was the case here, their construction is often financed partly by community contribution, which gives everybody a stake in them and a material reason to attend. They act as a rallying-point and shield for their communities, and as a source of moral guidance and general information—a mixture of church, castle and parish council. They help keep birth, marriage and death rituals, and daily life generally, on the Islamic straight and narrow. They are, in short, the perfect tool for building and consolidating self-sustaining, completely unintegrated parallel communities for Muslims in any environment.
In Sweden, Muslims also have predictable voting habits. It is estimated that 75% of them vote for the Social Democrats, the architects of multiracial Sweden but now in long-term decline—and in urgent need of a new electoral base.
I went back out of the metal door and wandered back down the old factory stairway. The rest of the brewery hulk seemed to be given over to offices of the immigrant support organizations that proliferate in Malmö. They had names like Alhambra Union of Kurdish Students, the African-Swedish Forum for Justice, the Iranian-Swedish Society, the Iranian-Swedish Solidarity Society (I smelt a splinter group), and the Bosnian-Swedish Friendship Association. Mostly they did not seem to amount to much more than a guy with a computer, file set and half-finished box of halal Chicken McNuggets. Maybe it was the lunch-hour effect, but a lot of the offices seemed empty that day.
Asian and African Muslims in Malmö often wore religious garb at work. Another place I had breakfast at was run by a family of Afghans. The teenage daughter served the customers in hijab (fully robed but with the face fully visible). The first morning I ate there, I listened to her talking with her dad in the kitchen in whichever Afghan language they used, and asked her how long she had been in Sweden.
“I was born here,” she replied, curtly, in native Swedish.
As I bit my tongue, a Swede came in and ordered his breakfast—in English. Even though she took his order in Swedish, and did not actually seem to know English, he bashed away in English: “Yes, with toast please.” Eventually, I interrupted, and joked, in Swedish,
“Actually, I’m the English speaker here.”
“Ah!” he replied. “You guys lost, you know!”
“What?”
“Two nil, at home to Chile last night. Haha!”
We laughed and the girl returned to the kitchen. Trivial indeed, but revealing. I had seen this happen before. Despite four decades of indoctrination, and absorption of hundreds of thousands of refugees, the idea that only ethnic Swedes can or should speak Swedish is still widespread. For some Swedes, brown-skinned immigrants provide the dash of exoticism they otherwise seek in overseas holidays. They are welcomed, but they are not seen as true fellow citizens.
Sweden too underwent the Reformation, and this creation of Catholicism is now Lutheran, under the Svenska kyrkan (Church of Sweden). Now Svenska kyrkan is an organization that knows which side its bread is buttered on. While the Church of England quietly sits on its multibillion pound landbank and investment empire and hopes nobody notices how rich it is, Svenska kyrkan is a brand with a logo, and you see both displayed prominently on its real estate, on big, colourful placards, along with its flag. If you didn’t know better, you would think Svenska kyrkan was a property developer. But when it comes to getting bums on pews, it is doing no better than the CofE. That very week, it was reported that 40,000 people had left Svenska kyrkan in the previous two months. This was partly connected with a church-related tax that Swedes have to pay, but it was part of a longer-term decline in faith. “Good heavens, no, I am not religious,” a warden in one of Malmö’s churches had assured me the previous year. “I think most people just come here for the company.” Support for gay marriage had cost them another swathe of worshippers, the papers said.
One religion, though, is doing okay in Sweden. In Malmö, I visited a mosque. Malmö has a quite well-known main mosque with a madrassa on the edge of town, a surprisingly shoddy-looking, domed white compound with a crude minaret that from a distance looked uncomfortably like a fairground space rocket. But I wanted something local. The Iranians at my breakfast local told me there was one twenty minutes’ walk away. “Not easy to find, mind.”
They weren’t kidding. Planning regulations are strict in Malmö, and mosques may not stick out architecturally in downtown areas. I eventually located it tucked away on the third floor of a large office block. It had no frontage whatsoever. The building was, of all things, a converted brewery. You opened a metal door to an old workshop where presumably fermentation tanks or filtration gear had been, and there it was, a great carpeted space decorated with wall plaques of Koranic scripture, suffused with that lulling tranquility you always find in mosques. A single bored-looking worshipper stared at a mobile phone in the corner, by a kind of misaligned booth half sticking of the wall—it was the bit that faced Mecca.
I learnt from him, a Bosnian, and a mosque warden, a Turk, that the mosque was a community-financed endeavour and that there were others dotted around town, equally low-profile.
“The building doesn’t matter anyway,” the Bosnian said. “Any will do, even if its original purpose flies in the face of religion.”
They estimated that only about a quarter of the Muslims in Malmö are actually practicing, but congregations were growing slowly and they had had a few Swedish converts—though less than a dozen, they reckoned.
I wondered, what on earth could induce a Scandinavian, born into one of these practical, permissive and equality-obsessed societies, to embrace Islam? A few weeks after this visit, the daily Aftenposten of Norway carried a long and insightful interview with one Norwegian who did. I’ve lost the original article, so I will call her Maria and scrape up as much as I can from notes and memory.
Maria originally became a Muslim, she said, to give “spiritual meaning” to her life, and later married an Iraqi imam. Originally, she wore the niqab, with eye-slits only, because “converts have to do more than other Muslims to prove that they are good Muslims.” Converts did not have the same perspective as Muslims born into Muslim families, where Islamic cultural traditions are part of their upbringing and identity. They lacked this background of moderated religiosity and often got their training from the Internet, where often the most rigid interpretations are emphasized. “They have a first phase where they become euphoric and more intense in their belief,” Maria said. “This can last several months or even years.” Asked about the growth in niqab use in Norway, she said: “At the moment an orthodox, conservative wind is blowing. There is a lot of pressure on Muslims and with the media chorus about Islamic extremism … young girls want to prove that they are not afraid. I respect those that do it. It’s a question of belief. Islam is about offering up yourself.”
But Maria eventually divorced the imam and gave up the niqab: “Now I think that the niqab, which covers the face, is backward and unnatural in Norway. It creates differences between us and others, and religious piety can lead to women restricting themselves as women, restricting their participation in society. The niqab reduces women to the minimum.”
***
Though I am not religious, I have always liked mosques. I like walking around unshod in their sanctified spaces, among the pillars and arches contrived to evoke the Arab origins, and watching the quiet praying and bowing. Ritual devotions are now completely alien to mainstream western society. In a mosque, I feel a mix of curiosity and respect. I cannot help viewing liturgical and political Islam as completely different things, even though, of course, they are not.
When you attend a service in European mosque, a couple of things soon dawn on you. For the average Muslim abroad, they are reminders of home as much as places of worship. And they are the cornerstones of Muslim communities in every sense, not just religious. As was the case here, their construction is often financed partly by community contribution, which gives everybody a stake in them and a material reason to attend. They act as a rallying-point and shield for their communities, and as a source of moral guidance and general information—a mixture of church, castle and parish council. They help keep birth, marriage and death rituals, and daily life generally, on the Islamic straight and narrow. They are, in short, the perfect tool for building and consolidating self-sustaining, completely unintegrated parallel communities for Muslims in any environment.
In Sweden, Muslims also have predictable voting habits. It is estimated that 75% of them vote for the Social Democrats, the architects of multiracial Sweden but now in long-term decline—and in urgent need of a new electoral base.
I went back out of the metal door and wandered back down the old factory stairway. The rest of the brewery hulk seemed to be given over to offices of the immigrant support organizations that proliferate in Malmö. They had names like Alhambra Union of Kurdish Students, the African-Swedish Forum for Justice, the Iranian-Swedish Society, the Iranian-Swedish Solidarity Society (I smelt a splinter group), and the Bosnian-Swedish Friendship Association. Mostly they did not seem to amount to much more than a guy with a computer, file set and half-finished box of halal Chicken McNuggets. Maybe it was the lunch-hour effect, but a lot of the offices seemed empty that day.
Asian and African Muslims in Malmö often wore religious garb at work. Another place I had breakfast at was run by a family of Afghans. The teenage daughter served the customers in hijab (fully robed but with the face fully visible). The first morning I ate there, I listened to her talking with her dad in the kitchen in whichever Afghan language they used, and asked her how long she had been in Sweden.
“I was born here,” she replied, curtly, in native Swedish.
As I bit my tongue, a Swede came in and ordered his breakfast—in English. Even though she took his order in Swedish, and did not actually seem to know English, he bashed away in English: “Yes, with toast please.” Eventually, I interrupted, and joked, in Swedish,
“Actually, I’m the English speaker here.”
“Ah!” he replied. “You guys lost, you know!”
“What?”
“Two nil, at home to Chile last night. Haha!”
We laughed and the girl returned to the kitchen. Trivial indeed, but revealing. I had seen this happen before. Despite four decades of indoctrination, and absorption of hundreds of thousands of refugees, the idea that only ethnic Swedes can or should speak Swedish is still widespread. For some Swedes, brown-skinned immigrants provide the dash of exoticism they otherwise seek in overseas holidays. They are welcomed, but they are not seen as true fellow citizens.
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