Muslims and Minorities in Norway

Tonight's my last night in Norway. As I pause to reflect on the past 4 days and the many conversations I have had with activists, politicians, religious leaders, journalists, and students, I am amazed by how much I have learned. Common themes include integration, secular extremism, social welfare, racism, employment discrimination, and the vast proportion of Muslim immigrants who are uneducated and/or of refugee status. Despite instances of blatant racism, Norwegians recoil at the very word "racism" for "to be Norwegian is to be good". In many if not most ways, Norwegians are very good. I have received nothing but kindness and hospitality while here. And the Norwegian government uses its oil wealth to take care of each and every one of its citizens, guaranteeing each an upper middle class lifestyle. The 121 homeless people in all of Oslo are homeless because they refuse to take help from the system; the moment they accept conformity (i.e. fill out the necessary aid forms), they will be living comfortably - without ever having to work.

And yet, these same luxuries are what hinder progress in certain areas. For instance, new immigrants who can stay at home and receive money from the government instead of having to work for it have little or no incentive to do so. In refusing to work, they are also refusing to learn the language and customs and interact with native Norwegians on a daily basis. Integration as a whole is therefore severely hampered.

Similarly, when the Muslim community is handed money from the government, the community has little or no need to work together to fundraise.  Each mosque with its ethnically-segregated congregation can take government money and continue to isolate itself from the rest of the Norwegian Muslim community. In contrast, in the US, the plethora of fundraising dinners and other fundraising initiatives force the community to work together, looking past their ethnic differences in their quest toward a common goal.

Aside from these counterintuitive downfalls of a seemingly fabulous social welfare system, while in Norway, I came to a better understanding of Europe's secular culture. This secular culture is exemplified in Norway's secular extremism, where the very discussion of religion or anything religious causes great discomfort.  This is true despite the fact that the Norwegian constitution requires that the head of government and almost half of its Parliament members belong to the Lutheran sect of Protestant Christianity.

In the case of immigrants, especially those from Muslim countries, this requirement to keep their religious identity out of the public sphere and to air their grievances - if they must - in non-religious terms comes as a great affront to their sense of self.  It's hard to discuss the issues when they are intrinsically linked to religion, and religion is a taboo subject for public discourse.

On the flip side, when it comes to battling serious human rights violations among the Muslim community - whether it be honor killings, FGM, or forced marriages -- instances of such violations among Muslims are generalized as representative of Muslims/Islam generally. So the selective discussion of religion, where it is used to conflate the actions of specific individuals with the actions of an entire community, but where religion is generally not an acceptable topic of discussion, leads to gross media distortions and huge gaps in public knowledge of Islam.