Amara and the tens of thousands of Muslim women who support her loathe the fundamentalist vision of a "fascist-like society that has nothing to do with democracy"-and unlike many "Clash of Civilizations" blowhards, she and her friends fight against it on the ground, every day. Some of their fights are small everyday acts of defiance: "Make-up has become war paint, a sign of resistance." But many are larger: they reject the head scarf as "nothing more than a means of oppression emanating from a patriarchal society." Travel on the tube as it leaves the Muslim East End, and you will see girls peeling off their hijabs and applying makeup with heart-pounding pleasure.
Here is an authentic Islamic Reformation on the streets of Europe. Here is the development of a strain of Islam fiercely committed to democratic values. Yet those who suggest that the birth of every new European Muslim is a problem-another tick from the time-bomb-treat Amara as akin to Osama. This mind-set is (at best) a distraction from the real fight: across the continent, groups of Muslim women are rebelling in the same way against the literalist, quasi-fascist interpretation of the Koran popularized by the mullahs. Tired of being its first victims, they are creating their own liberal lived Islams as an alternative. And if this rebellion is completed, European jihadism will be left literally unable to reproduce itself.
Johann Hari
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