Catalonia and the problem within Islam

Since the 18th century, Islam has failed to respond to the challenge of the West. It has either taken refuge in an obscurantist regression or followed the West with nationalism or a caricature of modernity based on technology and the worship of money, like the elites of the Golf monarchies. This is how expert Jaume Flaquer explains it. Reformism within Islam, which exists, fails to achieve this.

Flaquer also reflects that Islam's main problem is the same one that contributed to its splendor in the Middle Ages: Islamic law. If then it provided stability for its economic, social, and cultural development, overcoming the arbitrariness of medieval autocracies—the caliph, the king, or the sultan were subject to them—and allowed it to create an empire thanks to its capacity for innovation and incorporation of the best of the Byzantine and Persian worlds, now it is the other way around. Sharia (Islamic law), and above all the legal codes that establish it (fiqh), are a closure: they override civil laws and condition them when regulating the lives of citizens in many countries. Historically, Muslims considered their religion to be less legalistic than Jewish and less lax than Christian, the other two monotheistic beliefs with which they share a single God. This is no longer the case.

Fundamentalism has a fair amount of propaganda, often financed by what Dolores Bramon defines as Petro-Islam. Salafism (salaf means ancestor) is a supposed return to the origins. In social and political terms, it arose as a reaction to the subjugation of Islamic countries to the West. The reformist current (islah) also emerged, especially in Egypt in the 19th century, in response to the delay in the fields of science and reason compared to the West: it advocates an openness to the legal interpretation of Sharia law, aspires to view religion from the perspective of human rights, and has a feminist current (and in some cases defends homosexuality).

Based on the lack of reliable data, the percentage of the Muslim population in Catalonia can be placed between 5% and 8%, around 500,000 people. Among them, Salafism would be around 10%. And still within Salafism, jihadism (which advocates political means and violence) is clearly a minority. This does not mean that there is no danger, as we tragically experienced on August 17, 2017. Two imams were recently expelled, one from Figueres and one from La Jonquera. There are people, especially women, who suffer oppression within that religion: for example, Hanna Serrokh, who fled her hometown of Figueres at age 14 to avoid a forced marriage. Now, at 50, she has been able to tell her story in a book. Cases like hers continue to happen.

Islam is not growing more in Catalonia than other minority religions. Among the ten most present nationalities, only two, Moroccan and Pakistani, correspond to countries where Islam is the majority. According to 2020 data, evangelicalism is the faith with the second most centers here (the first, of course, being Catholicism): it has 778. Evangelical churches have grown 131% since 2004 (there were 341). As for mosques, there are 284, a growth of 104% (139 in 2004). Evangelicals are less visible and less geographically concentrated. There are 115 Jehovah's Witnesses, 68 Buddhists, and 57 Orthodox places of worship.

Islam has no visible head and is divided into two opposing currents: the majority Sunni (more than 85%) and the minority Shia, established mainly in Iran, Iraq, and Lebanon (Hezbollah). There is also Sufism, a kind of esoteric spirituality. Shiism has a clerical structure. Sunnis, on the other hand, do not have clerics, but rather civil imams who perform the role as a job, hired by the community. To avoid the danger of radicalization in private mosques, in countries like Morocco they are public, and the imams are paid by the Ministry of Religious Affairs.

Islam remains a great unknown. It is easy to distort it and simplify its reality, as Vox and Alianza do.