Muslim Women and Youth in the West: Background Paper

Chapter IV: The Question of Security

During the past 25 years, Muslims in the West—and young Muslims in particular— have been carefully scrutinized in matters of domestic and transnational security. In Europe, the tendency to view Muslim populations through the lens of security can be traced to the outbreaks of urban unrest by some first–generation Muslim immigrants in several cities in Britain and France in the early 1980s. These riots were a factor in the action by a number of European countries to establish an institutional framework to address issues of integration.

Urban riots in the Lyon region during the summer of 1981 impelled the creation of the French Inter–ministerial Commission on the Social Development of Neighborhoods and the Commission of Mayors on Security. The Neighborhoods Commission recommended more long–term national support for efforts to address security problems at the local level. As periodic urban riots have continued over more than two decades, French authorities have sought intermediaries among the second generation of Muslim immigrants ¹⁵⁸ and have supported ethnic associations they felt could maintain social order. A Senate report on the Lyon region in 1993 noted as follows:

Certain mayors are, alas!, ready to provide everything to prevent cars from burning in their towns. The public powers give in to the blackmail of the fundamentalists, who present themselves as the social actors who are best able to preserve order in difficult neighborhoods where no policeman dares to venture. ¹⁵⁹

After the early 1980s, the central government became increasingly involved in local efforts to manage security in part because localities, particularly those controlled by the left, were no longer able to deal with the very real problems of ethnic incorporation and education or to handle the outbreak of riots. Urban violence stigmatized those areas in which young Muslims were concentrated as “sensitive suburbs,” which, in turn, reinforced the impression of Islamic populations as outsiders, even though by the 1990s they were no longer just immigrants but also third–generation settlers in France. ¹⁶⁰

The first manifestation of civil unrest in Britain after World War II was in 1948–49 in Liverpool, Deptford, and then Birmingham. But the first serious riots were in 1958 in Nottingham and Notting Hill in London. Subsequently, riots have erupted in major British cities with high concentrations of immigrant populations at roughly the same intervals as in France—1981, 1991–92, and 2001. British riots have had many of the same characteristics as those in France, except that they have been more violent. The political consequences in the two countries, however, have been quite different. The reaction of French authorities to the first urban riots in Lyon in 1981 was to frame the problem in terms of social control and education; the British saw the 1958 riots in terms of race relations, the solution for which they thought was to limit immigration and prevent a “British Little Rock.” ¹⁶¹ Both the French and British approaches were rooted in a need to maintain public order: “For [then–British Home Secretary Sir Frank] Soskice, race relations legislation was in large part related to concerns of public order, a lesson first learned by the [Labour] party in 1958.”¹⁶² By 1965, Labour was able to get the Tory opposition to agree to this strategic formulation. Race relations became the core of the British policy on integration that was ultimately applied to Muslim communities. Indeed, this approach endured and was strengthened even after three additional rounds of serious riots between 1981 and 2001, as well as the attacks on the London underground in July 2005. Although quite different from that of the French, the British approach also set apart Muslim communities as “racial minorities,” subject to special scrutiny. The meaning of this segregation became more evident in both countries as the issue of internal security began to merge with that of terrorism and external security.

For France and Britain, the fight against international terrorism goes back to the 1970s and ’80s. In each case, it was conceived and eventually institutionalized as a domestic problem, and this understanding seriously affected relations with the domestic Muslim communities. On the one hand, young men of Islamic origin were regularly targeted for special surveillance. On the other, security services needed the cooperation of Muslim communities to effectively anticipate and investigate possible terrorist incidents.

Robert Leiken, in an article in Foreign Affairs, characterizes the European approach to terrorism as soft (and is particularly critical of the British):

With a few exceptions, European authorities shrink from the relatively stout legislative and security measures adopted in the United States. They prefer criminal surveillance and traditional prosecutions to launching a U.S.–style “war on terrorism” and mobilizing the military, establishing detention centers, enhancing border security, requiring machine–readable passports, expelling hate preachers, and lengthening notoriously light sentences for convicted terrorists. ¹⁶³

Yet as we will see, British and French antiterrorist strategies have been robust for some time, perhaps more so than those of the United States.

France

France developed its present approach to terrorism after a series of attacks in the early 1980s indicated that the earlier policy—dubbed the “sanctuary doctrine” by the French government—was producing more violence than security. Until then, French authorities had concentrated their considerable efforts on combating homegrown terrorism of the anarchist left, as well as regional separatist groups in Brittany, the Basque area, and, above all, Corsica. The French counterespionage service (the SDECE) and the agency for internal surveillance (the DST) had extensive experience in dealing with domestic terrorism—from the Algerian revolt of 1954–62 that was played out on the streets of Paris, to assassinations in the 1980s by the anarchist group Action Directe, to separatist violence in Corsica—but no organizational means for dealing with international terrorism.

The sanctuary doctrine—which presumed that international terrorism was a foreign policy problem, rather than a law enforcement one—created an exchange of sanctuary for an understanding that acts of terrorism would not be perpetrated in France or against French interests.¹⁶⁴ The presumption was that, at its core, the prevention of terrorism depended on diplomacy. A change in policy finally came after 14 attacks in 1986 by a variety of groups based in the Middle East, 12 of them by one previously unknown group, provoked the French government to rethink its approach to terrorism.

The 1986 Law Relative to the Struggle against Terrorism refocused efforts away from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and increased the administrative capabilities of the Ministries of the Interior and Justice, which effectively coordinated the various intelligence and police agencies. ¹⁶⁵ Under the new legislation, the fight against terrorism was centralized in a core group of juges d’instruction (investigating magistrates) in Paris, who took both the judicial and investigative lead in the French struggle with terrorism for the next 20 years.

Under subsequent legislation passed in 1986, 1995, and 1996, these investigating magistrates gained tools that are similar to, if less draconian than, those developed at the same time in Britain: permission to stop and frisk in routine investigations and to detain suspects without charge for up to four days in terror–related cases. The 1996 legislation recognized “conspiracy to commit terrorism” as a crime, giving investigating magistrates considerable power to prevent acts from ever occurring. In addition, juges d’instruction could order preventive detention for long periods once suspects were under judicial investigation—some defendants spent up to four years in prison before their trial after a 1994 roundup. ¹⁶⁶ During the worst of the Algerian civil war, which again reached Paris, there were major roundups of Algerians in France in 1993, 1994, 1995, and 1998. In each case, the roundups far exceeded the number finally held over for trial. ¹⁶⁷

The oft–cited virtues of this system are its specialization, centralization, flexibility, coordination, and political independence. Its virtues, however, are also its problems, since there is no political and little judicial oversight. Decisions by key magistrates, such as the preeminent antiterror judge Jean–Louis Bruguiére, are difficult to question, as is police action.¹⁶⁸ Moreover, there is no discernible boundary between external and internal security. The effect of the merging of the two has been to subject young French Muslims to endless surveillance. Laurent Bonelli documents a full range of legal police activity that targets young people in the working–class suburbs, Muslims in particular. ¹⁶⁹

Britain

In Britain, the campaign against terrorism has always been domestic. The primary heritage of the troubles in Northern Ireland is an accumulation of broad powers of arrest and detention that apply to all residents of the United Kingdom. In 1974, reacting to a wave of Irish Republican Army (IRA) violence throughout the year, the Labour government rushed the Prevention of Terrorism Act through Parliament soon after the October elections. The new act gave the home secretary the power to issue a list of proscribed organizations and to penalize anyone belonging to them, supporting them with financial and other means, or even wearing clothes and symbols that could be linked to these organizations. It also gave police the power to detain people judged to be threatening for up to seven days without an arrest warrant and without any charge being brought against them. Finally, it allowed authorities to exclude people from entering Britain, including citizens and residents who lived abroad.

The IRA was the only proscribed organization named under the act at first, but the list was expanded to include other militant organizations engaged in violent struggles, including those on the loyalist side in the conflict over Northern Ireland. Initially viewed as a temporary measure, the Prevention of Terrorism Act was renewed each year and modified in 1978, 1984, and 1989. Most of its major provisions were finally incorporated into the Terrorism Act 2000, although some of the exclusion and internment–without–trial provisions were dropped, at least until 2001.

Home Office reports indicate that several hundred people are stopped and examined each year, very few of whom are formally charged. Although the number of actual detainees fell each year during the 1990s, the number of those examined for suspected involvement with international terrorism grew each year, indicating a shift away from the Irish problem.¹⁷⁰

The Terrorism Act 2000 extended police stop–and–frisk powers and elaborated a list of 14 organizations involved in the struggle for Ireland. In February 2001, however, Home Secretary Jack Straw requested that 21 “international groups” be added to the list, which grew to 25 by September; 18 of these proscribed organizations were Islamic.¹⁷¹

A year before the attack on the World Trade Center, British policy had already been reoriented toward transnational terrorism in ways that heightened police powers and restricted civil liberties; perhaps more important, this legislation was no longer deemed temporary. A report on its operation indicated that between January and the end of August 2001, only 12 of the 30 arrests under the act were related to Irish terrorism.¹⁷² More frequent targets were immigrant residents and British Muslim citizens. The measures in place by 2000 were so extensive that in a variety of reports issued by European and international organizations, Britain ranked as one of the most repressive countries in Europe. ¹⁷³

The Anti–Terrorism, Crime and Security Emergency Act 2001, passed in reaction to the attacks in the United States, was not a sharp break with the previous legislation, but its changes were important because of their impact on immigrants and immigration. A key consequence of the legislation was to further separate citizens from foreign residents; indeed the focus was on foreign residents. Continuing the pattern begun in 1974, foreign residents who were dubbed “suspected terrorists” could be detained without trial or appeal. They could even be deported, unless the Home Office decided they were likely to be victims of human rights violations by their “home” governments. If deportation was not possible, foreign residents could now be jailed indefinitely. This necessitated that Britain opt out of Article 5 of the European Convention on Human Rights, which prohibits imprisonment without trial. It was the only signatory to opt out and did so by declaring a “state of emergency,” permitted by the treaty in case of public emergency or war. In the long run, the derogation of Article 5 proved to be a crucial obstacle to the enforcement of the 2001 legislation. In December 2004, the British High Court—the Law Lords—found that the antiterrorism law was a breach of fundamental human rights, essentially rejecting the opt–out that had been written into the law.

The solution to the court’s challenge, however, created additional problems for Muslim communities in Britain. The government proposed new legislation that finally replaced indefinite detention with limited but renewable judicially controlled detention under “control orders”—a form of house arrest—for citizens and foreigners alike. As a result, the Prevention of Terrorism Act 2005 sought to correct the act of 2001 by making what was unacceptable against foreigners applicable to all suspects.

The most recent British legislation, the Prevention of Terrorism Act 2006, was passed in the aftermath of the July 2005 attacks in London. It granted the home secretary power to proscribe new groups, including those thought to glorify terrorism, and expanded the number of criminal offenses to include participation in acts deemed as preparatory to terrorism, incitement or encouragement of terrorism, dissemination of terrorist publications, and presence at terrorist training locations. It also extended the powers of the police to search property and detain suspects for up to 28 days, though detentions of more than two days had to be sanctioned by judicial authority.

While it is not yet clear how these extensive powers will be used, they tend to further antagonize relations between alienated Muslim youth and the police. In July 2006, the British Security Service (MI5) disclosed that it had about 1,200 “Islamic militants” under surveillance, that they were engaged in an “unprecedented” 70 separate terrorism investigations, and that the number was accelerating.¹⁷⁴ As the focus of the fight against terrorism shifted from the IRA to homegrown Islamic terrorism, police powers increased, and the boundaries between issues of domestic security and terrorism became less clear.

The United States

How can we compare what has happened in Britain and France with what has happened in the United States? On the one hand, because urban violence in the United States has not involved Muslim communities as it has in Europe, the issue of terrorism has not been merged with that of domestic security, although there have been security issues involving the black Muslim community, which has come under frequent surveillance and detention. On the other hand, after 2001, the civil liberties of all Muslims in the United States have become less secure and arguably far less secure than those of other American citizens or residents.¹⁷⁵

Prior to the passage of the Patriot Act in 2001, the U.S. approach to domestic terrorism was defined by the reaction to the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center in New York, which in turn extended changes that had taken place a decade before as a result of investigations into the Watergate scandal. Both the FBI and the CIA were reorganized in ways that made their separate missions less distinct, but domestic terrorism never became a priority for either. Although the counterterrorism budget of the FBI tripled in the mid–1990s, spending remained constant between 1998 and 2001. As the report of the 9/11 Commission indicated, “in 2000, there were still twice as many agents devoted to drug enforcement as to counter–terrorism.”¹⁷⁶ For the CIA, counterterrorism appears to have become a priority in 1997, with the appointment of George Tenet, an expert in the field, as director. In 2004, however, the agency head testified before the 9/11 Commission that its clandestine service was still five years away from being able to play a significant role in counterterrorism. ¹⁷⁷

Before 2001, U.S. law did not allow the kind of preventive detention permitted under British and French law, except in cases where bail could not be posted, nor did it sanction most of the intrusive police powers permitted under French law. At that time, terrorist activity within the United States was treated as criminal activity.¹⁷⁸ The McCarran–Walter Act of 1952 had forbidden the outlawing of certain organizations so the FBI had instead been infiltrating those that were considered “subversive.” The 9/11 Commission Report argues, however, that by the 1990s, these governmental activities had been curtailed by legislation as well as by court decisions and had no impact on Muslim organizational life in the United States. All of this changed in 2001.

The primary changes in the United States after the attacks of September 11 have been legislative and organizational, but the application of executive powers to the war on terrorism has constructed a far–reaching system that is largely outside of the legislative purview. One result has been the activation of judicial oversight in areas only rarely touched before—the military tribunals at Guant‡namo Bay, for example—and judicial fine–tuning of the rights of U.S. citizens accused of terrorist activities.

Certainly, the Patriot Act, first passed on October 26, 2001, and renewed in 2006, is the most visible change since September 11. The act incorporates into American law many of the anti–civil libertarian principles that have existed in European law for some time. Enhanced surveillance powers not only provide the FBI and other government agents the ability to issue more search warrants, seize records, and scrutinize bank, telephone, and Internet records (through so–called National Security Letters), but also to operate without transparency or accountability. ¹⁷⁹

The act is not directed against “aliens” or immigrants; nevertheless, it specifically provides for noncitizens to be detained for up to seven days. If the government states its intention to deport, detention can be extended up to six months and is renewable. The seven–day limit can also be extended if the attorney general certifies every six months that there is a national security concern. A year after the attacks of September 11, 2001, 400 people (of the 1,200 or so who were detained in the weeks after September 11) were still being held on a variety of charges, with 175 of them awaiting deportation.¹⁸⁰ In March 2003, then–Attorney General John Ashcroft claimed that 478 people had been deported and 211 criminal charges had been legally brought since October 2001. ¹⁸¹ In contrast, a report by the NYU Center on Law and Security (CLS) indicates that sweeping surveillance under the Patriot Act has produced very few arrests and fewer convictions. ¹⁸² Among the 211 criminal charges claimed by Ashcroft, the NYU/CLS study documents 120 cases. Of the 84 people arrested for terrorism between September 2001 and October 2004, 54 have been indicted for terrorism and/or support of terrorism, of which 11 have been convicted and 16 have accepted a plea. Only 18 of the charges brought before the courts were for direct acts of terrorism, and only one person, the “shoe bomber” Richard Reid, was convicted of a direct act of terrorism during that period. One widely reported case was that of two 16–year–old girls of Muslim origin, Tashnuba Hayder and Adama Bah, the first terrorist investigation known to involve minors in the United States. Although the details of the allegations against them were sealed by the government, the two girls were believed to have been detained by the FBI for their activity on an Internet chat room frequented by a radical Islamic cleric in London who has encouraged suicide bombing. Both girls were eventually held on immigration charges (the immigration papers of the parents of one girl had not been renewed), yet neither was ever charged with a crime. In May 2005, Adama Bah was released to her home in New York, while Tashnuba Hayder accepted an order of “voluntary departure” to Bangladesh. ¹⁸³

The alternative—perhaps more serious—effort of the government to combat terrorism has been an extralegal, ad hoc campaign, the results of which have been dubious. The Patriot Act authorizes neither the incarceration of “enemy combatants” incommunicado, nor the detention of illegal immigrants without charges, nor secret immigration hearings. ¹⁸⁴ Although citizens, in principle, have greater claims on the legal system than noncitizens, there has been no consistency in the treatment of either. Thus, an American citizen, John Walker Lindh, who was captured in Afghanistan as an enemy combatant, was charged in a federal court and given a plea bargain, while two other citizens, Yaser Esam Hamdi and Jose Padilla, were detained without charges as enemy combatants.¹⁸⁵ Meanwhile Richard Reid, a British citizen, and Zacarias Moussaoui, a French citizen, were both sentenced to life in prison, after pleading guilty in federal court on terrorism charges. David Hicks, an Australian citizen, who was captured in Afghanistan and detained for more than five years at the American military base at Guantánamo Bay, pleaded guilty in March 2007 to charges of supporting terrorism and was sentenced to serve just nine months in an Australian prison by an American military tribunal.

The new American legislation does not appear to be harsher than laws already in place in France and Britain, but it makes life more difficult for immigrants and aliens, not only because of new rules, but also because of the new means of administering them that gave considerable discretion to federal authorities to detain suspects for long periods of time. Thus the follow–up Intelligence Reform Act of 2004

. . . is principally concerned with the reorganization of the intelligence community and the creation of a new “czar,” the director of national intelligence, to oversee the intelligence operations of the Central Intelligence Agency, the Pentagon, and other agencies. In addition, however, it modifies many of the laws and regulations identified with the Patriot Act. It expands the scope of foreign intelligence surveillance, and strengthens the power to detain suspected terrorists prior to trial. It sets minimum federal standards for personal identity documents and attempts to bolster their security. ¹⁸⁶

As in Britain and France, all of these additional powers and administrative personnel have created hardships for the Muslim community. It is clear from the arrest pattern detailed in the NYU/CLS study that the focus of attention has been on immigrants and that there has been increased detention and deportation of undocumented aliens. Legal residents have also had a hard time as new and existing rules are enforced with more vigor. ¹⁸⁷ Immigrants from Arab and other Islamic countries were required to register with the INS after September 11, 2001. Failure to register carried with it the danger of deportation. In the immediate aftermath of the World Trade Center attacks, 60 percent of Arab Americans surveyed were concerned about long–term discrimination, and 45 percent claimed to know someone who had suffered ethnic discrimination. Twenty percent claimed to have “personally” suffered discrimination. ¹⁸⁸

Pursuant to law, the antiterrorism actions of the United States have touched relatively few people, as is also the case in Europe. However, actions that have been enacted under the cover of executive power have touched many thousands of people. Consider the scope of the warrantless phone taps that have been reported by the New York Times and others since December 2005; thousands, “perhaps millions,” of phone lines were involved. ¹⁸⁹

The targeting of Muslims has been tempered in both Europe and the United States by government attempts to enlist Muslim individuals and community organizations in their efforts to enhance security. ¹⁹⁰ These efforts have been most explicit in Britain in the announced programs of the Foreign and Commonwealth Office and the Department of Communities and Local Government and are mainly aimed at engaging with Muslim communities to prevent radicalization and promote voices of mainstream Islam among Muslim youth. ¹⁹¹

The effort in France has been more complicated and has largely focused on the establishment of the French Council for the Muslim Religion (CFCM), discussed in chapter 2. In the United States, these efforts are being coordinated by the Office for Civil Rights and Civil Liberties of the Department of Homeland Security, which has organized an interagency Incident Management Team (IMT). The IMT is meant to bring key bureaucrats who deal with both security issues and public relations together with two dozen Muslim scholars and community leaders in the United States. ¹⁹² We will come back to these efforts in the next section.

This discussion of security is not intended to be exhaustive. It is meant to illuminate how three large Western countries with significant Muslim populations—Britain, France, and the United States—have adjusted (sometimes dramatically) their security policies in response to transnational terrorism and incidents involving their own Muslim communities. But this discussion does not encompass countries such as Denmark, The Netherlands, and Spain, which have also had to address problems of radicalization and/or terrorism; their approaches to security likewise bear further examination.

Back to the top.