A problem with Muslim enclaves

Western Europe is increasingly a house divided. While non-Muslim Europeans live in democracies, most Muslims in the same countries inhabit theocratic enclaves where they are expected to tread a narrow path - or suffer the consequences.

Muslim women have it the worst. They are subject without exception to the authority of their husbands, fathers, and community leaders. And if they seek to escape that tyranny, they can expect little help from government authorities, who are loath to "intrude" and show "disrespect" for someone else's culture.

Many European officials have long assumed that such problems would be resolved gradually through intermarriage, integration, and the consequent fading away of ghettos. But intermarriage and integration are not happening as expected - and the consequences of this failure are grievous.

Such is the conclusion drawn by "Female Integration," an explosive new book making headlines and the talk-show circuit here. It's based on a recent report to the Norwegian parliament by the Oslo-based Human Rights Service (HRS) and is being viewed as a window on larger Muslim immigration patterns in the rest of Europe.

The book's comprehensive statistical analysis of immigrant marriage patterns in Norway shows that members of most non-Western immigrant groups are, in overwhelming numbers, not only marrying within their own ethnic groups, but marrying partners - often their own cousins - from their countries of origin.

These marriages - which are invariably arranged, and often forced - have two chief motivations. One is to provide the foreign spouse with Norwegian residency rights under the "family reunification" provision of immigration law. The other is to resist integration by injecting into the European branch of the family "traditional values" - among them a hostility to pluralism,tolerance, democracy, and sexual equality.

As "Female Integration" shows, the systematic abuse of "family reunification" has dramatically transformed the way in which spouses are chosen within the Muslim community. This has made real integration all but impossible, and resulted in a pattern of exploitation of young women that Hege Storhaug, author of the book, describes as "the greatest political disgrace in contemporary Norwegian history."

While Norwegian Muslims of both sexes are forced into marriages, the situation is particularly brutal for girls. As female Muslims, they already get short shrift in the social power balance. Add to this the facts that they are often married off at extremely young ages (many in their early teens, for example) and that their imported husbands tend to be untouched by any notion of sexual equality, and one can begin to grasp why Ms. Storhaug calls them "living visas in a new form of human commerce." They have grown up in Norway and had a taste of freedom, but they are forced into marriages with men who take for granted a wife's total subservience.

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