A German 'expert' takes on Thilo Sarrazin

DW trotted out Ulrich von Schwerin, an 'expert' on Islam, to take on Thilo Sarrazin over his new book, Feindliche Übernahme. Sarrazin is a former Bundesbank board member (read: apparatchik) who has fallen out of favor with the German left due to his criticism of mass immigration from Islamic countries.

Let's look at the work of this Islam expert:

In [his previous] book, the former Berlin senator of finance and former member of the executive board of the Bundesbank claimed that Muslim immigrants had educational deficits and refused to integrate...

Note the word 'claimed'. There is ample evidence from the German government itself that Muslim immigrants have major problems with both integration and education:

• Munich University professor Ludger Wößmann: 2/3rds of Syrian migrants are illiterate in their own language.
• Chamber of Commerce of Munich and Upper Bavaria: 70 per cent of trainees from Syria, Afghanistan and Iraq who started full time training courses have dropped out.
• Herbert Bruecker of the IAB Institute for Employment Research: recent newcomers [Merkel's migrants] had not arrived primarily to work. As of 2016, only 13% have found work.
• Federal Employment Agency (Bundesagentur für Arbeit, BA):  eight percent have an academic education. Eleven percent have vocational training. 81 percent lack a formal qualification.
• Federal Employment Agency (Bundesagentur für Arbeit, BA): 74 per cent of the migrants have no job qualifications or professional training at all

his claim to be able to determine the core statements of Islam by reading the Quran without any knowledge of Arabic or theological background is an absurd presumption.

Most Muslims (e.g., in Indonesia) do not read the Quran in Arabic. So what?

He does not discuss the ambiguity of the text nor its poetic dimension. Instead of looking at the Quran as a whole, he takes individual excerpts out of context and reorganizes them under selected themes.

Indeed, someone who hasn't studied Islam might take quotes out of context. However, we can just look at what actual Islamic scholars utter. Imams have been caught in Toronto, Stockholm, London, Orlando and other cities preaching rather violent passages from the Quran.

Sarrazin also ignores the fact that the political ideology of Islamism is a product of modernity and that its interpretation is rejected by a great majority of Muslims

Unfortunately the author does not define 'Islamism', but he apparently intends for it to be a pejorative denoting radical Islam.

He does not say a word about the moderate versions of mystical Islam prevailing in most Muslim countries.

Note that the author doesn't name a single such country. There's plenty of evidence to call this claim into question. First, surveys do not show that Muslims in Islamic countries are 'moderate' in the sense of accepting western-style norms of respect for women, tolerance of homosexuality, free speech, etc.

• Arab Observatory of Religions and Freedoms (OARL) and the German Konrad Adenauer Foundation: a telephone survey of North Africans found that they identify as Muslim first, citizens second. Furthermore, a mere 39% of Egyptians condemned religious extremism.
• Pew Research Center: surveys on Muslims and their attitude to divorce, homosexuality, abortion, alcohol (etc).

Second, the Cairo Declaration on Human Rights is clearly at odds with western notion of human rights. Merely look at the content pertaining to freedom of speech and freedom of expression. This would not be considered 'moderate' in either east Asia or western Europe.

he tries to provide an appearance of objectivity though quotes, numbers and statistics, but the book's goal remains clear: to confirm his preconceived ideas.

This is just pure desperation, trying to ignore evidence instead of grappling with it. The author clearly doesn't have a cogent argument about any of those elements, so he is flapping his hands angrily.

His description of the history of Islamic culture as an 800-year-long decline reveals his downright malicious urge to deny Muslims anything positive.

A decline does not entail that there was nothing positive about a civilization. The author might be surprised to discover that there is a book called "History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire". The civilization of the Ionians, Athenians, and Persians all declined, but they left lasting legacies.

Anyone who has ever been to Istanbul, Granada or Cairo can only be astonished to read Sarrazin's declaration that "an independent Islamic building culture never developed."

Two staggeringly inept examples. Granada and Istanbul being formerly European regions subject to Islamic invasion and colonization. The author's larger omission is not recognizing that Europeans were hired to teach the Ottomans about building construction and architecture.

You can almost feel pity for Sarrazin for such narrow-mindedness.

This is the sort of gamma-male sneer that is all too common among left-wing male academics. 

He avoids mentioning that the credibility of the statistics he uses has been questioned — that would ruin his narrative.

How many official reports on climate change mention that some people question their data? We all know that statistics can be questioned, so there is no need to state it explicitly. 

Hardly a Muslim bases his actions primarily or even exclusively on Islam.

I'm not sure what this vague claim means (e.g., which actions?), but it sure doesn't look like the author is giving Muslims a lot of credit for adhering to the basics of their faith.

But even if Islam were the cause of all problems, what would be the solution?

No one argues Islam is the cause of all problems, so that's a straw man. 

We can certainly lay the blame for Europe's new violent gang rape problem on Muslims, however. Very few Amish or Koreans are gang raping 13 year olds or running over people with trucks in Europe these days.

I'm not sure what Sarrazin would offer for solutions, but I can name some options: repatriation, forced population transfer, or brutal civil war. Civil strife and ethnic warfare is inevitable in Europe, given past history. (The author should probably read up on the conflict in Spain).

Lebanon during its Civil War

His whole book shows that he is not concerned with helping shape peaceful coexistence, but rather with the strict separation of peoples and stopping the immigration of Muslims.

Note that the author does not give us an example of 'peaceful co-existence' between Muslims and other groups. Burma? Thailand? Philippines? Egypt? India?

On the whole, the DW piece is full of the sort of snide insults, fallacies, and flabby hand waving that characterizes so much of the work of the internationalist left these days.