By: domingo barbolla camarero  (Page 2/8)

Figure 1. Picture of evolution of foreigners by nationalities of the municipal register of Talayuela (2001- 2003).

Source: My own elaboration through data of municipal register of Talayuela

Religiosity is an exponent of integration for the Islamic immigrants who live in Talayuela (Cáceres). Through field work, we investigated to find if the religiosity of the Islamic immigrant in Extremadura is a factor of integration or of a more or less latent conflict; that is to say, up to what point does he or she accommodate to the welcoming society, or otherwise legitimize the attitudes and actions of revolt that can generate situations of violence like those of March 11th. At the same time, cultural or social factors, when mixed with religiosity, serve as an integration process or feeds to the confliction potential, serving as broth of culture to pre-terrorist attitudes.

If September 11, 2001 marked a before and after in international relations, and by extension in the daily coexistence between individuals of different cultures that inhabit the same geographic and temporary place, March 11 ^th also marked that duality in our country. In accordance with Samuel Huntington’s thinking, civilizations like the western, the Muslim, and the Chinese, - among the main ones – are replacing previous ideologies and nations, reason why the great differences between nations are now cultural more than political, economic, or ideological. Cultures and cultural identities shape the levels of cohesion, disintegration, and conflict in the post-Cold War period of the world. Following the American trail - with a certain European slant -, Giovanni Sartori, in his book Pluralism, Multiculturalism and Foreigners: an Essay on Multiethnic Society (2001), maintains that there are civilizations that are “pregnant” with conflict with others; thus it is said that “the problem is the Islam” with respect to the integration of its believers in the western societies.

Mikel Azurmendi, like many, maintains that the immigrants must be treated as individuals, adapting their individual projects to the welcoming society, and not as cultural groups that destroy coexistence. That's why every cultural manifestation of the Islam believers must be rejected. Similarly, Miguel Herrero de Miñón, “advises” to receive immigrants who share our western patterns, in detriment of “others” more difficult to integrate. In another conciliation slope, Ryszard Kapuscinski is in favor of prudence, not to emphasize the opposite elements, because otherwise the “clash of civilizations” has no turning back, nor winners or losers, we’d all lose.

More optimistic on the result of possible multicultural scenes are the academics and intellectuals Sami Nair, Tomás Calvo Buezas, Bernabé Lopez, Joaquin Arango, and many more. For them, the planet, the Europe of the future, and therefore Spain, will be more and more a pluricultural and multiethnic mosaic, nourished with emigrants and ethnic groups of the Third World, with differentiated ways of life from those of the western cultures. If we don’t learn to coexist together in the differences, increased racism and xenophobia is foreseeable, with a new outbreak of ethnic conflicts, and therefore of the terrorism as an “entrenched” answer of the minorities. For these authors, cultural diversity is a wealth of all complex, democratic, and plural societies. Dynamic cultures and artistic creativity can only evolve and transform if there is a dialectic interaction between plurality and homogeneity, generating new syncretic impulses and influences that dynamize the established cultural forms. The history of civilizations is the history of the encounters of different people.