Peter Speetjens
Special to The Daily Star

He’s handsome, intelligent, fluent in Flemish, yet born in Lebanon. Loved by some, hated by many, Dyab Abu Jahjah is known as Belgium’s own Malcolm X. He’s the founder of the Arab European League (AEL), an organization that speaks out for the rights of Arab and Muslim immigrants. As such, he’s also been called a threat to society in Belgium and Holland.
So, who is Dyab Abu Jahjah and what are people so afraid of? To answer these questions and others, Jahjah recently published a book, Between Two Worlds: The Roots of a Freedom Struggle. According to Jahjah it is “a combination of political autobiography, history, an ideological manifest and a collection of personal thoughts.”
The book, which was published in Dutch but will be translated into other languages soon, sheds light on the background and ideas of Belgium’s most (in)famous Lebanese son.
Born to a Maronite mother and a Shiite father in the southern village of Hanin in 1971, Jahjah starts his book with an account of how, after a 52-day siege, his hometown was destroyed by the Israeli henchmen of Saad Haddad. He and his family narrowly managed to escape to Jiyeh.
The chapters on Jahjah’s youth are intertwined with an introduction to Middle East politics from the end of the Ottoman Empire up to the second, current intifada. Within the regional overview, Israel plays an all-important role, a role Jahjah perceives as an undeniable part of European colonialism, which ruled the Arab world from Morocco to Iraq for the larger part of the 20th century.
In Jiyeh, Jahjah’s life became calmer. He joined the St. Charbel college, a mixed school for Muslims and Christians, where French was the main language.
His father was an active Arab nationalist and socialist.
“But my father didn’t actively raise us in politics,” Jahjah writes, “it was a passive process, as we often would be at home when there were political meetings.”
Young Dyab picked up enough from the home conversations to make his first steps into politics at the age of 8 when, in his grandfather’s garden, he founded the Hanin club ­ complete with chairman and secretary. The club’s goal was to collect money to buy fireworks.
In the years that followed, Jahjah’s political views became more serious and mature. As with most adolescents, however, they regularly changed. Reading about politics and philosophy in his spare time, he was first attracted to Nasser, then to Amal and the Baath Party. In the end he returned to Arab nationalism.
He recalls how at age 15 or so, he spent every Friday in the mosque and asked his grandfather: “Isn’t religion the most beautiful thing on earth?”
His grandfather confirmed it was a good thing but warned that, “as with all things, too much of it transforms it into something bad. Be careful it doesn’t become a tumor in your brain that prevents you from thinking. Let it be a light in your heart that makes you good and open to others.”
It seems Jahjah hasn’t forgotten his words. Contrary to what many critics claim, Jahjah has never become a religious fanatic. Socialism and Islam are two of the constant factors in Jahjah’s life, yet his biggest inspiration is the Egyptian philosopher, Saif al-Dawla, who analyzed and criticized the main European schools of thought to launch his “human dialectic method,” which according to Jahjah is a correction of the theories of Hegel and Marx. In short, it’s not ideas or material conditions, but mankind itself that forms the heart of things and is responsible for the winds of change.
In January 1991, Jahjah decided to leave Lebanon and his law studies at the Lebanese University. He was disappointed with the compromising outcome of the war, yet writes that the main motivation to leave was simply his ambition and desire to see the world. As this is not enough reason for any European country to welcome someone, Jahjah asked for political asylum. He claimed he feared for his life since he had a conflict with Hizbullah ­ a story he later admitted was untrue. When, in 1995, he was rejected asylum, he was still granted Belgian nationality after he married his Belgian girlfriend.
In the meantime, he studied political science while doing all kinds of jobs to stay financially afloat: he carried stones at construction sites, cleaned kitchens and slaughterhouses, and in Brussels he worked in a string of Lebanese-owned garages.
In these years, he got to know Flemish society and was confronted with a general atmosphere of xenophobia and discrimination, especially after he moved to Antwerp, Belgium’s second largest city.
He and his friends were more often than others checked for their papers, were regularly not allowed to enter bars or clubs and were paid less for the same jobs, to name but a few examples. While the government denies there is any racial discrimination on a systematic scale, Belgium has one of the highest unemployment rates among immigrants in Europe, while the police in multicultural Antwerp to this day are 95 percent white.
More significantly even, is the rise of the extreme right-wing party called Vlaams Blok, which became the largest political party in Antwerp by the end of the 1990s. It adorns itself with slogans along the lines of “Our people first,” and “Belgium is full.”
In this social and cultural environment, Jahjah and his friends decided in February 2000 to establish the Arab European League, an association aiming to improve the socio-economic situation of Arab immigrants by legal means of political pressure, such as meetings and gatherings to teach people their individual rights, in addition to public demonstrations.
However, Belgian, and later Dutch, society weren’t ready for him. The widely held view and explanation for the immigrants’ bad situation has always been that it is their own fault, because they lack the will to adapt and integrate. Jahjah’s AEL denies this notion. The group accuses Belgium of never having offered the means to integrate, such as special language courses or schools for young immigrants. But more fundamentally, it accuses both societies’ understanding of integration, which to him is nothing but assimilation.
Jahjah and the AEL base themselves on the fundamental rights of freedom of expression and religion to state that immigrants have every right to nurture their own culture and language. As an example Jahjah gives the situation of the Armenians in Lebanon, who are an integral part of Lebanese society, yet who have kept their language and traditions.
Belgium and Holland, however, especially after the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks, weren’t ready for dialogue. Politicians and the media portrayed Jahjah and the AEL as fundamentalists who wanted to establish a kind of Islamic theocracy. The AEL was even under investigation for rumored links with Hizbullah and Al-Qaeda. The whole administrative apparatus was confiscated, yet nothing was ever found. Jahjah himself was thrown in prison for a week and was subjected to a street ban. Despite everything, however, he’s still as energetic as ever, both on the barricades and in the debate, while the AEL is only growing.
Controversial as he may be in the eyes of Belgian and Dutch natives, most first and second generation immigrants feel that for the first time ever, someone stood up to fight for them. And if his political struggle in Belgium were a boxing match then the results so far are: first round won, 14 more to go.