The Muslim Among Us

Posted by Eugen Freund, MEP on 12th October 2015

It will not be easy to absorb and integrate all refugees, with different religions and different cultural backgrounds. But, as MEP Eugen Freund reports, a taxi driver he calls “Kharim” exemplifies that it is indeed possible.

We talk a lot about politics in the European Parliament, don’t we? An amendment to this, a resolution to that, a meeting on this, a conference on that, and then, laws, a lot of laws. But how often do we talk about the people? Except, of course, the people who are effected by the laws we enact. But a single individual – that stands out from the masses? Hardly ever.

So, today, I’d like to tell the story of one exceptional person. Let me call him Kharim.

He is not the proverbial taxi driver. The one, you know, who has a solution, or better, a comment to any problem. Who knows who is to blame for the ills of the world, from small ones, like bicyclists (“I would get them off the road, immediately!”) to big ones (“The US is sending us all those moslem refugees!”). No, that’s not him. This one always has a smile on his face when he picks me up, greets me with a firm handshake and always asks me, with genuine interest, how my week or my weekend was. We chat about his or my children (he is proud that the oldest attends a high school in Vienna) and we discuss politics. At the moment, there is only one issue: the refugee crisis. By the way, my driver is muslim.

He came to Vienna from Tunisia in the 1980s, a lone young man, like so many young men who nowadays cross our borders. When he arrived, the first Intifada had just shed another gruesome highlight on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Kharim wanted to study economics, but after a while he needed money so he applied for a taxi driver’s license. Eventually he got married and had three children.

A few years ago Kharim made it into the newspapers. Not because he had committed a crime, to the contrary. He became a witness to an attempted suicide: a teenager clung to the windowsill on the third flow of the building where Kharim lived. On the sidewalk half a dozen people where scurrying around, cell phone to their mouths, frantically trying to call police. Kharim looked up to the girl and made a split second decision: “She was about to fall, I knew I had a choice: if I catch her, I could die and she could survive. If I do nothing, she would certainly be dead,” he told me, years later on the way to the airport. So he caught her, saved her life. He was injured, but not gravely.

More recently he got involved in the plight of the refugees. This past August, he was just about to leave for Tunisia with his whole family and had spent most of his savings for the vacation, he got a call: “Kharim, you must help us!” A group of refugees he had gotten to know, was trapped in a camp, they had not slept for nights because of the heat. “We need some fans or something to cool us down.” Kharim tried to explain that he was just about to leave that very day, but they pleaded. “Please, help us!” So he called a few friends, they pledged to pitch in some money and he drove to a hardware store to buy the scarce supply of ventilators and brought them to his friends. I asked him how his daily life differs from that of other Austrians (a veiled inquiry about what many Muslims are accused of, namely that they live in a “parallel society”) “I do what most Austrians do: I go to work, I raise my children, I meet friends, and, yes, I have rights. And I enjoy those rights. But by the same token, as an Austrian citizen, I also have obligations. And I am very aware of those!”

Nowadays, he and his wife spend many hours at the main train station in Vienna. Every day, hundreds or thousands of asylum seekers end up here, before they proceed to Germany. She is helping as a translator; he is shuttling refugees to hotels where he knows the owners. “I only help families with small children,” he told me, “they are the most in need. Most of the Syrians are well educated, but they have experienced incredible atrocities in their homeland. After they finally left, they have been on the road for weeks. When they get into the car, they apologize: ‘we smell badly, please, open the window, I haven’t been able to take a shower for a many days.” On a recent Sunday Kharim was up until well after midnight, constantly on the phone to find a decent place for those unfortunates. “Some hotels charge 200 Euro for a single bed, but I have a Persian friend who has a hotel for 40 Euros. So I bring them there.” The other day, one of the refugees had spent the rest of his money, save 5 Euros, for train tickets to Germany. Kharim offered him a free ride. “No, he said, I am a proud Syrian, I will pay you with what I have.”

This is Kharim. I think his story deserves to be told. After all, there may be many Kharims among the refugees who some of us will claim to be hard to integrate.

Eugen Freund is a Member of the European Parliament (S & D) 

Before entering politics he was a journalist, covering int. politics.