Editor's Note

Islam is a major and inseparable part of today’s Europe. Muslims are the fastest-growing group in the European Union, and many large European cities have a sizable Muslim population. Moreover, the Muslim presence in several European countries is at least four generations old. However, it cannot be said that Europe has completely or frictionlessly integrated its Muslims, or that the majority non-Muslim population is wholly reconciled yet to their membership of the European family. Most of Europe’s Muslims are disadvantaged in socio-economic terms and are concentrated, ghetto-like, in the poorer districts of cities. And relations between Muslim and non-Muslim Europeans are fraught, characterised by fear, suspicion and hostility on both sides. This issue of Global Dialogue considers the reasons for this tension and mutual incomprehension. It looks at some of the main recent flashpoints involving Europe’s Muslims, and at how various European states have attempted to incorporate their Muslim inhabitants. It also enquires whether a distinctive European form of Islam is being born that holds out the promise of harmonious co-existence between the continent’s Muslim and non-Muslim citizens.

Jocelyne Cesari of Harvard University opens proceedings by stressing the need to consider the implications of immigration, integration, and globalisation in any analysis of the Muslim presence in the West. This she proceeds to do in a wide-ranging article that reviews the origins of Europe’s Muslim communities, their socio-economic circumstances, the manner in which various European countries have attempted to formalise relations between Islam and the state, and the tensions that arise between European notions of secularism and expressions of Islamic faith and identity. She concludes by outlining three possible scenarios for future Muslim attitudes towards Europe: acceptance, avoidance, or resistance.

Ingmar Karlsson, Sweden’s consul-general in Istanbul, discusses the steps Muslim and non-Muslim Europeans must take in order to assure the successful integration of the former—a matter vital to Europe’s future wellbeing. The failure of integration could result in “a kind of permanent guerrilla warfare in the ghetto-suburbs” of Europe’s major cities, whereas its success could see the development of a “fruitful triangular relationship” between Europe’s Islamic communities, their ancestral lands and their new home countries.

M. A. Muqtedar Khan of the University of Delaware argues that Europe is in the throes of a cultural transformation occasioned by the burgeoning within it of a new and assertive Islamic presence. The continent is being remade, and is finding it difficult to adjust to the “irreversible new reality” constituted by its Muslim inhabitants. Khan surveys the various manifestations of European Islam’s visibility and assertiveness and describes the corresponding insecurity and hostility that these inspire in Europe’s non-Muslim majority.

“The lives of many Muslims in Europe are marked by social and economic exclusion and marginalisation,” writes our next contributor, Tufyal Choudhury of the University of Durham. He details the disadvantage suffered by Europe’s Muslims in several socio-economic spheres—employment, income, health, education, and housing—and explores the merits and shortcomings of current European Union policies intended to tackle discrimination, principally the “Race” and “Framework” Directives of 2000.

Following these preliminary overviews of Europe’s Muslims as a whole, we turn to the situation in individual European countries to see how their Muslim communities are faring, the particular problems they face, and how each state has attempted to regulate and formalise dealings with its Muslims. We begin with France, home to western Europe’s largest Muslim minority. In the course of a detailed portrait of the provenance and attitudes of France’s Muslim community, Alec G. Hargreaves of Florida State University discusses the crises that erupted over the wearing of Islamic headscarves in schools and the 2005 riots in the impoverished suburbs known as banlieues. He suggests that such disputes arise more commonly from the denial of social justice than from a fundamental incompatibility between Islam and the French Republic.

The Netherlands until recently was renowned for the liberality of its multicultural model, unique in Europe for its tolerance and hands-off approach to the integration of immigrants. Today, that model is under fire, with Dutch politicians and public figures denouncing Islam and Muslims in unprecedentedly harsh terms. Nico Landman of the University of Utrecht asks whether the murder of the controversial film-maker Theo van Gogh has killed Holland’s multicultural tradition.

Early in 2006, Denmark was embroiled in a bitter international crisis that saw its products boycotted by the Muslim world, its flag burned by angry demonstrators, and a number of its embassies attacked in the Middle East. The crisis was the culmination of slow-burning anger at the publication by a Danish newspaper of several cartoons of the Prophet Mohammad that Muslims worldwide regarded as defamatory and blasphemous. Kate Østergaard of the University of Copenhagen and Kirstine Sinclair of the University of Southern Denmark describe how the cartoon controversy affected Danish Muslims and Denmark’s traditional policy on minorities, namely integration.

Britain’s Muslims are the subject of the two articles that follow. Dilwar Hussain of the Islamic Foundation in Leicestershire reflects on the formation of Muslim identity, the notion of “Britishness” and how this relates to British Muslims, the impact upon them of the terrorist attacks of 11 September 2001 and 7 July 2005, and factors that cause some young British Muslims to fall in with extremist groups. Often forgotten in the anti-terrorism discourse, he argues, is how much Muslims themselves have lost and stand to lose from acts of terror against Britain.

Nasar Meer and Tariq Modood of the University of Bristol assess whether British multiculturalism is in retreat, a claim commonly made by those who are intolerant of difference and who seek the wholesale assimilation, rather than the integration, of minority populations, especially of British Muslims. Examining the nature of Britain’s multiculturalism, the authors describe the struggle of British Muslims for legislation against incitement to religious hatred in order to gain the same protections that other minority groups enjoy under Britain’s various Race Relations Acts. Britain has not rejected multiculturalism, the authors conclude; difference is still recognised and supported in government literature and policy.

Roberto Toscano, Italy’s ambassador to Iran, provides an Italian perspective on the question of the Muslims of Europe. He enquires whether the specifics of the Italian situation suggest any answers to the difficulties that currently beset relations between Europe and its Muslims. He believes that the story of Italy’s Muslims is a hopeful one. “The only thing that can destroy, in Italy and elsewhere in Europe, the prospect of a European civilisation that includes Muslim culture is the association of Islam and terrorism,” he argues. Unfair though the link is, it will require a joint effort by Muslims and non-Muslims to overcome it.

Two pan-European essays conclude our issue. Pernilla Ouis of Malmö University, Sweden, addresses the nature of Muslim marriage in Europe. In matters of courtship and marriage, young European Muslims typically find themselves caught between tradition and modernity, between the customs of their elders’ countries of origin and the more relaxed mores of the liberal West. Ouis describes some of the difficulties this gives rise to, and the strategies young European Muslims adopt to find a spouse. She weighs certain possible changes to fiqh (Islamic jurisprudence) regarding marriage that could ease the predicament of Muslims in a minority situation, such as those in Europe.

Sara Silvestri of City University London and Cambridge University analyses the causes and consequences of the radicalisation of Europe’s Muslim youths whereby some are attracted to groups that espouse political violence in the name of Islam. She discerns the beginnings of a reaction to this abuse of the faith in the form of a revival of Islam as a counter-force for peace and moderation. The result could be the opening of a path towards “a long-term accommodation of Islam in European society”.

Paul Theodoulou

Summer/Autumn 2007