The Princeton Encyclopedia of Islamic Political Thought

Europe

Muslim presence in Europe has a long and varied history. Between the early 8th and late 15th centuries, parts of Spain (Andalus) and Southern Italy were under Muslim rule, and starting from the 15th century, the Ottoman Empire expanded into southeastern Europe and twice advanced as far as Vienna. Whereas Muslim rule of Andalus was ended by the Reconquista in 1492, the effects of the Ottoman presence continue to be strongly felt until today. The wars in former Yugoslavia during the 1990s, which also assumed traits of a religious strife, deeply disturbed the rest of Europe and had severe repercussions on the relations between the West and the Islamic world.

Contemporary discussions about Islam in Europe mostly refer to the more recent presence of Muslims in Western Europe. As of 2010, approximately 18.5 million Muslims are estimated to live in these countries, with the largest communities in France (outnumbering both Protestants and Jews), Germany, the United Kingdom, and Italy. The majority of Muslim migrants arrived in Europe after World War II either as refugees from former European colonies to the colonizing country (North Africans in France, South Asians in Great Britain) or as “guest workers,” cheap labor hired by European states (Turks in Germany, Turks and Moroccans in the Netherlands since the 1960s). Later, they were joined by students from Muslim countries, refugees from various international crises, and also by a growing number of European converts to Islam.

Despite the highly diverse background of Muslims in Europe, discussions since the 1980s have increasingly focused on issues of “Muslim identity” and “European Islam.” Previously, migrants had been perceived mainly in ethnic terms (as Turks, Arabs, etc.) and in a more regional context, but the religious angle came to predominate the association with migrants due to events on the global stage such as the Islamic Revolution in 1979 that “Islamized” public debates about these minorities. This development presented grave challenges to European states and societies, as well as to Muslim migrant communities and their second- or third-generation offspring (who were not automatically naturalized in all European states). The problems are further complicated by the fact that the Western approach to religion is far from homogeneous. Rather, the relationship between secular politics and religious communities ranges from the British combination of a state church and a liberal model of recognition of religious communities by the state to the German church laws that focus on corporative intermediate units to the rigorous French laïcité and its strict separation of religion and the public sphere. All these approaches, however, are tailored to the model of the Christian churches and often conflict with the far more amorphous structure of Islam.

For Muslims in Europe, on the other hand, the challenges are of two sorts. On the organizational level, the constant demand by most European states for a national representative body—if possible, single and uniform—to serve as interlocutor in legal issues (such as religious instruction in public schools) led to the emergence of several Muslim umbrella organizations. The most important of these include the Exécutif des Musulmans de Belgique (founded in 1996), the Muslim Council of Britain (1997), the Conseil Français du Culte Musulman (2003), the Dutch Contactorgaan Moslims en Overheid (2004), and the German Koordinierungsrat der Muslime (2007). They consist mostly of coalitions of local or regional associations but are far from unanimously acknowledged by the Muslim community; in addition to inner rivalry, groups like the ‘Alawis or the Ahmadis, which are deemed heterodox or even heretic in the Islamic world, are either excluded or refuse to be coerced under an all-encompassing Muslim umbrella.

The second challenge for Muslims in Europe consists of the relationship between Islamic law and secularism. Whereas in previous centuries Muslim scholars ruled out the possibility of Muslims living under non-Muslim rule in what they perceived as the “abode of war” (and instead demanded Muslims to emigrate to the “abode of Islam”), present-day Muslims are permitted to live as minorities under non-Muslim rule, although Islamic law (shari‘a) is not formally acknowledged in any European country (only Greece concedes a special status to the Muslim minority in Thrace). Discussions about how to adapt the provisions of Islamic law to the European environment gave rise, in the early 21st century, to a new genre of legal literature, a so-called Muslim minority right (fiqh al-aqalliyyāt al-muslima), propelled both by Muslim scholars who settled in the West (such as Taha Jabir al-Alwani) and by some eminent experts from the Islamic world. In this regard, too, institutionalization is to be observed in the shape of the European Council for Fatwa and Research set up in Dublin in 1997. This committee, which comprises 38 Muslim scholars from 21 Middle Eastern and European countries, organizes regular international conferences and issues statements and fatwas on all kinds of legal problems confronting Muslims in Europe; its president is the Qatar-based Yusuf al-Qaradawi, one of the most potent representatives of contemporary Islam.

Apart from individual scholars such as Qaradawi, organizations from Islamic countries run or backed by the state also compete for authority over Muslims in Europe (such as the Mecca-based Muslim World League or the Turkish Presidency of Religious Affairs), as do transnational groups such as the Muslim Brotherhood or the Tablighi Jama‘at. But there are also important individual Muslim voices even at the European level. While outspoken secular approaches (Soheib Bencheikh) have not caught on, Tariq Ramadan, a Swiss-born conservative reformer and grandson of Hasan al-Banna, the founder of the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood, has established himself as one of the most influential, albeit highly controversial, contemporary Muslim intellectuals. However, the real influence both of European Muslim organizations and individual reformers on the bulk of Muslims in Europe is difficult to assess, given that, for example, in Germany the mosque associations and umbrella institutions represent less than 30 percent of Muslims living in the country.

Several organizations have attempted to comply with European expectations and emphasized the compatibility of Islam and Western political and social values: in 2002, the German Central Council of Muslims (Zentralrat der Muslime) issued an “Islamic Charter,” which was intended as a declaration on the relationship between Muslims, the state, and society, and in January 2008 the Federation of Islamic Organizations in Europe in Brussels published a “Muslims in Europe Charter” to the same effect. These efforts (which aim at fundamental problems such as Islamic ethics, equality of the sexes, democracy, and human rights) notwithstanding, several more practical issues of contention persist: the question of the headscarf, Islamic religious instruction in public schools, the education of imams, the construction of mosques, and the practice of ritual slaughtering. More often than not, controversies in these areas are taken to court, and decisions vary greatly even within individual states.

An especially sensitive topic that affects the relations between Muslims and Western societies is Islamist terrorism and Islamism at large. Great Britain in particular served for a long time as a retreat for many activists from the Islamic world threatened by persecution in their countries of origin, among them also radical preachers of jihad, long before London itself was hit by (home-grown) Islamist terrorists in July 2005. Events such as the conflict over Salman Rushdie’s novel The Satanic Verses (1989), the riots in the suburbs of Paris (2005), or the publication of the controversial Danish Muhammad cartoons (2006)—all of which had severe consequences far beyond their European context—show the potential of agitators to eclipse the peaceful majority of Muslims living in Europe and to provoke hostility among Europeans toward everything Islamic.

The debates about what has aptly been described as “globalized Islam” is determined by several important issues: the contest for legal and spiritual authority over Islam in Europe, the interaction between organizations in the Islamic world and European Muslim individuals and associations, the attempts to create a European Muslim identity, and the emergence of international terrorism. In the process of reaching common ground for coexistence, both sides have to redefine traditional stances with regard to the relation between religion and society.