Over ten million Muslims live in Western Europe. Since the early 1990s, and especially after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, vexing policy questions have emerged about the religious rights of native-born and immigrant Muslims. Britain has struggled over whether to give state funding to private Islamic schools. France has been convulsed over Muslim teenagers wearing the hijab in public schools. Germany has debated whether to grant 'public-corporation' status to Muslims. And each state is searching for policies to ensure the successful incorporation of practicing Muslims into liberal democratic society. This 2004 book analyzes state accommodation of Muslims' religious practices in Britain, France, and Germany, first examining three major theories: resource mobilization, political-opportunity structure, and ideology. It then proposes an additional explanation, arguing that each nation's approach to Muslims follows from its historically based church-state institutions.

Atrocities by terrorists acting in the name of the ‘Islamic State’ are occurring with increasing regularity across Western Europe. Often the perpetrators are ‘home grown’, which places the relationship between Muslims and the countries in which they live under intense political and media scrutiny, and raises questions about the success of the integration of Muslims of migrant origin. At the same time, populist politicians try to shift the blame from the few perpetrators to the supposed characteristics of all Muslims as a ‘group’ by depicting Islam as a threat that seeks to undermine liberal democratic values and institutions. The research in this volume attempts to redress the balance by focusing on the views and life experiences of the many ‘ordinary’ Muslims in their European societies of settlement, and the role that cultural and religious factors play in shaping their social relationships with majority populations and public institutions. The book is specifically interested in the relationship between cultural/religious distance and social factors that shape the life chances of Muslims relative to the majority. The study is cross-national, comparative across the six main receiving countries with distinct approaches to the accommodation of Muslims: France, Germany, Britain, the Netherlands, Belgium and Switzerland. The research is based on the findings of a survey of four groups of Muslims from distinct countries of origin: Turkey, Morocco, the former Yugoslavia, and Pakistan, as well as majority populations, in each of the receiving countries. This book was originally published as a special issue of the Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies.

Winner of the Ernst Fraenkel Prize, Wiener Holocaust Library An Open Letters Monthly Best History Book of the Year A New York Post “Must-Read” In the most crucial phase of the Second World War, German troops confronted the Allies across lands largely populated by Muslims. Nazi officials saw Islam as a powerful force with the same enemies as Germany: the British Empire, the Soviet Union, and the Jews. Islam and Nazi Germany’s War is the first comprehensive account of Berlin’s remarkably ambitious attempts to build an alliance with the Islamic world. “Motadel describes the Mufti’s Nazi dealings vividly...Impeccably researched and clearly written, [his] book will transform our understanding of the Nazi policies that were, Motadel writes, some ‘of the most vigorous attempts to politicize and instrumentalize Islam in modern history.’” —Dominic Green, Wall Street Journal “Motadel’s treatment of an unsavory segment of modern Muslim history is as revealing as it is nuanced. Its strength lies not just in its erudite account of the Nazi perception of Islam but also in illustrating how the Allies used exactly the same tactics to rally Muslims against Hitler. With the specter of Isis haunting the world, it contains lessons from history we all need to learn.” —Ziauddin Sardar, The Independent

The growth of Islam in Europe is reflected in the increasing numbers of Muslims in British and French prisons, but authorities have responded differently to the challenges presented by Muslim prisoners in each country. The findings of three years of intensive research in a variety of prisons show that British prisons facilitate and control the practice d of Islam, whereas French prisons discourage it and thereby sow the seeds of extremism. The policy implications of these ironic findings are examined in detail.

This book traces the global, national, and local origins of the conflict between Muslims and Jews in France, challenging the belief that rising anti-Semitism in France is rooted solely in the unfolding crisis in Israel and Palestine. Maud Mandel shows how the conflict in fact emerged from processes internal to French society itself even as it was shaped by affairs elsewhere, particularly in North Africa during the era of decolonization. Mandel examines moments in which conflicts between Muslims and Jews became a matter of concern to French police, the media, and an array of self-appointed spokesmen from both communities: Israel's War of Independence in 1948, France's decolonization of North Africa, the 1967 Arab-Israeli War, the 1968 student riots, and François Mitterrand's experiments with multiculturalism in the 1980s. She takes an in-depth, on-the-ground look at interethnic relations in Marseille, which is home to the country's largest Muslim and Jewish populations outside of Paris. She reveals how Muslims and Jews in France have related to each other in diverse ways throughout this history--as former residents of French North Africa, as immigrants competing for limited resources, as employers and employees, as victims of racist aggression, as religious minorities in a secularizing state, and as French citizens. In Muslims and Jews in France, Mandel traces the way these multiple, complex interactions have been overshadowed and obscured by a reductionist narrative of Muslim-Jewish polarization.

This book combines historical, sociological and ethnographic research methods to provide a rich and multi-faceted study of the Muslim presence in Ireland in its historical and contemporary dimensions.

State, Religion and Muslims offers a comprehensive insight into the discrimination against Muslims at the legislative, executive and judicial level across the 12 Western countries situating discriminatory practices in their institutional framework with a multidisciplinary look.

In light of cultural crises such as the Danish cartoon controversy and the terrorist attack on the Charlie Hebdo newspaper in Paris, Christopher Caldwell’s incisive perspective has never been more timely or indispensible. Reflections on the Revolution in Europe is destined to become the classic work on how Muslim immigration permanently reshaped the West. This provocative and unflinching analysis of Europe’s unexpected influx of immigrants investigates the increasingly prominent Muslim populations actively shaping the future of the continent. Muslims dominate or nearly dominate many important European cities, including Amsterdam and Rotterdam, Strasbourg and Marseille, the Paris suburbs and East London, and in those cities Islam has challenged the European way of life at every turn, becoming, in effect, an “adversary culture.” In Reflections on the Revolution in Europe, Caldwell examines the anger of natives and newcomers alike. He exposes the strange ways in which welfare states interact with Third World customs, the anti-Americanism that brings European natives and Muslim newcomers together, and the arguments over women and sex that drive them apart. He considers the appeal of sharia, “resistance,” and jihad to a second generation that is more alienated from Europe than the first, and addresses a crisis of faith among native Europeans that leaves them with a weak hand as they confront the claims of newcomers.

Bombings in London, riots in Paris, terrorists in Germany, fury over mosques, veils and cartoons--such headlines underscore the tensions between Muslims and their European hosts. Did too much immigration, or too little integration, produce Muslim second-generation anger? Is that rage imported or spawned inside Europe itself? What do the conflicts between Muslims and their European hosts portend for an America encountering its own angry Muslims?Europe's Angry Muslims traces the routes, expectations and destinies of immigrant parents and the plight of their children, transporting both the general reader and specialist from immigrants' ancestral villages to their strange new-fangled enclaves in Europe. It guides readers through Islamic nomenclature, chronicles the motive force of the Islamist narrative, offers them lively portraits of jihadists (a convict, a convert, and a community organizer) takes them inside radical mosques and into the minds of suicide bombers. The author interviews former radicals and security agents, examines court records and the sermons of radical imams and draws on a lifetime of personal experience with militant movements to present an account of the explosive fusion of Muslim immigration, Islamist grievance and second-generation alienation.Robert Leiken shines an unsentimental and yet compassionate light on Islam's growing presence in the West, combining in-depth reporting with cutting-edge and far-ranging scholarship in an engaging narrative that is both moving and mordant. Leiken's nuanced and authoritative analysis--historical, sociological, theological and anthropological--warns that "conflating rioters and Islamists, folk and fundamentalist Muslims, pietists and jihadis, immigrants and their children is the method of strategic incoherence--'in the night all cats are black.'"

This book offers a unique transdisciplinary collection of essays written by highly renowned international scholars.