Islam in Europe: Current Trends and Future Challenges

Europe is changing. While this in itself is not a remarkable fact, the role of Muslim immigrants in hastening that change warrants clear-eyed analysis. Coming to grips with Europe’s changing identity must involve taking seriously the anxieties of all stakeholders and addressing the implicit legitimate values driving the conversation. The experience of Muslims in Europe holds lessons for Muslims elsewhere in the world. Media portrayals of Muslims in Europe are overwhelmingly negative. Islam is often presented as a new religion that threatens European secular values. In the American context, stereotyping of Islam in the mass media has rendered the religion a convenient replacement for the Red Menace, which replaced the Yellow Peril. Both in America and in Europe, the fear is that Islam is an alien religion bent on fragmenting long-established identities. It is one of history’s best-kept secrets, not just that Moors ruled parts of Portugal and Spain for centuries, but the extent to which Islamic culture took root and flourished in Christian Europe. Latter-day attempts to ignore the positive contributions of Islam to European identity and to conceal this peaceful coexistence cannot be innocent. A balanced reading of history would acknowledge the mutual appropriations and cross-fertilization of East and West. It is important to unearth the anxieties that necessitate such denials. The development of Muslim culture in the Iberian peninsula and the willingness of Iberian residents to convert to Islam were necessary steps in making Europeans think of themselves as a people. 1 The Umayyad caliphate that collapsed in the eleventh century succeeded in making Spain a place of intellectual openness, scientific and philosophical learning. A full accounting of European identity must include the contributions of rationalist Muslim thinkers like Al-Kindi (812–873), Al-Farabi (870–950), Ibn Sina (Avicenna, 980–1037), Al-Ghazali (1058–1111), Ibn Rushd (Averroes, 1126–1198), and Ibn Khaldun (1332–1406). It is crucial in light of this history to put in context what is written in the newspapers or said on TV about the perceived everlasting incompatibility between Islam and democracy, Islam and gender equality, Islam and modernity, and relationships between Mus