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An examination of the political and sociological issues facing Muslims in Europe.
This paper aims to briefly present the basic facts and issues concerning Muslims in Europe, from a political and sociological perspective, and to offer elements of comparison with the US. There will be a slight emphasis on France, due to author's area of specialty - and to the fact that France is home to the largest Muslim population in Europe.
A few popular myths about Islam in Europe should first be dispelled, in order to grasp the real issues and challenges:
Myth #1: Being Muslim constitutes a fixed identity, sufficient to fully characterize a person.
When it comes to Muslims, people wrongly assume that religion - rather than nationality,gender, social class, etc. - necessarily trumps other identities. To take just a few examples,the Washington Post, in an article on migration to the EU (June 2008), writes about "Muslims arriving from the Middle East and Africa, and Eastern Europeans moving west", even though a) not all of the migrants from this region are Muslims, b) "Eastern Europeans" would never be labeled "Orthodox" or "Catholics", and c) that is not the issue anyway, since the article is about immigration. For a couple of weeks in November 2005, the media used the term "Muslims riots in France" to describe the wave of urban violence that resulted in burnt cars and property damage. But these riots had nothing to do with Islam, and everything to do with the social and economic conditions of largely immigrant communities. Muslim groups, who tried to play a mediating role, discovered themselves to be irrelevant and powerless.
