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The questions connected with the presence of Muslim migrants in Europe, both in regard to the problems they face and the challenges they raise for the host populations in European societies, are constantly evolving.  The issues that are raised today, by immigrant Muslims and by non-Muslims of the host countries, are different from those discussed and studied 10 or 20 years ago.  Moreover, the very way the questions are put has changed over the past twenty years.  As I will try to show, one can expect this conceptual evolution to continue in coming years.

In this article, I intend to explore some of the new issues that have arisen in recent years regarding Muslim presence in Europe[1] and eventually to focus on one sector of the Muslim community in Europe as emblematic of the new crises and challenges faced by European Muslims.[2]  I will center my attention on the young generation of “post-migrant” Muslims and their ways of adjusting to the often traumatic experience of in European society.

In order to understand this new generation of European Muslims, it is necessary to see them in the framework of their parents’ world, that of the Muslim migrant.

1. Taking roots in Western in Europe

The great influx of Muslim migrants to Europe took place in the early 1970s, when the rapidly expanding economies of northern Europe nations required vast numbers of skilled and unskilled workers.  This need was to a great extent fulfilled by labor contracts between host countries, such as Germany, Belgium, Netherlands, Denmark, and France, and Mediterranean states, both Christian (Italy, Greece, Spain, Portugal) and Muslim (Turkey, Morocco, and Tunisia), as well as Christians and Muslims from the then still united Yugoslavia.  The migration of Muslims from the eastern and southern shores of the Mediterranean to the Christian nations on the northern shore took place more than a decade later, in the 1980s, in an informal (and frequently illegal) manner.

The topic of the Muslim migrant in Europe, which was at first of little interest to scholars, began in the mid-1980s to attract the attention of journalists, politicians and, eventually, of sociologists and researchers on religion, when it became evident that the presence of Muslim migrants in Europe was not going to be a transitory phenomenon.  For most of the 1970s, it had been presumed that the migrants were merely serving out fixed term work contracts, upon the expiry of which they would return to their homelands.  However, even when the doors were closed to worker migration after the 1976 recession, it became clear that many of the migrant workers would not be returning to their native lands, but that they intended to remain in the European country where they had been working.

The clearest indication that the Muslim migrants were sinking permanent roots in Europe was the reunification of families.  The first wave of migrants in the 1970s consisted predominantly of young, single males, or else married men whose wives and children remained in their country of origin.  It was the psychological evolution that occurred among the migrant workers inthe 1980s and 1990s as a result of family reunification that would radically change the nature of Muslim presence in Western Europe.

There is no indication that the migrant workers in the early years of the 1970s had any thought of remaining permanently or “settling” in Europe.  Their family home was in the homeland.  Wives, supported by female relatives and grandparents, raised the children and sent them to local schools in Turkey, Morocco, etc.  The breadwinner in Europe was felt to be living in an abnormal situation far from the daily life of the extended family.  The husband would return home for summer vacation or perhaps, if he were fortunate, Ramadan and Id al-Fitr, at which time he could expect to be treated as an honored guest in the home.  However, this artificial and anomalous situation was expected eventually to come to an end when the father returned to the family for good.

The experience of countless Muslim migrants in Europe in the decade between 1976-1985 showed that things did not work out that way for many migrants.  When their contracts expired, many returned home, but many others signed on indefinitely at the same jobs or else found new work that imposed no fixed term to employment.

This brought about dramatic changes in the way the migrants regarded their new countries.  Europe was no longer simply the location of temporary employment and economic support for one’s distant family.  It came to be seen as a place where one might expect to live out one’s years (at least, until the far-off year of retirement, when many migrants still hoped to return to their homelands), raise one’s family, and create a familiar environment in which one might live comfortably within a circle of friends, relations, and neighbors.

As a consequence of this changed mentality, rudimentary social structures among Muslim migrants in Europe, began to be replaced, in the early 1980s, with more stable institutions.  As the migrants began bringing their families to live with them in Europe, children were sent to local schools, becoming, in some cases, a majority of the pupils.  Through the schoolchildren, the national European language would increasingly infiltrate the home and, along with the language, European customs, mores and values.

Neighborhood support systems grew up among wives and mothers, usually based on common locality of origin in the homeland.  Coffeehouses, social clubs, Turkish baths, groceries, restaurants and barbershops where Arabic, Turkish or Urdu was normally spoken transformed European cities like Paris and Marseilles, Berlin and Dusseldorf, Birmingham and Leeds into multiethnic, multireligious cities.

In these cities and in many others like them, neighborhoods changed quickly as a result of family reunification, since the presence of wives and children demanded that Muslim migrants find more adequate accommodation than the rooming houses which had sufficed for single men.  Generally, the migrants could afford only the lowest rents, which meant that they moved into older, run-down areas which frequently came to be regarded as “migrant ghettos.”  In England and France, public housing estates created predominantly Muslim neighborhoods and bidonvilles.

Areas which were undesirable for one reason or another became predominantly migrant.  A typical example is the Kreuzberg district of Berlin, where the division of the city in 1974 turned the area from being a solidly middle class district to an inconveniently located pocket, bounded on three sides by the Wall and virtually isolated from the rest of West Berlin.  The consequent low rents drew Turkish workers who were pouring into West Berlin to replace the East German workers prevented by the Wall from continuing their employment in the West.  The inexpensive housing in Kreuzberg also attracted artists, adherents to anarchist movements and those politically on the far left, and diverse unconventional groups who rejected the prosperous materialism of post-war Western Europe.  A casualty of the 1992 reunification of Berlin is the fact that the Kreuzberg area has become once again a desirable, centrally located neighborhood and hence increasingly unaffordable both to Muslim migrants and to their low-rent neighbors.

2. Meeting religious needs

In the early years of the 1970s, when the Muslim migrant community was still mainly unmarried males, makeshift prayer halls were common.  Living rooms, garages, basements, union lodges, school classrooms, and Christian parish facilities were sufficient for the modest locational demands of Islamic prayer.

With the growth of stable communities in Europe and increasing numbers of families and children arriving, Islamic religious needs have d to be met in a more highly organized way.  Informal places of prayer have been replaced by permanent mosques, which serve not only for the daily prayers, but also for Qur’an and Arabic classes, for community celebrations such as marriage, circumcision, reunion, and anniversary.  In nations where many migrants have obtained citizenship and the right to vote, the mosques also serve as centers for discussion, debate and local politicking.

In some of the major cities of Europe, such as London, Paris, Vienna, Brussels, Rome, and Frankfurt, grandiose Islamic Centers were constructed.  These have had relatively little impact on the life of ordinary Muslim migrants.  Oriented towards diplomatic communities and educated professionals, the Islamic Centers are usually located in prestigious neighborhoods where the migrants do not live and often are not welcome, or on extensive suburban tracts which are difficult to reach by public transportation, the migrants’ usual means of conveyance.

More important for the daily religious life of Muslims are the local neighborhood mosques and prayer-halls.  As Muslim migrants moved into older, more central neighborhoods, often located conveniently near the urban train stations, resident Europeans tended to move away, generally to newer housing in suburban areas.  Since Muslims were effectively replacing non-Muslim - usually Christian - Europeans in the cities, the Muslims’ need for mosques coincided with a superfluity of unused churches among Christians.  The fact that churches in many cities have been purchased by Muslim groups and transformed into mosques is consequently less indicative of the relative health of Christianity and Islam in Europe than of demographic changes introduced by the presence of Muslim migrants in those cities.

3.  Obtaining imams

In some ways, the problem of finding proper religious leadership has been more difficult for Muslims in Europe to resolve than that of obtaining places to pray.  It is often said, both by Muslims and by non-Muslim observers, that there is no priesthood in Islam.  It is true, particularly in Sunni Islam, that no one is ordained to carry out certain ritual duties that could not be done by any other Muslim who knows the proper procedure.

Religious leadership in Islam has always been flexibly organized in that the various services to the religious community may be carried out by the same person or by a variety of individuals.  The imam is the prayer leader.  The mu’ezzin makes the call to prayer; the khatib gives the Friday sermon; the mufti offers legal opinions on matters of legality and morality; the ustadh teaches the Qur’an, Arabic, and religious studies generally; the qadi acts as judge in religious tribunals; the shaykh (Arabic), pir (Persian), or ishan (Turkish) is the spiritual director.  The same person, or any combination of people, might perform each of these services, so long as one were suitably trained.

Those who affirm that there is a type of clergy in Islam refer primarily to sociological roles.  Particularly as government policy towards religious education in the Muslim world has developed in this century, the imam is trained to be an all-purpose religious functionary.  He is not only the prayer leader who also preaches the Friday sermon and teaches the Qur’an and Arabic, but he plays also many of the sociological roles that have been traditionally carried out in Christian milieux by the clergy.

He is the respected person to whom ordinary believers turn in times of confusion and moral dilemma for advice on spiritual, economic, and familial matters, from whom they seek consolation and encouragement in times of distress and tragedy, the one from whom believers solicit God’s blessings on hopes, projects, and properties.  He is expected to preside by leading a prayer at communitarian functions and family celebrations such as circumcision and marriage.  He is the one around whom the local organizational life of the community takes place and who is acknowledged as unofficial spokesman for the local worshiping community in relations with those outside the umma.

During the past 50 years, while the sociological position of the Christian clergy has diminished considerably, particularly in Western Europe and North America, the role of the imam in most predominantly Muslim areas has been correspondingly enhanced.  If anything, his role today is stronger than it was 100 years ago.  The modern Muslim state, by laying down regulations for the training of imams, whether in traditional religious institutes or in modern theological faculties, and through examinations to certify their credentials, has actually strengthened the sociological role of the imam by transforming him into a type of Muslim cleric.

At the same time, many modern Muslim states, by arrogating to themselves the privileges of making appointments and conferring benefices, of providing monthly stipends, of producing and distributing obligatory Friday sermon outlines, and of supervising pious foundations (awqâf), in short, by enforcing their power to reward the compliant and to control or punish the recalcitrant, have sought to make the imam into a carefully regulated civil servant.

In neighborhoods of Muslim migrants in Europe, the desire for an imam was felt by migrant groups as early as the late 1970s.  This was handled differently by Muslims of various nationalities, and resulted in quite different solutions proposed or imposed by the governments of the migrants’ countries of provenance.  Of those nations providing the largest numbers of migrants, Turkey and Morocco exemplify contrasting policies on the matter of providing imams for Muslims in Europe.

Of all Muslim majority nations, the Republic of Turkey is, with the possible exception of several ex-Soviet Central Asian states, the most militantly secular.  At the other pole, Morocco is as near to a theocracy as can be found in the Muslim world.  The King bears the title of “Commander of the Faithful,” and more often than not presides at national ceremonial occasions as Islamic leader dressed in religious garb.  Thus, it is ironic that while the Kingdom of Morocco has had little official involvement in the organizational life of Moroccan Muslims in Europe or in the appointment of Moroccan imams and religion teachers, the secular government of the Republic of Turkey has undertaken to supervise and administer both efforts.

Unlike most Muslim majority countries, the Republic of Turkey, as a secular state, has no Ministry of Religious Affairs.  Islamic concerns are handled by the Presidency of Religious Affairs which, through bilateral agreements with countries such as Germany and the Netherlands, has agreed to train and examine prospective imams for Turkish communities in Europe, to appoint imams at European mosques for limited terms, to provide textbooks and teachers for Islamic education and Turkish language studies, and to organize an annual series of Ramadan lectures to be delivered by nationally recognized professors of religious studies.

Critics charge that this extensive commitment on the part of the Turkish government is not entirely disinterested.  By organizing and monitoring each step of the process of preparing, selecting, and providing imams, the Turkish government is able to control decisions over who is sent, how the imams are trained, and when they are to be replaced.  In this way, imam candidates who are outspoken critics of the Turkish government or military, those suspect of subversion or extremism, and members of banned parties or separatist movements can all be prevented from attaining positions of prominence and influence among Turks resident in Europe.

In addition to those mosques and imams which are officially supported and supervised by the Presidency of Religious Affairs, there are also independent Turkish mosques throughout Northern Europe whose imams are trained and sent by independent Muslim organizations such as the Süleymaniye and the various movements inspired by the thought of Said Nursi or who represent ethnically distinct Muslim groups such as the Kurds.  There are frequently tensions between the officially sanctioned mosques and imams and the independent mosques which are frequently critical of the Turkish government.

Turkey’s policy regarding imams for Muslims in Europe is not followed by other nations of Muslim provenance.  Neither blessed by government support nor hindered by official interference, Arabic-speaking and Urdu-speaking Muslim communities have resorted to other means of obtaining an imam.  In the past, imams were found in casual ways, through informal networks of friends, family ties, classmates and local contacts in the country of origin.  However, in recent years, a method rapidly gaining in popularity resembles that of elders in many Protestant congregations, by whom it was perhaps inspired.  A committee of mosque trustees invites candidates to meet the committee, present their academic and religious credentials, and perhaps preach a sermon.  When the trustees make their decision and choose an imam, they sign a contract for a mutually agreed upon term.  In this way, the imam is directly responsible to the trustees and can be dismissed should he prove unsatisfactory.

While it is not uncommon in Europe to find neighborhood mosques indiscriminately serving Arab Muslims from many countries, Turks, Kurds and Cypriots, Bosnians, Wolof-speaking Senegalese, Persians and Pathans, mosque communities more often tend to be formed on the bases of ethnic, linguistic, and cultural unity.  The attraction is mainly linguistic in that while Muslims are united in their use of Arabic in prayer and recitation of the Qur’an, worshiping Muslims would prefer to hear the Friday sermon in their own language and to associate freely in their native tongue with Muslims from the same nation or region.

4. Meeting educational needs

The growing number of children among migrants settled in Europe has necessitated decisions regarding education.  The generally superior school systems in most European countries has been one of the most attractive features favoring permanent settlement of migrants.  At the same time, education has provided migrant families with a new series of dilemmas.

In European schools, children of migrants are educated in the national language, which means that the bonds of language to their homeland are inevitably loosened.  The children eventually become more literate in the European tongue studied at school than in their native language.   Parents have discovered that their children often protest against being forced to study Turkish, Arabic, Bengali etc. after school hours or on Sunday.  The children often feel that the study of what they consider “their parents’” language at hours when their European classmates are enjoying themselves to be an unwelcome, tiresome, irrelevant burden.  Migrant parents are torn between the desire to see their children attain acceptance by friends and success in European society and a longing to have the children retain their national roots.

More worrisome for migrant parents are the European values which their children learn along with the sciences and humanities.  Liberal ideals of personal autonomy and fulfillment, a critical attitude towards tradition and religion, human rights of the individual, equivalent gender roles, and an internalized personal morality, are unfamiliar and threatening concepts for many migrant parents.  The corresponding devaluation of traditional religious values such as obedience to authority, socially transmitted and enforced ethical principles, and the centrality of the extended family in a God-centered universe has provided much material for recurrent intergenerational conflicts.

While Muslim migrants welcome the freedom to worship and organize guaranteed by the European societies, they are often alarmed by the results of secularization which they encountered.  They are particularly concerned about the influence of sexual license, drugs, and alcohol on their children.  The absence, in many sectors of Western society, of religious practice or values engender fears that their children also will abandon religious faith.

The prevalence of secular attitudes in state school systems has led many migrant parents to send their children, often at considerable financial sacrifice, to Christian schools, in the hope that there religious values would be communicated to their children.  In countries such as Belgium and England, the large enrollment of Muslim children in schools operated by Christian churches has resulted in some Christian schools having a majority of Muslim students and led to a reexamination of the nature and goals of programs of Christian education.

The pattern of Muslim students in Christian schools is most pronounced in England and Scotland, where most Muslim children are of Pakistani or Bangladeshi origin.  In the countries of origin, it had been common practice for families of the economic and political elite to educate their children in Church-operated schools.  In Europe, migrants discovered that these educational opportunities were also available to those of more modest economic and social status.

Whether their children are in state schools or in those run by the churches, the migrant parents have sought an environment in which the basic obligations of Islamic life can be practiced and where its fundamental values will be respected.  They request the availability of alternative halal meals when  pork is served and permission for the children to observe major Islamic feasts.  They want the separation of sexes in physical activities, modesty of dress for boys and girls in mixed company, and religious norms in sex education.  When Christian instruction is available for Christian children, they ask that instruction in the Islamic faith be made available for Muslims.

Educational systems and policies in European nations vary greatly in their response to the demands of Muslim parents.[3]  In France, the strong tradition of laïcité in education and government has been challenged in recent years by Muslim parents in regard to the wearing of headscarves by Muslim schoolgirls, although a recent survey of opinion in France indicates that most Muslims in France consider the question one of marginal interest[4].

In Germany, where education is the responsibility of individual states (Länder), more flexible educational policies have enabled the states to provide language and religious instruction to the children of migrants.  The German states provide for complementary mother-tongue education whereby Turkish teachers, recruited from Turkey when necessary, are employed on a contract basis.  Through agreements drawn up between individual states and the Turkish government, the Turkish authorities take direct responsibility for Turkish-media instruction, employing teachers, fixing curriculum, and providing textbooks.  In Germany, religious instruction usually finds its place within the mother-tongue curriculum, along with language and literature, history and civics.

5. Heterogeneous nature of Muslim migrants

The highly heterogeneous nature of Muslim migrant communities underlines the necessity of careful distinctions when treating their situation in European nations today.  The Muslim migrants are of diverse ethnic, linguistic, national and racial backgrounds, each with its own history, culture, language and pattern of family ties, religious practice, and political outlook.

Moreover, the European states differ widely in their laws and policies in regard to migrants.  Not only in the aforementioned matter of education, but also in questions of civil status, religious recognition, employment patterns, political participation and, in general, the openness of society to newcomers, there is wide variation from one European nation to another.

Factors of colonial history and policy as well as actual relations with the countries of provenance cannot be discounted in forming attitudes which affect the relations between migrants and the host societies.  An issue that might be resolved relatively easily in one country, such as that of religious education in Germany, can elsewhere become, as has the question of headscarves in France, a national crisis.

All these factors strongly affect the ways that the new generation of post-migrant Muslims relate to the societies of the European countries in which they were born.  It is to this new generation of Muslim youths in Europe that I devote the remainder of this article.

6. Post-migrant Muslims of Europe

The term “post-migrant Muslims” refers to the growing number of children born to Muslim parents in European countries.  They do not consider themselves migrants and reject the term which implies that they have come from somewhere else.  They prefer to refer to themselves as “minority communities” within their respective countries.

They have little knowledge of the country of their parents’ origin and often show little interest in political, religious, and social developments in that country.  A typical attitude was well expressed in a discussion group of young Muslims in Glasgow in 1992, when the spokesman stated: “Our parents and grandparents came from Pakistan, but we know nothing about Pakistan.  We have no interest in going to Pakistan.  We wouldn’t know how to live if we went there. We don’t know any of the languages of Pakistan.  We are Muslims, Scottish Muslims, and we are building a Scottish Islam.”

One hears the same kind of statement from Dutch and German youths with Turkish names, but for whom Turkey is a very foreign nation, and from French Muslims of Algerian origin.  Although mother tongue language instruction is offered students in both Germany and the Netherlands, teachers complain of a lack of interest on the part of the students, for whom Western European languages are the key to educational and occupational advancement.

The dilemma facing these young people is that while they are not Algerian, Turkish, Pakistani etc., neither are they truly French, German, English etc.  Many feel distant, geographically and emotionally, from the country of their parents’ origin, yet they do not feel fully accepted in the country where they were born.

In a recent survey of Muslim youths in Europe, two-thirds had claimed to have experienced some form of discrimination.  While sometimes based on color or language, religion can often be a basis of discrimination.  School textbooks frequently give inaccurate, biased, negative information about Islam, although a number of European countries have now undertaken an examination of textbooks to discover cases of overt or subtle discrimination.

A negative media image of Islam and Muslims contributes to their feelings of alienation and low self-esteem. They often find themselves victims of suspicion, exclusion, and aggression.  At times of international crises, such as the Palestinian national struggle, the Algerian civil strife, the Kurdish insurgency, and the Gulf War, the frustration and apprehension of Europeans are often directed against the nearest Muslims at hand.  At an European youth congress, a Dutch student of Turkish descent recalled at an international youth meeting how during the Gulf War he was repeatedly challenged about the actions of “his Saddam Hussein” and his “violent fellow Muslims”even though he personally was neither interested in politics nor a practicing Muslim, and despite the fact that Turkey, where he had never lived, was an active participant in opposing the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait.

Not all the problems of Muslim youth in Europe arise from discrimination.  Some are endemic to their social status as children of immigrant, working class families among whom the national language - German, French, Swedish, English, etc. - is little used at home.  Muslim migrants tend to come from the most economically and culturally disadvantaged sectors of their native countries.  The migrant fathers, who usually migrated earlier and are forced to speak the national language at work, generally have a functional command of the European country.  The mothers, from whom children first learn to speak, whose circle of acquaintances is often limited to friends and neighborhood contacts, often have but a rudimentary knowledge of the host language.

This language gap is frequently not overcome during the years of schooling.  The more competitive and sought-after a particular program or school, the less likely that children of Muslim migrants will participate.  They intuit a general attitude, sometimes also conveyed by their own parents, that the only occupations open to “migrant” youth are either the lowest-paid and dirtiest forms of manual labor or, at best, running small shops.  Hence, it is not surprising that the drop-out rate of Muslim minority children in Western European countries is high.

Particular difficulties face young women of migrant background.  Their parents had usually come from societies where the role of women was centered about the home and family, where women lacked the social mobility available to men.  Proper dress and social behavior, particularly in relation to associating with men, were taught and often imposed by the family.  Young women educated in European school systems have come to adopt notions of female equality and mobility that are contradictory to those of their parents, as well as a preference of forms of dress, music, and entertainment enjoyed by their European companions.

The family conflicts that arise from the clash of mores has not infrequently resulted in alienation from the family and even in violence.  Women’s centers in Europe can testify to examples of  young women who have suffered psychological or physical harm at the hands of irate fathers or brothers.  One must be careful, however, not to exaggerate the frequency of this problem.  Most migrant families have adjusted well to European mores and have welcomed the educational and occupational opportunities for women  in Europe. 

The reactions of second or third generation Muslim minority youth to the pressures of life in European society are varied.  One can distinguish four mutually diverse reactions:

1. Maladjustment.  The first is destructive and self-destructive anger.  In too many countries, a negative self-image caused by relatively poor performance in school, conflict and turmoil in the family due to cultural and generational differences, and experiences of discrimination or a lack of acceptance lead young people to adopt anti-social behavior.

The phenomenon of Muslim youth in prison, in almost all Western European countries, beyond their proportional percentage in the population (in the Netherlands, the number of Muslim prisoners is said to reach 25% of the total number of prisoners in the jails), attests to this lack of adjustment to European society.  This maladjustment is seen in crimes of trafficking in drugs or acts of violence often committed in circumstances of alcoholic consumption and family disputes.

2. Assimilation.  A second reaction is a acceptance of secular European values.  Particularly among those whose experiences of life in Europe have been mainly positive, they live in ways that are indistinguishable from other Europeans.  They may show little or no interest in Islam or any other religion, and are not strongly influenced by Islamic ritual or ethical precepts, much less by Muslim communitarian projects.  They often take active part in secular organizations with social or political goals, and distance themselves from traditional celebrations, feasts, and cultural forms connected with the homeland of their migrant parents.

These well-assimilated young people look upon themselves as modern Europeans for whom their migrant ancestry is irrelevant to their European way of life.  Engaged in building a life for themselves in secular Europe, they seek to minimize those elements of their upbringing that would separate them from other Europeans and to avoid whatever could reinforce or perpetuate the forms of prejudice or discrimination they might have experienced in the past.

While these first two responses to life in European societies  are not explicitly religious, they are not incompatible with deep religious needs.  Muslim prison chaplains testify to the spiritual longing of those incarcerated for criminal activities, while secularized youths of migrant background often exhibit the same eclectic fascination with the sacred found among other modern young people.  By contrast, the next two responses to European life are explicitly religious.

3. Rejection.  Some young Muslims are attracted to movements that reject a many Western values.[5]  In Islam they claim to find a superior civilization, based on divine revelation and offering a more decent and just way of life.  Especially among those for whom life in Europe has not been a positive experience, they are attracted by an interpretation of Islam that is scornful of their milieu.  They regard modern European society as decadent, a triumph of materialistic atheism and hedonistic self-centeredness, and reject liberal values as the product of human arrogance and economic aggressiveness.  They judge casual promiscuity and self-destructive activity like drugs and alcohol as the inevitable outcome of societies in which God’s will is violated or ignored.

In their harsh judgment on European societies, they turn to a concept of Islam which represents the antithesis of European values.  For them, God has delivered a clear message regarding the way humans should live in this world and organize society.  It is incumbent on those who believe in God to work to establish  a God-centered world in according with the teachings of the Qur’an.  They see it as their mission to “save” Europe from itself by offering Europeans the one, true message of Islam and ambitiously speak of “Islamizing Europe.”[6]  They are often critical of their migrant parents whose Islamic commitment they regard as complacent and compromised.

These groups, who are referred to in the press as “fundamentalist,” may support radical Islamic political options in predominantly Muslim  countries, whether they be governments in power as in Iran and the Sudan, or Muslim movements engaged in a struggle for power like the GIA in Algeria and HAMAS in Palestine.  The influence of radical groups among European Muslims should not be overestimated.  A recent survey in France has shown that very few Muslims belong to or support radical movements and organizations.[7]          

4. Integration.  It would seem that relatively few religious Muslim youths in Europe sympathize with radical forms of Islam.  The majority are devout Muslims, for whom their religion is not only an important part of their personal identity, but an effective means to worship God and do God’s will.[8]  However, growing to maturity in the modern European context, it is not possible for them to have the same understanding of Islam as professed by their parents.  They can be quite critical of the Muslim tradition as it has been handed down to them.  They often accuse their parent’s generation of confusing Islam with traditional values, folkloric customs, and popular religiosity.  They criticize governments and movements in predominantly Muslim countries of politicizing Islam and utilizing religious ideals  for purposes of ambition, wealth, and political power.

They are seeking and, in fact, engaged in building a European Islam that is devoutly obedient before God, dynamic in its approach to societal obligations, and eager to integrate what is best in European values into a distinctively Islamic vision of society.  This new development of a truly European Islam must not be underestimated.  It is widely discussed by young Muslim believers in many European countries and is gaining strength in national and continental organizations.

6. Intercreation

As Muslim post-migrant youth seek to assess realistically their place in European society, they realize that they are culturally part of Europe, where they were born, and that their future is not to be found in the nations from which their parents migrated.     Many are convinced that they have something valuable they offer and that as children of migrant families and specifically as Muslims they can make an important contribution to European civilization.

Yet they know that this is often not the way they are regarded by their fellow Europeans.  Even as they do not see themselves as unproductive parasites, burdens, or disruptive elements in the nations in which they live, they are constantly aware of the negative stereotypes that they face daily, a sense of “foreignness” or “strangeness” that they seem powerless to overcome.  A Swiss-born Muslim of Egyptian descent claims that at the heart of Europeans’ distrust of Muslims lies the suspicion that the Muslims themselves want to keep separate: “Suspicion is the rule about the Muslims’ true belonging.  They have come to the West to take advantage of material progress and to earn money, but their hearts are elsewhere.  They are but ‘profiteers,’ and we now hear the same reproaches which used to be expressed about Jews.”[9] The difference between their own self-perception as Europeans and the way they are often regarded by fellow Europeans has led many young European Muslims to reevaluate their place in European society.  

They see themselves as involved in creating a new cultural synthesis that is neither specifically French nor Algerian, Turkish nor German, Pakistani nor English, but something that brings together elements from their parents’ culture and that of the host societies.[10]  Dress, television, music, transportation, city planning, and daily schedules all raise challenges for Muslims in Europe that necessitate “being Muslim” in a different way from that practiced in previous ages and places.

In the past decade, young Muslims from various European countries have been discussing these issues in international fora.  In 1993, in Strasbourg, the term intercreation was coined to express this ongoing cultural dialogue, and the neologism has caught on among minority youths.  Intercreation involves an affirmation of the many positive qualities of European life in which they believe and are committed to promote, but it also means refusing to assimilate European values to the point that their own cultural uniqueness is denied or minimized.  This concept arises from a frank and reasonable assessment of the fact that they were raised in an environment that is different from the majority in their respective nations and that out of the dialogue between their two cultures they are engaged in creating something new, hence the term intercreation.

To skeptics, this assessment may seem overly optimistic, but many young Muslims in Europe hold that it combines an idealistic desire to make a positive contribution with one’s life with a realistic evaluation of their place in European society.  They suggest that their religious beliefs, cultural traditions and experiences of being a minority can be employed in providing new insights and energies that will enrich European societies.[11]

This evaluation is supported by evidence that Muslim presence has already irreversibly transformed European society.  “Paki” food shops have become an integral feature of British neighborhoods, while basic services in many sectors of German life are totally dependent on Turkish workers.  Muslim immigrants in Europe are not only providing services, but universities are beginning to turn out professionals in medical, scientific, and educational fields whose parents migrated from Muslim areas.[12]

A cultural transformation has already begun to take place, in which it is not only the Muslim migrants who are making the changes.  In the relatively banal but not insignificant area of cuisine, couscous has become a part of every day life in France, just as döner kebap in Germany, rijstafel in the Netherlands and biriani in England are all halal Muslim dishes which are now featured in the daily cuisine for Muslims and non-Muslims alike in those countries.  Moreover, as more and more non-Muslim immigrant Chinese and Vietnamese have come to open and operate döner stands in cities like Berlin and Munich, it is clear that this Turkish dish is no longer associated with its country of origin, but has become standard German fare.

Elsewhere, Muslim graduates of academies of fine arts are beginning to make names for themselves in typically European art forms such as sculpture, painting, film, ballet, and music.  One might note, for example, the strong participation of Arabs, mainly of Algerian origin, in modern French literature and in joint cinema productions.[13]

This does not mean that integration of Muslims in Europe is coming about without problems.  Tensions continue to arise, exacerbated by expressions of racist intolerance, conflicts with national policy, and the effects of international events.  The coming decades will be crucial in determining how young Muslims in Europe will react to the societies in which they were born.  Self-destruction, assimilation, rejection, and intercreation are  all viable possibilities facing post-migrant Muslims.

However, it is not they alone who will be changing and developing in coming decades.  Much of what will seem possible in their own choices of values and attitudes will depend on how each European  society develops in its attitudes towards them.  Continuing discrimination and racism will encourage destructive and rejectionist responses.  Attitudes of welcome and encouragement will encourage assimilation and intercreation.

Thomas Michel, S.J.

[1]I will not offer a survey of Muslims in Europe nor a summary of statistics.  For those interested, the works by F. Dassetto and A. Bastenier, Europa: nuova frontiera dell’Islam (Roma, 1988) and J. Nielsen, Muslims in Western Europe (Edinburgh, 1992) are among the most useful.  An article of mine in La Civiltà Cattolica (IV, 1992) attempts to present an introduction to the problematic.

[2]Our focus here is mainly on Western Europe, as the problematic of Muslims in Eastern Europe is quite different.  Among the Muslims of Eastern Europe there are few “migrants,” the vast majority being descendants of Muslims who have lived there for centuries.  In fact, Eastern Europe has seen a net emigration of Muslims from the area in the 20th century.

[3]Cf. the section ‘Problemi d’istruzione,’ in my article  “I musulmani in Europa,” La Civiltà Cattolica, (IV, 1992), pp.  362-375, esp. pp. 369-373.

[4]A 1994 survey of Muslims in France revealed that only 22% favored the wearing of headscarves by Muslim schoolgirls.  Alain Woodrow, “Islam à la Française,” The Tablet, 12 November 1994, p. 1437.

[5]These groups have not been greatly studied by scholars.  One careful treatment is Gilles Kepel’s study of the G.I.F. (Groupement islamique en France) in his Les banlieues de l’Islam Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1987, pp. 263-267.

[6]Cf., for example, the call of Cheikh Faiçal Maulaoui in Paris, in Kepel, Les banlieues, pp. 259-260.

[7]The aforementioned survey of Muslims in France showed that only 7% had a favorable opinion of FIS (the Algerian “Front Islamique du Salut”).  Woodrow, “Islam à la Française,” p. 1437.

[8]In the French survey, 76% of Muslim youths in France observed the Ramadan fast, 64% refrain from alcohol, and 65% hope someday to make the pilgrimage to Mecca.  Woodrow, p. 1437.

[9]Tariq Ramadan, To Be a European Muslim, Leicester: The Islamic Foundation, 1999.

[10]Some of the issues facing Muslims living in modern European societies are treated by the sociologist Akbar S. Ahmed in “Culture and Change,” in his Postmodernism and Islam, London: Routledge, 1992, pp. 192-221.

[11]In the aforementioned survey of Muslims in France, fully 95% believe that “it is possible to be totally integrated into French society and practice Islam.”  Woodrow, p. 1437.

[12]In fact, the occupational situation of Muslims is changing.  A recent study shows that 10-15% of Muslim families in Britain are from the professional or managerial sectors.  Iqbal Wahhab, Muslims in Britain: Profile of a Community, London: Runnymede Trust, 1989, pp. 11-12.

[13]Bruno Etienne, La France et l’Islam, Paris: Hachette, 1989, pp. 159-163.