The Emancipation of Europe's Muslims: The State's Role in Minority Integration

Abstract

Muslims are the largest religious minority in Western Europe, and they are growing much faster than the historically dominant Roman Catholic and Protestant churches. This fact alone makes the place of Islam in Europe a topic worthy of consideration, but when one further bears in mind that political controversy concerning the rights and status of Muslims has visited every country in the region, it seems inevitable that this will be a salient issue for the coming decades in European politics and society. As such, Jonathan Laurence's book is an insightful and important contribution to a growing literature on the issue of Muslims in Europe. Focusing his attention on the seven European countries with the largest Muslim minorities—Belgium, France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Spain, and the United Kingdom—Laurence argues that states have “followed remarkably similar pathways in managing their relations with Islam” (pp. 14–15). The common trajectory among the disparate states is an initial phase (1960–90) when European governments “outsourced” the management of Islam to others, specifically to foreign embassies. These embassies wanted to control the religious life of their expatriate communities (p. 38), which European states encouraged because of a conviction that Muslim foreign workers would eventually return to their country of origin (pp. 30–31). Given such an assumption, states had no incentive to pursue policies to integrate Muslims into the values of their host country. Thus, any supposed failure on the part of Muslims to assimilate into the values of the West was partly a consequence of state actions that actively discouraged them from doing so.