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NoonPodcast نون بودكاست · Muslims in Europe: A precarious reality and integration as the toughest challengeWhile the relationship between Muslims and Europe stretches back several centuries, real attention to it came only after the latest waves of migration in the current decade, which peaked in 2015. That prompted both the West and the East alike to place this issue on the table of political and social debate, especially as it fueled the growth of the far right, whose strongest slogan is opposition to minorities and migrants in general.
At Noon Post, through the “Muslims of Europe” file, we will shed light on the reality of Muslims across European countries in general: their issues and concerns, their problems and challenges, levels of integration within European society and its dilemmas, their ability to overcome the impasse of “Islamophobia,” and the obstacles standing in the way. In the first report of this file, we take a brief tour across the map of Muslim communities in the Old Continent, the history of their presence, and the ways they are dealing with current challenges.
Muslims in Europe
It is worth noting that there is no precise, up-to-date official census indicating the number of Muslims in Europe today. However, according to estimates by the German archive center for Islam (DEI Institute), the number of Muslims in the Old Continent stands at 53 million, making up 5.2 percent of the population if the European part of Turkey is included. The US-based Pew Research Center, meanwhile, estimated that in EU countries alone they numbered about 25.8 million people across 30 countries, accounting for 4.9 percent of Europe’s population in 2016, and indicated that this share could reach 8 percent by 2030.
Historical background
Europe became acquainted with Islam in the mid-seventh century AD through Islamic expansion under Ottoman rule, and the islands and coasts along the Mediterranean were the first gateway through which Islam entered the European continent.
The beginning was in eastern Europe, where Islam spread widely in the countries of southeastern Europe and the Balkans. The Ottomans succeeded in giving those cities and countries a European character with a Turkish imprint, especially among Gorani, Bosniak, and Albanian Muslims, in addition to the spread of Muslim communities in Russia, Crimea, and Chechnya.
On the western side, Al-Andalus was the great gateway for Islam’s entry into Europe. After Muslims took control of it, it became a beacon of knowledge and religion impossible to miss, and it was able to radiate a light that illuminated the skies of London, Paris, Berlin, and other European capitals that drew from Islamic civilization what qualified them for leadership and progress to this day.
The entry of Muslims into Europe was not the entry of conquerors, as some promote. Rather, the West at that time was in dire need of someone to transmit to it the civilization of the Muslims, whose fame had spread after the contributions they made in service of humanity across all fields, in an attempt to benefit from it in a way that would move them from their miserable reality at the time to something better a fact documented in the writings of fair-minded Western scholars themselves.
The growing number of Muslims
Under the headline “Europe’s growing Muslim population,” Britain’s The Guardian published a report reviewing Europe’s fears over the growing number of Muslims in ways that could alter the continent’s demographic map. Since 2014, Europe has seen a major increase in the number of arriving Muslims unlike anything it had experienced before.
The report predicted that if fertility rates remain at current levels, the share of Muslims in some countries will rise rapidly. It cited Germany, where the Muslim share is expected to increase from 6.1 percent of the total population in 2016 to 19.7 percent in 2050 more than tripling. In Poland, it is expected to rise from 0.1 percent to 0.2 percent, equivalent to a 100 percent increase.
Some may question the objectivity of those figures given the efforts European governments are making to close their borders to eastern migration waves. But the US-based Pew Center noted that the proportion of Muslims will rise even if all 28 EU states, along with Norway and Switzerland, close their doors, due to higher fertility rates and younger age profiles compared with Europe’s aging population and declining fertility rates. Statistics indicate that Muslims under age 15 make up about 27 percent of their total population, compared with only 15 percent among non-Muslims.
The researchers behind the Pew report expected the number of Muslims in some European countries to triple at a minimum by 2050, through three migration scenarios that would have a clear impact on the size of the Muslim population on the continent:
The first scenario: assumes no Muslim migration to Europe at all. In that case, the share would rise from 4.9 percent to 7.4 percent. France is expected to account for the largest share of that increase, with Muslims rising from 8.8 percent currently to 12.7 percent by 2050, excluding Cyprus, where Muslims account for more than 25 percent because of Turkish Cypriots.
The second scenario: points to moderate Muslim migration to Europe. Here, the share would rise relatively in some countries, most notably Sweden, where it is likely to reach 20.5 percent, while in Britain it would increase from 6.3 percent in 2016 to 16.7 percent, and in Finland from 2.7 percent to 11.4 percent. This would be the case in most western European countries in particular.
The third scenario: assumes high migration due to political or security circumstances. In that case, the proportion would rise at rates greater than expected, with Sweden taking the lion’s share of Muslims as a percentage of the total population at 30.6 percent, followed by Finland at 15 percent and Norway at 17 percent.
The report concluded that the proportion of the Muslim minority will inevitably increase year after year, regardless of migration patterns. This has alarmed many European thinkers and leaders, especially those on the far right, who have repeatedly warned in their crude racist way of the danger this increase poses to the future of the continent’s people, and have called for confronting Muslims and drying up their sources in European countries.
The expanding role of Muslims
The difference between Europe before knowing Islam and Europe after it is vast. Muslims enriched the West in general with major contributions in every field, refuting the false narrative recently circulated by Europe’s far right that Muslims and migrants are a “drain” and a “burden” on their countries.
In his article in the London-based newspaper Al-Hayat, writer Mohammed Bakri reviews the contours of Muslims’ role in Europe, noting that before Arab Muslims entered Italy and Sicily, Europe was immersed in darkness and suffering from chaos, as acknowledged by fair-minded European thinkers. But with the arrival of Islamic civilization, the dark continent moved into realms of light and civilizational brilliance.
Bakri points out that, without exception, Europe’s capitals sent scientific missions to Muslim Andalusia to receive Arab and Islamic knowledge and ideas and draw from Islamic civilization. This can be seen through the contributions of Arab and Muslim scholars to reviving European civilization, at a time when Muslim scholars were the most trusted reference point for both East and West alike.
Historians note that the sciences of agriculture, industry, medicine, pharmaceuticals, chemistry, music, and even the military arts that Europe now celebrates all derive in their origins from Islamic and Arab civilization. Some of the Muslim giants of those sciences still have their names engraved in gold on the walls of the world’s universities and major research centers.
The report prepared by historian Emily Greble and published by Chatham House is among the most valuable reports to address Muslims’ contributions in Europe despite the restrictions they face, especially from the far right. In her book “Muslims and the Making of Modern Europe,” Greble spoke of Muslims’ pivotal contribution to shaping the meanings of European citizenship through “reworking both imperial secular norms and Islamic legal rulings to fit their unique context in step with the developments of the age.”
Among the most famous remarks made in praise of Muslims’ role in Europe is what the Western thinker Diehl said: “The Arabs brought with them to the island of Sicily the manifestations of their art, their lofty beautiful arches, and the splendor of their industries born of their knowledge.” Likewise, the Frenchman Gustave Le Bon wrote in “The Civilization of the Arabs: The Universality of Islamic Civilization”: “The merit of the Arabs and Muslims in the field of civilization was not confined to themselves; they had a profound effect in both East and West, both of which owe their civilization to them. This influence was theirs alone, for it was they who, through their moral influence, refined the barbarians.”
As for Richard Coke, in his book “The City of Peace,” he says: “Europe owes much to Arab Spain, for Cordoba was a blazing lamp of knowledge and civilization at a time when Europe was still groaning under the weight of filth and primitiveness.” He is joined in that view by René Guénon, who said: “Many Westerners did not realize the value of what they borrowed from Islamic culture, nor did they understand the reality of what they took from Arab civilization in past centuries.”
A missionary marketplace and religious fluidity
Unlike most followers of the same sects and religions or even similar ethnic minorities Muslims in Europe suffer from a lack of cohesion. The space is crowded with all kinds of religious currents, a vast missionary marketplace, as Moroccan researcher Muntasir Hammad, a specialist in Islamic affairs, calls it, bringing together Sunni and Shiite currents, Muslim Brotherhood and Salafi trends, alongside the growing presence of Sufis.
On the administrative side, there are mosques and cultural centers, as well as official and semi-official associations concerned with representing the Muslim minority. All of them contribute in one way or another to the religious structuring of these minorities. But recent decades have witnessed radical changes in both their organizational and missionary features, according to the Moroccan researcher.
In his article, Hammad notes that funding for these centers and mosques often comes from non-European Islamic countries, either in support of missionary work or in implementation of certain agendas. This has had a negative resonance with some governments, which have recently taken decisions to dry up mosque funding sources in an attempt to control them and produce a “moderate European Islam,” as is the case in France.
Saudi Arabia tops the list of countries spending the most money on building mosques in Europe, with an annual budget of between $2 billion and $3 billion, followed by Qatar, Turkey, Algeria, and Morocco, according to El Confidencial. Italy was the first country to officially announce that the construction and maintenance of its mosques were being covered by Qatar, which allocated about 25 million euros in 2016 to build 43 mosques.
Spain also allowed the Gulf state to finance the construction of 150 mosques there through 2020, in return for covering the maintenance of the famous Cordoba Mosque. This is in addition to the 200 million euros Saudi Arabia had allocated to build 200 mosques in Germany in 2015.
The crisis and the solution
Integration is one of the most important objective indicators used to measure how successful any community or minority is in a foreign country. In the Muslim case, the matter may be even harsher if Muslims fail to achieve good levels on this indicator, given the severe repercussions that may follow, perhaps pushing some to flee and leave.
In 2017, a study in Europe revealed that Muslims in western European countries had made notable progress on integration indicators — language, education, working life, and dialogue between Islam and other religions within the societies of France, Britain, Austria, Germany, and Switzerland.
Commenting on the study, Ece Demir, spokesperson for the Turkish-German civil society organization, said the situation is not as bleak for Muslims in terms of integration into European societies as the media portrays it, but that there is a lack of acceptance among some Europeans, and that this has escalated recently with the rise of the far right.
And the findings of the study, published by the German Bertelsmann Stiftung under the title “Muslims in Europe: Integration but without social acceptance,” aimed to read the map of Muslim integration in Western societies. It was based on interviews with about 10,000 people across the five countries, surveying between 1,000 and 1,500 people in each country. At the same time, it excluded migrants who had arrived in Europe since 2010, on the grounds that they had not spent enough time there for their views on integration to be relied upon.
The indicators used to measure integration revolved around four main criteria: education, employment, income, and their relationships with non-Muslims. The study showed that language integration was highly successful in Germany, France, and Britain, while it was relatively lower in Austria and Switzerland.
In education, France came first, with about 89 percent of Muslims completing their education beyond age 17. The figure was relatively lower in Britain at 80 percent, then 64 percent in Germany, 60 percent in Austria, and 26 percent in Switzerland. In employment and equal opportunities, Germany ranked first, though the situation may have changed somewhat over the past four years.
When asked about the extent to which Europeans accept Muslims within their societies, Austria ranked first in rejecting Muslims at 25 percent, followed by Britain at 21 percent, then Germany at 19 percent, Switzerland at 17 percent, and finally France at 14 percent. On the other hand, this did not prevent Muslims from forming friendships with Europeans: the share of Muslims who had formed friendships was 87 percent in Switzerland, followed by France at 78 percent and Germany at 68 percent.
Racism: The deadliest weapon
Anti-Muslim hate speech in Europe has grown over the past seven years to an unprecedented degree, alongside the rise of the far right, which during that period succeeded in entrenching itself and regaining its stature and popularity once again. This can be seen through a number of indicators:
In a 2016 survey conducted by the European Union Agency for Fundamental Rights of more than 10,000 Muslims in 15 European countries, nearly 92 percent of Muslims said they had suffered racial discrimination in its various forms. Of those, 53 percent said it was because of their names and 39 percent because of their Islamic dress, while 94 percent of women had been subjected to racist harassment because of the hijab.
In a series of reports by the European Center for Counterterrorism and Intelligence Studies, a major increase was revealed in rates of racist crimes targeting Muslims specifically in European countries. In Britain, for example, anti-Muslim racist crimes in 2021 reached about 2,703, while hate crimes in general rose by 40 percent over recent years, with Muslims accounting for more than 52 percent of them.
Between 2014 and 2015, Germany recorded more than 700 attacks on mosques on its soil. Dermes Yildirim, head of the European Islamic Association, said racist parties in Germany and Europe in general are working to stir fear among Germans over the growing number of Muslims, adding in remarks to “Al Jazeera“: “We are concerned about the growing racist violence against Muslim migrants, as a mosque is attacked almost every day.”
The same concern was expressed by Bulent Bilgi, head of the Union of International Democrats in Germany, who said that hostility toward Islam and Muslims in Europe has reached frightening dimensions over the past five years, noting growing anxiety over the increasing influence of the Muslim community, which has ultimately led to a broader popular base for Islamophobia.
In light of the above data, it is clear that the reality of Muslim communities in Europe is not as it is portrayed to be a flourishing, rosy reality entirely free of troubles. Muslims in the West face many challenges amid a climate of anxiety hanging over them because of the growing hate speech that has accompanied the rise of the far right, even if that varies from one country to another. This is what will be highlighted in the detailed pieces in this file.