Corinne Torrekens

The impact of dramatic events on public debate concerning accommodation of Islam in Europe

Using the data of the EURISLAM project, this article investigates the impact of dramatic events on the public debate with regard to Islam in Belgium, the Netherlands, France, Germany, Switzerland and the UK. It assesses the extent to which dramatic events such as 9/11, the bombings in Madrid and London and the murder of Theo Van Gogh in Amsterdam impacted on the debate on multiculturalism, notably the accommodation of Western-European institutions to Islam. In this contribution, we analyse the overall evolution of public debate in the written press on Muslims, and more particularly Muslim rights, for the period 1999–2009. Our aim is to empirically analyse the transitions that the public debate on Islam in Europe has undergone in the wake of the most dramatic terrorist acts perpetrated by Muslim extremists during the last decade. We hypothesize that dramatic violent events involving Muslim extremists had an impact on the number of claims about Muslims and Islam in general, but not on the debate about religious rights for Muslims in Europe. Descriptive analysis and time series plus intervention analysis were undertaken to test these hypotheses.1

Muslims’ religiosity and views on religion in six Western European countries: does national context matter?

ABSTARCT This article investigates the impact of discursive and political opportunity structures on religiosity among Muslims and on perceived distance between Muslims and non-Muslims on the role of religion in society, making use of the EURISLAM-data-set (2010). We will focus on Moroccan, Turkish, Pakistani and ex-Yugoslavian origin samples of migrants of Muslim origin and a control group of non-Muslim majority group citizens for six participating countries (Belgium, France, Germany, the Netherlands, Switzerland and the UK). Our analysis does not show any impact of opportunity structures on Muslims religiosity nor on perceived differences between Muslims and non-Muslims.

Islam in Belgium: From Formal Recognition to Public Contestation

In this chapter, I will provide a general overview of the current situation concerning the accommodation of Islam in Belgium. As Belgium’s national statistics do not include any information on the religious affiliations of the population, it remains extremely difficult to arrive at an accurate figure for the number of Muslims living in Belgium today. Consequently, the best we can do is to use orders of magnitude and estimates based on an extrapolation of the number of people who have migrated to Belgium and their descendants. These estimates have at least two major disadvantages. First, they assume that all immigrants from countries where Islam is the dominant religion are Muslims, as are their descendants, whereas in fact some of them may belong to other religions (certain Muslim countries have or had large Jewish and/or Christian minorities, for example) or be nonreligious.