Islam in Europe. Integration Models, Empirical Evidence, and the Question of a European Islam

Abstract

Since the mid-twentieth century the presence of Muslim communities in Western and Northern Europe has grown mainly through labor immigration, family reunification and, since 2014, asylum migration, alongside older Muslim communities long established in South-Eastern Europe. European states addressed this growth through three successive integration models, the guest-worker model, the minority-rights model and the assimilationist model, none of which produced a stable settlement, and the European Union now frames integration as a reciprocal process in which both the newcomer and the receiving society are expected to adapt. This article asks how far that framing is supported by recent evidence in education, employment, housing and social belonging, drawing on current Pew Research Center, European Commission and European Union Agency for Fundamental Rights data rather than the decade-old projections that still dominate much of the literature on this subject. It finds that structural disadvantage has proved durable, and in several respects has worsened over the past decade, even as subjective indicators of belonging and institutional trust among European Muslims have remained comparatively stable. The article closes with a religious-studies and Orthodox theological reflection on what this durable, internally diverse European Islam implies for Christian engagement with religious pluralism.