American and European Muslims after 9 / 11 : What Is Different ?

2 Muslims are currently the largest religious minority in Western Europe. This presence of Islam in Europe is a direct consequence of the existence of pathways of immigration (that opened up in the early 1960s) leading from the Western States' former colonies in Asia, Africa, and the Caribbean. Following the official end of work-based immigration in 1974, the integration of such immigrant populations has become irreversible, and is connected to the increasing number of policies on family reunification which contribute to the recomposition of families and the noticeable increase in family size within Europe. In such a context, asserting one's belief in Islam becomes a major factor in population sedentarization. In each country, this visibility of Islam is at the origin of many questions, doubts and often violent oppositions in relation to the newcomers. The fact that there were Muslims amongst the slave populations, as well as the specific relationship between Islam and the black community, indicate that the conditions for Islam's evolution in the United States are likely to be very different. However, in the United States, too, the visibility of Islam is a recent phenomena linked to the significant increase in the number of immigrants coming from Muslim countries, with a specific rise in Muslim immigration since 1965 (and until the present day) from India, Pakistan, Indonesia and Afghanistan. Immigrants from such countries now outnumber those originating from the Middle East. Since the 1970s, these new arrivals have given themselves over to building mosques and schools, to founding all sorts of magazines and newspapers, and thus demonstrate a religious vitality that is very distant from the assimilationist attitude of Arab immigrants o f the early twentieth century. Islam's visibility within American society is reinforced by the increasing Islamicization of the Jocelyne Cesari 3 black community (an estimated 50% of Muslim converts come from the black community). The extreme ethnic and religious diversity of American Muslims means that the boundaries of the Muslim community in America are surrounded by more controversy than in Europe, especially in the post 9/11 context. Research on Islam has not always managed to avoid the snare of exceptionalism, especially in Europe. For example, when I first began as a researcher in the mid 1980s, the existing knowledge about Muslims (at that point almost all Muslims in Europe were immigrants) came primarily from the sociology of immigration. The main goal of such early research (research …