For European Islam

Faced with migration flow increase, Europeans must learn to coexist with peoples from different cultural and religious backgrounds. To the light of this awareness and in order to step up “social cohesion and civil peace in Europe”, the European Union proclaimed 2008 the “European Year of Intercultural Dialogue”. An important aspect of the growing diversity is the increasing number of people of Muslim origin in a geographic area with a traditionally Christian population majority. For this reason, as a contribution to the European Year of Intercultural Dialogue, Comece (the Commission of the Bishops’ Conferences of the European Union) and the “Church and Society” Commission (part of CEC) along with the Konrad Adenauer Foundation (Kas), in cooperation with Muslim partners, are organizing a series of seminars on the broad-ranging topic “Islam, Christianity and Europe”. The 4 seminars will be held in Brussels, in the seat of the European Parliament. The following themes will be addressed: “Intercultural dialogue: in response to which problems?” (April 17): “Liveability of religion in European public space”; “the question of places of worship and of wearing religious symbols” (May 29); “Christian Europe and Islam in Europe” (July 3rd); “The European Union’s external relations with Muslim Countries” (September 11). Intercultural dialogue and the Muslim presence in Europe. “The European Union must be much more than an economic space”. With these words Rüdiger Noll, director of the CEC Commission, opened the first of the 4 seminars explaining their nature and objectives. “The European project must belong and be addressed to citizens. It must be founded on mutually shared values. This is why the European Year of Intercultural Dialogue is so important”. Ural Manço, religions’ sociology professor at the university faculty of Saint-Louis (Brussels), analysed the situation of Muslims in Western Europe in the past 50 years. Migration- he said- began in the 1960s. In this period, “after-war Europe needed manual labour”. With the economic crisis of the 1970s the legitimacy of Muslims’ presence in Europe was gradually lost. The “choc came when the children of these migrants were unable to achieve the long hoped-for social advancement, despite their parents hade done their utmost to give them a good education and integrate them in the job market. Many of them were discovered to have no specific professional qualification or were employed in low-level jobs, some even remained unemployed. In these precarious conditions, for some Muslims, religion became a means to recover the recognition they had not been granted in the professional environment”. The question of “social recognition” often entails the request of rights, first and foremost the freedom of religion. However, “many Muslims would admit that in Europe they are free to live their religion as they wouldn’t be in their Countries of origin”. Religions in the “European public space”. The construction of mosques in European cities and the use of the Muslim veil acted as real and true catalysing elements in Europe’s public debates concerning the freedom of worship, the acceptance of change, the respect for differences, the principle of secularity. The “visibility” of the religious phenomenon in the public space was the topic of the second seminar held May 29. Despite European Countries have legal systems which guarantee religious freedom, and therefore also the freedom of worship, it’s an increasingly controversial topic. Especially the erection of Muslim places of worship triggers feelings of opposition in many cities throughout the Continent. According to sociologist Chantal Saint-Blancat, “the building of the Mosques is a clear example of how delicate is the process of pluralism normalisation in Europe”. “Building new places of worship subverts the urban space we are familiar with. It shows in a clear and visible way that there are groups which are culturally different from us”. Ms. Saint-Blancat pointed out that some religious groups are viewed with greater tolerance compared to Muslims, such is the case of the Sikh. The fact is, that “the erection of mosques is often a catalysing symbol enabling to convey unexpressed fears of the Other”. In his address delivered during the seminar, Yahya Sergio Pallavicini, vice-president of Italy’s Muslim religious community, recalled that “most major mosques erected in European capital cities were financed by Saudi Arabia”. He expressed his hope “that mosques remain places of worship and not places for political propaganda”, and that European Muslim leadership be the promoter of the question regarding the formation of imams and foreign subsidies to mosques.