Muslims as Co-Citizens in the West-Rights, Duties, Limits and Prospects

Abstract

One major side-effect of the current process of economic and cultural globalization seems to be that our world is becoming multireligious. In particular, this results from the accelerated spread of Islam. There are already six million Muslims in the United States, virtually all of them American citizens, with an impressive and growing infrastructure. In Europe, due to labor migration, foreign students, war refugees, and asylum seekers, the number of Muslims is around four million in France, perhaps three million in the United Kingdom, and 2.5 million in Germany. Altogether, including Bosnia-Hercegovina, there may be about twenty million Muslims in western and central Europe today. Due to its structural tolerance vis-A-vis “peoples of the book,” the Muslim world has always been multireligious. Islam expanded into formerly Christian temtories-the Near East, North Africa, Spain, Byzantium, the Balkans-without eliminating the Christian communities. Nowhere is this more evident than in Cairo, Damascus, and Istanbul, and in countries like Greece and Serbia. This situation was facilitated by the fact that the Qur’an contains what may be called an “Islamic Christology.”Coexistence with the large Jewish populations within the Muslim empire-aside from the Near East in Muslim Spain,and subsequently in North Africa and the Ottoman Empire-was facilitated, in turn, by the extraordinary focus of the Qur’an on Jewish prophets in general and Moses in particular! On this basis, Islamic jurisprudence developed the world’s first liberal law called al-siyar for the status of religious minorities (al-dhimmi).~ In the Western world, developments were entirely different. Here, religious intolerance became endemic, even between Christian churches; ...