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

Abstract

One major side-effect of the current process of economic and culturalglobalization seems to be that our world is becoming multireligious. Inparticular, this results from the accelerated spread of Islam. There arealready six million Muslims in the United States, virtually all of themAmerican citizens, with an impressive and growing infrastructure. InEurope, due to labor migration, foreign students, war refugees, and asylumseekers, the number of Muslims is around four million in France,perhaps three million in the United Kingdom, and 2.5 million inGermany. Altogether, including Bosnia-Hercegovina, there may beabout twenty million Muslims in western and central Europe today.Due to its structural tolerance vis-A-vis “peoples of the book,” theMuslim world has always been multireligious. Islam expanded into formerlyChristian 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 bythe fact that the Qur’an contains what may be called an “IslamicChristology.”Coexistence with the large Jewish populations within theMuslim empire-aside from the Near East in Muslim Spain,and subsequentlyin North Africa and the Ottoman Empire-was facilitated, inturn, by the extraordinary focus of the Qur’an on Jewish prophets in generaland Moses in particular! On this basis, Islamic jurisprudence developedthe world’s first liberal law called al-siyar for the status of religiousminorities (al-dhimmi).~In the Western world, developments were entirely different. Here, religiousintolerance became endemic, even between Christian churches; ...