Overview

Major Muslim immigration to Europe began as part of the colonial ventures of the nineteenth century, but in multiple ways Islam has long been part of Europe. Images of infidels in the Holy Land galvanised support for the Crusades and the Papacy. Islam directly shaped societies in southern Spain and the Ottoman Balkans. Life in the Mediterranean world long involved collaborations among Muslims, Christians and Jews. This history has left strongly ambivalent attitudes towards neighbouring Muslim majority lands. The debates in the early 2000s over Turkey’s future in Europe reveal the perduring emotional associations of 'the West’ and 'Christendom’, and remind us that many Europeans considered, and some still consider, Islam to define Europe’s southern boundaries.1

During the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Muslims moved from the periphery into the centres. French conquest of Algiers in 1830 led to extensive settlement in Algeria and to control over Morocco, Tunisia and parts of western Africa. British and Dutch efibrts to regulate trade and production in South and South East Asia grew into direct or indirect rule over the majority of the world’s Muslims. Some Muslim subjects of these empires eventually travelled to the metropolis for work or study.

Immigration on a large scale only began when Western Europeans sought to import low paid workers from abroad. This process began in France towards the end of the nineteenth century, much earlier than elsewhere because of France’s close ties to its African territories. Other states and their industries recruited workers in the reconstruction years immediately follow ing the Second World War, and many of these workers happened to be Muslims. Although initially this recruitment was for temporary work, by

1 Jack Goody, Islam in Europe (Cambridge, 2004).