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; ...