The central question of Joel Fetzer and J. Christopher Soper's well-written and highly accessible book—how to explain the disparate political responses to the religious concerns of Muslims in Britain, France, and Germany—is clearly important. Indeed, while the question was pertinent before the tragedy of September 11 in 2001 and the American invasion and occupation of Iraq in 2003, it has become exponentially more urgent since. Although the difficulties of incorporating Muslim populations into the countries receiving them were neither a cause of nor directly connected to the aforementioned events, the negative chain reaction they subsequently precipitated within and outside of the diverse Muslim community within Western Europe nevertheless exposed serious tensions between many of the community's religious practices and the dominant cultural, social, and political mores of the host societies. In short, the answer to the book's organizing question very much matters for Western Europe's political, religious, and social tranquility.

The book's central argument is that the respective constitutional and legal status of religion in Britain, France, and Germany, along with the historical context through which the institutions of church and state interact, have been critical in shaping how each country has accommodated the religious needs of Muslim groups (p. 13). Fetzer and Soper arrive at this argument after considering the evidence pertaining to each state's proclivity to accommodate Muslim practices and teaching in the public schools, the public financing of Islamic schools, and the construction of mosques. This evidence in turn is funneled through the respective prisms of four social science paradigms. The first paradigm, resource mobilization, predicts that the state will accommodate the demands of Muslims more or less in direct proportion to the level of the latter's political resources. The second paradigm, inspired by political opportunity structure theory, contends that the success of Muslims in extracting policy concessions from the state will vary according to the nature of the inherited domestic political institutions that structure overall group mobilization. Yet a third major paradigm predicts that a country's “political ideology” and, specifically, its core ideas about citizenship, nationality, and pluralism, will critically influence how the state resolves issues pertaining to immigrant rights (pp. 13–14).

While Fetzer and Soper respectfully acknowledge the usefulness of each paradigm in explaining the different public policy responses to Islam among the British, French, and German states, they ultimately find each one wanting, and thus inferior to a fourth: their theory of church–state relations. According to this theory, and on the strength of the secondary literature, the authors' numerous interviews with religious and political elites, and their original public opinion survey evidence, the legacy of church–state institutions and relations peculiar to each country points to British policymakers as the most inclined to accommodate the religious policy demands of settled Muslims, French policymakers significantly less inclined, and German policymakers falling somewhere in between their British and French counterparts. With regard to the propensity of the state to allow religious dress in public schools, fund private Islamic schools, and facilitate the construction of mosques, the authors find that France ranks significantly below both Britain and Germany because of the state's stubborn legal and ideological attachment to a “strict” interpretation of laïcité—the historical tradition of separating church and state—an attachment that they conclude is “disastrous” for the integration of Muslims in France.

How convincing is the book's thesis? Before addressing this question, it is necessary to note that the authors' dependent variable is not entirely satisfactory. At various junctures in the book, for example, the authors identify the dependent variable as the degree of state accommodation of Muslim religious “practices” (pp. 20, 146), while conversely, at other points, it is specified as the response of the state to the “needs” (p. 6), “concerns” (p. 6), “demands” (p. 6), or “rights” (pp. 7, 150) of Muslims. The vagueness of the dependent variable is problematic if only because the failure of liberal states to accommodate adequately the “concerns” of settled Muslim populations, for example, is a decidedly less serious issue for politics and public policy than is their failure to accommodate the “rights” of this community. One could reasonably argue that it is easier for liberal states to justify normatively and to get away politically with their neglect of the “demands” or “needs” of Muslims than their “rights.”

Having said this, the case study evidence is fairly persuasive. Fetzer and Soper do an impressive job of testing the aforementioned theories against the evidence gathered from each country and building a solid case for the superior explanatory power of their theory of historical church–state relations. On this score, the evidence supporting the importance of the legacy of laïcité in France is particularly compelling, if intuitive (Chapter 3).

While impressive, the evidence supporting their thesis, and hence the thesis itself, are not unimpeachable, however. At least two red flags can be raised in this context. First, the authors could be fairly accused of having been somewhat selective in gathering and presenting their evidence. For example, the evidence pointing to a pattern of enlightened state policy toward Muslims in the British case goes back only a couple of decades or so. In any event, Muslims have been migrating to the UK in significant numbers since the 1960s. If British state policy has been relatively enlightened, why did the government approve the first Muslim state primary school only in 1997?

Second, although the authors' elite interviews and public opinion survey evidence (Chapter 5) generally suggest the conclusions at which they arrive, plausible alternative explanations cannot be ruled out. For example, how do we know that the French state's tortured relationship with its Muslim settlers is a function of laïcité and not a legacy of postimperial racism, a possibility that the authors perhaps too quickly dismiss (p. 21)? Could laïcité be the formal justification for French state policy, rather than its cause?

Several other challenging queries like these could reasonably be put to the authors. However, none would ultimately diminish the valuable contribution that Muslims and the State in Britain, France, and Germany makes to our understanding of the lingering impediments to the incorporation of Muslims into the societies of Western Europe.