Are Western Muslims tacit supporters of Islamist terrorism—or do they for the most part embrace Western norms and laws that guarantee sexual equality and freedom of expression? Does the growing role of Islamic scholars in shaping patterns of observance among Western Muslims constitute a threat to liberal democracies—or is it Islam that is challenged by Western values?

The three books reviewed here share an ambition to clarify public debates by putting “Muslim issues” in broader comparative perspective. However, while the authors depend upon the same sources and figures to correct misconceptions about “the Islamization of Europe,” the effect is to highlight the paucity of current statistics.

Exact figures on how many Muslims live in Western Europe and the United States do not exist, but demographers put the number at less than 8% even in the two countries with the largest influx of Muslim migration, France and the Netherlands. The surge in Muslim immigration is recent, but the native-born cohorts now outnumber the immigrants in the UK, France, the Netherlands, and several other European countries. Western Muslims are of all races and speak a variety of languages, although most speak no Arabic, the language of ritual. Most Muslims are not particularly religious, and among those who are observant, religious practices and interpretations of ritual obligation vary widely.

John Bowen's brilliant ethnography shows the ways in which French Islamic scholars and centers of teaching attempt to balance scriptural fidelity with a new hermeneutic that is accepting of Western lifestyles. The volume edited by Jocelyne Cesari deals with various aspects of Muslim life in the United States and Europe. The quality of the contributions is uneven, but this book contains several excellent chapters, including one by Cesari that complements Bowen's book on the application of Shariah (Islamic religious law) in European courts in relation to family law issues, and another, by Farhad Khosrokhavar, on jihadism in Europe. Shamit Saggar, who served as a 10 Downing Street advisor in the early years of Tony Blair's government, writes about the radicalization of young British Muslims in response to a political narrative of imagined Muslim victimization and the reality of discrimination and hostility to Islam. What governments might do to promote accommodation and integration are recurrent themes in the three books, and it is Saggar's central preoccupation.

Can Islam Be French? Bowen asks, and then immediately retracts the question. Islam is a universal faith. It is absurd to think of “Islam in one country.” Yet practices vary and have distinctly local flavors. The spread of Islam across continents in the tenth and eleventh centuries required adaption to local conditions. As Bowen shows, French Muslims are drawn ineluctably into a transnational debate. Their scholars struggle to come up with justifications for interpretative techniques that would enable them to do what they really want: balance faithfulness to the text with French social and political realities (p. 198). Will the French government allow them the breathing space they need in order to establish a new and workable equilibrium? And will it provide resources? The French state fully supports Catholic and Jewish faith schools, but only three Islamic schools existed at the time of the research. None had yet obtained government financing, although such financing is possible in theory.

Over several years, Bowen visited a number of mosques, an imam training institute, and Islamic centers of learning and teaching, as well as a religious primary school. He attended khutbahs (Friday sermons conducted after prayers) and sat in on classes. In most cases, classes were conducted in French and the instructional material was also in French. The reliance on French is not surprising considering that the students are mostly native born, speak little or no Arabic, and seek to learn what their parents have neglected to teach them. Above all, they desire to find out for themselves how to be Muslim. I have come across the same drive for self-discovery in my own encounters, and I recognize Bowen's account of the tensions between teachers who want to direct students to think about the general principles and the ethics of the faith and the obsession of the students with settling the proper rules and regulations for dress, ways of praying, and conduct in public and private life.

Bowen's case studies include conservative centers and two grand mosques (Lyon and Paris), as well as centers lacking sponsorship from the international Islamic missionary organizations, such as the Tabligh or the Muslim World League. An example is the Lyon-based Union of Young Muslims, which has been associated with Tariq Ramadan, who is now a professor at Oxford University. It is run as a collective and resembles European co-ops centered around alternative lifestyles, rather than a mosque association as traditionally understood (p. 49).

The author suggests that identity reconstruction by means of hermeneutic innovation is a plausible project but in need of encouragement. “Association” is a positive term in French public discussions but “community” is not. The difference is that the former is supposedly free of cultural or religious content and therefore supportive of the republic, rather than a competitor. In fact, Jewish and Catholic voluntary organizations have been vehicles of integration into French society. Bowen asks why it should be any different for Muslims (p. 182). This is a reasonable question. Social scientists might follow up by contrasting and comparing the responses of Jewish and Muslim faith communities to cultural assimilation and socioeconomic advancement.

Saggar argues that “pariah politics” is a Muslim reaction to the hysterical predictions of a civilizational apocalypse from the European Far Right. The moral panic is fed by media features on fifth column activities in mosques. The term pariah politics is not used here in its usual sense to denote political parties deemed too extreme for inclusion in government. “Pariah-dom,” Saggar writes, “contains a number of nuances and complexities…. [P]ariah groups are described not only in heavily biased and critical terms, but are also accused of having it both ways, or at least trying to have it both ways” (p. 5). Other minorities have resorted to pariah politics, and Saggar himself cites the experience of Jews a century ago. I would add blacks, in some places Catholics, and the Irish as other examples of minority groups that have at some point been driven into the same corner.

As an example of the pariah status of Muslims, Saggar cites Wolfgang Bosbach, the German Christian Democrats' parliamentary speaker on home affairs, who in 2004 said, “This is not an Islamic country. It is a Christian country, and we should not be forced to accommodate Islam” (p. 174). The rhetorical exploitation of anti-Muslim sentiments by European populists is also the topic of a chapter written by Yasemmin Shooman and Riem Spielhaus in Muslims in the West after 9/11, edited by Cesari. Bosbach's Christian Democrats have nonetheless engaged in dialogue with religious Muslim groups seeking the equivalent of a loyalty oath in exchange for concessions on religious education in schools, funding, and a range of other issues aiming to promote integration. A chapter in Cesari's book written by Peter Frank details the history of this historical compromise.

The “clash of civilizations” rhetoric rolls just as easily off the tongue of the Islamist agitator. Three complaints dominate British Muslim identity politics. The first is that Muslims are discriminated against more than any other minority. The second is that Islamophobia warps the mind of policymakers. The third that the Muslim Ummah (translated as “nation” by Islamists, faith community by others) is under coordinated assault in the West's “war on Islam” (Pariah Politics, p. 223).

Muslim grievances are both real and invented, Saggar argues, and it is increasingly difficult to tell one from the other. Each complaint contains a grain of truth but is false as a whole. Therein lies the challenge to policymakers. The fact of discrimination should be acknowledged and addressed, but it must be made clear that most of the problems faced by Muslim minorities are not “Muslim problems” but more general problems that affect Muslims among others. There is no Muslim underclass. Once faith is disentangled from class, immigration history, and lifestyle, it is evident that Indian and Pakistani Muslims are not particularly deprived compared to other immigrant groups. It is, in fact, Bangladeshi Muslims who account for most of the socioeconomic variation often attributed to Muslims in the United Kingdom. Two-fifths of the British Bangladeshi population live in London's four most deprived boroughs. Moreover, Bangladeshi Muslims are poorer in no small part because their women have very low rates of employment.

The solution to problems of religious toleration is to start appreciating pluralism and to facilitate the Muslim desire for affirmation of the faith's legitimate place in the West, while recognizing that other faith groups make comparable claims. When conflicts arise, they too should be addressed as general problems (p. 252). Arranged or compulsory marriages are issues that affect Muslims and Hindus alike. Muslims and Jews have comparable problems with religious divorces. But will a universal approach satisfy a Muslim population already largely persuaded that they are confronted by special problems? Saggar cites a survey from February 2006, which showed that 40% of British Muslims thought that shariah law should prevail in Muslim-dominated areas of Britain. This does not suggest an appetite for religious pluralism (p. 221). In Britain, the younger generation's embrace of politicized theology is part of a vicious cycle of reactive identity formation driven by hostile media hype and Islamist radicalization. Extremist ideas are capable of unifying Muslim complaints into a coherent set of ideas to an extent not imagined by policymakers.

In a chapter in the Cesari volume, Khosrokhavar makes a similar point about the importance of reactive identities as a source of radicalization. Noting the hostile depictions of Muslims in the French media and the indifference of public opinion to the fate of Palestinians, many people conclude that “the West is against Islam and true Muslims should fight against the West in order to recover their dignity and honor” (Muslims in the West, p. 232).

Saggar cites public opinion polls that indicate support for Al Qaeda goals and means, or other unpalatable positions with respect to political violence. Denial runs deep in Western Muslim communities (Pariah Politics, p. 205). Saggar also cites an “unsourced personal conversation” with an intelligence official as evidence of the existence of a fifth bomber related to the July 7, 2005, London conspiracy, who has never been apprehended (p. 231). He concludes that public policy has been insufficiently attuned to the “tacit support” for extremism. To be sure, he notes, it is not helpful to suggest that all Muslims are potentially terrorists, yet the reality is that terrorists have been able to rely on community support to a much larger extent than is publicly acknowledged.

Arguments about “what lies below” are notoriously difficult to assess. Extrapolating from polling data to population numbers is hazardous under any circumstances, and the polls Saggar cites are contradicted by other polls. Gallup asked Muslims in London, Berlin, and Paris, together with the general public in the UK, Germany, and France, to say if they had confidence in various government and democratic institutions, finding that on balance, Muslims have at least as much and often even more confidence in elections, the judicial system, and even the media than does the general public (see Muslims in Europe: Berlin, London, Paris. Bridges and Gaps in Public Opinion, Special Report, Gallup World Poll, 2007). Only the military had greater support among non-Muslims than among Muslims. But London Muslims (78%) were more supportive of the police than was the general public (69%). The support for the police was surprising in view of the frequent complaints by British Muslim lobby groups about “Islamophobic” policing. The reality is that a generally compliant and supportive subgroup has an extremist fringe that is detached from the rest of the population.

Fear of terrorist attacks is, not unreasonably, widespread in Western Europe and the United States. In consequence, books and articles on Muslim integration in the West convey a sense of urgency not commonly found in debates in comparative politics, but scholarly analyses are drowned out by simpler, polarizing arguments. Scholars may argue that the political behavior and social problems of Muslims in Western countries can be explained in terms of the variables and theories that we use to explain the behavior and problems of other minorities. However, the clash-of-civilizations thesis provides an intuitively appealing account in a polarized public debate, and it is now often taken for granted outside the academy.

Academic studies also have their own problems, not least methodological. The tradition of national case studies, based on statistics or policy approaches, is often unhelpful in comparing the situation of Muslims in Western societies, and not only because the national statistics are unreliable and often nonexistent. Ethnographic studies and carefully matched microscopic comparisons are often more suggestive. Saggar interrogates the category “Muslim” by contrasting and comparing the dynamics of educational attainment among Pakistani Muslims, Pakistani Hindus, and Bangladeshi Muslims. Bowen's book is riveting reading in part because the author took his time and charts the changes in the behavior of his interlocutors in response to the changing realities of immigration and national politics.

Nevertheless, the problem of the statistics is more fundamental still. The French authorities traditionally argue that “counting by race” (or religion) is divisive and conducive to stereotyping. But targeted policymaking is impossible and real issues of discrimination cannot be addressed while the most basic information is missing. We need social surveys with sufficient sample size to permit the disaggregation of the label “Muslim” into universal sociological categories—gender, class, and status—as well as specific ones pertaining to the Muslim immigrant experience. Chances are good that assimilation has progressed far more than the lament about “Eurabia” assumes.