Tariq Ramadan - To Be a European Muslim

The present book was written two years ago as I was carrying out a years research in Leicester, in the Islam in Europe unit of the Islamic Foundation. I must first of all acknowledge the excellent research facilities offered me at the Islamic Foundation. I particularly want to thank the Foundations Chairman, Professor Khurshid Ahmad, and its Director, Dr. Manazir Ahsan, for their warm welcome. Numerous discussions with Dr. Ataullah Siddiqui, Dilwar Hussain, Sohail Nakhooda, Mokrane Guezzou, Anwar Cara and Batool al-Toma enabled me, thanks to their help and advice, to develop the present research in the desired direction. To them all, I am fraternally grateful. I do not forget Khurram Murad (God have mercy on him) who more than once deeply touched me with his kindness. A word, also, for all those who have been following my work for years and who help make it accessible. This book could not have been completed without the questioning and suggestions of Yamine Makri.

This book also owes a lot to the memory of my father (God have mercy on him) and to his very specific approach to legal issues slowly elaborated and fashioned all along my theoretical studies on Islamic law and jurisprudence. It is also greatly indebted to all those who, in one way or another, accompanied me along the road and who, through their own studies and reflections and/or through their own field experience, have enriched me with their opinions and remarks: I am thinking in particular of Tarek Oubrou, Fouad Imarraine, Mamadou Daffe, Abd al-Halim Herbert, Larbi Kechat, Abdelaziz Chambi, Didier Bourg, Tayyeb Shah, Malika Dif, Ubaid Allah Gloton, Yusuf Islam, Ahmad Jaballah, Ahmad Bouziane, Farid Abdelkarim, Yacoub Mahi, Ibrahim Hewitt, Abd as-Samad, and many others, who have also directly or indirectly helped fashion the contents of the present work and who have encouraged me to present its substance in a new manner. They are my attentive and friendly brothers and sisters: I pray God to protect and love them. My thoughts, my invocations, my fraternity and my love accompany you, all.

The friends, companions or partners in the long, intense and sometimes repeated debates over the issues of coexistence, pluralism and secularism are also present in my memory: Jrgen Nielsen, Peter Clark, Jocelyn Cesari, Philippe Lewis, Franois Burgat, Pierre Dufresne, Isabelle Ducret, Albert Jacquard, Michel Morineau, Pierre Tournemire, Patrice Mugny, Guy Coq, Juan Martinez, Nathalie Dolle, Claude Torracinta, Alain Gresh, Robert Bistolfi, Jean Boussinesq, Henri Tincq, Jacques Neirynck, Jacqueline Costa-Lascoux, Christian Delorme, Richard Friedli, Jean-Claude Basset, Patrick de Laubier, Jean Offredo, Gilles Couvreur, Edmond Blattchen, Olivier Roy, Gema Martin Muoz, Dominique Roulin, among so many other interlocutors. Their friendly or critical, direct or indirect contributions were of the most helpful, along with those of other interlocutors. Though it would be impossible to mention them all here, I extend to every one of them my heartfelt gratitude.

My wife Iman does more than accompany me. Along the road, she challenges, argues, questions, criticises. For so many years, she has been the mirror in whose reflections an important part of my thought has found its source and orientation. I have been able to understand a dimension of Gods love by pondering over the priceless value of His gifts: my wife, her heart, her intelligence, and our children. Thanks for her presence, thanks for her patience.

It is now a generation since western Europeans began to notice that there were Muslim communities settling in our cities. The days of the temporary migrant worker had been replaced by the establishment of families in a process which was clearly going to be permanent. The first mosques started appearing, and we began to pay attention. As we looked behind the superficial developments we discovered that there had been Muslims in Western Europe for a long time, in some cases for centuries, although in smaller numbers. The new presence in Western Europe served also to remind us that there were already well-established Muslim communities in parts of Eastern Europe even if we thought we could safely ignore them hidden away behind the Iron Curtain. The new presence reminded us of our own presence in the Muslim world, in the form of empire.

But, of course, while we were paying attention to the changes we had to deal with and the reluctance to do so in some quarters assumptions were also being made about the impact of this new situation on Muslims themselves. The early simplistic conclusions were that with the passage of time, perhaps over one generation, the new immigrant communities would have become assimilated, at least in the sense that their attitude to religion and its requirements would have been Europeanised. Some observers suggested that intermarriage in particular would be a major factor in this expected process of assimilation. Now, one generation later, the picture looks radically different from what those earlier we might now call them nave observers thought.