One of the fastest expanding religions today in Europe is Islam. An enormous arrival of workers and other immigrants from the Middle East and past colonial regions in the Caribbean, Asia, and Africa led to a spreading existence of Muslim inhabitants amid Europe. In addition to that, considerably large communes of native Muslims can be located within Bulgaria, Romania, Hungary, Eastern Europe, Greece, Slovakia, former Yugoslavia, Poland, the Czech Republic, and particularly in Albania. Yet the overpowering majority, of about three quarters of the total number of Muslims, are currently residents of Western Europe. Muslims display a selection of national, linguistic and ethnic traits, and ...view middle of the document...
5 percent (Doc 9). In addition, the most contrasting and foreign culture to the German susceptibilities, it the immigrant nationality of the Turks, which supposedly is “their Muslim religion and their extremely patriarchal family structure but their sheer number— with 1.8 million the Turks represent the largest minority in Germany (Doc 5).” Philippe de Schoutheete, describes the unity and diversity of the Western Europe “The sense of a shared destiny, based on one same vision of mankind, represents both the cause and the condition of common policy and common legislation. . . . Diversity is clearly one of the keys to European society. It is already very prominent (Doc 7).” In this representation, Philippe demonstrates a very positive outlook on the diversity and multicultural perspective on behalf of Europe. While everything Schoutheete states sounds very idealistic, precautions should be made on how accurate this representation actually was. Philippe is a representative to the European Union, which would make sense if he was making it sound more pleasant and acceptable than it actually is. While I’m very certain that “Diversity is clearly one of the keys to European society”, the remark Schoutheete makes regarding “shared destiny” and that “shared values coexist with cultural diversity and national identities” create the assumption of there being biased influences present. Muslims had for the majority, maintained a considerably subtle profile, until the arrival of the later years in the 1970’s. The formation of Muslim-mainstream relations and the construction of their religious communities did not create ample uproar. Needless to say this does not indicated the Islamic growth and spread throughout Western Europe always went effortlessly.
In the present day, living throughout all of Europe are numerous Muslim communes. Nevertheless, partially due to the rapid increase of Muslim immigrants, and on top of many other factors, are there complications between the two civilization’s relations, regarding debates, policies, and prejudices. A serious problem caused by the extreme immigration masses was emphasized by Jorg Haider, and how it was affecting the citizens of Austria. He noted that the amount of foreigners permitted to live in Austria should be immensely reduced. Surely, his campaign highly influenced the passage of a 1991 law, which decreed that foreign workers could not make up more than 10 percent of the work force. Shortly after in 1993, it was decreased to 9 percent, following the new Resident Alien law (Doc 3). In a similar matter the “European Union,” from Turkey: A Country Study, from the Federal Research Division of the Library of Congress addresses another problem that arose from the high immigration. The document suggests that the “The principal economic objections to Turkish membership [in the EU] center on the relative underdevelopment of Turkey’s economy compared to the economies of EC/EU members and Turkey’s high rate of...
