Introduction

Abstract

Recent years have witnessed a burgeoning debate about the situation of young Muslims in Western Europe (see Nielsen, 1999; Lewis, 2002; Pauly, 2004; Zaidi, 2007). The seismic events of 9/11 in New York prompted a wide range of responses from pundits and commentators. That there is something to be explained seems self-evident. Some of the hijackers in 2001 were young Muslims radicalised while in Germany as students. The murder of Theo van Gogh, the Dutch director of the film Submission, which dramatised the oppression of Muslim women by projecting images from the Koran onto naked bodies of young women who intoned their personal stories of abuse in Holland in 2004, focused attention on children of Muslim international migrants in Europe. This reached a crescendo in Britain after the London ‘suicide bombings’ on 7 July 2005. Later that year urban riots in many French cities once again put young Muslims (this time with parents from the Maghreb) under the spotlight.

The profound alienation of many Muslims - especially the second and third generations of immigrant families, young men and women themselves born in Europe - is one of the most vexing problems facing the continent today. (T. G. Ash, New York Review of Books, 5 October 2006)