Muslims and the State in
Britain, France, and Germany

Joel S. Fetzer and J. Christopher Soper
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003. 208 pages.

The expanding Muslim communities in Western Europe have become a
source of consternation in European capitals. Central to the issue of
Europe’s growing Muslim population is how far the secular state is willing
to accommodate religious practices deemed to be antithetical to “European”
values. Fetzer and Soper’s timely comparative study effectively addresses
the issue’s historical foundations as well as clearly explains the European
Muslims’ disparate political responses. 

The authors’ central focus is how three core European states have
accommodated the needs of Muslims flooding their borders since the 1960s.
Exploring Europe’s surprisingly disjointed response to Muslim immigration
proves to be both theoretically interesting and an invaluable exercise in
debating what options are available to elected governments that are being
increasingly pressured by right-wing activism when it comes to accommo-
date the practice of Islam in Europe. 

The questions raised in the book’s six chapters, three of which are ded-
icated to the countries in question and the others to presenting the data col-
lected via the authors’ surveys, should prove helpful to larger discussions in
European studies about what the contemporary dilemmas facing Germany,
Britain, and France are in the context of the so-called war on terrorism.
While most studies on Islam in Europe, particularly migration and gender
studies, focus on how Muslims mobilize their socioeconomic resources,
Fetzer and Soper contend that developing a public policy on Muslim reli-
gious (and political) rights is actually mediated in significant ways by the
different institutional church/state patterns within each country. 

This move away from the assumption that Muslims, if organized in the
right way, could expect certain institutional concessions in “democratic
Europe” proves to be a helpful intervention into a sometimes doctrinally

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rigid field of research. As this book demonstrates clearly in chapter 3,
“France: Laïcité and the Hijab,” although Muslims in France seem to be the
most organized, they ultimately have proven to be the least successful in
gaining concessions from the French government, which is eager to keep the
secular state and its services separate from the religious communities’ needs.
It turns out that British concessions to Muslim community “rights” are far
more generous, despite the fact that Muslims in Britain do not share the
organizational competence and uniformity of their French counterparts.

While not explicitly stated, the authors’ analysis of migrant politics in
Europe does have some potential pitfalls. At times, they slip into the habit of
reducing the “Muslim” to a generic category. As a result, they fail to
acknowledge the existence of ethnic, doctrinal, national, economic, and lin-
guistic divisions within Muslim communities that may contribute to the
variable experiences that Muslims have with European states. While Fetzer
and Soper are to be commended for appreciating factors that distinguish
Muslims from each other, this persistent dose of reductionism may affect
their conclusions. For example, when explaining why the reader must rec-
ognize the nuances of intra-Muslim relations in each country, the authors
tend to stick to the clumsy term “Muslim community” throughout the book
in order to make their sociological observations.

It sometimes becomes a frustrating exercise to try to decipher the
authors’ intentions when the analysis is so often reduced to treating British,
French, and German “Muslims” as a categorically singular unit. Ultimately,
this failure to remain sensitive to the varying factors that could account for
the fact that all three countries host a fascinatingly diverse set of Muslim
groups taints the value of the authors’ conclusions.

It might have been more instructive, for example, to reflect on what
accounts for the lack of political cohesiveness among Muslim communities
in order to appreciate how state institutions, regardless of their capacity to
accommodate varying interests, circumvent Muslim demands for equal
access to state funds and institutions. For all of the British political establish-
ment’s efforts to address institutional restrictions to the practice of Islam, for
instance, there is an equally valuable conclusion to draw from just who will
become the acknowledged representatives of the British-based ummah
when institutions are actually created. 

By no means does the largely Pakistani/Indian Muslim diaspora
depicted in this study accurately represent the varying interests in the larger
Muslim experience(s) in Britain. The process by which some groups, never-
theless, become associated with British Muslims may help this study further.

102 The American Journal of Islamic Social Sciences 22:4



Likewise, the blanket application of “Algerian” and “Turk” in respect to
French and German Muslim communities, respectively, fails to account for
the vast range of generational and regional/cultural distinctions that these
Muslims make as they socialize and organize politically. Further exploring
the underlying distinctions that the Bosnian, Kurdish, Albanian, and Alevi
Muslim communities make from their Berber or Turkish counterparts may
contribute to communal failures to lobby the state successfully.

That being said, this study sheds a great deal of light on regional vari-
ances of applying state authority vis-à-vis Europe’s Muslims when taking
the perspective of Berlin, Paris, and London. The fact that they approach
their Muslim migrant communities so differently in terms of accommoda-
tion (in Britain) to open restriction (in France), and with Germany some-
where in between, extends this study’s value well beyond the narrow field
of comparative institutional analysis or state/society relations. Therefore, it
is a useful contribution for scholars wishing to make comparisons between
Europe and other regions experiencing similar tensions as regards accom-
modation and state control. The book may also be appropriate for graduate
seminars that want to explore a variety of case studies on Europe. 

The narrative is crisp and economical, favoring at times a far-too-abbre-
viated style that tends to skip over issues that perhaps deserve more energy
and time. This is especially true when the authors start to discuss the vari-
ables of doctrinal and cultural diversity among Muslims in these three coun-
tries. Nevertheless, the authors’ well-argued conclusions deserve serious
consideration. In the end, I suspect that their work will even inspire more
detailed studies, perhaps as a result of concluding that while this study is
valuable, it is, nevertheless, incomplete.

Isa Blumi
Assistant Professor, International Studies Department 

The American University of Sharjah, United Arab Emirates

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