Islamic Groups in Europe: Between Community Affirmation and Social Crisis

Abstract

Until the middle of the 1980s, the social sciences took little interest in the presence in Europe of populations of Muslim origin. The people in question were generally classified according to categories which, depending on the country, counted them as ‘immigrants’, as ‘Gastarbeiter’, ‘extracommunitari’ or ‘Blacks’. Each state followed the tradition established by its particular juridical and political norms in the ways it conceived of, and chose to describe, the overseas labour which came to work in its factories at the height of the ‘thirty glorious years’ of economic boom unleashed by post-war reconstruction.