Western Europe

As we have already indicated, the growth of Islam in Western Europe in the past twenty-five years has been striking. Although there are no reliable statistics available it is generally agreed among researchers in this field that France, West Germany and Great Britain, in that order, have the largest Muslim populations in contemporary Western Europe.

France

While in France estimates of the size of the Muslim population vary from two to five million, the figure most often quoted is about two and a half million. The majority of these Muslims originate from France’s former North African colonies with over three-quarters of a million from Algeria, almost halfa million from Morocco, and some two hundred thousand from Tunisia.

North African immigration began with the arrival of Algerians in France in the 1870s following the French suppression of the rebellion in the Kabylie Mountains in 1873. Between then and 1905 most of the immigrants settled in Marseilles, working mainly as domestics or petty traders. The first two decades of the present century and in particular the years 1916-19 saw the emergence of what is termed ‘industrial immigration’ as increasing numbers of Algerians, mainly Kabyles, were recruited to work in the factories in Marseilles and Paris and in the mines in Lens and elsewhere in the north of the country. This was followed during the interwar years and the Second World War by a marked decline in the number of immigrants from Algeria, and from Morocco and Tunisia, while at the same time some of the earlier immigrants were now returning home.

There are also in France over 120,000 Muslims from Turkey, some 70,000 from tropical or Black Africa (the majority com­ing from former French West Africa, in particular Senegal), an estimated 16,000 from Yugoslavia and a few thousand from Pakistan.

From a demographic point of view the Muslim population in France, and the same can be said of West Germany, Great Britain, Belgium and Holland, has undergone considerable change in recent times. This has been due in the main to the increase in the proportion of Muslim women relative to the total Muslim population as a whole since the late 1960s, and in those of both sexes under the ages of twenty-five and fifteen respectively. As to the rise in the number of Muslim women in France in the past twenty years or so, this has been of the order of 150 per cent in the case of Moroccans, almost 70 per cent among Tunisians and around 55 per cent in the case of the Algerians. One of the more important consequences of this is the greater stability that it has given to the Muslim community in France and those other countries in Western Europe just mentioned.

Moreover, alongside this increase, there has been, as we have already said, a significant rise in the number of Muslims under the ages of twenty-five and fifteen respectively. Close on 50 per cent of the Algerian, Moroccan and Tunisian Muslims in France are under twenty-five and two-thirds of the under twenty-fives are fifteen years of age or under. Both of these developments have led to a change in the direction and orienta­tion of the Muslim community in France and, as we shall see, in a number of other countries in Western Europe.

In France Muslims have been pressing for changes in certain existing educational, legal and political arrangements and practices to enable them to live and practise their religion in a largely secular, non­Muslim context. On the political front, as an example, for many see progress here as the key to progress in other areas such as law and education, Muslims in France have joined other immigrants in the campaign in recent times for local voting rights. This is something that has been permitted for some time in the United Kingdom to citizens of member states of the Commonwealth and the Irish Republic. Moreover, Sweden, followed by Denmark, granted immigrants both the right to vote in local elections and to be elected, in the early 1970s.

However, at the time of writing, this right still does not exist either in France or West Germany, although it should be noted that in the case of the former there are some Muslims of North African origin who have French citizenship and, therefore, enjoy all voting rights. A majority of these French Muslims, as they are called, are from the middle or lower middle classes, college educated, and number about eight thousand in Paris. By way of contrast, the vast majority of the rest of the Muslim population is em­ployed in construction work, or in Renault car or Michelin tyre factories, or as lorry drivers, while others have been ‘successful’ in that they have moved on from such employment to become owners of small grocery shops and the like.

From the point of view of many of the older genera­tion of Muslims in France one of the most serious problems lies in the education of the young, many of whom are illiterate in Arabic.

One of the strongest arguments used by the parents in support of a much more rounded and thoroughgoing Muslim education which would include the culture, customs, language and traditions of their own country of origin—Algeria or Morocco or Tunisia, for example—is that the evidence shows that where the young are trained and educated in the ‘traditional’ or Muslim way and have a grounding in their mother tongue they are far less likely to become delinquents.

The younger Muslims of school age, however, remain by and large unimpressed by the case advanced by their parents for a thoroughgoing Muslim education. Moreover, unlike many of the older generation of Muslims in France, very few of these younger Muslims have a desire to return ‘home’, that is to go back not only to what is still considered to be their country of origin but the one to which ultimately they are supposed to owe their allegiance. The main problem, however, for those of this mind is that they believe that they are far from being fully accepted by the wider French society and therefore fall, as it were, between two cultures. As a consequence some, a minority, have turned to a more fundamentalist version of Islam as a framework for establishing and protecting their identity.

Estimates of the number of converts to Islam among the French themselves, and among other non-Muslim immigrant groups in France in recent times, vary from several thousand to as many as one hundred thousand, women converts being the most numerous.

Although the pace is slow, what is perhaps most interesting in the case of Islam in France, and this is also noticeable in Britain and elsewhere in Western Europe, is the process of increasing secularisation of the younger generation of Muslims on the one hand, which however is partly offset by the ‘reconversions’ made by an active, missionary Muslim movement that sees its religion less and less in terms of North African Islam or an Islam incarnated in any particular culture or tradition. This is an attempt to create a Muslim community with which second and third generation Muslims can identify.

West Germany

Although there has been a small Muslim presence in the Federal Republic of Germany or West Germany for close on three hundred years, the modem history of Islam in that country only began to take shape in the 1960s with the influx of large numbers of Turkish ‘guest workers’. Today the Muslim community in West Germany is estimated to be just under two million, making it after the Lutheran and Catholic churches the third largest religious body in the country and, as we have already seen, the second largest Muslim grouping in Western Europe. It is composed in the main of the Turkish guest workers just mentioned, many of whom have been joined by their families and who to all intents and purposes are immigrants with little prospect or intention of returning home. The next largest group after the Turkish Mus­lims are those from Yugoslavia, who number around 100,000, followed by an estimated 45,000 North African Muslims, mainly from Morocco and Tunisia. Others include Shi'ites from Iran, about 20,000, perhaps 10,000 Sunnis or orthodox Muslims fromjordan, some 5,000 Muslim refugees from the Soviet Union, and between 1,000 and 2,000 German-bom converts to Islam.

Numerically, therefore, Islam in West Germany is predominantly of the Turkish Sunni (orthodox) kind. But it is worth noting that although Shi'ite groups, for the most part Iranian, are much smaller, the relatively high proportion of their members who are either academics or in business enables them to exert a much greater influence than their numbers would otherwise allow.

The Muslim population is concentrated mainly in the North Rhine-Westphalia and Baden-Württemberg regions, and in Ber­lin, which with a Turkish community of around 100,000, has the largest Turkish population of any city outside Turkey. Cologne is another city with a large Turkish population of around 60,000 and one in which many Muslim organisations, associations and fraternities have their headquarters.

It would be misleading, however, to give the im­pression that the Muslims in West Germany form a highly organised and tightly integrated community. There can exist considerable difference of opinion between the various Muslim organisations over, for example, mat­ters of policy regarding such issues as the means to be used to achieve official recognition from the State which has not as yet recognised Islam as a statutory organisation with specific civil rights. Moreover, it would seem that a majority of Muslims are no more than nominal members of one or other Muslim association or fraternity. These loosely knit bodies are usually attached to one or other of the seven hundred mosques, many of which are no more than makeshift arrangements in the form of a room set aside in the home.

Nevertheless, they help to provide Muslims in West Germany with an element of community and cohesion at the local or city level, and through their links, albeit at times very tenuous, with federal and international Muslim organisations, at the national level and in the wider world of Islam respectively.

Several international Muslim organisations and brotherhoods have representatives in West German cities, and included among these are the Muslim World League, the Muslim Brotherhood and the Naqshbandiya Brotherhood which is also found in Britain and France. Further, several Muslim institutions have close links with the Turkish gov­ernment’s Department of Religious Affairs and have been concerned as much, if not even more so, with Turkish affairs than with the interests of Muslims in Germany. And this no doubt helps to perpetuate in the minds of the German people the image of Islam as a ‘religion of foreigners’. Moreover, nothing has been done to dispel this image of Islam by Turkish governments which through such organisations as the Directorate for Religious Affairs Abroad, established in 1972, took responsibility for, as it was stated, ‘our countrymen abroad’, and especially for maintaining solidarity and unity among them, their links with the ideals of the Turkish nation and for the provision of religious instruction. On the other hand, there are Turkish movements in West Germany, for example those groups that together form the Organization of National Vision, that oppose not only their govern­ment’s claim to have responsibility for the education and religious instruction of Muslims but also the existence of a secular state in Turkey. As far as many West Germans are concerned, therefore, the country has become something of a battleground between the Kemalists, that is those Turkish Muslims who support the principle of the secular state established by Kemal Ataturk (see ‘The Turks and Islam’, pp. 390-407) and the integralists, those who seek to revive the Islamic state in Turkey. All of this, then, only seems to confirm the suspicion people have that the Islam in their midst has more to do with Turkish politics than religion.

This, however, is not an accurate description of the actual situation, for there are a number of Muslim organisations that stress that Islam in the Federal Republic is not a passing, foreign phenomenon and concentrate much of their time and energies on missionary work with the aim of turning their fellow believers into active, conscious Muslims for the purpose of creating an authentic Muslim community in the West German setting. These groups are preoccupied above all else with obtaining statutory recognition for Islam in West Germany and with the question of Muslim education, both of which have given rise to considerable public debate and even argument, especially in recent times and not least among Muslims themselves.

An estimated one in ten pupils in West Germany’s schools today are Muslim and mainly Turkish, and by law they are entitled to Islamic religious education. But, as we have already pointed out, there is no agreement among Muslims themselves as to how this should be provided. The state authorities, for their part, have resorted to a number of different solutions, some opting to take responsibility for the development of a Mus­lim curriculum together with the related teacher training for those interested, Muslim or otherwise, while other authorities have decided to provide Islamic religious instruction, taught by Turkish teachers following a Turkish cur­riculum, for classes of bilingual Turks. Although not to every Muslim’s satisfaction, the first of these developments, along with such changes as the virtual ending of‘homeland’ burials, is slowly providing Turkish Islam in the Federal Republic with a more recognisably local character.

The problem of integration, however, remains acute and is generally attributed to the refusal of Muslims to accept the fact that they are part of a modern, pluralistic society. Muslim parents—they are not alone in this—are seen to oppose on religious grounds many practices such as coeducation, the use of contraceptives before marriage and marriages with non-Muslims, all of which the majority allegedly regards as a matter of personal choice.

Moreover, as in France, the second generation of bilingual Muslims, many of whom were born in West Germany, experience a most acute emotional and psychological problem posed by partial integra­tion. In what since the 1970s has become a special branch of German litera­ture, the thoughts and feelings of these Muslims on this question, expressed in German and in their own words, have been published. What is quite clear from these accounts is that many of these second generation Muslims have, in varying degrees of seriousness, an identity crisis. Some speak of having their feet on two planets, others of planning their return ‘home’ when they wake up in the morning only to have become more accustomed to Germany by noon, while others write of travelling every day for thousands of kilometres ‘there and back’ in their imaginary train, of ‘living between wardrobe and suitcase’. One writes:

I carry two worlds in me, but neither is a whole, they both are bleeding unceasingly Their front line goes through my tongue I keep picking at it like a prisoner playing on a wound.

Born and educated in Germany, these young Mus­lims are often not accepted by the wider society where in recent times there has been something of a backlash against foreign workers and where financial inducements have been offered to those who are prepared to leave. On the other hand they are told by their parents that they were ‘not meant for that country (Germany)’, that it ‘was not made for them’, that their real world is at ‘home’—Turkey or some other Muslim land. It is little wonder, therefore, that second generation Muslims frequently ask the question, ‘Who am I and where do I belong?’. Again, as in France, some resolve the issue by turning to Islamic fundamentalism for a framework and a reference point for their identity.

It would be misleading, however, to convey the impression that all second generation Muslims in West Germany are suffer­ing from a deep-seated identity crisis or that all they meet with from the host population is either cold indifference or outright hostility. For example, the Federal Protestant Church in Germany (EKD) at its meeting in June 1983, requested, among other things, that in mapping the way forward in educa­tion the state take very seriously the religious and cultural heritage of Muslim children and stressed that it was incumbent on the Church to take up the cause of Muslims living in Germany in accordance with the ‘biblical principles of charity and hospitality’.

There are, however, German Evangelicals who take what traditionally might be termed a very conservative view of Islam and whose attitude not only conflicts with but causes concern to the main-line German Protestant churches mentioned above. The former reportedly iden­tify Islam as an ‘anti-Christian’ religion, even an obstacle to salvation that should be fought on all fronts, and request their members to use every means including the school to convert Muslims.

Currently, however, there would appear to be more German-born converts to Islam than there are Muslim converts to Christian­ity. Some of the former have been won over to Islam by the fervently ‘evangelical’ and missionary-oriented Muslim sect of Indian origin, the Ahmadiya movement founded in Qadian by Ghulam Ahmad in the 1880s. Beginning in the 1950s, this movement established mosques in Hamburg, Frankfurt and elsewhere in West Germany, while much earlier this century it had already started its missionary work in Britain. Today the number of converts of German origin in recent times is somewhere between one and two thousand and, along with many of the several thousand naturalised Muslims in Germany, they seek to create an Islamic culture appropriate to the German setting.

Great Britain

The modern history of Islam in Britain began around the middle years of the nineteenth century with the arrival of Muslim seamen who came in the main from Aden, the Yemen, the Horn of Africa, in particular Somalia, Iran, Bengal, Gujarat and Sind. From the 1850s to the outbreak of the First World War the Muslim community in Britain was composed of these seamen, a majority of whom settled in the ports of Bristol, Cardiff, Liverpool, London and Tyneside, a small number of students and professional groups, mainly from India, and a few British converts. Some of these converts were profes­sional people—academics, mainly in the sciences, barristers, solicitors, civil servants, diplomats and contract engineers—from the middle and upper classes, while others were local women who converted to Islam on marrying Muslim seamen.

Among the better known of these early converts were the solicitor William Quillian, who founded an Islamic institute and a mosque in Liverpool, and Lord Headley, who announced his conversion to Islam at a public meeting in Caxton Hall in December 1913. The former came to be known as the ‘Shaikh of Islam in Britain’ and on several occasions was appointed to represent the Sultan of Turkey, Abd al-Hamid II. Lord Headley for his part, in close co-operation with the Indian Kwaja Kamaluddin, a lawyer by profession and a member of the Ahmadiya movement which had established a mosque at Woking in Surrey, founded the British Muslim Association for the purpose of spreading Islam in Britain.

However, it was to be a succession of political events, most notably the partitioning of India and the foundation of the state of Pakistan in 1947, and government legislation on immigration, that was to lead to the expansion of the Muslim community in Britain. Anxious about the fate of their relatives following on the 1947 partition, Muslims already living in Britain encouraged their kinsfolk to join them. This led to a relatively small but at the time significant increase in the numbers of Muslims in Britain, a majority of whom came from the rural areas of Pakistan. This was followed for most of the 1950s by a steady flow of immigrants from Pakistan to Britain, a flow which was to increase markedly when it became widely known that Britain proposed to introduce restrictions on entry through the Commonwealth Immigrants Act of 1962. A similar situation occurred in the late 1960s when, as a result of the indigenisation policies of East African governments, many East African Asians came to feel insecure. This sense of insecurity was heightened by the knowledge that the British government was to withdraw automatic right of entry to Britain from certain classes of British passport holders, in particular those who were descendants of people of British origin. This restriction on immigration came in an Act of Parliament in 1968, but before it was introduced, a further influx of immi­grants, many of them Muslims, arrived in Britain.

Since these restrictions on immigration were intro­duced the growth of Islam has been the result in the main of the arrival of the dependants, mostly women and children, of those Muslims already resident in Britain. Prior to the 1960s the Muslim community in Britain was com­posed in the main of Muslim men, a majority of them either semi-skilled or unskilled, in search of work, and many of whom intended to return home one day to their families. That situation changed with the above-mentioned arrival of dependants which was to result not only in a significant increase in the number of Muslims born in Britain but also in the growth of a more stable Muslim community there.

In contemporary Britain a majority of the Muslim community, between 360,000 and 400,000, originate from the rural areas of Pakistan and Bangladesh, with the next largest grouping coming initially from India. Other sizeable groups of Muslims include the Turkish Cypriots, Arabs from the Middle East and North Africa, East African Asians and Shi'ite Muslims mainly from Iran. There are also smaller groups of Somalis and Yemenis, most of them descendants of those nineteenth-century Muslim communities already mentioned, and others from West Africa.

Not only is the Muslim community in Britain cul­turally heterogeneous, it is also somewhat fragmented by sectarianism—for example there are a number of Shi'ite groups, and others such as the Ahmadiya which are not considered to be orthodox—and also as a result of the quest for work which has taken Muslims to different parts of the country. There are relatively large concentrations of Muslims in the south-east, the east and west Midlands, the north-west and Yorkshire and Humberside. However, though the Muslim community in Britain displays considerable diversity and is far from being a homogeneous, integrated body, organisa­tions and institutions have been established for the purpose of co-ordinating activities and generating greater co-operation and unity. Recently the British Council of Mosques was set up for these purposes among others. There is also the United Kingdom Islamic Mission which operates through an associa­tion of mosques—there are around two hundred and fifty registered mosques today in Britain compared with nine in 1960—for the purpose of providing religious instruction for Muslim children in state schools.

As in France and West Germany, education is a major concern of the Muslim community in Britain. While there is no unanimity as to how exactly this should be achieved, most if not all Muslims want their children to receive a thorough grounding in the Qur’an and Islamic studies. Some would prefer this to be done by Muslim teachers within the state system, providing that provisions can be made for, among other things, single-sex education, attendance at mosque and the observance of prayer times and dietary laws. Then there are those who wish to see the establishment of Muslim schools along the lines of Catholic or Jewish schools, and one such school, the Islamia Primary School in the London Borough of Brent. This solution is not favoured by among others the National Union of Teachers (NUT). This union, in its discussion paper on Muslim schools published in October 1984, while agreeing that there was a case for single-sex schools, believed that the setting up of separate Muslim schools could be divisive.

It would appear that the first of the two proposals mentioned above would find considerable support among many of the less well-to-do Muslims, while the better educated, middle-class Muslim appears to be in favour of the second. It is worth noting here that this Muslim middle class, although small when compared with the percentage of the total popu­lation in Britain that is categorised as middle class, is by comparison with Muslims elsewhere in Western Europe quite large and influential, and its stance, therefore, on such matters as education and marriage is often taken to be representative of Muslim opinion generally. Evidence suggests, however, that many working-class muslims are less conser­vative in their views on these and other matters than their middle class co-religionists.

Differences of opinion also exist on the question of the Shari'a, Islamic law. Some Muslims in Britain and elsewhere in Western Europe maintain that since the Shari'a is a totally integrated legal system based on a divinely revealed source, the Qur’an, it is not possible for them on grounds of faith to accept anything less than a separate system of family law, with its own autonomous judiciary. Muslims of this persuasion in Britain, therefore, request Parliament to make provision for this in the country’s legal system and establish the necessary courts. Parhament, however, would not have control over the content of Muslim law, nor could there be any appeal to a higher, non-Muslim court. Other Muslims are of the opinion that Islamic family law could be built into the existing legal system in one of several different ways, for example by the establishment of family tribunals before which Muslims could choose to appear and whose decisions would be subject to appeal in the traditional way in a court equipped to take into consideration Islamic practice. This last mentioned approach would have the virtue of maintaining the essential unity of the legal system.

While very few are indifferent or hostile to Islam as a religion the views of the younger generation of Muslims born in Britain on questions such as education and arranged marriages show that there is a good deal of heart searching and even criticism. This cannot be separated from the realisation that for the vast majority at least there is no alternative to being a Muslim in Britain, in the sense of professing and living an Islam that is pruned of what are regarded as inessentials, including some of its ‘foreign’ cultural trappings.

Something of this heart searching and criticism can be illustrated by reference to the question of arranged marriages, where research shows that while some Muslim girls have confidence in this system and respect it, others reject it for the reason that it deprives them of the right to choose. Moreover, someofthelatterarguethattheirparents’ reasons for insist­ing on such marriages have little or nothing to do with Islam and all to do with social pressure combined with a desire to preserve a particular way of life, culture and tradition. Nevertheless, the alternative, love marriages as they are known, are widely believed to be more likely to fail than arranged marriages.

Intimately bound up with the question of arranged marriages is the equally thorny question of Western education already dis­cussed. Girls, who under the system of arranged marriages are normally married by the age of sixteen, may wish to continue their education and enter upon a professional careeer before getting married and this can lead to tension in the home. Some Muslim men, moreover, are of the opinion that Western education radically alters the attitude of Muslim girls, rendering them incap­able of performing with any conviction and enthusiasm the role of wife and mother in the traditional way, and therefore are reluctant to marry such girls. Moreover, the latter, for their part, are not always prepared to accept the traditional role assigned to them and realise the difficulties this might give rise to if marriage arrangements are not sufficiently flexible to allow full con­sideration to be given to their feelings and aspirations.

There are, however, many Muslim girls who accept that, despite whatever they themselves may want to do with their lives, they will not be going beyond secondary school to train for a career and, as a consequence, pose little or no threat to the traditions and customs of their parents. All of this means that there are very few ‘out marriages’ among Muslim girls and even where Muslim men are concerned, almost all of the very few that have ‘married out’ have only done so after their prospective partners had agreed to convert to Islam.

As is the case in France, West Germany and in other Western European countries, Muslim parents tend on the whole to depict the wider society as permissive, regarding its standards on matters of sexuality in particular as being extremely low. They are, therefore, concerned and anxi­ous to shield and protect their children from the ‘evil’ influences of that wider society and this has led in some instances to a strengthening of the institution of purdah and to an increase in the number of those Muslims who favour single-sex schools.

However, while many Muslim parents are clear in their own minds as to what they want for their children, an increasing number of the latter live in conflicting worlds—the home and the wider society—and are not, as we have seen, fully accepted in either. As a result they tend to develop dual images of themselves in their anxiety to satisfy the demands of two cultures. Then Islam often becomes the via media or escape route between the two, although this is not necessarily the same Islam, in all its details and cultural trappings, that their parents commend. The former insist more on an Islam that rises above any particular culture and that can be meaningfully practised in any society. They tend, therefore, to be scriptural- ists, to emphasise that the life of a Muslim must be grounded exclusively in the Qur’an and hadith (tradition) and that practices and obligations that cannot be found there are not to be regarded as authentic. There are also those who simply accept things as they are; for some of them the home provides an escape from the tensions of the wider society, while for others it is the other way round.

These young Muslims are not alone in the pursuit of an Islam stripped of some of what they see as unnecessary cultural baggage acquired in other lands. British-born converts to Islam—there have been several thousand of these in the past twenty years—are also anxious to encourage the development of an Islam that is more recognisably Qur’anic and in accord with authentic tradition than that which they sometimes see advocated and practised by some of their fellow believers. Like their counter­parts in West Germany and elsewhere in Western Europe, the British con­verts insist that, while Islam does not necessarily always conflict with them, it nevertheless can and indeed must be seen to transcend the par­ticularities and peculiarities of any one culture, otherwise it will not succeed in its universal mission.

If this move towards a more scripturally based form of Islam gathers support the most likely outcome will be, somewhat paradox­ically, a more marked adaptation of this religion to the attitudes, perspectives and way of life of Britain, something that is also occurring in the case of other religions transplanted to Britain, among them Buddhism and Hinduism.

Islam Elsewhere in Western Europe

After France, West Germany and Britain, Holland with an estimated 320,000 Muslims, the majority of whom are originally from Turkey, followed closely by those from North Africa, and with a substantial minority from Indonesia, has the largest Muslim population in Western Europe. Belgium has close on 200,000 Muslims, over 50 per cent of whom are from North Africa, while Turkish Muslims account for most of the remainder. Cyprus, with 18 per cent of its over 600,000 inhabitants Muslim, and Greece with around 140,000, most of whom once again are of Turkish origin, come next. In the case of Greece this figure marks something of a decline in the number of its Muslim inhabitants in this century. In both Austria and Italy the number of Muslims is somewhere between 40,000 and 50,000. The Muslims in Austria are in the main Turkish labourers, most of the others coming from Yugoslavia, while a majority of those in Italy are from Eastern European countries, in particular Albania, Yugoslavia, Bulgaria and Hungary, with a small number from the Horn of Africa. In 1984 the foundation stone of the Rome mosque was laid and over twenty Muslim countries have promised to help pay for its actual construction, the estimated cost of which is twenty­eight million pounds sterling.

Turkish migrant workers once again make up the majority of the 17,000 Muslims in Switzerland, and also of those in Sweden where the Muslim population is estimated at 25,000. It is perhaps worth pointing out here that not all Turkish immigrants are Muslims. For example, in Sweden some are Christian and a majority of these are Syrian Orthodox. Denmark’s Muslim population is around 15,000 and in this case, as in so many others, most are Turkish migrant workers with the remainder coming from North Africa and Pakistan. Norway has a somewhat smaller Muslim community estimated at around 12,000 and centred mainly on Oslo. Over 50 per cent of these Muslims originate from Pakistan, the remainder being evenly divided into Moroccans and Turks. Finland’s closely knit Muslim community of under 1,000 is of Tartar origin. Its existence in Finland dates back to the last century and beyond, and it is strictly endogamous and at present in decline. The total Muslim population in the Iberian peninsula probably numbers no more than 6,000 over 5,000 of whom live in Spain, a mere handful in a land where Islam and Arabism had once established deep and firm roots. The 1,000 or so Muslims in Portugal originate from the African states of Guineau-Bissau and Mozambique, and from Pakistan.