Muslim communities in Europe
 

At the present time, Muslims live in Europe in the form of scattered minorities that vary in size from one European country to another. Some countries accommodate thousands of Muslims while others accommodate millions.

The Muslim population in the Russian Federation and some Eastern European countries is estimated to be millions. There is one European country where Muslims constitute the overwhelming majority of the population, namely Albania.
Muslims in Western Europe have different circumstances. Their number may be a few hundreds in some countries but have grown to reach a few millions in others.
The vast majority of Muslims who migrated to European countries had political relations with their own countries. They came to the European countries to look for work or in the pursuit of better life opportunities that were not forthcoming in their countries of origin.

Upon knowing that most of the Islamic world was under European colonialism at the end of the nineteenth century and early twentieth century, we can identify the nature of the Muslim communities that settled in each country separately. In a country like England, we find that most of the Muslims who came to it were from countries that were under British occupation in the Asian and African continents, especially from India, Pakistan and Bangladesh.
In France, the majority of Muslims who migrated to France were from the Arab Maghreb countries which were under French occupation, such as Algeria, Tunisia and Morocco.
In the Netherlands, the majority of Muslims there were from Indonesia, which was subject to Dutch occupation for a long time.
In Germany, the Muslim community there was predominantly from Turkey, formed of those who emigrated from Turkey after the abolition of the Islamic Caliphate and the call of Mustafa Kemal Ataturk to apply secularism.

These were the Muslim communities which constitute the overwhelming majority of the Muslim communities in Western Europe, and they were joined by immigrants from other Muslim countries. In addition, a large number of Europeans embraced Islam due to their countries’ historical bonds with the Islamic world, as previously highlighted.

This fact increased the chances for these Europeans, with their different orientations and intellectual and social statuses, to have a better understanding of the nature of Islam. This also gave the Europeans the chance to read about Islam from Islamic references and sources, away from the distortion of the Orientalists and their incorrect information about Islam that their previous generations propagated among Europeans.

Another far-reaching reason for the change in the European view of Islam was the number of prestigious European intellectuals who converted to Islam. They found in Islam clarity, simplicity, and integrity of faith that corresponds to sound logic.