Having recently become intrigued by Braverman's comments (echoed in the past by Merkel and others) about the apparent failure of multiculturalism, I recently read Nilüfer Göle's book
The Daily Lives of Muslims. It is based around a series of interviews and discussion groups held with Muslims who are living in 21 cities in European countries.
What she found was that many of her interviewees overwhelmingly favour the secular laws of the country of which they are citizens and strongly identify with that country, and were unable to identify in any way with the harsher aspects of Sharia, such as the well-known hudud punishments, or Muslim extremists.
It is additionally worth emphasising a point noted by John Bowen in his book
Blaming Islam, namely, that 'in France, half of all Muslims supported the law most often cited there as anti-Islamic: the 2004 ban of Islamic headscarves from public schools.' Bowen concludes that., 'Muslims are adapting like everyone else and are divided like everyone else.'
Additionally, with integration in mind, it might just be worth once again stating the obvious, namely, that there are British Muslims who are now leading politicians, cricketers and actors. Some, like Kamila Shamsie, even write novels.
Of course, the picture is not entirely rosy to say the least, as the events of the last few days have definitely shown. Unfortunately, as British and US Muslim intellectuals like Ziauddin Sardar and Khaled Abou El-Fadl have been keen to point out, the Saudis have deployed their oil wealth to spread their toxic message of intolerance far and wide, even to the extent of doctoring English translations of the Qur'an to reflect it. Anti-Semitism is, unsurprisingly, part and parcel of that message. And that's before we begin to also consider the influence of, say, Deobandism or Hizb-ut-Tahrir.
For anyone who wishes to take the temperature of Islam in the UK in particular, I would therefore recommend the following publications:
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