exploring muslim identities in europe & north america

BY CAS MUDDE December 16 at 2:59 pm The following guest post is by  Cas Mudde ,  assistant professor in the School for Public and International Affairs at the University of Georgia  — reproduced from The Monkey Cage  -Washington Post. As Erik Voeten recently  posted , various European media recently reported on  research  on fundamentalism and out-group hostility by the Dutch sociologist Ruud Koopmans at the German Social Science Research Center (WZB), which found that “Islam fundamentalism is widely spread.” Koopmans and his collaborators interviewed nearly 9,000 people in six West European countries (Austria, Belgium, France, Germany, the Netherlands and Sweden), including 3,373 ‘natives’ and 5,548 ‘immigrants,’ respectively of Moroccan (2,204) and Turkish (3,344) origin. The survey stands out because of its cross-national scope, its solid theoretical and empirical basis, and the high number of ‘immigrant’ respondents. That said, both the research report and the media

Back in August 1997, in the early morning of a warm summer day I was on a ferry, arriving to the beautiful city of Rethymno in the island of Crete. This was the second time in my life I was visiting Crete but, unlike the crowds of backpackers revellling in the ealy morning sunshine on the ship decks, my ultimate destination was not a tourist spot but a grim military camp where I had to report to undergo the compulsory military training that (almost) all conscripts in the Greek army have to go through. Despite my initial sense of impending gloom, these few months I spent in Western Crete gave me the opportuni ty of getting to know, and fall in love with this part of the island. This relationship I established with the place was necessary and perhaps unavoidable in a way, as it provided an antidote to the isolation and desperation that life in a military camp often entails.  But, from the moment I set eyes on the town of Rethymno on that morning, I knew that there was something intriguin